Quote from: estar;581194It reflects the dual nature of RPGs, crunch and fluff. Or more seriously rule mechanics and background setting.

A lot of companies wouldn't have an issue using share alike rule mechanics. They would have issues shareing their background materials. The OGL reflects that ditchnomy in roleplaying games which makes it useful to the hobby and industry.

I meant to respond to this earlier.  

I see what you are getting at, but this is why I think it is a better idea to keep the mechanics and the background largely separated.  Rules don't have to read like a technical manual or a mathematics textbook, by any means.  But it's probably easier overall to have a fireball spell in the core books instead of MacGuffin's Infernal Conflagration.  The latter spell can be listed in the campaign books, where most of the material would probably be copyright anyway.  Short bits of additional rules materials could then be noted as OGL or CC, rather than trying to exclude the greater volume of copyright material.  "Undiscovered Country, copyright 2012; All rule boxes and Occupational Enhancement Packages are CC BY-NC-SA" or whatever.  That way, if there was a particular rule you didn't want to release, leave it out of the normal frame that would denote the other rules as Creative Commons.

Just going back to the Reaper kickstarter a moment.

I think Ryan's dead wrong on the prepaints.  Reaper released the original run of Bones as prepaints and it was a bit of a flop.  For the most part unpainted looks a hell of a lot better than crappy prepaints.  With Bones you don't even need to seal them up from constant lead exposure.

I think what we saw there is that there's demand for miniatures but the price has escalated beyond what the market will bear in recent years.  On top of that it's hard for a distributor to do a good job of stocking a range of miniatures.  Way too many individual pieces.  So there's pent up demand and a distribution and supply problem.  The Reaper Kickstarter addressed all of these and did it with some damn fine minis.

I'm carrying the Bones line in my store and have from the start.  My distributor thought I was nuts to bring in two racks of them.  But I'll never use them myself.  I'm a metal adict.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581392Nah.  Basic, B/X, BECMI were all largely compatible.  Same with AD&D1 and 2e.

FWIW my experiences at the time were that people chose one or the other, not both.

Quote from: Skywalker;581404FWIW my experiences at the time were that people chose one or the other, not both.

In my experience, even if you were playing 2e, everyone was still playing 1e modules.  Heck, do you know how many times we ran KotBL in our AD&D campaigns?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581406In my experience, even if you were playing 2e, everyone was still playing 1e modules.  Heck, do you know how many times we ran KotBL in our AD&D campaigns?

My experience was that a lot of people would start with "kiddie D&D" (BECMI) and would then graduate really fast to AD&D. You'd think that lots of people would have used 1st ed modules with 2e, but that wasn't happening around me: the vast majority of people would play 2e settings like Dark Sun or Ravenloft or Planescape, and it honestly wouldn't come to their mind to use G1-3 and "dumb down" their game back to "vanilla 1e".

Quote from: Benoist;581408My experience was that a lot of people would start with "kiddie D&D" (BECMI) and would then graduate really fast to AD&D. You'd think that lots of people would have used 1st ed modules with 2e, but that wasn't happening around me: the vast majority of people would play 2e settings like Dark Sun or Ravenloft or Planescape, and it honestly wouldn't come to their mind to use G1-3 and "dumb down" their game back to "vanilla 1e".

This is similar to my experiences. Now I think about it, I got much less use out of my AD&D1e material during those AD&D2e days than I did during my time with either D&D3e or D&D4e, as people were quick to move into burgeoning setting/Dungeon magazine treadmill at the time.

Quote from: RSDancey;5813172:  None of the CC licenses enable works to have mixed rights.  The whole work is either in or out of a CC licesence.  This would have made it virtually impossible to use a CC license to make a product mixed with Open Game Content with an IP licesened from a 3rd party.

This is what I meant when I said "the Product Identity clause made it better". Basically the OGL gives the publisher a lot more control and confidence:

(1) It starts with the assumption that everything in the work is NOT open. (So you can't accidentally open up something by forgetting to declare that you want it to be closed.)

(2) Then you specifically open content, so that people are 100% clear on what is and is not open content that they can use for themselves.

(3) And then it gives the publisher an extra safety blanket because PI lets them say "regardless of what we just said in #2, we are definitely not making this stuff open".

The CC is basically the exact opposite of this: It assumes everything is open and forces the publisher to close it.

