By the power of the angry black lesbian!!!

LOL. The "elite" of this hobby clowns itself non-stop.

What an exceptional waste of time and money. Not only doesn't it protect you from lawsuits, it actually opens you up to more liability. Because as the FAQ AxE says:

QuoteBy using material licensed under the ORC, you automatically agree to license out your game mechanics in your published work under the same terms.

In other words, your work can be deemed to be licensed under the ORC if your mechanics are similar enough to other mechanics licensed under the ORC even if you don't explicitly do so. And since similarity is based on mechanical 'concepts' rather than copied text (which is the only thing a copyright license can even enforce) there's a lot open to interpretation. For example Call of Cthulhu is not directly licensed under the ORC, but it uses BRP which is. So does that mean it's licensed under the ORC anyway?

Based on the wording if not intent of the license, yes, it is.

So I suspect you're going to see a lot of companies who back the license in principle without actually using it.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on July 09, 2023, 09:11:05 AM
What an exceptional waste of time and money. Not only doesn't it protect you from lawsuits, it actually opens you up to more liability. Because as the FAQ AxE says:

QuoteBy using material licensed under the ORC, you automatically agree to license out your game mechanics in your published work under the same terms.

In other words, your work can be deemed to be licensed under the ORC if your mechanics are similar enough to other mechanics licensed under the ORC even if you don't explicitly do so. And since similarity is based on mechanical 'concepts' rather than copied text (which is the only thing a copyright license can even enforce) there's a lot open to interpretation. For example Call of Cthulhu is not directly licensed under the ORC, but it uses BRP which is. So does that mean it's licensed under the ORC anyway?

Based on the wording if not intent of the license, yes, it is.

So I suspect you're going to see a lot of companies who back the license in principle without actually using it.

Do you understand the difference between mechanics and the whole work? Because it doesn't seem like you do.

What falls under the license is what you put under it, so if game X uses the mechanics of BRP and BRP is put under ORC then the creators of game X can't sue you over using the mechanics, furthermore, since the math can't be copyrighted or patented it's the text of the mechanics that's under the license and not anything that's not needed to make the mechanics work, so only the descriptive text needed to explain a spell but not it's name (unless you explicitly put the name under the license also).

The more I read the ORC license the less I like it because you can protect made up words, but mechanics are automatically licensed under Share Alike. This was also a fault of the OGL, and I would really like to see the logic behind mechanics not being protectable. Sure, mechanics can't be copyrighted, but their expression can be, so there's no reason you can't protect naming a mechanic a certain thing as proprietary. But all these licenses force mechanics into the open.

But the bottom line I see is that everything here could be done by releasing an SRD in either CC BY or CC BY SA. SRDs are not publisher books; they're reference documents, so SRDs don't take much effort to compile relative to the rulebooks themselves. Except that the Creative Commons route is objectively better because it gives the designer control over if they want Share Alike to be applied or not. The ORC forces Share Alike.

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 02:19:04 PM
The more I read the ORC license the less I like it because you can protect made up words, but mechanics are automatically licensed under Share Alike. This was also a fault of the OGL, and I would really like to see the logic behind mechanics not being protectable. Sure, mechanics can't be copyrighted, but their expression can be, so there's no reason you can't protect naming a mechanic a certain thing as proprietary. But all these licenses force mechanics into the open.

But the bottom line I see is that everything here could be done by releasing an SRD in either CC BY or CC BY SA. SRDs are not publisher books; they're reference documents, so SRDs don't take much effort to compile relative to the rulebooks themselves. Except that the Creative Commons route is objectively better because it gives the designer control over if they want Share Alike to be applied or not. The ORC forces Share Alike.

And the user of the SRD then gets into the legal quagmire of not knowing how to use it without making his whole work fall under the same license, because the CC licenses weren't thought with that option in mind.

An Open License (to be trully open) has to fulfill certain requisites, one being you not being able to close what was made open upstream.

And no one is forcing you to use the license for your own works or to copy paste the wording of works under the license.

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 02:19:04 PM
This was also a fault of the OGL, and I would really like to see the logic behind mechanics not being protectable. Sure, mechanics can't be copyrighted, but their expression can be, so there's no reason you can't protect naming a mechanic a certain thing as proprietary.

