C&Ds for Online D&D 5E Character Generators

Ed Friedlander reports that WotC has asked him to remove his D&D character generators. Ed ran the generators at his site, Pathguy.com, including a D&D 5E character generator. His Pathfinder RPG character generator is still running. Thanks to Slayyne for the scoop (who also reports that at least one other site has also closed). [Update: while the actual request has not been shared, others have reported that these are very amicable requests].

You can see his closing note here.

"After almost two decades, Wizards of the Coast has asked me to remove my online character generators. I appreciate the many people who have written and thanked me for my work, and I hope you will continue to enjoy the hobby.

As a physician and gamer, I've supported and defended the hobby, and helped concerned families understand its value.

The "Dungeons and Dragons" phenomenon has encouraged young people to study other cultures. It is a game in which people work together to accomplish a meaningful goal. Characters even define themselves in terms of their good morals and their ethics. On one level, it simulates the spiritual warfare described in the Christian scriptures and in the Arthurian legends on which the game is based. I am proud that I was able to make a contribution.

My generator for Pathfinder will of course remain online. Click here for more information about this role-playing game.

May your dice come up 20s.

Ed Friedlander MD"

Back in November, the D&D Tools website suffered a similar fate, as have a couple of spellcard websites. While WotC appears to be largely easygoing as far as fan creations are concerned, they do take action when content from their products is copied or distributed.

Ed's character generator created characters by selecting a number of options, and output a character sheet similar to below. I'm not all that familiar with it, so I don't know what text, if any, it may have borrowed from the official rules.

As yet, there's no license (Open Gaming or otherwise) for D&D 5th Edition (although WotC does intend to do so), although a number of publishers have published books anyway using the older Open Gaming License for D&D 3E and 3.5.

What is interesting to hear is that some people who have received such requests describe them as very amicable. Toxic Rat says "Speaking from personal experience, I received a very nice email asking that I take down particular content owned by WotC. No threats, no warnings of legal action, just a request to honor their copyright." That's great to hear.

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[Mark CMG]

On the other hand, the OGL states "You agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of such Trademark or Registered Trademark."

Some might argue that fair use overrides the license. Others would argue the license requires you to forego that particular right in order to benefit from the other parts of it. I'm no lawyer, so I wouldn't know.

You've got the right of it, in that you gain some benefits from entering into the contract (using the OGL) but give up other rights by doing so as well.

 

[Sacrosanct]

On the other hand, the OGL states "You agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of such Trademark or Registered Trademark."

Some might argue that fair use overrides the license. Others would argue the license requires you to forego that particular right in order to benefit from the other parts of it. I'm no lawyer, so I wouldn't know.

My understanding is that if you use the OGL, you cannot use Fair Use because you're agreeing not to. You can't really have it both ways. If you want to use Fair Use, you can't use the OGL.

 

[MoonSong]

On the other hand, the OGL states "You agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of such Trademark or Registered Trademark."

Some might argue that fair use overrides the license. Others would argue the license requires you to forego that particular right in order to benefit from the other parts of it. I'm no lawyer, so I wouldn't know.

My understanding is that if you use the OGL, you cannot use Fair Use because you're agreeing not to. You can't really have it both ways. If you want to use Fair Use, you can't use the OGL.

The generators weren't OGL, which is the entire point. just because of that, it doesn't means they were wrong. Fair use is fair use, maybe they were pushing it, but only a court could rule if they were actually infringing.

 

[Mark CMG]

The generators weren't OGL, which is the entire point. just because of that, it doesn't means they were wrong. Fair use is fair use, maybe they were pushing it, but only a court could rule if they were actually infringing.

Fair use doesn't allow for wholesale copyright infringement by someone putting out a product, for free or for sale. Did the generator use a lot of the text from the game? Seems like that would be the only way it would be useful as a generator for the game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

"Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship."

It's not like just anyone can ignore copyright and then say, "I think that's fair!"

 

[Dausuul]

I see what you're saying but its really a matter of having enough manpower on each side of the equation to ensure simultaneous release. Again, you think of it as "adding" digital tools, so your conclusions about what needs to be done first is a self-fulfilling prophesy. They didn't *have* to have the books ready for any particular time. It's a larger overall project and just needs to be planned properly for it to come about in that manner.

Manpower = money. For developing a professional-quality suite of e-tools, it's a lot of money; tens of thousands of dollars for even very simple stuff, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) for something like DDI or Morningstar. And there ain't a lot of money in RPGs. Paizo and Wizards are the only companies that could dream of putting up that much cash ahead of release. For a new, untested entrant into the field? Forget it.

And why would you blow that kind of money when you can just hand it over to the community and let them take the risks and do the heavy lifting? That's what Paizo did, and it's worked out great for them. Meanwhile, Wizards keeps trying to build its own e-tools (sometimes in-house, sometimes with contractors) and falling on its face. This is the third edition in a row that they've tried to provide digital support on release and failed.

 

[Mark CMG]

Manpower = money. For developing a professional-quality suite of e-tools, it's a lot of money; tens of thousands of dollars for even very simple stuff, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) for something like DDI or Morningstar. And there ain't a lot of money in RPGs. Paizo and Wizards are the only companies that could dream of putting up that much cash ahead of release. For a new, untested entrant into the field? Forget it.