Quote from: StormBringer;581374Preposterous. BY-NC-ND
Is virtually the same thing as copyright by itself, except it allows unlimited or 'viral' distribution of the work.

You just claimed that we would have seen the same number of products released if, instead of the OGL, WotC had released 3E under a non-commercial license. Sheer nonsense.

Quote from: One Horse Town;581389Every new edition of d&d has done that.

Not really. Some editions of D&D have been radically more effective at converting the existing player base than others. For example, both AD&D1 and 3E were very successful at this. AD&D2 and D&D4 weren't.

Excerpt from here:

When consumers are faced with an upgrade, there's always going to be some portion of the customer base that says, "Nah. I'm good with what I've got." (This applies beyond RPGs: Look at the varying success of Windows Vista and Windows 7 at winning over existing Windows customers.) In the case of D&D, the two most effective transitions in the history of the game were the transition from OD&D to AD&D and the transition from AD&D2 to D&D3.

In my opinion, both of those transitions were effective because (a) they addressed perceived shortcomings in the existing rules; (b) they worked to form a bridge of continuity between the old edition and the new edition; and (c) they were effective at reaching out to new customers.

Now, the actual methods by which these goals were accomplished were radically different. AD&D (a) aimed to codify a more "official" version of the game while also expanding the detail of the rules in an era when "more realism" and "more detail" were highly prized. It was launched with a Monster Manual that was (b) designed to be used with the existing OD&D rules (by the time the first PHB came out, a sizable chunk of the customer base was already using AD&D products in their OD&D games). And it was released hand-in-hand with a Basic Set that (b) remained highly compatible with the 1974 ruleset and (c) offered a mainstream, accessible product for attracting new customers.

D&D3, on the other hand, (a) radically revised a game that was perceived as clunky and out-of-date, which allowed them to (c) reach out to a large body of disillusioned ex-customers. They simultaneously (b) released conversion guides and used a massive, public beta testing period to get large numbers of existing players onboard with the changes before the game was even released.

The conversion to D&D4 failed for several reasons.

First, no effort was made form a bridge between the old edition and the new edition. (A crazy French guy screaming "Ze game remains the same!" like some sort of cultic mantra notwithstanding.) In fact, WotC went out of their way to insist that there was no bridge between the editions.

Second, WotC was attempting to reach out to new customers. But I maintain that they made the fundamental mistake of trying to pull customers away from video games by competing with video games on their own turf. That's just not going to cut it. If RPGs are going to be successful in the future, it will be because they emphasize their unique strengths. Tactical combat and prepackaged My Perfect Encounters(TM) aren't going to cut it.

Finally, 2008 was misidentified as being another 2000.

In 2000 WotC was dealing with an overwhelmingly dissatisfied fanbase and responded with a new edition that largely addressed that dissatisfaction without overstepping the boundaries of its "mandate". It wasn't perfect. Plenty of people remained dissatisfied (or hadn't been dissatisfied in the first place). But there were also a lot of people saying "3rd Edition looks just like my house rules for AD&D" or "it's exactly what I've always wanted D&D to look like", and success followed.

In 2008, I think it's clear that WotC thought they had a similar level of overwhelming dissatisfaction. But either they didn't or their sweeping and fundamental changes to the game exceeded the "mandate" of that dissatisfaction. Or both. (Personally, I suspect they were misled by the echo chamber of the 'net and a corporate decision to prevent OGL support for 4th Edition. They tried to solve "problems" that most players weren't actually experiencing and simultaneously "fixed" them in an unnecessarily excessive fashion.)

In some ways this takes us back to the "New Coke" metaphor: The taste tests for New Coke indicated it would be a huge success. But the taste tests were fundamentally flawed: They were "sip tests". And in sip tests the smoother, sweeter taste of New Coke won. But nobody buys their soda by the teaspoon; they buy it by the can.

4th Edition radically overhauled D&D's gameplay in order to respond to complaints driven by CharOp specialists, armchair theorists, and other lovers of spherical cows. For a lot of people on the ground, the game didn't have those problems and 4th Edition was a solution in search of a problem.

THE OGL AND SRD

WotC's corporate culture had clearly turned against the OGL by 2008. They no longer saw a massive network maintaining interest in their game and generating new customers who were all funneled back into their core products. Instead, they saw an entire industry profiteering on their IP.

