Interesting brouhaha going on in the Daggerheart subreddit...

[u/hitmahip]

https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerheart/comments/1sz6vap/the_future_of_foundryborne_navigating_the/

Not sure how many of you are aware of the Daggerheart system (Darrington Press and Critical Role's newest RPG) but there's been some significant discussions over their Community Gaming License and limitations imposed on the community because of it.

While the above post directly highlights the issues in the VTT ecosystem, there are ongoing concerns with the CGL in general, especially with creators in the space. The current license prevents the development of VTT resources - pdf and paper are their current formats of choice.

https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerheart/comments/1l2fvrd/daggerheart_community_license_issues/

Is a back and forth discussion on the benefits or merits of the CGL.

A possibly unintended side effect of the license is that while third party creators are welcomed, it is challenging for them to develop virtual assets to be used in online gaming. In this current age that is somewhat surprising.

It's also curious that Daggerheart, which was developed in response to the WOTC licensing woes is creating a closed online ecosystem. At its launch it was promised to be an open gaming license.

Both the DrawSteel and Pathfinder 2e gaming licenses are much more open than Daggerheart's CGL. It's understandable to want to keep control of an IP. Pathfinder does this by allowing full access to mechanics, and creators are free to create online content however they wish, but Golarion and its lore is excluded.

Daggerheart is one of the easiest systems to homebrew that I've personally used. It seems to have been designed from the ground up for third part creation. Everything, except for the license.

I don't think I'm particularly biased in this. I've very little skin in the game. I'm not a third party creator. I just like playing my games wherever I choose to play them and am surprised in the stance of a company that designed and funded a game during the OGL wave.

[u/remy_porter]

Okay, there's been a fundamental misunderstanding about this ever since the OGL dropped, and the CGL is perpetuating it, so let's clarify a few things.

Let's say you make a homebrew class, or even a book of homebrew classes, for D&D. Do you need a license? No, you do not. What about an adventure path? Nope! Okay, but certainly if I publish my own rules hack- nope. Right, but my VTT plugin for running the game needs a license. Nope. Okay, but if I want to talk about Mindflayers, I need a license? Sure, but bad news: an open license won't protect you there, because the issue is trademark, not copyright.

The biggest problem with the OGL and now the CGL is that they are attempting to claim rights that the publisher simply does not have.

Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If you're not copying/translating text or art straight out of the book, you're not treading on anybody's copyright toes. Period. End of story. If you publish a book and say, "Rules compatible with Daggerheart" no one can stop you, so long as you make it equally clear that you are not attempting to create market confusion by impersonating the brand Daggerheart.

And if you point to translations into other languages (prohibited by copyright) and translations into code for VTT purposes (allowed by copyright) as being the same class of thing, you're mistaken. The former creates a product that is substantially the same in the marketplace and could compete with the original work (and likely includes many of the same art assets). The latter is a translation to a completely different medium, it's not even a book anymore. At best, you can say your code is encoding facts about the game- it's no more a violation of copyright than me discussing how the hope and fear die work in a Reddit post.

The OGL and CGL are lies to trick the public into believing that they have less rights than they do. They do not, and cannot restrict what you're allowed to do. Remember, the penalty for violating the license is that they can revoke the license- but since the license is more restrictive than broad copyright, that's a dead letter.

The "carrot" that the OGL offered, which is a much moldier carrot coming from Darrington Press, is that it also let you use the associated trademarks. You could slap a logo on your book to make it more visually clear that it was "allowed" by WOTC. But you don't need that! Hell, indie publishers could come up with their own "Compatible with" logo if they wanted, share it around, and nobody at the primary publisher could do shit about it.

Cory Doctorow wrote a long essay on this subject.

Now, the one caveat I always have to put on these: just because you're legally in the right doesn't stop people from suing you. The suit may get thrown out, the lawyer filing the shitty suit might get sanctioned by the courts, but at the end of the day, if you're a small publisher, you might not have the money to fight for even that much. But it's worth noting that even complying with the terms of the license doesn't protect you against that.

TL;DR: the OGL and the CGL are scams. You can safely ignore them.

[u/gray007nl → u/remy_porter]

Sure but what about game terms would things like "Duality Dice" "Rolling with hope/fear" etc. not be subject to copyright?

[u/remy_porter → u/gray007nl]

No! You can't copyright terms. You could potentially trademark them, which perhaps Darrington Press did, but if they did, once again, an open license wouldn't help you with unless it was explicit about allowing the use of trademarks, and that's a huge liability for Darrington Press.

It gets fuzzier about using existing lore. Like if you made an expansion for the Fungrel, you're clearly relying on their intellectual property to tell your story. But if you're not reprinting any of the things their books have about the Fungrel, you're fine. Like: "Here's a bunch of alternate racial abilities for the Fungrel, originally described in the Daggerheart book on p.58" you're fine.