If you don't put the D20 trademark on your product, the D20 TL does not apply. All the D20 TL does is tell you when you are allowed to use thee D20 trademark.
No, the D20 TL does in fact say you can't use parts of the previously "open" game. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.
It would be like Sun releasing Java's code under the GPL, but requiring that you pass a certification test to use the Java trademark. The certification test doesn't stop you from using the code however you like; it just says under what conditions you can call it Java.
No, it would be like Sun releasing Java's code under the GPL, but requiring you to remove part of it if you use the Java trademark, regardless of the modifications you've made.
The D20 license constrains you to remove the otherwise "open" character creation rules if you're distributing something with the D20 trademark. Technically, yes, it's a restriction on the trademark rather than the rules, but it's still a backdoor way to accomplish the same thing... what sense would it make to restrict the full Linux distro to only things that didn't say "Linux" on them?
You can't afford the legal fees to fight Hasbro on point 1.
So I should sing their praises because they're an 800-pound gorilla that says it'll play by the rules?
The whole derivative work thing is messy, comes to RPG's. At what point is it "derivative" to create an adventure? When you run it for a group of friends in your living room? When you run it for a group of friends by email, with published archives? When you run it for a group of strangers at a con? When you write it up on your website? When you print it in a magazine? When you print it as a game-store product?
It's a slippery slope, and they're (all RPG publishers) already partway down. I'd take that bet.
That's right, they put a TM next to the word Nazi (which pretty much summed up the company's attitude).
While TSR has a lot to answer for, this actually isn't one of those things.
The image of the Nazi character was trademarked by Lucas; they were the ones who required the "TM." TSR just was silly enough to put the TM next to the picture's caption (it was a little cardboard standup, if I remember right) rather than by the image itself.
The nature of business is to destroy the competition.
The issue with those companies, and the reason they were dubbed Evil Empires, was not their treatment of the competition. It was their treatment of the customer... as the competition.
Remember, this is a proposal. If this thing ever gets off the ground, I for one will count myself lucky.
Why? Why wouldn't people be able to work on them in public anyway? (Answer: they would.) Why wouldn't everybody be free to incorporate them anyway? (Answer: they would.)
The "great effect" has been achieved already, just by having the Internet. Do a web search on even the most obscure system, and you'll find someone's house rules posted. Did they need this license to do that? Nope.
Fudge isn't doing this sort of open gaming license.
They're not? Have you read the Legal Notice at the front of FUDGE?
Only thing Steffan does that's not quite opensource.org-ish is require his permission to distribute something commercially, and he's licensed the pay-for distribution of the ruleset all by itself to Gray Ghost Games.
I'm thinking you can still distribute the ruleset within another work, and you can distribute it by itself if Gray Ghost also agrees.
And of course you can distribute it by itself if you're doing it for free, that's the whole point.
Sure, you could have 'house' modifications of the rules, but you could never publish them without TSR's consent
Wrong. That's part of the FUD TSR's lawyers were/are spreading. You couldn't publish copyrighted text, but you really could modify the rules (or recreate the rules in different, non-derivative words) any way you want to, and publish away.
If you read Dancey's rants on Usenet, that mindset hasn't changed... they still think you can't do that without something like the OGL. And, as long as they've got Hasbro's legal force behind them, they're right. In a practical sense, not in a legal/ethical/moral sense.
There was something about the character creation rules NOT being open. If so, then the code equivalent would be open sourcing everything but the kernal.
Kind of. The character creation rules are open, according to the license as written.
However, and here's where they're pulling a fast one (well, one place, anyway), if you want to use the D20 trademark or actually say your product is compatible with anything, then you can't use the character creation rules. That is, the restriction is written into the trademark usage, rather than the game license.
It's more like open sourcing everything but requiring you to leave a couple chunks of the kernel out of your distro if you want to call it Linux.
Car Wars wasn't an RPG, it was a (sort of) board game. GURPS Autoduel was the RPG version set in the same world.
But yes, it eventually got hideously complicated, and the acceleration table was nothing as compared to the crash tables. Fire rules? Don't even get me started on fire rules.
The original Pocket Box rules are the way to go. Yeah, they're occasionally unrealistic, but they're simple, darnit.
There's a retro movement afoot in PBeM Car Wars, though I haven't actually seen someone go back to the PB version. There's at least one minimal equipment game that looks like the PB equipment list. At least that eliminates monstrosities like laser-guided VFRP's and whatnot.
