[BerislavLopac]

While I understand the desire to define things legally - both by those who want the games to be open and by those who want to control them - game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D (or any other system) in the first place [0].

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...

[mhd]

> We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D

And we never needed Apple's permission to have overlapping windows. Alas…

There was a long history of C&D letters and outright lawsuits. Heck, up until recently one of the head honchos of WotC was working at one of the companies being targeted by TSR in the 90s for their "Role Aids". A detente where you didn't have to worry about that as a small time publisher or hobbyist was rather appreciated.

Never mind that "mechanics" isn't as clearly described as we engineer type of nerds would like. So I'm writing my third party D&D-ish adventure. The players encounter a bunch of Orcs lead by an Evil Wizard. "Wizard" and "orc" existing way before D&D, so we're good here. But now I need to provide stat blocks, with abilities, hit points, "magic missile" spells etc. How far can I go where we move beyond "mechanics" and into "trade dress" or whatever lies beyond that legal dimension door?

Never mind that from a usability POV, there's a big benefit of having your stats exactly as WotC did them.

I often get the feeling that people citing the "rules can't be copyrighted!" adage don't game or are one of those people with three binders full of house rules.

[CuriouslyC]

Magic missile by itself is questionable since that language never gets used outside of D&D references, but it is also suitably generic. If you also used Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, Charisma and Wisdom as stats, and had hit dice, and so on, that would be problematic. If you chose new names for everything but the rules were otherwise identical that would be completely safe.

Part of the problem is this is a gray area even in the law, just look at the kerfuffle around the Warhol prince print that is still ongoing.

[mhd]

> If you chose new names for everything but the rules were otherwise identical that would be completely safe

Reminds me of the Judges Guild "Universal System" where they had a lot of weird stats in their books, often with some made-up rules, just to avoid any issues with D&D at the time (late 70s/early 80s, I think).

Event went so far as to have three-digit stats, stating that the first two are the regular ones (to correspond on the D&D 3-18 range) and the last is "how often you can use it without having to roll for a stress test".

If you're going that unusable, you might as well write for your own or a non-litigious system and let the people convert it themselves. It's a lot of homework anyways…

[HelloNurse]

Come on, this kind of "made up rules" is meant to be ignored, not followed. Normal players would have dropped and ignored that extra stat digit, either because they recognized it as a plausible deniability tool whose usefulness is limited to written material or because preferring D&D-like stats is an obvious corrective "house rule".

[mhd]

Yeah, that rule was clearly just there for show. Just like the second digit on levels ("number of professions you've mastered").

There were some rather elaborate rules for constructing armor that didn't really map to D&D's armor class, though. Probably even more of a curve ball.

The hit points – sorry "hits to kill", my mistake – were either what you'd expect from a D&D character with the same (first digit) level or the sum of (the first two digits) of Constitution and Strength.

Don't remember much more than this…

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

I think this is an easy conclusion to reach in this context of a licensing discussion but no player is going to, in the usual context, open a book they've never heard of and think all of the ridiculous rules were put there to avoid copyright issues.

[crote]

I wonder how the ongoing dilution influences this.

For example, World of Warcraft has had the virtually identical Arcane Missiles spell for nearly twenty years now, and Terraria even had the identically-named Magic Missile for over a decade already.

In trademark law lack of enforcement can lead to the trademark becoming genericized, which is why words like Aspirin, Videotape, or Escalator are no longer trademarks but regular everyday words.

If you never enforce your IP rights despite being well aware of violations, and even actively promote use of it by third parties, at what point does it stop being IP and become common culture?

[hef19898]

One good example are Battletech's Unseen Mech models. The stats were ok, the drawings were owned by some folks in Japan. Liscense agreements were impossible, so instead of risking a law suit, Battletech switched Mechs. And that required an in-universe retcon of sorts to explain why the Mechs everybody used and inhereted from their great-great-grandparents weren't there anymore.

[miiiiiike]

> [...] game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D (or any other system) in the first place.

This is something that I've been seen written over and over again.

While the mechanisms themselves are not subject to copyright, the rules, as authored by Wizards of the Coast, are. That is the specific implementation of those mechanisms (e.g. the definition of a feat, skill, or spell) is subject to copyright.

