Sitting in the living room, listening to music from 78rpm discs. Sometimes it’s weird. A president. A French lesson. Sex (I think?). But mostly old music.
The OGL 1.1 discussion is spoiling my appetite for D&D. What a mess.
Time to switch all the shit to Creative Commons licenses! 🤬 – 2023-01-05 The OGL Mess
If I have to go over all my PDFs in my download folder going back to 2006 because of the OGL 1.0a being “unauthorized” I will be extremely angry. Having to consider the option is already making me moderately angry. Not finding the source files for many of them is not helping.
The problem ist that even if I think that something like M20 doesn’t contain any text copied verbatim from the d20 SRD, I translated it (M20 Regeln) and made a variant (M20 Hard Core). I’d say, I clearly based my work on @greywulf.
So, did Robin have to use the OGL? Maybe not! Sure, there are spells like “magic missile” or “fireball” and other named elements like “Strength” or “Shield” or “Armour Class” – common enough words. Are they covered by copyright? I’d say: no. It’s the spell description that’s covered. It’s the sentences and paragraphs explaining how combat works.
This is the problem, though: Ignoring a wrongfully applied license means I effectively have no license for translation and adaptations. The entire chain of people building on each others’ work has to relicense their stuff. The entire point of using a good license was so we could do this and not worry, ever. And now we have to redo it all, with many of the people we’re building on no longer active.
It’s a huge busywork. They are wasting the time of all the people that want to do this right. And people forcing me to waste my time is something I really hate.
That’s why I’m angry, Wizards of the Coast. Is this the D&D lifestyle? What a load of glittershit.
They might have aimed their railgun at their competitors, but they’re perfectly willing to have us all live in uncertainty. “We’re not going after you, promised!” Just behave or perhaps they’ll go dig up some violation or other.
I was really fired up, writing that German Megadungeon Pamphlet over the holidays. And now I’m angry.
Anyway.
That’s why my mind is on other things. Like Helmbarten and Halberts. Fantasy Traveller!
✔ It’s short
✔ It’s dedicated to the public domain
Or … I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll just sulk. Or make some music.
#RPG
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I’m honestly very wary of risking anything with games that could be attributed to D&D, despite general legal assumptions that “rules can’t be copyrighted”. If they pick that battle, I don’t want to have anything to do with US lawyers (unless they write HackMaster), I don’t want to have to explain myself to DT or itch.io, and I don’t want to put this upon people using my works.
So right now I’m waiting what game publishers using the OGL do. Dual-licensing with CC like FATE might be a good idea – and also a good show of community support. If Fudge, OpenD6 or Traveller would do that, I’m inclined to lean in that direction.
Given past experiences with software licensing, I wonder whether it’s time to pick a “public good” license like the FDL for my own stuff, or go “public domain” (i.e. CC0).
– mhd 2023-01-06 19:13 UTC
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Reactions like the following from @berinkinsman are the kinds of reactions that come naturally, I fear.
People are speculating about the leaked version of OGL 1.1 and what it means for derivative works going forward. I don’t have the time or spoons to figure out what changes I might need to make right now. So I’m shutting it down, at least for a while, probably forever.
He’s talking about the game Hippogryph.
– Alex 2023-01-08 12:28 UTC
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Having spent quite some time on M20, having written a variant, loving Classic Traveller, and having written more than one game using 2d6 mechanics, and still pissed at Wizards of the Coast for the OGL 1.1 debacle, and assuming that M20 remains stuck using the OGL 1.0a, I was very pleased to see a short 2d6 based Fantasy Adventure game by @audreygwinter:
Simple Fantasy Adventure belongs to a class of games often called “retro-clones”. … Simple Fantasy Adventure is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). – Simple Fantasy Adventure
– Alex 2023-01-10 07:20 UTC