They're still in business. They filed for reorganization (partial bankruptcy... Chapter 7 versus 11, or the other way around) awhile back, and their parent company's been bleeding them white, and they've had to give up a lot of their licenses (some of which were braindead anyway... Species? Come on) but they haven't quite gone out of business.
Have they finally dropped character classes in favour of a skills-based system?
ISTR there are still classes, but they're addressed in a more sensible manner (templates, rather than absurdly limited stereotypes). Someone else has posted links elsethread to some first looks at the new stuff, though.
I think the world needs a simple set of rules with complex possibilities
TSR was considered the Microsoft of the gaming world
Of the roleplaying world, yep. (As with Microsoft, if you said "Evil Empire" in a RPG context, people knew you meant TSR.)
Wizards went a similar route. Way back when they were an itty bitty struggling company (in their first RPG-company incarnation, before Magic:TG), Palladium Books came down on them for including conversion rules for Rifts in the back of one of their products. I still have a Space Gamer (or similar) magazine with a full-page ad from Wizards announcing that no, they hadn't (quite) been sued out of business, and they had a product coming out "this summer" that they felt was going to turn things around.
Anyway, Magic certainly did turn things around, in that Wizards dropped RPG support in favor of pumping everything into the card business, and Wizards proceeded to use precisely the same tactics that had been used against them, in the card game industry.
So with TSR busy struggling with financial woes, WoTC became the new Evil Empire of the collective gaming business, and the TSR buyout seemed perfectly natural (other than the fact that WoTC had already bought and killed a couple of RPG lines in the course of changing its business mind...)
(Hmm. Is WoTC still squatting on any of those old licenses, or did they finally sell them all off?)
Actually, the new version isn't looking half bad. Jonathan Tweet is involved (in charge? I forget what his title is, and of course he's constrained by marketroids) and the thing seems to be a halfway modern system.
Of course, their marketing people claim this is all very groundbreaking, which it's not, except to people who've never played anything else. But that it brings D&D's massive installed user base up to a fairly current standard is really pretty impressive.
identical in every respect to the PHB (page for page, line for line) only without using any of the D&D trademarks
Close, except that the fundamental difference in HasWizTSR's license is that the PHB itself is not open. You can produce stuff for it, but you can't redistribute any of their copyrighted material, even without their trademarks.
Which is exactly what you can do without the "license."
Roleplaying games are inherently "open source." (You can't copyright the rules themselves, only the specific text of the books.) The so-called OGL grants no rights above and beyond what you already have, and actually takes some away.
Look closely at what's happening... they're trying to control the source anyway through use of the "D20" trademark.
And they're claiming to be first, when critters like Steffan O'Sullivan's FUDGE has been doing this for a long time.
Once you post to Usenet, your email address becomes instant fodder for the spambots.
Not necessarily. I post there using a semi-protected name... "+news" added to my email address. Anybody whose ISP uses sendmail can do that, far as I know, and the mail will still happily get through. Set procmail up to discard (or bounce to abuse, if you're ambitious) blind carbon copies and anything that includes +news but doesn't have an in-reply-to or other header indicating that it's a reply gets discarded/bounced too. That way, nobody has to remove a spamblocker from your address and can reply transparently (provided they don't go and put that address in their records for future non-reply emails), yet the spammers don't get through. Works good, lasts long time.
And afu is not, by any means, a toxic waste dump. It's one of the last bastions of decent Usenet. Furrfu.
You probably hadn't ought to base your worldview on TV sitcoms.
Me, I was at a Superbowl party solo, while hubby was on a plane headed for HP training. I didn't notice anybody's wives slaving away, and the guys did as much sammich-material-bringing as anybody else. The guys weren't as creative, though. Ham. Generic cheese. More ham. Roast beef. More generic cheese. Me, I brought smoked Gouda and black olives and Italian dressing and all the extra stuff. Sammich construction seemed pretty equal-opportunity, though.
Some of us have webpages we couldn't afford to lose (even temporarily) to a messy lawsuit, but supposing we put up convenient not-mirrors that were slightly less risky?
What I mean by this is, suppose I just happened to have a link to a file called decss.zip (etc.) that just happened to be the same size as the controversial file(s), but instead contained something non-injunctified... say, a nice textfile discussing in layman's terms the difference between decoding-to-view and copying-which-doesn't-need-to-decode.
Let 'em find a metric buttload of those on a search engine, and then they'd either have to download and unarchive every one (whack-a-mole is SO much harder when you have to make positive ID before whacking), or else get slapped with a SLAPP when they tried to issue an injunction against me and every other chaff site.
