Hot answers tagged publishing
23
I am not a lawyer. This doesn't constitute legal advice. If you require legal advice in a practical matter, retain a lawyer. Yadda, yadda.
However, these are two well-understood parts of game design, so I can comment generally.
Rules cannot be copyrighted, as they are procedures and processes. The correct arena of government-granted production monopoly for ...
20
Legal issues
First, I'm not a lawyer. I've spent the past 15 years paying attention to the shifting landscape of copyright and trademark and other IP law, so I can point you toward a few ideas that might help, but I'm still not a lawyer and can't give you legal advice that's worth a damn when you actually start publishing.
Infringing others' IP rights
...
20
In terms of the GURPS part, assuming this is not for sale and just posted publicly on the Web, your use would be dictated by the Steve Jackson Games Online Policy. This allows you to make adventures and stuff but not things that require a restatement of the GURPS rules - so you'd want to be careful that your "fan book" doesn't do that.
In addition, the ...
20
I am a game designer with my own game designs already on the market. My primary system at the moment is currently the number one RPG system on Amazon.com. I'm also a writer with over ten books to my name and dozens of shorter stories. I've read a lot of books with regards to copyright law and checked both the Canadian and U.S. laws concerning copyright, ...
19
Anything you find in the SRD is Open Gaming Licence content and thus free to use so long as you abide by the terms of the OGL. You'll note that it does not contain XP or Wealth-By-Level rules, and you'll also notice that it doesn't really contain fluff; those rules (and the fluff) are still WotC's property and cannot be used. Beyond that, you're perfectly ...
12
No, we don't have evidence about the whole industry, let alone specific data on revenue that would give us the ability to extrapolate to the effects on the whole industry, because too few companies share the kinds of sales information necessary to do such a wide-scale analysis. There are anecdotes aplenty about how digital effects individual companies, but ...
11
I focused on copyright and cyberlaw when I obtained my JD, but I never took the bar because I knew I didn't want to practice law. So this is backround material, not legal advice, and I am not a lawyer.
There are two legal areas to pay attention to here: trademark and copyright. Trademark was created to protect businesses from fraudsters trying to masquerade ...
11
There's a formal breakdown
This breakdown is generally considered true across the RPG (and for that matter videogame) community, making for three classes of material:
First Party Material is created and/or published by the developer directly (such as Paizo publishing for Pathfinder or Nintendo making a game for the Wii U). This can be hard copy books ...
11
It depends on what you want to use and how you want to use it. As Lord_Gareth mentioned, all of the content from the System Reference Documents are available under the Open Game License. If you write your adventure and setting in a sufficiently generic way, you may not need to bother with the OGL.
The answers for Copyright of Existing Systems might also be ...
10
RPGGeek is a very exhaustive RPG database (including related things). As of February 2013, it lists 29541 individual published RPG items (that is, books, fanzines, published PDFs and so on) belonging to, according to their count, 4007 different RPGs.
You can browse the list of all “individual RPGs.”
These are published RPGs (all homebrew is grouped under ...
9
Yes, and the law says you don't actually need the Open Game License to do it. But, You probably need to use the OGL anyway because the world is crazy.
The OGL is the legal vehicle that most publishers used during the d20 craze, and is what Pathfinder uses, to be "compatible with" D&D 3rd Edition; it was given by Wizards of the Coast during their ...
8
I'm not sure I'm your market for this, but I think you're going in the wrong direction. What I'm looking for in an NPC is a quick sketch about them and what they want, along with possible interactions with other NPCs and hooks for the players. I don't have time for a thousand words for an NPC.
Lately I've been running a lot of player-driven one-shot games, ...
7
As you're probably aware, copyright law prevents you from publishing a work that has "the exact setting" of another game you don't own the rights to; it's a derivative work, and as a result could expose you to legal action by Eden Studios or C.J. Carella. The idea of supernatural apocalypse and intervention by divine entities, however, has existed long ...
6
These aren't intended to help someone who thinks, "quick, I need
someone to fill x role". Instead they are intended to be characters
that the players create long term relationships with. Imagine the NPCs
in White Wolf products or the major players in a D&D adventure.
There's your problem: Either a GM wants to save work, in which case they ...
