Free D&D 5E Monster A Day PDF On Reddit

The quality of this resource is AMAZING! It shames many other third-party products. I would have paid for this level of editing, really. Our group will definitely use it

Thanks!

 

[Jester David]

I guarantee you that the art is NOT creative commons; a lot of it is from Pathfinder or Magic: the Gathering (as are a few of the monsters themselves; Eldrazi and Slivers are longstanding MtG staples.)

As a fan work, its pretty cool. However, I don't know if its me, but the page size varies wildly from entry to entry, as does the formatting (horizontal to vertical) making the work hard to read one-after-another.

Pretty sure they're not - I'm seeing a lot of Pathfinder art.

It's fan stuff, though. Whether or not you have an issue with his copyright violations of the artists...it's a nuanced thing. You could always go buy WAR's new book as a way of paying for looking at his art used without his permission! Not sure that'll help some of the other concept artists there...

Darn.

I'm okay with some copyright bending when it's already bending trademarks and is a free product. Fan projects are held to different standards. Especially when there's so much art.

But I hold myself to a different standard and am crawling through Deviantart looking for decent Creative Commons artwork I can use for my own PDFs (prettying up my homebrew content), and it's slow and annoying. I was hoping to just copy some names from this PDF...

 

[RevTurkey]

It looks very good..BUT...

I would hope that permission to use the art was given by the artists and/or copyright holders. If so...great. If not then I think it is wrong and should be taken down. It wouldn't be fair to the artists or companies who have worked hard to be in a position to purchase artwork.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Darn.

I'm okay with some copyright bending when it's already bending trademarks and is a free product. Fan projects are held to different standards. Especially when there's so much art.

But I hold myself to a different standard and am crawling through Deviantart looking for decent Creative Commons artwork I can use for my own PDFs (prettying up my homebrew content), and it's slow and annoying. I was hoping to just copy some names from this PDF...

They, uh, kinda aren't held to different standards. While there's likely little room to sue for damages, as they'd be small at best, suing for infringement is the same standard -- using without permission. This isn't even close to fair use, either. This project is one C&D away from folding due to the art. Heck, even putting the monsters in WotC trade dress is open to infringement. They can't get you for making your own monsters, or even publishing or selling your own monsters, but they can get you for making your stat blocks look like theirs.

Again, damages could be small, but litigation is expensive for the defendant, and even a modest claim for damages that gets thrown out can end up costing a person far more in legal and lawyer fees. This is exactly how copyright trolls make a living, and they do so successfully under far less obvious infringement than this project.

 

[drjones]

http://thegeniusinc.com/dd-monster-maker-download/?ref=3.0.0 That's a monster generator program. Its not what Stonestrix uses, but it makes a pretty much perfect png (and other exportables) of the monster stat block.

That's great, I was just going to moan about how the pdf was interesting but I was not sure I could trust the design of the monsters to be relatively balanced. I miss the 4e adventure tool monster generator. I will be using this thing now to make some custom variants but what I'm not sure about is keeping the math legit. This tool has a suggested CR but other than using that, reskinning other monsters, or winging it and fudging things up/down on the fly I'm not sure what to do.

 

[Guyanthalas]

That's great, I was just going to moan about how the pdf was interesting but I was not sure I could trust the design of the monsters to be relatively balanced. I miss the 4e adventure tool monster generator. I will be using this thing now to make some custom variants but what I'm not sure about is keeping the math legit. This tool has a suggested CR but other than using that, reskinning other monsters, or winging it and fudging things up/down on the fly I'm not sure what to do.

I've been doing a lot of monster design work lately (mostly for a Tome of Beasts entry) and it is very much a "more art than science" kind of thing. The guidelines are pretty straight forward on how to do the mathematics behind AC/To-Hit/Damage, which is the important bit anyway. Where it gets a little more... liberal... is the "traits" and "abilities" you give to monsters. I really don't think you can mess it up that badly just following the DMG. After I got done making the monster, I understood the process MUCH better and feel way more comfortable using tools like the one posted in this thread.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

They, uh, kinda aren't held to different standards. While there's likely little room to sue for damages, as they'd be small at best, suing for infringement is the same standard -- using without permission. This isn't even close to fair use, either. This project is one C&D away from folding due to the art. Heck, even putting the monsters in WotC trade dress is open to infringement. They can't get you for making your own monsters, or even publishing or selling your own monsters, but they can get you for making your stat blocks look like theirs.