Or would that make it too difficult for a legitimate search to turn up a real mole?
Slashdot Mirror
No, the D20 TL does in fact say you can't use parts of the previously "open" game. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.
It would be like Sun releasing Java's code under the GPL, but requiring that you pass a certification test to use the Java trademark. The certification test doesn't stop you from using the code however you like; it just says under what conditions you can call it Java.
No, it would be like Sun releasing Java's code under the GPL, but requiring you to remove part of it if you use the Java trademark, regardless of the modifications you've made.
The D20 license constrains you to remove the otherwise "open" character creation rules if you're distributing something with the D20 trademark. Technically, yes, it's a restriction on the trademark rather than the rules, but it's still a backdoor way to accomplish the same thing... what sense would it make to restrict the full Linux distro to only things that didn't say "Linux" on them?
So I should sing their praises because they're an 800-pound gorilla that says it'll play by the rules?
The whole derivative work thing is messy, comes to RPG's. At what point is it "derivative" to create an adventure? When you run it for a group of friends in your living room? When you run it for a group of friends by email, with published archives? When you run it for a group of strangers at a con? When you write it up on your website? When you print it in a magazine? When you print it as a game-store product?
It's a slippery slope, and they're (all RPG publishers) already partway down. I'd take that bet.
No. Use of the "D20TL" does affect the other license, so it can't properly be said to only apply to the trademark. You can't have it both ways.
While TSR has a lot to answer for, this actually isn't one of those things.
The image of the Nazi character was trademarked by Lucas; they were the ones who required the "TM." TSR just was silly enough to put the TM next to the picture's caption (it was a little cardboard standup, if I remember right) rather than by the image itself.
The issue with those companies, and the reason they were dubbed Evil Empires, was not their treatment of the competition. It was their treatment of the customer... as the competition.
Why? Why wouldn't people be able to work on them in public anyway? (Answer: they would.) Why wouldn't everybody be free to incorporate them anyway? (Answer: they would.)
The "great effect" has been achieved already, just by having the Internet. Do a web search on even the most obscure system, and you'll find someone's house rules posted. Did they need this license to do that? Nope.
They're not? Have you read the Legal Notice at the front of FUDGE?
Only thing Steffan does that's not quite opensource.org-ish is require his permission to distribute something commercially, and he's licensed the pay-for distribution of the ruleset all by itself to Gray Ghost Games.
I'm thinking you can still distribute the ruleset within another work, and you can distribute it by itself if Gray Ghost also agrees.
And of course you can distribute it by itself if you're doing it for free, that's the whole point.
Wrong. That's part of the FUD TSR's lawyers were/are spreading. You couldn't publish copyrighted text, but you really could modify the rules (or recreate the rules in different, non-derivative words) any way you want to, and publish away.
If you read Dancey's rants on Usenet, that mindset hasn't changed... they still think you can't do that without something like the OGL. And, as long as they've got Hasbro's legal force behind them, they're right. In a practical sense, not in a legal/ethical/moral sense.
Kind of. The character creation rules are open, according to the license as written.
However, and here's where they're pulling a fast one (well, one place, anyway), if you want to use the D20 trademark or actually say your product is compatible with anything, then you can't use the character creation rules. That is, the restriction is written into the trademark usage, rather than the game license.
It's more like open sourcing everything but requiring you to leave a couple chunks of the kernel out of your distro if you want to call it Linux.
Car Wars wasn't an RPG, it was a (sort of) board game. GURPS Autoduel was the RPG version set in the same world.
But yes, it eventually got hideously complicated, and the acceleration table was nothing as compared to the crash tables. Fire rules? Don't even get me started on fire rules.
The original Pocket Box rules are the way to go. Yeah, they're occasionally unrealistic, but they're simple, darnit.
There's a retro movement afoot in PBeM Car Wars, though I haven't actually seen someone go back to the PB version. There's at least one minimal equipment game that looks like the PB equipment list. At least that eliminates monstrosities like laser-guided VFRP's and whatnot.
I recommend waiting until May, although your local game store would probably appreciate it if you took the older version off their shelf for 'em.
"FUDGE Customizable Role-Playing Game, Expanded Edition. GGG1010, 128 pages, $19.95" according to http://www.fudgerpg.com/fudge/
They're still in business. They filed for reorganization (partial bankruptcy... Chapter 7 versus 11, or the other way around) awhile back, and their parent company's been bleeding them white, and they've had to give up a lot of their licenses (some of which were braindead anyway... Species? Come on) but they haven't quite gone out of business.