Words per se can't be copyright protected. They can be trade mark protected. I guess the ORC wants to stop that.

Quote from: S'mon on July 09, 2023, 03:54:07 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 02:19:04 PM
This was also a fault of the OGL, and I would really like to see the logic behind mechanics not being protectable. Sure, mechanics can't be copyrighted, but their expression can be, so there's no reason you can't protect naming a mechanic a certain thing as proprietary.

Words per se can't be copyright protected. They can be trade mark protected. I guess the ORC wants to stop that.

Y'all are both stuck on can/can't. The ORC went with "doesn't" and "won't".

The ORC is intended to share, not protect, the mechanics. It's the whole purpose of it. The very first sentence in the AxE under "The ORC License in Plain English" says:

QuoteThe ORC License provides a way for game creators to openly share the mechanics of their game and allows for downstream users to freely use, modify, and reshare adaptations of these game mechanics.

Hypothetically, you can't copyright game mechanics.  And what has been stymieing the ability to share creative ideas?  The concern that some big bad billion dollar corporation will come in and try to do exactly that.  Here's a license that,if someone is using it, they can't ever sue anyone based on "stealing" (lol) their game mechanics.  In an ideal world, this portion of the ORC doesn't do anything.  But in this less than ideal world, it does a whole lot- it prevents anyone from using an ORC-licensed product to do that.  Which, again, WotC just made serious threats about a few months ago.

No one should be trying to copyright mechanics.  It's not even supposed to be possible.  This feature is an unalloyed good.

Quote from: Venka on July 09, 2023, 09:33:13 PM
Hypothetically, you can't copyright game mechanics.  And what has been stymieing the ability to share creative ideas?  The concern that some big bad billion dollar corporation will come in and try to do exactly that.  Here's a license that,if someone is using it, they can't ever sue anyone based on "stealing" (lol) their game mechanics.  In an ideal world, this portion of the ORC doesn't do anything.  But in this less than ideal world, it does a whole lot- it prevents anyone from using an ORC-licensed product to do that.  Which, again, WotC just made serious threats about a few months ago.

No one should be trying to copyright mechanics.  It's not even supposed to be possible.  This feature is an unalloyed good.

Perhaps I should rephrase my concern with my particular situation to make it apparent what the problem is.

My game uses a LIFO stack to organize the initiative organically, something akin to the Stack in Magic: The Gathering. To make this work well in an RPG, you have to over-tighten the action economy so that overly large stacks containing 5+ actions--the kind of stack which threatens to disorient players--can't form because there's not enough AP out on the table to form such a stack. But because it's over-tightened, it's inherently a little unpleasant to play.

That works for me because the game is somewhere between action-horror and survival-horror, depending on how the GM wants to play it, and both of those game genres like tight action economies. Don't get me wrong; I still think it's cludgy and can use some more polish, but it does at least kind of work.

You put this in the hands of a homebrewer with no game design experience and their first inclination will be to add more AP to loosen the action economy to make an action-adventure game. This may even playtest well because the playtest group may already be familiar with my game, and is therefore well equipped to handle complex stacks. You put this in front of a group who has no experience with this kind of mechanic--it isn't a common RPG initiative system--and players all around the table will drop a ton of actions on a single turn, get confused because the system expects the players at the table to remember how a stack of 7-8 actions is organized, and will immediately conclude the mechanic itself is broken when the truth is more that loosening the action economy geometrically increases the possible complexity of a stack and the players need time to learn before you do that to them.

Modifying this system requires some degree of formal game design understanding just so Chesterton's Fence doesn't explode in your face. If I release this under ORC and the game gets more than 2 followers, somebody with no understanding of game design is going to YOLO into hacking it and it will go super badly. Because, unlike D20, this mechanic actually requires you to know a thing or two for the game designer to manage it properly.

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 10:22:04 PM

Quote from: Venka on July 09, 2023, 09:33:13 PM
Hypothetically, you can't copyright game mechanics.  And what has been stymieing the ability to share creative ideas?  The concern that some big bad billion dollar corporation will come in and try to do exactly that.  Here's a license that,if someone is using it, they can't ever sue anyone based on "stealing" (lol) their game mechanics.  In an ideal world, this portion of the ORC doesn't do anything.  But in this less than ideal world, it does a whole lot- it prevents anyone from using an ORC-licensed product to do that.  Which, again, WotC just made serious threats about a few months ago.