Again, damages could be small, but litigation is expensive for the defendant, and even a modest claim for damages that gets thrown out can end up costing a person far more in legal and lawyer fees. This is exactly how copyright trolls make a living, and they do so successfully under far less obvious infringement than this project.

Skipping the are you right or wrong part. Is there a name of someone to sue?

 

[Sunseeker]

Yeah, I've always thought it would be cool to covert some of the stuff from MTG and other fantasy games to D&D, and there's nothing wrong with making the attempt, though the names of the things may be covered by copyright. However, using art the way they're doing is simply going too far.

I won't download this and I encourage others to not download this and if you have contact with the creators to suggest they remove the art.

 

[Jester David]

They, uh, kinda aren't held to different standards. While there's likely little room to sue for damages, as they'd be small at best, suing for infringement is the same standard -- using without permission. This isn't even close to fair use, either. This project is one C&D away from folding due to the art. Heck, even putting the monsters in WotC trade dress is open to infringement. They can't get you for making your own monsters, or even publishing or selling your own monsters, but they can get you for making your stat blocks look like theirs.

Again, damages could be small, but litigation is expensive for the defendant, and even a modest claim for damages that gets thrown out can end up costing a person far more in legal and lawyer fees. This is exactly how copyright trolls make a living, and they do so successfully under far less obvious infringement than this project.

It falls into the same legal area as fan fiction or fan films. It's almost free advertising for the artist and the game, it gives credit, and it explicitly does not try and make money. No real money is being lost, especially since it doesn't reasonably compete with a published work.
It's certainly illegal, but targeting it for a lawsuit is an inefficient use of resources and only targets the fans, resulting in negative publicity.


As for a different standard... I was referring to myself making 5e content for my blog/webcomic 5 Minute Workday, while using creative commons art from Deviantart, which would be different as the artists gave implicit permission for use.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Skipping the are you right or wrong part. Is there a name of someone to sue?

Yes. If the holder of the copyright wishes to pursue, they can subpeona the real names of the participants from the service provider. Sadly, the internet isn't as anonymous as people seem to think it is. It takes work.

It falls into the same legal area as fan fiction or fan films. It's almost free advertising for the artist and the game, it gives credit, and it explicitly does not try and make money. No real money is being lost, especially since it doesn't reasonably compete with a published work.

Fan art and fan fiction are both creative acts, and so enjoy more leeway than copying art directly.

Really, the issue here is the taking of IP that implies that the work is sanctioned by or even produced by the copyright owner. The trade dress is particularly of issue there. Also, failure to defend a copyrighted work reduces your ability to protect it in future cases -- even to the point of losing the ability to protect it at all, so the image owners have an interest in protecting their works even if there's no chance of damages.

It's certainly illegal, but targeting it for a lawsuit is an inefficient use of resources and only targets the fans, resulting in negative publicity.

Granted with a maybe. The actual blowback might be very small, or it might Streisand. Hard to say. Also, if the complaint is directly targeted at only the infringing bits (hey, it's great you guys are making and sharing critters, but you can't use my art/trade dress to do it without permission), then the blowback would be very small indeed.

To put it bluntly, the project is doing something worthwhile, but is going about it in a stupid way. Most stupid is stealing art. Only minorly stupid is taking the trade dress when you don't have to.

As for a different standard... I was referring to myself making 5e content for my blog/webcomic 5 Minute Workday, while using creative commons art from Deviantart, which would be different as the artists gave implicit permission for use.

Ah, both cool and very legal of you!

 

[Corpsetaker]

Isn't that the sorcerer from Pathfinder?