The argument of whether or not WotC was right or not can be saved for another time. (Although I will note that every scrap of evidence I've seen indicates that the strategy works both in the RPG industry and outside of the RPG industry. D&D3, Pathfinder, and the OSR community all seem to have flourished under it as well.)

But given the existence of the OGL, the decision to stop making Classic D&D and start making New D&D was a disastrous one. The goal appears to have been to create an edition with enough fundamental incompatibility that the OGL couldn't be used to support it, but the practical effect was to leave the largest network of material supporting an RPG in history all pointing towards a giant void.

A void into which it was absolutely trivial for someone to step.

(END EXCERPT)

Ultimately, the existence of the OGL and the massive pyramid of support material for 3E (that WotC was powerless to remove from the marketplace) probably made the decision to design a game with radically different gameplay and slap the D&D trademark on it a lot worse. But the D&D4 WotC designed was always destined to be a big, fat loser in terms of converting the existing fanbase.

If it hadn't been the OGL and Pathfinder, there would just be an even larger community of 3.5 players who exited the marketplace entirely (just like there was a large market of 1E players who exited the marketplace in 1989).

Quote from: StormBringer;580958If the Creative Commons had been around in 1999 instead of two years later and was used for D&D, do you think all those OGL games would not have been created?

Before the OGL, you had a lot of "unlicensed" D&D-based games; they were things like "Role-Aids", or what some might term "fantasy heartbreakers" and the sense was always that these were somehow inferior products.

It was the explicit encouragement of third-party products during the D20 boom that changed this idea; far from the popular notion that it created a huge wave of crap, though it did, the most important development of the D20 boom is that also created a large number of products that people for the first time ACCEPTED as being equal in quality and acceptability for use in D&D gaming as the "official" products WoTC was putting out. That was the sea-change.

Would things be the same today without the OGL? That's practically an impossible question to answer, but my guess is that what would have been missing is that widespread acceptance; and while the OSR games might still have existed, for example, they may also have ended up reaching a much smaller audience.
The OGL's biggest effect was a change in the gaming hobby's culture.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Justin Alexander;581426Just like there was a large market of 1E players who exited the marketplace in 1989.

Are there any numbers to show this?

Also, speaking of crowd sourcing, is there anyway to get in(late) on your L&L project?

Cheers

Quote from: RPGPundit;581432It was the explicit encouragement of third-party products during the D20 boom that changed this idea; far from the popular notion that it created a huge wave of crap, though it did, the most important development of the D20 boom is that also created a large number of products that people for the first time ACCEPTED as being equal in quality and acceptability for use in D&D gaming as the "official" products WoTC was putting out. That was the sea-change.

I'm not so sure about the 'first' time part.  Judges Guild offered materials with the D&D logo in the 70's and early 80's that was widely accepted as part of D&D.

Quote from: StormBringer;581374or its use?

It appears your understanding of CC licenses is a bit outdated.  Place all the Product Identity in a copyright notice, place BY-SA notices on the rest of the work, and how is that different than what the OGL offers?

Point of Order,

The Open Game License was released in 2000.

Creative Commons didn't come into play until 2002.

So to criticize Dancey and Wizards for not using a non existent license is well.. a silly thing to do. But understandable since they were released within 2 years of each other.

Quote from: StormBringerIt appears your understanding of CC licenses is a bit outdated.  Place all the Product Identity in a copyright notice, place BY-SA notices on the rest of the work, and how is that different than what the OGL offers?

OMG, a debate about copyright as it applies to rules in games.  It's so 1999!

Here's the fundamental flaw with your advocacy of CC license for TRPGs:

The mechanics can't be copyright.

What does that mean "in the real world"?

In the real world, every TRPG publisher asserts that you cannot use its mechanics without its permission.  This is not some crazy landgrab conjured out of thin air by Wizards of the Coast (in fact if you know anything about the history of Wizards of the Coast you'll know they were on the receiving end of a very nasty lawsuit about this exact issue).

Every.  Single.  Mainstream.  TRPG.  Publisher.  Asserts.  This.

Back in "the day", before the OGL, if you visited a mainstream publisher's website, they would usually have some kind of FAQ or community guideline that talked about how they reserved the exclusive rights to use their game system, that you couldn't publish material compatible with their game system without their permission, etc.  All of them.

