There's a lot of good stuff back into those 36 pages of Hogan's, but I just want to highlight two things. First, the text is really funny. It's just a hoot to read. Hogan really nails the cynical black humor of the Black Adder vein.
The other thing he does is borrows from elsewhere cite his influences right in the text. For example, Jim Raggi has one of the sanest methods for adjudicating encumbrance, so borrowing his rules makes a lot of sense to me. Mr. Hogan does exactly that, and says so right in the encumbrance section. I like that a lot. The kind of folks who write up D&D variants should be swiping each others' best bits. Because really, unless encumbrance is your bag, finding someone else who has already put the work in is a godsend. Ditto any other type of rule that you aren't inspired to work over yourself.
I've seen quite a few published 3rd party books for 3.x that borrowed open content from other publishers, exactly as allowed under the licensing. But sometimes the only way you'd find out that part of the book was someone else's work was by reading the stupid tiny-fonted legalese in the back. That sucks. If someone is good enough to swipe from, don't hide it under a bushel. There's no need to be insecure about borrowing, especially here in the OSR scene. We already rely on ridiculous amounts of material from Gygax and Arneson and many others.
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Agreed. If I'm reading an awesome game and part of it was inspired by this whole other awesome game, I would want to know about it so that maybe I could also by that second awesome game, too.
ReplyDeleteI think a more conversational tone, less "professional" feel to our games would be cool, including being straightforward with sources and inspirations behind rules or ideas. It's a hobby after all, and generally is written from one DM to another.
ReplyDeleteTotally agreed. I remember when I built my first campaign website during the 3.0 era, I was posting Open Game Content for my players and others who visited the site, and I felt like I should attribute each feat, prestige class, cleric domain, or spell to the original source, so, for example, after each listing, I would put: "Source: Dynasties & Demagogues" or whatever. I also had the sources listed in my Open Game License, which was properly filled out and kept updated.
ReplyDeleteBut then someone came along to my site and mentioned that I was incorrectly (and illegally) mentioning the sources by their copyrighted names, and that it wasn't allowed according to the rules of the Open Game License unless I obtained express permission from the publishers to mention their product names on my site. So, I just got rid of all of those references.
Seems extremely silly and short-sighted to me. Like Daniel said up above, I would think that seeing a source listed next to the original content would inspire people to seek out the primary source book.
There were a lot of silly things that happened during the 3.0 era.
But then someone came along to my site and mentioned that I was incorrectly (and illegally) mentioning the sources by their copyrighted names, and that it wasn't allowed according to the rules of the Open Game License unless I obtained express permission from the publishers to mention their product names on my site. So, I just got rid of all of those references.
ReplyDeleteSadly, this is correct under the terms of the OGL and since the vast majority of retro-clones use the OGL, they must abide by those terms.
I mostly agree, but there are some exceptions for the sake of art. For instance, Mazes & Minotaurs or Encounter Critical would probably do well to avoid this, since the conceit is that these are games from alternate realities in which those inspirations don't exist. This exception is important to me because that's a similar conceit to what I'm doing with the WRG-based game that I'm designing. In reality, I'll be garnering some inspiration from things that have gone before, but the presentation is going to work best if the game doesn't refer to those sources explicitly.
ReplyDeletefaoladh: In a case like that, it might be helpful to have a separate "Designer's Notes" document, or a series of webpages or blog entries.
ReplyDeleteKaiju: That's a good idea.
ReplyDeleteThere's an essay (by Sandy Petersen, IIRC) in Schick's "Heroic Worlds" where he talks about this (the whole credit-where-its-due thing), and I always try to take it to heart (see page 1 of Risus ...)
ReplyDeleteRe Encounter Critical and other games where the inspirations are out-of-universe: what Kaiju said. Those on the EC Mailing List (or those who've slogged through the audio commentary) know that while EC itself is mum on the games it's made of, I publicly tip the hat to the inspirations (Arduin, Space Patrol, etc) whenever given a reasonable excuse to.
Thanks, Jeff, for the tip on this cool little game, which I hadn't heard of and instantly adore. Though ironically, skipping ahead to the encumbrance rules (which I had to since you called 'em out) I felt slightly disappointed that they were (slightly) more complex than the rules I often use (in the forever-unpublished Russkie fantasy game I was doing with Ed before he passed) but I'm still glad to know they're properly attributed to their inspiration :)
I am spending the next 10 days tidying up footnotes and references on my Magnificent Octopus. Citation is how I do my work, chasing citations the essence of history. So, yeah. But keeping the footnotes in any commercial publication is next to impossible, and bibliographies are the first things to be cut. It's silly.
ReplyDeleteA great example there from Martin R. Thomas of why the OGL is a trap, not some wonderful gift of freedom. It allows you to do nothing that you were not allowed to do before (read it closely, folks) and prevents you doing some very simple and reasonable things.
ReplyDeleteHere's what you can do WITHOUT the OGL:
http://www.kenzerco.com/index.php?cPath=25_28
To quote Dave Kenzer "A world where one could not reference others’ materials in their product would be a dark and sad place"
And here's a quote from the US Library of Congress website:
"Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form."