The OGL and D&D SRD allowed limited republishing of copyrighted material by third party publishers.

If you aren't using the words from the D&D rulebook you can publish a game that's 100% compatible with D&D. You would also have to spend a lot of time reimplementing the spell, skill, feat, and weapon boilerplate.. Which is why the D&D SRD and OGL were created.

It's like a hash table. While you can't implicitly[0] protect the concept of a hash table you can copyright and implicitly protect your hash table. Someone else can create a hash table but they can't copy and paste the code from your proprietary implementation. It's yours.. Unless you give them a license to use and/or distribute it.

The death of/community moving away from the OGL and D&D SRD is a good thing.

The RPG world is a victim of the OGL and D&D SRD's success. How many games are based on the six attribute format? I've been playing games like that for 30 years and I've had enough. When I pick up a book and see dex/str/con/wis/int/cha my eyes glass over. I want D&D to fade, I want publishers to create new, entirely novel, systems, and I don't care what it means the status quo. The ideas haven't been there for many years now.

What's great about the OGL and D&D SRD is that it brought an open source mentality to game publishing. It created a framework for companies can collaborate on a system and made that the default way of thinking about the creation of RPG material. That isn't going to go away. We're just going to be getting more and, possibly, better systems.

It's going to cause fragmentation, turmoil, consumer confusion, and it's going to be great. We'll get a burst of creativity, followed by a plateau, and finally everyone will congregate around a new system in a decade or so.

[0]: Copyright is implicit, patents and trademarks are not.

[rkangel]

> When I pick up a book and see dex/str/con/wis/int/cha my eyes glass over. I want D&D to fade, I want publishers to create new, entirely novel, systems, and I don't care what it means the status quo

The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the system doesn't really matter. The game rules are incredibly secondary to the concept of role-playing - the universe, the people, the motivations, the personalities etc.

We've got a system, it works and everyone knows how to use it. We've met the bar for a foundation we can build our universes on (until now, and this controversy).

That said, I don't think I've spent enough time playing other systems to really be sure of my feelings on this - the above is based on the situation we've got to. I've got Call of Cthulu on the shelves next to me and plan to run a game, partly because I want to answer that question: "does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world"?

[dleslie]

> I've got Call of Cthulu on the shelves next to me and plan to run a game, partly because I want to answer that question: "does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world"?

In my experience, they do because of the sort of players they attract and the engagement required of them.

Complicated games with many source books attract rules lawyers, who dominate the group experience by way of using their knowledge of obscure rules to control the play.

Whereas overly simple games, like FATE, lack enough structure to guide more timid players through the experience, and so play becomes dominated by the prominent story tellers in the party.

[miiiiiike]

> Does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world.

Play "Warhammer Fantasy Role Play" and get back to me. How many fingers did your players have by the end?

Or Dungeon Crawl Classics.. How many level-0s made it through the meat grinder?

The randomness in other system leads to some interesting developments that you don't see in D&D. There's also the culture of the games. In modern D&D there's almost a contract between the players and DM that the players aren't to interfere with the DM's world building and the DM will not interfere with the grand destinies of the characters.

It's completely uninteresting to me. I want to play and play with as many different characters as possible so I can see different parts of the system and worlds. Playing the same characters from level 1 to godhood is dull. Character death should be frequent and glorious.

I also like Blood Bowl so.. I have a pretty high tolerance for nonsensical, dice driven, narratives. There are so many good story hooks if you just go with it.

[CuriouslyC]

The D&D combat system is high variance (single d20 rolls), and fundamentally flawed. DMs routinely have to fudge rolls and engage in divine intervention to prevent the night from ending early because the pack of gnolls that were supposed to be a filler encounter turned deadly with a streak of high rolls.

Wargame systems where combat is the focus and fudging is cheating tend to use more small dice so you end up closer to a normal distribution of values, rather than a uniform distribution. That avoids stuff that doesn't make sense like a shepherd rolling repeated natural 20s while a dragon rolls 1s - if the dragon is rolling 5 dice for an attack the floor of that is still above the shepherd's ability to defend.

