Quote from: DrSly on December 28, 2024, 02:01:00 PM

Quote from: Socratic-DM on June 03, 2024, 04:40:17 PMThis has been a question I've been sitting on for awhile because it seems to be a bit different depending on the creator in question.

For example someone had recently been caught plagiarizing from ultraviolet grasslands, mainly they had stolen some monsters and random tables as far as I recall the story.

But it was never clarified to me if the issue they had was because it was similar or because it was a straight up lift of text from the UVG book.

But that drama mainly centered around a circle of far lefty types, so their standards don't really matter to me.

I'm more interested what the core-OSR crowd thinks so I guess I'll ask a couple of examples.

Number 1: Is it okay to copy a mechanic wholesale? as long as it's somewhat reworded and proper inspiration credit is given somewhere in the book?

Number 2: Is it okay to modify an existing random table and put that in your own book, provided you list inspiration?

Number 3: When is it okay to burrow or use a mechanic and not list inspiration?

Number :4 is it less to do with credit, and more to do with claiming you are the originator of an idea or mechanic?

I guess I don't have any other questions, those are just the one's that came to mind, the OSR being built on TSR era D&D to me always has had a weird relationship with plagiarism and I typically don't hear it come up often.

Have any of the earlier / "core" companies involved in ttRPG publishing ever gone after the OSR publishers for copyright infringement? I'm genuinely curious.

Not to my knowledge, but it might have happened. TSR was suing people who put D&D related material online. It was wild. That would have been the mid-90s. My memory is foggy on it, and I don't want to google it.

OSR happened after TSR was bought by WotC

Plagarism is what the other guys are doing.

In an OSR context, plagiarism is basically only if you cut and paste material directly from someone else's book. If you take the same mechanic and rewrite it yourself, never mind doing something similar but modified, that's just part of the design school of the OSR.

Your questions don't really match your title. Plagiarism is copying someone else's work without attributing them. Plagiarism is not illegal. It can be bad form, and even job-threatening in some milieus such as scholarship—places where the path an idea takes is important and where citation counts are a measure of job effectiveness. That isn't the game world as it currently stands, and I hope it never is.

Plagiarism is about attribution. Copyright is about having a monopoly on copying and distributing. Copyright has nothing to do with attribution. If it would be against copyright law without attribution, it would be against copyright law with attribution.

QuoteNumber 1: Is it okay to copy a mechanic wholesale? as long as it's somewhat reworded and proper inspiration credit is given somewhere in the book?

"Okay" is a fuzzy term. First, mechanics are not copyrightable, so there is no need to reword, and of course copyright has nothing to do with credit. From a plagiarism standpoint, game books are not term papers, and personally I don't want my game books cluttered with attributions. If you choose to roll dice to create statistics, I don't need a footnote saying you got that idea from Ernie Blackwell on page 78 of Greymoor Manor vs. the Ents.

QuoteNumber 2: Is it okay to modify an existing random table and put that in your own book, provided you list inspiration?

Tabular data is also not copyrightable, nor is terminology. That said, if you're copying an entire table exactly, that's where I as a reader might want to see attribution, just because if I enjoy your book with that table, I might also enjoy their book, too. Or, if the table supposedly presents real-world information, I'm going to want to know if it was copied from the United States Department of Agriculture or if it was copied from the "Win the War" Cook Book of 1918, I'm going to want to know the source of that information in order to be able to judge its usefulness.

In a very old superhero game I wrote, I copied the table for blood types from a Red Cross flyer. I attributed that table, just in case someone cared about how accurate it is.

QuoteNumber 3: When is it okay to burrow or use a mechanic and not list inspiration?

Again, this depends on what you mean by "okay". If you mean "is it legal", it is always legal to borrow or use a mechanic, and "inspiration" has nothing to do with it. If you mean "is it proper", again, put yourself in the shoes of your reader. Will they want to know the source of your inspiration? If sourcing just clutters your book, save the inspiration for a blog post. Or, for an Appendix N-style chapter.

Remembering that Appendix N was not for providing credit for ideas. It was for providing readers with sources to help them grok the game.

QuoteNumber :4 is it less to do with credit, and more to do with claiming you are the originator of an idea or mechanic?

Never claim that you're the originator of an idea or mechanic. Even if you think you are, you are almost certainly not. Let scholars fifty years down figure that out—and whether it even matters for this particular idea.

Possibly useful: I did a lot of research on copyright as it applies to roleplaying games several years ago.

Quote from: Ruprecht on December 28, 2024, 05:39:07 PMOSR happened after TSR was bought by WotC

And it isn't just D&D. OpenQuest can be considered OSR, for example.

Quote from: capvideo on December 29, 2024, 01:06:08 PMPlagiarism is copying someone else's work without attributing them.

Self-plagarism is a thing too. Writers that just copy/paste their old work into a new product without being explicitly clear that buyers are getting a recycled product are an example.

Quote from: HappyDaze on December 29, 2024, 05:37:00 PM

Quote from: capvideo on December 29, 2024, 01:06:08 PMPlagiarism is copying someone else's work without attributing them.

Self-plagarism is a thing too. Writers that just copy/paste their old work into a new product without being explicitly clear that buyers are getting a recycled product are an example.

And that can be a legitimate complaint. I don't want to beat up on palladium but one of the reasons there books have the formatting issues they do is grabbing and reusing text. To there credit they have a pretty large library of original work in there products as well.

You guys are focusing way too much on what is or isn't legal. The question isn't literally are you going to get sued over it, it's what people should consider culturally as part of the community.

In general I think if you're just taking from Basic D&D or AD&D or OD&D or whatever it's generally expected that you're doing that already anyway. But if you're using someone else's mechanic or idea, even if you're rewording it, you should definitely give credit. Maybe not necessarily in the book itself but definitely when you talk about the game and advertise it. There's a certain game that I won't name here (you can probably guess anyway) where this was really irritating to me. It lifted mechanics, mainly from DCC but other OSR games too, and the marketing really hyped it up as something brand new and original. If you called anyone on it they would say "well the idea of combining all this stuff from different games is original" and it really isn't.

Knave 2e is the gold standard for this. In the back of the book Ben Milton credits all the games, blogs, and stories that inspired the unique mechanics, and also explains why he made the design choices he did and the intent behind them. It's concise and doesn't go on for paragraphs and paragraphs, but it's both respectful to the work of others and a helpful resource.