How can this be?  

The answer is that copyright is a much, much more murky thing than most people understand.  And the more you delve into the way copyright interacts with games, especially TRPG games the murkier it gets.

My position has always been that in the event that this issue was litigated competently a court could find that TRPG rules transcend the limitation envisioned by the copyright office when they issued their famous "the rules of games cannot be copyright" statement.  TRPG rules are not like the rules for a game of chess.  They are a complex gumbo that mixed together math, fiction, derivative interfaces, characters, graphic materials, and all sorts of other kinds of work - many of which are copyrightable on their own.

And in fact that's the consensus opinion of the publishers in the TRPG marketplace.  Which is why they tell you that you can't make something compatible with their games without their permission.

OK, so we have two mutually exclusive legal positions:

A:  Game rules cannot be copyright

B:  TRPGs are something bigger than "game rules" and the thing they are can be copyright.

In 1999, there wasn't much caselaw that one could point at to make the case for the second position.  Since then, the caselaw has become much, much stronger.  Look up the cases regarding Harry Potter encyclopedias, for example - a case the judge was ready to dismiss on the first day, but was convinced to hear anyway and in the end changed his position 180 degrees in favor of the idea of enabling copyright protection for Rawling's works from being used by 3rd parties without a license.

There are also some interesting computer game cases - see EA's defense of the Sims Social vs. Zynga for example.  This case is still being litigated but the fact that its been brought at all is telling about the way the legal community is being confronted with the idea that there are "games" and there are GAMES and the two are different.

But back in 1999 we had the A/B situation and it was murky as hell.  It was so murky in fact that nobody actually tested it.  There was essentially no content produced for sale that used someone else's game without permission, so de facto, B was the rule that was applied.

One of the objectives of the OGL was to remove this problem.  And the solution to removing it was to accept B, then define a license to enable those rights to be sublicensed - even if those rights weren't actually legally enforceable.

The OGL lets you license game mechanics.  That license is viral.  That license is irrevocable.  That license is world wide and royalty free.

This is not trivial.  This is at the core of why the OGL worked.  It removed all the gray area from the law and replaced it with a definitive answer.  If you didn't like it, you didn't have to use it, but if you used it, you accepted that the industry's consensus was binding on you when you used material provided under that license.

Of course, the upside was that you got to use whatever you wanted without any meaningful fear of litigation and didn't have to seek review or approval of what you chose to do with that material.

Removing this gray area was not an objective of, nor was it accomplished by, any of the CC licenses.

Now as to the issue of Product Identity:

Quote from: StormBringerMixing within the same product is not an issue:

"Creative Commons recommends that licensors who wish to mark works with  trademarks or other branding materials give notice to licensors  expressly disclaiming application of the license to those elements of  the work."

But that is just one's own work.  If you want to include 3rd party material:

"All Creative Commons licenses allow the original work to be included in  collections such as anthologies, encyclopedias and broadcasts."
If the particular work included the SA provision, including a re-mix or alteration of the work in another 'collection of rules' would be permissible.

Unfortunately, you're misunderstanding both what Creative Commons says you can do, and you're misunderstanding some of these terms which are defined.

We'll start with the easy issue which is the definition of "anthologies, encyclopedias and broadcasts".

The US Copyright Law has special rules for Anthologies and Collections.  Those rules are designed to permit the compilation of a number of works under one cover - but those works are still separate.  You know, like a book of short stories.  Those rules do not permit a work to mix all that content together.  They are each treated as indivisible units which happen to share a wrapper.

The same is true for the right to perform a work ("broadcast").  A TV Network doesn't gain a copyright interest in the shows it broadcasts.  Each show is independently copyright and is treated as an atomic unit.

Encyclopedias are a different animal.  The copyright law has exceptions from the rules about making derivative works to permit "fair use" - a common law concept (which means its not written down, it's just assumed to be known and applied).  One of those fair use provisions is to allow quotations of limited amounts of copyright material for the purpose of commentary or critique.  Without this exemption, an encyclopedia that contained any references to any copyright content would be impermissible.

But the amount of content you can use when making commentary and critique is very narrow.  You can't for example, write "I think the following story is awesome", and then include the text of Stranger in a Strange Land.  You are supposed to limit yourself to the bare minimum of content required to make your point.