6
The Law of the Geek podcast has two episodes about the protectability of game systems under copyright law: Warning: System Failure and OMG, it's the OGL.
While it is not legal advice, they are lawyers.
As an aside, Geoff makes the case that Paizo, from a legal standpoint, should have made Pathfinder without involving the OGL or Wizards of the Coast's ...
5
On the definition of "official"
The question posed in the title "What is an “official” supplement in the context of D&D 3.5?" does not have an answer, as far as I can tell. The word "official" is not defined in any D&D supplement to my knowledge.
But there are a few possible interpretations of the word, thanks to Wizards of the Coast's publishing ...
5
Creative Commons is a nice license to use. For example, Eclipse Phase is using it and has sold a lot of physical copies -- there was a note on their web site but I cannot find it now. This allows you to distribute your book(s) for free with a tip jar. This is an easy way to get noticed but not all publication houses will agree to print the book under that ...
5
I have in the past bought adventures from DriveThruRPG. Not NPCs or any other type of lists, but I might still be able to help with my experience as a buyer.
Wrap it in a pretty box.
When I did buy documents I was, of course, interested in the content (which is, in the end, what you're selling) but the presentation is important even if we don't admit it to ...
5
I'll try to put things down in a FATE perspective. FATE puts a lot in the hands of players. The ability to declare and assess aspects about the game world, including the NPC's, is a major feature of FATE based games. By putting such things down in advance, you would take away that power. It would be hard to declare that the old soldier you meet at the pub ...
4
Savage Worlds has an excellent licensing setup that you can check out at:
http://www.peginc.com/licensing/
I have written to the email address provided there to ask about licensing, and they gave me a list of several things they were looking for.
They hold all their officially licensed products to the same standards as their own products. They check that ...
3
Disclaimer: I am a featured reviewer at DriveThruRPG.
Yes and No
Yes, digital sales hurt print vendors, such as bookshops. On the other hand, however, they're not hurting the industry of gaming. Admittedly, one could argue that some of the practices are perhaps a little sketchy (Catalyst putting out fifteen guns or drones or vehicles for Shadowrun every ...
3
This is a networking and marketing task, at its heart. You have to find people who are interested, who you're also interested in, and casting a wide net is the most effective way to collect that many impressions in a reasonable amount of time. Still, it does take some time.
You also have to pitch your project in an accessible way while also providing enough ...
3
Who should I talk to about copyright
A lawyer in your country that knows the relevant local, domestic and international laws.
What's the best format to put my documents in prior to submitting them
I imagine "the best format" will depend per company. Asking the game companies that you are submitting to (which can be found by going to your local ...
3
I've been writing homebrew settings and adventures for many years. What I find works best is a mix of history and little details.
That said, I always start with a map of the relevant territory. How big the area is depends on the idea that sparked the setting. Some have been continents, others only a village in a valley, or just a chain of islands.
...
2
My simple advice is to contact SJG and ask them, they're likely to have a lot more experience in this area than you are and if you get an all clear from them then it very much simplifies your life.
One thing to keep in mind is that it's not just SJG that you have to be happy with but also the copyright holders for the two licenses (WB 3 and HoM&M). If ...
2
Why not individuals
I'd never buy individual NPC writeups.
I've bought a few NPC books that include a variety of materials. When I buy a book, I expect a number that won't get used, and hope a significant number will.
My expectations of an NPC book
I'm couching my expectations in terms of letter sized pages.
I expect a significant NPC writeup to include ...
2
As others have indicated, there really are no solid industry-wide figures. While Wizards of the Coast seems to have a conflicted relationship with PDFs, smaller players have embraced them. You can mine these reports for information:
Posthuman Studios: Their 2010 Year End Review goes through their numbers, which I've summarized in this blog post. Not only ...
1
The best information you can get about this is from publishers themselves. Many of them run both print and PDF product lines. I recall, but cannot now find a publisher discussing the cost-analysis of when to have a product go from print to PDF and when to release a niche product directly to PDF. It is by no means simple and of course entirely up to the ...
1
I've seen a number of kickstarter campaigns for both new RPGs and RPG supplements -- you might want to try a kickstarter campaign for the initial funds, if you don't have enough out of pocket.
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