39 thoughts on “Pregens for con slots w/beginners”

  1. I really like your simpler move names. The standard DW ones try to be evocative, but I mostly just find them silly, and sometimes misleading (“Spout Lore” is the worst offender there). I’m tempting to move over to yours.

  7. Lester Ward How? From the DW website:

    “The text of Dungeon World is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can make, distribute, and even sell anything you like based on Dungeon World.”

  10. It also claims copyright.

    It is also not, itself, issued as Creative Commons. While the license under which Dungeon World was released doesn’t require this, I consider its lack… rude. Thus, violation of the “spirit” of open gaming. Your mileage may vary. I’ll not be spending money on it.

  11. Lester Ward Can you explain where you’re seeing the claim of copyright? If it’s that tiny text at the bottom, that’s not a copyright symbol, but a “@” symbol to suggest a twitter handle.

  12. Lester Ward you can claim copyright on your own work. That’s allowed. If this were CC-SA or CC-SA-BY he would also need to relicense it as CC

    You don’t get to declare following the rules as rude, man. There is a CC license that requires re-releasing as CC and the authors of DW chose not to use it.

    Please spend some time learning about licensing.

  13. In other words, what the author seems to be saying (based on the preview anyway) is “these guys created this cool game at let me make derivative works on it, but the work in the document is mine and you can’t make derivative works of it”. Totally allowable by terms under which Dungeon World is released, but not something I admire or support. Life is too short for that shit.

  14. Lester Ward you need to get off your soapbox on this, you’re in the wrong. It’s a) not copyrighted according to Joe Nehmer and b) fully attributed (apparently) on every page.

    The author has followed the letter and spirit of the CC-BY license in every way possible.

    [Creds: I am the project lead and “owner” of archlinux.org – Arch Linux and deal with trademarks, licensing, and legal issues almost daily with regards to open licenses. There is absolutely no ethical or legal wrongdoing here in any way]

  16. Nice. I like the concise and simple wording of the moves!

    Aaron Griffin OT: I knew your name was familiar! Nice to see you here. I’m a happy Arch Linux user since ~2008.

  17. Aaron Griffin, I have way more tolerance for building commercial, closed products out of open sources in the software arena. For example, many commercial products use libraries released under the Apache license, which allows such things similarly to the way CC-BY does. Doesn’t bother me. Role playing games are more personal, though, with a long history of unnecessary walled garden bullshit. When someone goes out of their way to make their work open, it rubs me the wrong way when people build closed stuff out of it, even if doing so is totally legal.

  19. Uh… wasn’t talking about that. If I was, I would have said “When someone goes out of their way to make their work open, it rubs me the wrong way when people build commercial stuff out of it.” I didn’t say that. I don’t think it either.

  21. Lester Ward DW was created with a CC license simply so this sort of stuff can be done. To thing otherwise is the height of absurdity.

    How the fuck is this not a derivative work, the kind actually encouraged by creative commons? And how the fuck are all the other derivative works passed around in this community any different?

    Joe Nehmer same

  22. Because most of the other derivative works are also released under a license that also allows you to make derivative works out of them. There may be other DW related products out there that aren’t themselves CC licensed, but I can’t think of any.

    It may be that this thing is CC licensed as well, for all I know, but you wouldn’t know that from the sample image or product description.

  23. Lester Ward I get where you’re coming from. I’d rather people took CC-BY stuff and made CC-BY stuff with it. I’m worse disposed towards this project and its creator because they moved to a closed licence. Like you, I’m more bothered about this in trpgs than in other domains (largely because innovations in rpgs are so small – the idea of someone aggressively trying to protect their trpg IP feels less like part of genuine innovation and more like someone staking out some common land and seeking rent on it).

    Your original wording, “violating the spirit of the licence”, though, that’s misleading. He’s not using a clever technicality to do something the creators (of DW or the licence) never envisaged. He’s doing exactly what the licence explicitly allows. And if it turns out Sage and Adam hadn’t realised that CC-BY allowed this when they chose that licence, I’d be quite suprised.

  24. Lester Ward That’s why CC has a Share Alike sublicense.

    DW is not CC-SA or CC-BY-SA licensed. Is the fact that this was a choice made by the authors lost on you? They could have just as easily made it a Share Alike version and solved this if they had thought it a problem.

    Not everyone agrees with viral licences. This is one of the main arguments against GPL software – the virility. It is entirely possible that this was a conscious choice on the parts of the authors.

    All of this is a fine academic argument, but that’s not what happened here. You began saying it was copyrighted and how bad that was (it wasn’t copyrighted) and continued to move the goal posts to save face.

    You’re completely wrong on this issue, what you have claimed in this thread has been in bad faith, and should own up to it. No one has violated the law, the ethics, or the spirit of any license agreement the authors have made with the community.

    CC-BY exists alongside CC-SA and CC-SA-BY licenses for a reason, and it is highly likely the authors knew what they were doing when they chose the license they chose.

  26. All this talk about licenses and whatnot finally made me head to creativecommons dot org and actually check it out (since I too will be releasing an adventure for DW later this year).

    I’m pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to say what you want and get the right license. Perhaps my fears of “doing it wrong” won’t be so bad.

  27. Rob Alexander, thanks for responding to what I was actually talking about. I should have phrased it the way you did from the beginning, or at the very least said “the spirit of open gaming”, which is what I really meant and thought I’ve been talking about.

  28. So… since we’re talking about creative commons and all that, how about game adventures? If I’m writing a module for Dungeon World, is there a preferred CC people expect?

  29. Lair of the Unknown is CC BY-SA, but it makes use of BY-SA sources, so would have to be.

    Last Days of Anglekite is CC BY closed.

    Shadows of Umberto is CC BY-SA.

    Servants of the Cinder Queen is CC BY-SA.

    Within the Devil’s Reach is CC BY-NC-ND.

  30. Lester Ward my copy of Anglekite says:

    “All text and images for The Last Days of Anglekite are copyright 2014 by Magpie Games. All rights are reserved.”

  36. Brennan OBrien it’s worth noting that while they cannot be copyrighted, parts can be trademarked as well as patented. Licenses such as the OGL tend to cover usage of all these things (see Open Gaming Content in the OGL)

  37. Of those, trademark has been historically more powerful in the gaming industry. Wizard’s MTG patent, for example, didn’t really prevent anyone from making competing trading card games in any meaningful way.

    Likewise, historically the “can’t copyright mechanics” thing hasn’t stopped people from bringing lawsuits anyway(see the Primal Order case, for example).

    Once things turn litigious, it turns out not to really matter that much what the law or a license actually says. Generally the deeper pockets will “win”.

  39. Also covered each player custom-building his own deck from a larger universe of cards, though was more expansive than that in that it covered doing this sort of thing with any “game component”, not explicitly cards.

Comments are closed.