If I try and shake free of the Dragon via say itch.io or similar, and want to use a community license, does anyone have an opinion as to which one?

OGL?

Mork Borg has their own.

Any pros/cons I should consider?

Other (non-WoTC) companies have used the OGL with their IP, it seems to work ok.

It all depends on what you're trying to achieve by the license. A license is there to define what usage is acceptable or unacceptable. What usage of your creation do you want to prevent?

Quote from: Zalman on April 03, 2022, 10:31:45 AM
It all depends on what you're trying to achieve by the license. A license is there to define what usage is acceptable or unacceptable. What usage of your creation do you want to prevent?

Ideally I want an ecosystem to develop that always includes the core.

I don't want someone to take the core and claim ownership over it.

Something similar to one of the Creative Commons levels...

But I've never seen those used in RPGs before, so I wonder if there's a reason why.

Quote from: mcbobbo on April 03, 2022, 10:48:31 AM

Quote from: Zalman on April 03, 2022, 10:31:45 AM
It all depends on what you're trying to achieve by the license. A license is there to define what usage is acceptable or unacceptable. What usage of your creation do you want to prevent?

Ideally I want an ecosystem to develop that always includes the core.

I don't want someone to take the core and claim ownership over it.

Something similar to one of the Creative Commons levels...

But I've never seen those used in RPGs before, so I wonder if there's a reason why.

I think most people avoid Creative Commons because it allows others to sell your IP for profit, and they want to keep all the profits. If your only goal is to prevent someone else from claiming your work, and you don't mind if they repackage it and sell it (with your name on the cover), then Creative Commons Attribution License works fine.

IANAL. The OGL works by having the writer specify what is product identity or closed content, and then what is open game content or what is sharable/reusable/able to be copied. Also include the OGL License and you are golden. One of my pet peeves is a game using OGL as a descriptor only to have little to no specified open game content.

There is not as much Creative Commons usage because the OGL does not give you permission to change what other people have licensed.

There are Creative Commons licensed RPGs. Really it depends on what your goals are. There are a couple of RPGs that sell hard copies, but use CC to allow people to distribute the PDF for free. You could write your complete game, then publish a bare bones version of the rules under one of CC's remix licenses, which would work a lot like the OGL. Using the CC licenses from a business standpoint requires a lot more thoughtfulness. It would be best to say, "Here's my plan. Here's the types of documents, here's the licenses for each one," and get some feedback on if it will work like you think it will.

OTOH, using the OGL is like falling off a log. Just don't plagiarize, don't infringe trademarks, clearly indicate what is OGL and what is PI even if you think it's implicitly obvious from the license, and for fuck's sake use a compliant Section 15.

Quote from: mcbobbo on April 01, 2022, 03:27:11 PM
If I try and shake free of the Dragon via say itch.io or similar, and want to use a community license, does anyone have an opinion as to which one?

Use the Open Game License.

- Take the text of your book, and strip it down to just a reference for the mechanics.
- Make that text open content. Your published rulebook will prize in of itself because it is fully polished work written with your "voice".
- Yes somebody will be able to copy it to make their own competing version.
- But nobody will do that because your fans will view it as a dick move.
- You always retain the copyright to your work free to license to other people for different terms. Although any text you made open content any text will remain open content under the OGL for others to use.

Just remember: get advice BEFORE you license anything. BEFORE you release it under Creative Commons or the Open Gaming License or anything similar.

Once you have released it as open content, there is no legal way to undo that (unless the other person has violated the license, and then your only recourse is as the license defines).

Also note that, AFAIK (and I am not a lawyer), none of these licenses have been tested in court, so they currently exist in kind of a gray area legally. Very precise legal language, actual real lawyers think they should hold up (main guy at Necromancer Games, the Rappan Athuk people, was a lawyer, just to give one example), but no court rulings on them.

Last, if what you want was a sort of d20/D&D 3e situation, where people were required to buy the PHB to create characters, that needed more than just the OGL. There was a separate license, the d20 System License (IIRC), which required you to omit character creation rules if you were to include that trade dress/Logo and (I think, it's been 22 years) even to say "hey this is compatible with D&D 3".

OTOH if you wanted to run with just d20 mechanics (including character creation), and not use the d20 Logo, you could do that and operate just under the OGL.

So you'd want to look closer at the d20 System License and use a clone of that, modified for your specific system, and require people to just not use certain mechanics, OR omit a specific subset of mechanics from the material you declare as Open Game Content, so people are required to buy your corebook to have a complete game. (Again, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. You should consult one before making any moves like this.)

Cautionary Tale: West End Games' last owner declared d6 as Open Content, and all of it got posted for free essentially the next day. Hadn't set up anything similar to the d20 System License so he gave his entire system away, and had nothing to sell. His company went out of business not too long after.

That is not what happened to WEG. D6 wasn't even a flagship product of theirs at that point, it was licensed mainly to serve the fanbase. At first, the IP owners tried to maintain an Open D6 license separately from the OGL (much like the d20 license), but the Open D6 license was abandoned by the owners after they went out of business and simply weren't invested in that point at managing anything.

By contrast, the #1 and #2 RPGs in the world right now in sales have published essentially their entire rules under the OGL.

WEG is a cautionary tale, but not for that reason. There were multiple problems, all of which predate the Open D6 project. The proprietary D6 books didn't sell, Torg had a difficult life, they lost the DC license... they simply weren't selling profitable, popular books. The last owners of the WEG material went out of their way to make free copies of the OGL material available, as a last gesture of goodwill.