So, my group ended up not being able to play on Saturday, so, instead, I figured I would talk about something that I’ve seen a lot of confusion on lately. Copyright, open gaming, and licenses. Now, firstly, I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve done a lot of reading. This is definitely not to be construed as legal advice, so much as a basic information, or a primer. If you have questions about any of these things then I definitely invite you to reach out, but know that I may tell you to ask an actual lawyer.

Copyright

First, lets discuss copyright and what it actually is and does and how it relates to table top roleplaying games. The biggest issue that is relevant to TTRPGs is that you cannot copyright a rule or procedure, only the way it is expressed. This means you can’t copyright a recipe, the instructions to replace an ignition system for your car, or the rules to a board game. This is how all of those Monopoly clones exist out there, for instance. Expression is how those rules are written out or otherwise conveyed. This means that the exact wording of your RPG book is, in fact, copyrighted, but not the rules that text explains.

Okay, that may be confusing, so lets do the RPG book thing and give an example. The rule we will examine is Advantage. So, from the D&D 5e SRD we get this:

Sometimes a special ability or spell tells you that you have advantage or disadvantage on an ability check, a saving throw, or an attack roll. When that happens, you roll a second d20 when you make the roll. Use the higher of the two rolls if you have advantage, and use the lower roll if you have disadvantage. For example, if you have disadvantage and roll a 17 and a 5, you use the 5. If you instead have advantage and roll those numbers, you use the 17.

If multiple situations affect a roll and each one grants advantage or imposes disadvantage on it, you don’t roll more than one additional d20. If two favorable situations grant advantage, for example, you still roll only one additional d20.

If circumstances cause a roll to have both advantage and disadvantage, you are considered to have neither of them, and you roll one d20. This is true even if multiple circumstances impose disadvantage and only one grants advantage or vice versa. In such a situation, you have neither advantage nor disadvantage.

Now, I can reword this as:

Sometimes a situation is more or less difficult than normal. In these situation, the GM may call for a roll with Advantage or Disadvantage. A roll with Advantage means you roll 2d20, and take the result that is in the player’s favor, while Disadvantage takes the result against the player. In situations in which the player may get Advantage or Disadvantage from more than one source, only one applies, while Advantage and Disadvantage cancel out.

Note that this basically covers the rule and it works the same way, but I expressed it in my own words. Even if Advantage wasn’t in the SRD, I would be able to use my description in my own game because it does not violate copyright.

Patents and Trademarks

Now, where things get tricky is with patents and trademarks. You can patent a procedure, and you can trademark the names of characters or places in your setting. These are both very different things, however.

There may be patents for TTRPGs, but most of the ones I have seen are related to video games. Still, preventing people from using your methods and procedures (the stuff that doesn’t fall into copyright) lives here. If you want to lock your rules down and never let anyone use them, this would be your method.

The other thing was trademark, and that covers specific characters, places, items, etc. This is what Wizards of the Coast has on beholders, by the way, and why all the OSR games name them something else with varying degrees of success. But as you may have noticed, this doesn’t stop people from making similar creatures with the same or similar rules mechanics. Those things are not part of a trademark. This is why you can have stuff like knock off Power Ranger action figures and generic orange juice. If you want to protect your setting, this is how you can do that.

Open Gaming

So, with that out of the way, you may very well be wondering why you need an open license, and you’d be right to wonder. The most technical answer is that you don’t, but that just leads into the next question of why such a thing is such a big deal out. After all, there was a big kerfluffle earlier in the year you might remember. If anyone can just rewrite the rules and go on about their day, then why does it matter?

Well, if you just asked yourself that, you also just happened to answer your own question. You have to rewrite everything. An open license means that you can just copy and paste the parts of the original rules that you are using. Control-C, Control-V, all done. It lets you save the time and effort of going through and reexplaining everything, and also the effort of hunting down any places where you were not completely clear.

