hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3120.txt

Episode: 3120
Title: HPR3120: How open are roleplaying games?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3120/hpr3120.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:15:59

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,120 for Friday, 17 July 2020. Today's show is entitled
Open a Roll Playing Games. It is hosted by Andrew Conway
and is about 46 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summary is
Clare 2 and McNally talk through what open and free mean in roll playing games.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com. Get 15% discount on all
shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello Hacker Public Radio people. This is me doing a show on a subject I've never
done before with a cohost who has done many shows on this topic before. I'm doing this
with Clare 2. Hi Clare 2. How are you doing?
Hey McNally. Pretty good.
So to give you a quick, I give the listeners a quick summary of how I felt this show might be necessary.
Clare 2 very kindly offered to run some HPR Dungeons and Dragons sessions
all audio with people all over the world. I think there was two sessions that you ran.
Wasn't there Wednesdays and Thursdays something like that?
Yeah, two initially and it expanded into four. Sunday, Sunday, Monday, Thursday and Friday
or Wednesday and Thursday, whatever time zones they get confusing.
But yes, four sessions every week for about two months.
Wow. That's a great idea you're doing for.
So now when we started, I didn't have the official game players manual.
I think you've got the players manual.
But you did email me this thing called the SRD, which I thought wrongly.
The SRD document for five version five E of Dungeons and Dragons.
I thought that was kind of just a less attractive, depictured D all the art taken out of it.
PDF that just had all the rules in it.
And I remained with that impression. We might play the game successfully for some weeks.
Without me really noticing, except for one or two things made me think, I can't find this in this book.
I've got when we realized that the manual that you were playing to, and maybe at least one of the other participants was playing to,
was not the same as this SRD that I was looking at.
Although for most things it didn't matter, but for a few things it did.
So I guess that's going to be my first question, Clatu.
What is the SRD?
The SRD is the system reference document.
And this was an innovation, well, system reference document to Dungeons and Dragons specifically.
And this was an innovation created by a guy named Ryan Dancy back in, I don't know, late 90s, I think 92 or 97 or something like that.
And he was working at the company at that time that owned the Dungeons and Dragons IP and realized that the company was going after people left and right.
Whenever they would even mention Dungeons and Dragons.
Like if they were publishing a book and they mentioned Dungeons and Dragons, you know, they would practically get sued immediately.
So that's why if you go to buy old game books, like from the 90s and 80s, a lot of times they will say, and some companies do this today, I guess, to be, to be cheeky maybe, you know, as a reference.
But they would say weirdly colorful phrases like this is compatible with the world's oldest role playing tabletop game.
They would never say D&D or Dungeons and Dragons outright they would just say the world's oldest role playing game or the world's first role playing game.
And that was because literally they were the company that developed D&D was that litigious at the time.
But at some point around like 92 or 97 or whatever it was, I don't have the date on me actually.
Dancy Ryan Dancy decided that he would that that it would be smarter to foster a community, the gaming community around D&D.
And rather than suing people for showing their affection to D&D, why not encourage it.
And he very directly was inspired by Gnu, the Gnu project in software.
He names that very specifically on his website opengamingfoundation.org.
He lists the Gnu project as the source of inspiration for this concept.
And so he created this system reference document, which is essentially all of the rules, all the all the rules founded in math and and enough flavorful rules to be able to play the game.
He said that that part of the game would be open source and freely available to anyone.
So if you had zero dollars in your pocket and you wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons for instance, then you could download this system reference document and it would tell you how to play.
Yeah, and it absolutely does.
So much so that I hardly noticed that I didn't have quite the full set of rules that the others I was playing with had, which is the way you just explained it, which I knew actually very little of even after a bit of reading around of them last week, came as a surprise to me.
I'm partly the reason it came as a surprise to me is that I have really had two spells of being interested in Dungeons and Dragons.
The first was in 1983 and I have sitting next to me my original red boxed basic rules set.
Yeah, I found it recently. I don't have the dice, I've lost the dice that you had to fill in with the crayon and I was totally into that in their late 80s.
In fact, exactly the same era as you would have seen in the TV show Stranger Things, that was exactly that time.
And then I really didn't play it much until probably about five to ten years ago.
And even then, although I started playing it again, it was very informal, barely even paying attention to the rules sometimes.
Because there were kids involved with wandering attention and I was playing it with other parents who had kids and that kind of thing.
So I knew nothing of this, the whole what went on in the 90s and the 90s passed me by completely, which is why I've come back to this.
Thinking I know Dungeons and Dragons, but turns out I don't.
So I mean, this sounds like a great thing. So essentially that you can build your own game, you can even publish your own content based on this SRD system reference document.
And it uses a license called the Open Gaming Licenses Act, correct?
Yeah, the Open Game License.