[rkangel]

I'm never sure whether this is a bug or a feature. When DMing, while I do very occasionally fudge things I try hard not to. The unpredictable aspect of the universe is a good thing and adds to the drama of an encounter. I do do some other things to make this work - I don't have a huge number of random encounters (also for game pace) and have some mechanism that softens player death a little. E.g. an NPC that can do a resurrection that they can earn, or an in-universe character re-roll.

[trynewideas]

Ironically, D&D's spin on Rule Zero, which is what you essentially describe in practice, isn't in any first-party SRD even though it's been arguably the foundational D&D rule as written in every published edition.[1]

It is, however, an OGL-covered rule in Pathfinder:[2]

> The rules presented are here to help you breathe life into your characters and the world they explore. While they are designed to make your game easy and exciting, you might find that some of them do not suit the style of play that your gaming group enjoys. Remember that these rules are yours. You can change them to fit your needs. Most Game Masters have a number of "house rules" that they use in their games. The Game Master and players should always discuss any rules changes to make sure that everyone understands how the game will be played. Although the Game Master is the final arbiter of the rules, the Pathfinder RPG is a shared experience, and all of the players should contribute their thoughts when the rules are in doubt.

1: https://theoutcastrogue.tumblr.com/post/685341001180741632/r...

2: https://pathfinder.d20srd.org/coreRulebook/gettingStarted.ht...

[trynewideas]

> The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the system doesn't really matter. The game rules are incredibly secondary to the concept of role-playing

Damn, have I got, like, 20 years of blogs, 40 years of forum and BBS posts, and 60 more years of magazine, zine, and rambling manifesto articles for you.

[mcv]

Even if you're certain you'd win a lawsuit, you'd still have to be able to afford that lawsuit. As we saw in the Google vs Amazon case of the Java API, such lawsuits can be long and complex, and most RPG publishers are tiny. WotC is probably bigger than the entire rest of the industry put together.

Even if technically game mechanics are fair use, where exactly to draw that line has never been tested in court, and in the past, well before the OGL, RPG developers publishing something that was intended to be compatible with someone else's game, have been sued over that. Including WotC itself in their early days.

So just that already gave WotC an incentive to want a more open license. And in the late 1990s, before they released the OGL, the RPG industry was shrinking, with each company on its own island, and no exchange of material between different systems. WotC reasoned that the value of an RPG comes primarily from how easy it is to find players to play the game with, and if all RPGs are built on the same core mechanics, they have a common player base and players can much more easily pick up a new game. That's why they created the OGL: to connect all the islands, create a common player base for everybody, make all RPGs more valuable as a result, and thereby make the entire industry bigger. A bigger pie, of which WotC got the biggest piece.

On top of that, they hoped that third party contributions would also improve D&D itself. Inspired by ESR's the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

But the real thing that convinced other publishers to contribute to this common OGL system, much more than any of the legalities, is the trust that WotC built. The OGL was a solemn promise that they would never sue anyone who stuck to the rules in the OGL. Instead of the vague complexities and grey areas of copyright law, there were now clear lines drawn about what you could and couldn't do. And that is what convinced other RPG publishers to go along with this. To trust WotC. And everybody benefited from it.

And now WotC destroyed that trust, and may never be able to repair that. Paizo is trying to rebuild a new similar agreement and the accompanying trust from the ruins of WotC's sudden idiocy.

WotC seems to be seeing the RPG industry as a zero-sum game, where any money made by someone else, is money not made by them. That's not how it works. WotC benefited enormously from the OGL. The biggest editions of D&D are those that used the OGL (3.x and 5), whereas 4 was significantly less popular, and at some point even outsold by Paizo's Pathfinder. RPGs have always been a community effort. 20 years ago, WotC understood that. Modern Hasbro leadership only thinks in terms of products and consumers, and that attitude is going to hurt D&D.

[sswezey]

I think you mean Google vs Oracle for the Java API copyright lawsuit.

[Pet_Ant]

No, if precedent wasn’t a thing, then I’d be for Oracle vs Google. Google wanted to free-ride without contributing. If they could have they’d have made their own language from the beginning. Even then, they didn’t really support real Java but it’s evil twin brother Dalvik. When you are Google-scale you should pay. Noblesse oblige.