And why would you blow that kind of money when you can just hand it over to the community and let them take the risks and do the heavy lifting? That's what Paizo did, and it's worked out great for them. Meanwhile, Wizards keeps trying to build its own e-tools (sometimes in-house, sometimes with contractors) and falling on its face. This is the third edition in a row that they've tried to provide digital support on release and failed.

No doubt, yet it has to be the goal for the industry leader.

I don't think they go into development of a new edition of D&D even considering that it might fall on its face. And, let's face it, to even have simple tools at all at some stage, the work and the money commitment has to be budgeted long before the release even if they *aren't* going to have the tools available until somewhere down the road.


So (and I know this isn't something you are necessarily arguing against, Dausuul) the question becomes, does it help the new edition to have digital tools in place concurrent with the edition release more than if you make the customers of the new edition (mind you, your best customers who are early adopters) wait until who-knows-when?

And you're right that we know they tried multiple times to get some tools right for 3.XE at various stages but, by every best guess, the tools were a huge revenue stream for 4E with the subscription-based digital tools. So, I have no idea why anyone would think there is a more compelling argument NOT to do their best and plan to have tools ready to launch alongside the edition release in this era.

Do we have any guesses how many core books were sold and what sort of money was made from them? Millions? What of the DDI? I don't think I opened a thread for four or five years where someone didn't mention the number of visible subscriptions and it seems that anyone could calculate roughly what a monthly fee times the number of subscriptions time however many months they were in operation to figure out the millions it brought in. Given that the life cycle of an edition is limited to, let's say, five to seven years, why would you shave a year off the front of that potential revenue stream? Did the experience of 4E DDI not get them prepared to have tools in place at launch? I just don't get it.

 

[Mistwell]

The generators weren't OGL, which is the entire point. just because of that, it doesn't means they were wrong. Fair use is fair use, maybe they were pushing it, but only a court could rule if they were actually infringing.

There was no cease and desist. It was just a letter politely asking them to stop. And the guy who got the letter refuses to show anyone else what it said, despite Morrus asking him politely. So it's not a matter of WOTC circumventing a court system or anything like that - it's not even vaguely close to that.

 

[Mistwell]

I find it rather silly to see some people claiming releasing all three core books is the "industry standard" when the only company that's done that (that's a real player in the industry) is WOTC itself. So if they set the industry standard before (despite Paizo not following that standard) then you're saying they set the new standard now. Which means them not releasing them all at once is the new industry standard.

None of this "release all at the same time" makes sense from an "industry standard" basis. It's not the industry standard, and never was. One company has done that, it was WOTC itself, and they didn't like the results so decided to change their minds on how to do it. You can dislike it, but the "industry standard" argument doesn't make sense for that part of this topic.

Moreover, it's meaningless now. You had to wait a few months, and those months are done now, and it's obviously not the end of the world here or even a genuine mark against them - I see no evidence it hurt their sales or games started in 5e because of the core release schedule - a schedule somewhat similar to their primary competitor (Paizo). It doesn't "add up" to another list of complaints to tip any scale - anything which was as finite as a few months, that's already passed, during heavy sales, is a sign it is not a factor contributing to any "adding up" of factors which harm the game. It's a one-off issue that they got through just fine, at worse.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The generators weren't OGL, which is the entire point. just because of that, it doesn't means they were wrong. Fair use is fair use, maybe they were pushing it, but only a court could rule if they were actually infringing.

In addition to what others have said, step back and look at it from a common sense angle. If you could do all that with just fair use, would it make sense to have an OGL at all to begin with? Probably not. Fair Use is actually pretty tightly defined in what you can do. See Mark's post above. The whole reason of the OGL was to give extra tools for 3PP to use to be compatible with the specific edition. Any by agreeing with the OGL, you agreed to other limitations that you might have been able to do under fair use.

It very much is NOT "take the best of both and put that into your product." It very much is "Choose either or, but you need to follow the rules of which one you do use."

 

[MoonSong]

In addition to what others have said, step back and look at it from a common sense angle. If you could do all that with just fair use, would it make sense to have an OGL at all to begin with? Probably not. Fair Use is actually pretty tightly defined in what you can do. See Mark's post above. The whole reason of the OGL was to give extra tools for 3PP to use to be compatible with the specific edition. Any by agreeing with the OGL, you agreed to other limitations that you might have been able to do under fair use.

It very much is NOT "take the best of both and put that into your product." It very much is "Choose either or, but you need to follow the rules of which one you do use."

Actually the ogl only has two benefits: 1) it is a warranty you won't be sued by WotC, 2) it allows you to liberally copy entire sections from the srd verbatim. Appart form it, it doesn't let you do anything you couldn't do by fair use, in fact you renounce certain rights when using the OGL.

But from a certain point of view it made a lot of sense to do it:
1) It created goodwill in the aftermath of the later TSR days, where the company went so lawsuit happy on fans and 3PP.
2) Many people don't get copyright, so it lets them have a certain degree of control over 3PP by restricting them from doing certain things.
3) By the wording of it, it was a way for Ryan Dancey to make sure no company could ever safely kill the game.