No one should be trying to copyright mechanics.  It's not even supposed to be possible.  This feature is an unalloyed good.

Perhaps I should rephrase my concern with my particular situation to make it apparent what the problem is.

My game uses a LIFO stack to organize the initiative organically, something akin to the Stack in Magic: The Gathering. To make this work well in an RPG, you have to over-tighten the action economy so that overly large stacks containing 5+ actions--the kind of stack which threatens to disorient players--can't form because there's not enough AP out on the table to form such a stack. But because it's over-tightened, it's inherently a little unpleasant to play.

That works for me because the game is somewhere between action-horror and survival-horror, depending on how the GM wants to play it, and both of those game genres like tight action economies. Don't get me wrong; I still think it's cludgy and can use some more polish, but it does at least kind of work.

You put this in the hands of a homebrewer with no game design experience and their first inclination will be to add more AP to loosen the action economy to make an action-adventure game. This may even playtest well because the playtest group may already be familiar with my game, and is therefore well equipped to handle complex stacks. You put this in front of a group who has no experience with this kind of mechanic--it isn't a common RPG initiative system--and players all around the table will drop a ton of actions on a single turn, get confused because the system expects the players at the table to remember how a stack of 7-8 actions is organized, and will immediately conclude the mechanic itself is broken when the truth is more that loosening the action economy geometrically increases the possible complexity of a stack and the players need time to learn before you do that to them.

Modifying this system requires some degree of formal game design understanding just so Chesterton's Fence doesn't explode in your face. If I release this under ORC and the game gets more than 2 followers, somebody with no understanding of game design is going to YOLO into hacking it and it will go super badly. Because, unlike D20, this mechanic actually requires you to know a thing or two for the game designer to manage it properly.

It would be the same under ANY open license, even under the OGL, unless you pay for lawyers to craft you a license that you approve the applicants to use it.

But nobody is forcing you to use an open license, just publish as normal and if there's enough interest someone will take the time/work to extract the mechanics (which you can't copyright or patent) and make his own game with those and claim compatibility with yours because the law allows him to do that too.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on July 09, 2023, 09:11:05 AM
What an exceptional waste of time and money. Not only doesn't it protect you from lawsuits, it actually opens you up to more liability. Because as the FAQ AxE says:

QuoteBy using material licensed under the ORC, you automatically agree to license out your game mechanics in your published work under the same terms.

In other words, your work can be deemed to be licensed under the ORC if your mechanics are similar enough to other mechanics licensed under the ORC even if you don't explicitly do so. And since similarity is based on mechanical 'concepts' rather than copied text (which is the only thing a copyright license can even enforce) there's a lot open to interpretation. For example Call of Cthulhu is not directly licensed under the ORC, but it uses BRP which is. So does that mean it's licensed under the ORC anyway?

The license has three types of content Licensed Material (open content), Reserved Material (product identity) and Third Party Reserved Material (content OR mechanics licensed from a third party where the IP isn't under your control).

The license itself spells out in detail what is Licensed Material in section I.e. Which are how PC are created, gameplay elements, dice mechanics, and methods of playing the game. In short, ALL game mechanics are meant to be declared as Licensed Material and thus open content. The only way around this is to use someone else's game mechanic under a different license as Third Party Reserved Material.

This is not sneaky or an oversight it is implementing formally that game mechanics can't be copyrighted.

Also note you can't use the Third Party Reserved Material exception if you control the IP. You can't have any control either directly or indirectly over the third party IP. If you do then you have to make the content Licensed Material.

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 02:19:04 PM
The more I read the ORC license the less I like it because you can protect made up words, but mechanics are automatically licensed under Share Alike. This was also a fault of the OGL, and I would really like to see the logic behind mechanics not being protectable. Sure, mechanics can't be copyrighted, but their expression can be, so there's no reason you can't protect naming a mechanic a certain thing as proprietary. But all these licenses force mechanics into the open.