And regardless of all of this, none of these exceptions permit you to make a derivative work based on the underlying copyrights.

The creation of derivative works is the elephant in the room from my previous section about the A/B interpretation of copyright as it applies to TRPGs.

You won't find a workable definition of "derivative work" in the copyright law.  The definition is basically "you'll know it when you see it", and that's how it's litigated.  There's a great case out there, Anderson v. Stallone about a writer who created a script for a Rocky sequel, and the judgement was that even though his script contained nothing but the names and "characters" (whatever that means in regards to a movie script) from Rocky, it was a derivative work and Stallone, not Anderson, owned the copyright to it.

Nothing in the copyright law, and nothing in the CC licenses, permits the kind of remixing that the OGL enables, where you can take someone else's materials and use it as construction materials to create a derivative work.

You literally cannot do this with disclaimers and notices - not in any practical real world sense.  Most OGL'd works are massively derivative of the content they're licensed from almost at a genetic level.  They're neither collections, encyclopedias, or critiques.

So let's talk about your quote regarding trademarks.

Is "Darth Vader" a trademark?  How about "The Force"?  How about the description of a light saber?  How about the concept of a "Jedi Knight"?  How about the concept of "The Empire" and "The Rebellion"?

Trademarks aren't universal.  They apply to categories of products.  What categories are these things trademarks in and what categories are they not?

Trademarks and copyrights aren't interchangeable.  They do two entirely different things.

Copyrights:  Create a monopoly on use, performance and derivation of a work as an incentive for people to make more works.

Trademarks:  Create an indication for a consumer that a product or service comes from a known and trusted source.

The idea that Trademark is something that could be handled by comments and disclaimers within a TRPG is utterly impractical.  The OGL's solution to this is to let you say "this thing X, you can't use it".  Doesn't matter what X is or what the legal claim is, or anything else - if you accept the terms of the OGL, you agree to be bound by the restriction not to use X in that work.

If I say "A world with elves, hobbits, dwarves and orcs is my Trademark", nothing in the CC license prohibits you from ignoring that claim - out of negligence, or just because you don't think my Trademark claim is valid.

That's a powerful and necessary component of the OGL.  TRPG publishers are justifiably proud of and jealously guard the creative bits of their worlds and settings.  They hope to someday extract income from licensing them.  A license that did not absolutely ensure that they were not "giving away" those rights would have been a non-starter.  Hand waving of the sort you advocate wasn't going to be good enough.

I understand you're passionate about the CC license regime and I salute you for it.  There's a lot to like in the CC ecosystem.  But it isn't a good fit for what the TRPG industry needs to do its business, and saying that isn't saying anything bad about CC.

RyanD

Ryan,

You may have addressed it elsewhere, but what are your perceptions of the move away from Open Gaming Content produced by WotC?  Obviously the move to 4th edition was a move away from Open Gaming Content, but I noticed a growing frustration in the industry that support for alternate base classes, for instance, was outside of the OGL.  For example, if I wanted to use DM Genie for my games, the more we moved beyond 'core only' the more trouble we had.  With everything under the OGL, everything could just 'work' together.  

It felt like a dramatically increasing level of incompatability.  

Do you think moving away from Open Content ended up hurting WotC as 3.5 moved toward the end of its supported cycle?  

And don't pay too much attention to Stormbringer.  He likes to assert things as if he were an expert, and refuses to accept proof that his position is wrong.  He's like Colbert - he listens to his gut regardless of what 'facts' might say.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;581531And don't pay too much attention to Stormbringer.  He likes to assert things as if he were an expert, and refuses to accept proof that his position is wrong.  He's like Colbert - he listens to his gut regardless of what 'facts' might say.

:teehee:

Mr Dancey and I have spoken before.  I think he can decide whether or not to engage in a discussion, and when to terminate said discussion without your help.

(Protip:  Colbert is parody)

Quote from: deadDMwalking;581531You may have addressed it elsewhere, but what are your perceptions of the move away from Open Gaming Content produced by WotC?

It was a horrible mistake for which they paid the price of a failed edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the rise of the first true competitor to take it on head-to-head and win in Pathfinder, and the loss of a tremendous reservoir of positive community equity that they greatly need now if they're ever to climb out of the hole they've fallen into.