mamba
Legend
or you have a hit on your hands and make millions from it, kinda like it works in the music business too…In practice, I can't see either WOTC or OBS really caring so long as you don't use their IP.
or you have a hit on your hands and make millions from it, kinda like it works in the music business too…In practice, I can't see either WOTC or OBS really caring so long as you don't use their IP.
OBS is owned by Roll20.Do you mean with OBS (the owners of DriveThruRPG)?
the two merged, it is equally wrong to say OBS now owns Roll 20. Neither company exists any moreOBS is owned by Roll20.
That's incorrect--the combined company is known as Roll20 LLC.the two merged, it is equally wrong to say OBS now owns Roll 20. Neither company exists any more
I thought they were renamed to Wolves of FreeportThat's incorrect--the parent company is Roll20 LLC.
Dude, you ran the D&D team. You tell us!Has anyone probed the limits of what DMsG’s “perpetual exclusive right to publish your content” actually means? Can I, for instance, publish an OGL “mass battle system” on DTRPG and simultaneously publish a subset of that system that includes army lists for proprietary D&D settings like Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, et. al. via the DMsG? After all, those are certainly not the same product. What if the DMsG product shares the same system, but doesn’t incorporate the actual text of the DTRPG product? What if the DMsG product is just the army lists and customers need to purchase the DTRP product to use them?
This is important to highlight, and I think a lot of creators are confused by this.DMsG creators sign an agreement with R20, not WotC.
Dude, you ran the D&D team. You tell us!
I kid, but maybe you can give us insight into how WOTC thinks about this internally. Several creators I know feel like WOTC is one “eye-beast” away from sending the Pinkertons to their door. They feel like the eye of Sauron is always on them watching for them to go out of line. It's one of the reasons a CC SRD is so valuable. Many argue that we don't really need the SRD to make compatible products as long as we're not lifting big chunks of text out of the core books. But with an SRD released under the CC, there isn't any question about it. We explicitly know we can take from the SRD as long as we follow the CC (which is super easy to do).
My point is, very few small publishers want to spend the effort to see what we might get away with when we feel like we're one C&D away from losing the work we've done.
I think I’ve seen a couple of creators write adjacent products in and out of the Guild but many just don’t want to rock the boat.
BTW, thank you and @mearls again for hanging out here and talking to us about this. It's an insight few of us have.
it doesn’t allow you mimic WotC’s visual designs for these creatures. Make sure there is plenty of daylight between your depictions of monsters and the official WotC illustrations.
We have to give them credit for taking affirmative steps to “future proof” 3P publishing by releasing the SRD through Creative Commons.
Read the licenses and follow them to the letter. If you endeavor to be a serious publisher, it’s worth spending a couple hundred dollars to get appropriate legal advice.
Think twice about being deliberately provocative. Lots of young people play D&D. If a 3P publisher was pushing something like The Book of Erotic Fantasy or The Complete Nazi Sourcebook, or something, there’s a real chance WotC would evaluate its options.