From here.
17 US Code - 102
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

Quote(b)In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

A combat system is a procedure and thus has no copyright protection. A random table where Judges Guild decides how to weigh the various attributes of a woman does have copyright expression unless it can be shown that it is based on some type of actuarial table thus an expression of a real-world principle.

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 02:19:04 PM
But the bottom line I see is that everything here could be done by releasing an SRD in either CC BY or CC BY SA. SRDs are not publisher books; they're reference documents, so SRDs don't take much effort to compile relative to the rulebooks themselves. Except that the Creative Commons route is objectively better because it gives the designer control over if they want Share Alike to be applied or not. The ORC forces Share Alike.

CC-BY is silent on how how to declare that only part of a work is based on the CC-BY. This is not a problem for the author who created the SRD, but rather for the third party who uses the SRD and wants to share. The default behavior of author of mixed content with CC-BY is either not to license anything at all and just include the credit. Or release the entirety of their work also under CC-BY (or CC-BY-SA). It is rare to find a in-between case because it so unclear as to what the author is supposed to do. In contrast the OGL, and ORC spell what you have to do clearly.

In contrast, the CC-BY-SA license is far more strict, you have to make the entire work share-alike. Where ORC only requires that you do this for the game mechanics.

From here
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#if-i-create-a-collection-that-includes-a-work-offered-under-a-cc-license-which-licenses-may-i-choose-for-the-collection

QuoteBY-SA and BY-NC-SA material
In general, when remixing ShareAlike content, your adapter's license must be the same license as the license on the material you are adapting. All licenses after version 1.0 also allow you to license your contributions under a later version of the same license, and some also allow ported licenses. (See the license versions page for details.) If you wish to adapt material under BY-SA or BY-NC-SA and release your contributions under a non-CC license, you should visit the Compatibility page to see which options are allowed.

The CC folks even spell out explicitly which other licenses are compatible with CC-BY-SA.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 10:22:04 PM
Modifying this system requires some degree of formal game design understanding just so Chesterton's Fence doesn't explode in your face. If I release this under ORC and the game gets more than 2 followers, somebody with no understanding of game design is going to YOLO into hacking it and it will go super badly. Because, unlike D20, this mechanic actually requires you to know a thing or two for the game designer to manage it properly.

Issues with licenses only come from those who don't want to share fully. Whatever the reason including the above.

"Super badly" is a subjective judgment on your part. Tabletop roleplaying is a leisure activity done for entertainment for fun. I point this out because until you realize there is little point in sharing or publishing as you will continually run into more folks doing it wrong. The success I had at OSR Publishing wasn't from thinking that the rest of the hobby was wrong. Rather explaining that I had specific reasons to do what I was doing. Using an older edition of D&D as my foundation, yet adding a skill system on top of it. New classes and so on. Explaining the advantages (and challenges) of sandbox campaigns and so on.

I didn't keep these reasons mysterious, I blogged/post about them, and I talked about them in podcasts. I touch on these reasons tersely in my actual books and explain why.

My recommendation is that you come up with a terse way of explaining what you know about manipulating your mechanics and include it whatever you share or publish. As opposed to just trying to control what others do with your mechanic.

Finally, as a procedure, your mechanic can't be copyrighted anyway as I explained in an earlier post see 17 USC - 102. Any attempt at trying to control its use through copyright or license is a fig leaf.

Quote from: Fheredin on July 09, 2023, 10:22:04 PM
If I release this under ORC and the game gets more than 2 followers, somebody with no understanding of game design is going to YOLO into hacking it and it will go super badly. Because, unlike D20, this mechanic actually requires you to know a thing or two for the game designer to manage it properly.

What does the ORC have to do with this?  If you release this game without any license, and someone immediately publishes a book using exactly your mechanics but with novice mistakes added in, you're in the same situation as you would be with the ORC.  Except, if you were a really rich company, you'd be able to threaten that poor schmuck with a lawsuit- one which you wouldn't be able to win, if he fought back with the aide of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but one which he might simply cease and desist to avoid.  Is that better?  Why is that better?

Is it possible to put a non-WOTC OGL SRD (like the Open D6 SRD) under the new ORC license? Not rewriting it, just a lift and shift.