ISTR there are still classes, but they're addressed in a more sensible manner (templates, rather than absurdly limited stereotypes). Someone else has posted links elsethread to some first looks at the new stuff, though.
I think the world needs a simple set of rules with complex possibilities
Well, there's always FUDGE (http://www.fudgerpg.com/ and links therefrom) for that niche.
Of the roleplaying world, yep. (As with Microsoft, if you said "Evil Empire" in a RPG context, people knew you meant TSR.)
Wizards went a similar route. Way back when they were an itty bitty struggling company (in their first RPG-company incarnation, before Magic:TG), Palladium Books came down on them for including conversion rules for Rifts in the back of one of their products. I still have a Space Gamer (or similar) magazine with a full-page ad from Wizards announcing that no, they hadn't (quite) been sued out of business, and they had a product coming out "this summer" that they felt was going to turn things around.
Anyway, Magic certainly did turn things around, in that Wizards dropped RPG support in favor of pumping everything into the card business, and Wizards proceeded to use precisely the same tactics that had been used against them, in the card game industry.
So with TSR busy struggling with financial woes, WoTC became the new Evil Empire of the collective gaming business, and the TSR buyout seemed perfectly natural (other than the fact that WoTC had already bought and killed a couple of RPG lines in the course of changing its business mind...)
(Hmm. Is WoTC still squatting on any of those old licenses, or did they finally sell them all off?)
Don't forget the trademark issues - not directly a part of the license, but important nonetheless.
I don't think there's any restriction on Linux that says if you call it Linux you can't distribute vital pieces...
You're right, and I stand corrected on that count.
I'm still not impressed with the hinky trademark restrictions, though. But you knew that from rec.games.frp.misc
Actually, the new version isn't looking half bad. Jonathan Tweet is involved (in charge? I forget what his title is, and of course he's constrained by marketroids) and the thing seems to be a halfway modern system.
Of course, their marketing people claim this is all very groundbreaking, which it's not, except to people who've never played anything else. But that it brings D&D's massive installed user base up to a fairly current standard is really pretty impressive.
Relatively speaking, anyway.
Close, except that the fundamental difference in HasWizTSR's license is that the PHB itself is not open. You can produce stuff for it, but you can't redistribute any of their copyrighted material, even without their trademarks.
Which is exactly what you can do without the "license."
And Hasbro owns WoTC.
Look closely at what's happening... they're trying to control the source anyway through use of the "D20" trademark.
And they're claiming to be first, when critters like Steffan O'Sullivan's FUDGE has been doing this for a long time.
Not necessarily. I post there using a semi-protected name... "+news" added to my email address. Anybody whose ISP uses sendmail can do that, far as I know, and the mail will still happily get through. Set procmail up to discard (or bounce to abuse, if you're ambitious) blind carbon copies and anything that includes +news but doesn't have an in-reply-to or other header indicating that it's a reply gets discarded/bounced too. That way, nobody has to remove a spamblocker from your address and can reply transparently (provided they don't go and put that address in their records for future non-reply emails), yet the spammers don't get through. Works good, lasts long time.
And afu is not, by any means, a toxic waste dump. It's one of the last bastions of decent Usenet. Furrfu.
You probably hadn't ought to base your worldview on TV sitcoms.
Me, I was at a Superbowl party solo, while hubby was on a plane headed for HP training. I didn't notice anybody's wives slaving away, and the guys did as much sammich-material-bringing as anybody else. The guys weren't as creative, though. Ham. Generic cheese. More ham. Roast beef. More generic cheese. Me, I brought smoked Gouda and black olives and Italian dressing and all the extra stuff. Sammich construction seemed pretty equal-opportunity, though.
(Go commercials!)
What I mean by this is, suppose I just happened to have a link to a file called decss.zip (etc.) that just happened to be the same size as the controversial file(s), but instead contained something non-injunctified... say, a nice textfile discussing in layman's terms the difference between decoding-to-view and copying-which-doesn't-need-to-decode.
Let 'em find a metric buttload of those on a search engine, and then they'd either have to download and unarchive every one (whack-a-mole is SO much harder when you have to make positive ID before whacking), or else get slapped with a SLAPP when they tried to issue an injunction against me and every other chaff site.
Or would that make it too difficult for a legitimate search to turn up a real mole?