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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9891454" data-attributes="member: 177">So, this sharing isn't particular to forums.  It goes back to the early years of gaming, when there were very few outright publishers, and folks did a lot of their own home-brewed alterations to game systems, which got informally shared around a lot.Okay, so, part of the issue here is language.Moral, ethical, and legal are three different things.  Sometimes laws happen to match the ethics and morals of private individuals, other times not.But also, if you want to get into publishing, it would serve you well to understand copyright as it applies to your work.Which is why I bolded a segment above, because it bears discussion.Copyright protects the particular expression that appears in a published work.    It does not protect the underlying mechanics, processes, or systems that published work expresses.  So, if you have published a mechanic about "hit points", someone else cannot legally copy the three paragraphs you use, and paste it directly into their work.  It is, however, perfectly legal for someone to rewrite those paragraphs, and re-express it to be about "health level".  They have then removed your particular expression.If your mechanics, processes, or systems are so unique and valuable as to require legal protection, it might be a thing you can protect via a patent.  But you don't get a patent just by putting a thing into print - there's a separate application process that most RPGs do not bother to go through.  I, personally, cannot think of a single ttrpg that has tried to patent its mechanics.See above.  The RPG community, broadly, seems to find that copyright protection largely aligns with our ethics around content.  We largely agree that violating copyright is unethical.  The process of training LLMs these days is typically based on violating copyright on a truly massive scale, and so some individuals here find it highly unethical.  But, to be brutally honest, we don't find the systems, processes or mechanics of most games to be so terribly ground-breaking that they merit protection.  The thought, "Wow!  You roll 3d6 instead of one d20!  How visionary and creative!" is not something that we take to heart.  We usually feel that the meat of creativity is in the particular expression, not in the nuts and bolts underneath.In addition, the gaming community broadly has not realized much value out of highly protected mechanics.  We find it serves the hobby more when publishers make it easier to work with their mechanics by using open licenses like the OGL, Creative Commons, or the like, instead of trying to prevent anyone else from engaging with the mechanics.</blockquote>

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