[kmeisthax]

Uh, no. Hard no. Literally any legal principle in which Google has to pay for 20 lines of API declarations (which is the thing that Oracle was able to claim copyright over in court) means pretty much the end of software freedom, since reimplementation is how FOSS was bootstrapped. This means that Microsoft could sue Valve for offering Proton on the Steam Deck. GNU and BSD become legally radioactive. Ruffle survives only through detrimental reliance[0]. The entire console emulation community gets sued for hilariously large sums.

Oh, and Oracle now has to pay billions of dollars to Amazon for providing an S3-compatible storage API, completely ending their cloud ambitions and cementing the AWS monopoly.

[0] Adobe published documentation on SWF specifically to encourage browser vendors to reimplement.

[Pet_Ant]

> if precedent wasn’t a thing

It's the size of Google that I feel makes it lose rights. When you are a giant you should lose to compensate for all the power you have as a consequence to the natural accumulation of power. So that Google should pay, doesn't follow that a small start-up should. Unfortunately, the laws are not written that way.

[kmeisthax]

If we're going to throw out the overly-literal interpretation of "equality under the law" that means "exact same rules regardless of socioeconomic status or other context", then why only do this for the very narrow case of API reimplementation? Why not just break up Google for the crime of being a threat to the sovereignty of its host government and people? If Google is powerful enough that we need to start "taking away rights" in order to create a level playing field, then we should start talking about killing Google, if only to minimize how many rights need to be taken away and for how long.

Furthermore, the underlying reason why we're making Google pay is still total bullshit. Remember: we're not arguing for "start-ups should get a pass on copyright infringement but Google should pay billions". We're arguing over 20 function signatures. Nobody should have to pay for that, and any copyright law that covers function signatures is unfit for purpose, even if it's a bill of attainder[0] that only applies to Google.

[0] A law that specifically prescribes a punishment to be applied to one person and one person alone. For example, if Congress were to pass a bill saying "Larry Page is guilty of copyright infringement for scraping the Internet and has no civil rights", that is a bill of attainder.

This is such an easily abusable process that the Constitution, unamended, forbids it.

[mcv]

I think Google should have bought Sun when they could. But whatever your opinion on that case is, my point is that copyright is complex and has big grey areas, and having to fight this out in court is going to be way too expensive and risky for most parties involved.

[mcv]

I do indeed. I knew I mistyped that in a couple of places. No idea why. Oracle seems to have vanished from my brain.

[Sakos]

Even if this is the case, I don't think there are any companies in the space with deep enough pockets to go up against WotC and challenge it. Just the fear of legal reprisal is a huge problem and has a significant chilling effect that can't be ignored.

A new license is absolutely necessary in the context of the modern court system.

[shagie]

> game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable.

Correct. This is where patents come into place.

For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 and https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-milli...

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3208754A/en is another fun one.

But lore and wording gets into trouble. Is "Magic Missile" copyrighted? How about Halfling ( https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/116283 )?

> A missile of magical energy darts forth from your fingertip and strikes its target, dealing 1d4+1 points of force damage.

> You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.

Without looking which one is D&D and which one is Pathfinder?

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/magic-missile/

https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Magic%20Missile#content

Would the pathfinder version be considered a derivative work of the D&D version (well, not that D&D version since that was 5e... still).

[BerislavLopac]

This question is basically what the article linked in my comment above is all about.

[coremoff]

compounded by, in D&D's case, the fact that most of their core material uses completely generic terms; fighter, cleric, strength, wisdom.

Excepting a few, most of their monsters are generic fantasy monsters too or random combinations of "let's stick this head on this body".

The stuff that is copyrightable they do a terrible job at monetizing (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberon, various planes, higher powers, etc.)

[thatguy0900]

Funnily enough, a lot of iconic dnd monsters like rust monster and owlbear was Gary gygax buying bags of random plastic toys and giving them statblocks. So they were themselves just statblocks for others copyrighted works.

[musicale]

Great point, but it seems like it would be a huge pain to have to change all of the spell and monster lists and D&D-specific terms from the SRD into generic equivalents.

On the other hand, claiming copyright or trademark on D&D terms and mechanics that have diffused throughout the RPG universe for nearly 50 years (experience points, hit points, ability scores, spell levels, character classes and levels, alignment, saving throws, initiative, etc.) seems like a fool's errand.