D&D General How To Use Creative Commons

Up on the A5ESRD website we have added a 'How To Use Creative Commons' guide, to accompany our recent 'How To Use The OGL' guide.

How to Use Creative Commons — Advanced 5E System Reference Document

a5esrd.com

This is not legal advice, of course. While we have run these pages past our lawyers at Azora Law, they are not your lawyers, and neither are we. We hope these guides are helpful, but please refer to your own lawyer if you are in doubt.

The A5ESRD site houses not just the System Reference Documents for 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E in OGL and CC forms (and, where relevant, will also house versions released under other licenses) but it is also intended to be a useful resource for publishers who plan to use these SRDs and licenses.

The A5ESRD itself is a fully-featured 5E SRD. Level Up: Advanced 5E was released last year, as a standalone but backwards-compatible alternative to 5E, and the A5ESRD site ensures that material remains fully open, and fully available to creators.

The A5ESRD is a work in progress; we are adding new content to it weekly.

 

[Ramaster]

Thanks for sharing this!

 

[Baumi]

Thats a great Explanation of CC! 8D

Thanks!

 

[collin]

Thank you so much. Nice to have this information in an easy-to-find place.
Peace and good gaming to all!

 

[Art Waring]

Thank you for this informative article. I am a little confused about noting any modifications (quoted below).

Would it be sufficient to say "this work is an excerpt of the original 5.1 SRD" when modifying SRD content for your game using the CC license? I am simply trying to understand just how much explanation is required when modifying CC SRD material.

Thank you for your time.

Note Modifications​

If you are distributing an existing CC work, you need to indicate if you have made any modifications to the licensed material in a reasonable manner, and if there have been previous modifications, include any such indication(s) also. This includes excerpts, for which you might say “This work is an excerpt of the original.” If you’ve modified an image you might say “Desaturated from original”.

 

[Cadence]

Thank you for this informative article. I am a little confused about noting any modifications (quoted below).

Would it be sufficient to say "this work is an excerpt of the original 5.1 SRD" when modifying SRD content for your game using the CC license? I am simply trying to understand just how much explanation is required when modifying CC SRD material.

Thank you for your time.

For my Dungeon23 document as I'm going along, I put in the following for the things I did new.

"The description of <insert name here> below is an adaptation of material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at Systems Reference Document | Dungeons & Dragons. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0 ."

I'm curious if that is sufficient. It's basically the wording WotC asked for, but noting it is an adaptation. (In most cases it was spllicing together a bunch of creatures and spells - so naming them individually seemed unuseful).

 

[LordEntrails]

Agree with @Art Waring , the section on Modification is a bit unclear to me. Another example or two would be very beneficial.

 

[Morrus]

Thank you for this informative article. I am a little confused about noting any modifications (quoted below).

Would it be sufficient to say "this work is an excerpt of the original 5.1 SRD" when modifying SRD content for your game using the CC license? I am simply trying to understand just how much explanation is required when modifying CC SRD material.

Thank you for your time.

I can’t offer legal advice, I’m not a lawyer, and this reply has not been through a lawyer like that page has, but my personal reading is that I don’t see why not.

 

[beholdsa]

This is great!

Although I want to add that to my knowledge, despite what the page says, CC is not widely used in software. It's primarily a creative works license. The software industry tends to use software-specific open source licenses, such as the BSD-3-Clause, MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses.

Source: I develop open source software for a living.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

I can’t offer legal advice, I’m not a lawyer, and this reply has not been through a lawyer like that page has, but my personal reading is that I don’t see why not.

Your reading should be good enough. The Creative Commons license is made for creatives to use, not lawyers.