In other words, it makes it easy, lowering the barrier of entry. Now folks with day jobs and families can afford to write up their own adventures or settings and not have to reinvent the wheel. A hobby with more contributors is a healthier hobby.

But that actually isn’t the only benefit. It also acts as a way for independent creators to feel safe and secure about their content not landing them in legal trouble. Having some form of open license is essentially a signpost saying “we’re cool, you’re cool, knock yourself out.” This is why many companies, even larger(ish) ones like Kobold Press were concerned enough to express their worry. If the OGL changed and they were no longer complaint they could have be subject to massive legal fees that would have probably closed their doors.

Ultimately, though, that is the thing to remember. Do not release your game as open content if you don’t actually mean it. If there is a rule you don’t want others to have, then you really shouldn’t be releasing it as open gaming because you don’t actually believe in open gaming. Its really that simple. And that’s fine, by the way, in case it needs to be said. I support any creator’s right to make their own decisions about their creations. I’m just not interested in giving them any money, because I think its bad for the industry. But I support their right to do it.

Licenses

So, at this point you should hopefully know what is and isn’t subject to copyright and why you might want to use an open license for your work. The big question for a lot of people at this point is which license. This is a harder question to answer, because there are lots of right answers.

Previously, the go to answer for a lot of people was the Open Gaming License, as put forth by Wizards of the Coast. It is a fine license, but I for one am disinclined to give control over the license to a big corporation, and have been leery for over a decade now, because I know how companies run. They are driven by profits and nothing else.

The new kid on the block is the ORC license that Paizo helped develop (although they do not control it). Again, it is a fine license, but in my opinion it is far to complex, so busy trying to nail everything down that it becomes indecipherable by the average person. It has some nice features, like being able to have only one document but clearly call out what is and isn’t covered (what is considered Intellectual Property, for instance, or things that are not shareable, like art).

Its biggest downside is that it is only Share-Alike. This means that anything created with it must also be open gaming material. Now, I personally don’t have an issue with this, as I think everything should be open, but its a big no go for some folks. If your goal is to let as many folks as possible making content for your game, then it might actually prevent that, but that’s a philosophical question.

There are many others, many of which are made specifically for a certain game, but the only other major name out there is Creative Commons. CC is a huge license family that has numerous options to customize the rights you are giving others, and it has a long reputation in the open source world for all sorts of things. Almost all Creative Commons licenses require attribution, basically naming your sources. This is included in the shortened form as CC-BY. This is the way I suggest using Creative Commons, but there are literally tons of other options, including Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA), a concept we talked about above, and Non-Commercial (NC) which basically forbids the use of the material for commercial uses. To me, this is the worst of all worlds, gaining neither the material and awareness boosting potential of an actually free license, but you are also letting folks just download it for free and put it where ever they like, which basically negates the one benefit of closed source.

The biggest downside to Creative Commons is that, for our purposes as game designers, it really works best with two separate documents, one that is the SRD that is CC-BY, and the other that is your actual game that is not. This way it is unambiguous what is included in each and what isn’t. Essentially, if its in the SRD document, its open, but if its only in the setting document, then its not. This is a little more hassle, but I honestly think that it is a better setup to begin with. Usually, if someone is using an SRD they aren’t necessary wanting to create something in the setting anyway, but are just looking for a set of rules they like.

The Bottom Line

So, to recap:

• Copyright is for expression, not rules.
• Patents are for rules and procedures.
• Trademarks are for setting specific items, people, and places.
• Open licenses work more as a safety blanket and an encouragement to produce content by lowering the cost of entry
• If you don’t actually want your game to be open, just don’t
• Of all the licenses currently out there, my favorite is the plain old work-horse Creative Common Attribution.

Hopefully that cleared up some of the misconceptions about open licenses, and gave you something resembling guidance on how all the parts fit together. I definitely recommend following up on the different licenses and actually reading them (to the best of your ability) to try and get a clearer picture of each, because its a personal decision that I can’t (and shouldn’t) make for you.