And it is, yeah, that was developed by Ryan Dansey at I think it was TSR at the time and then they got purchased by Wizards of the Coast.
Although he might have been, no, he was at Wizards of the Coast when he developed it, sorry.
And it was developed in the year 2000 and it is essentially, it's a pretty short license.
Like as licenses, licenses go, there's only 15 sort of numbered points to it.
Although the first one has like, I don't know, six or seven or eight little sub points, but it's not the worst thing in the world to read.
And it's a good thing to read because it really is, it is, like I say, there's no extrapolation required.
He says very explicitly that it was inspired by the GNU foundation.
And that's what it does for gaming. It says essentially, so in D&D, the tradition is, or at least the modern tradition is to lay down a general rule.
And then to let specific rules override the general, so specific always overrides the general.
And you'll see that in D&D and spells a lot, which since you are, you're playing a cleric in the one game that we're playing, you're intimately familiar with.
You know, you'll have something that normally works this way, but because you can cast a spell, suddenly it works a different way.
So why I'm saying this is because the open game game license is a little bit like that.
It is, it lays down this very general blanket statement, which says, hey, this is open content. This is game, this is open game content.
The stuff in this book or in this pamphlet or whatever you've, whatever you've got in your hand that you're looking at this thing on, says it's open game content, which means,
and I'm going to say something very general. So I'm going to, I'm going to list exceptions in a moment.
So don't, don't stop the book, don't, don't stop listening. If you're, don't, this is important.
I'm going to override what I'm about to say. But the open game license says, whatever is in the thing that you are looking at, you can now, you can reproduce, you can remix, you can redistribute, you can do whatever you want with, want to with it, which is huge, right.
Now, there's this huge important exception, which is one E point one E, which says, except anything identified as product identity.
And that's the big sort of gotcha that you have to really pay attention to when you're looking at the open game license.
If, if the publisher of some, some content says, hey, product identity in our book refers to the name of the game, the name of a spell, and the name of the gods, then, then when you are redistributing that work, you have to omit the name of the game, the name of the gods and the names of the spells, which is why one of the points that we were known.
When I handed out the system reference document, one of the spells that came up, someone was using from the player's handbook as published and sold in stores.
And so it got to use this fancy cool name. I don't remember the spell, but it was a, it had a very specific name.
Or was the arms of somebody, yeah, we're allowed to see that in this podcast. We're not going to say it.
We can say it, but we can't, yeah, we can't, we couldn't include that spell. I can't send that to you and, you know, and copy it out of the book and send it to you and say, hey, you know, now, now we can use that spell because that is that that spell specifically.
And it's one of the few spells, to be honest, is only in the player's handbook, so they don't, they don't distribute that in the system reference document.
And there really aren't that many that are not in the system reference document. It's quite surprising.
And you could see someone a skeptic saying, oh, well, you know, they're going to only give you the boring stuff in the system reference document and save all the good stuff for the one that they sell.
And they'd be perfectly within their rights to do that, but they really don't. They, they give a lot of stuff out in the system reference document.
But that's, that's why some things would be missing from this SRD versus the thing that you purchase in the game in the bookstore.
Because that's part of a product identity. That's the part of the stuff that they feel like, well, that's not something we want to give away for free for whatever reason.
Maybe they feel like they invested a lot of time in money into that thing, or maybe they think that it's just sort of something that identifies them strongly.
Like the, if you're into D&D, you'll know what a beholder is. That's not open game content. D&D, the company wizards of the coast, they own the image and the concept of a beholder.
And that's not something that they allow other people to, to use elsewhere. You can't publish your own beholder as open game content. That is something that is trademarked and copyrighted by wizards of the coast.
But again, that is one of the few, the few things that they reserve for themselves. And the way I think of it is very much like Firefox.
If you get Firefox on Debian, I mean, I haven't done that recently, but it used to be that you'd get icecat because they couldn't use the Firefox trademark because they had altered some of the, I don't know, some of the code somewhere. I don't remember what the details are.
And yeah, certain things just kind of an owner sort of sees it as intrinsic to their identity. And so they don't give that part out for free, but you can take everything else. And at that point, what's really the difference?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was that exact spell that you mentioned, the arms of whatever it was called.
Haydhar.
Haydhar, arms and haydhar.
Arms and haydhar.
Yeah.
And it was that exact spell that made me think hang on. I'm definitely not looking at the same because you guys.
Now, the interesting thing is how, now I think about it's what my reaction was to that because when I, as soon as I realized, I then was realized there was a whole bit of the game.
That I could still play the game, but there was a whole, there was a depth to the game that I was missing.
And what was I missing while I was missing?
I couldn't find any details about the god. In fact, the very god that my character had decided to follow my leaky, which you'd mentioned.
Yeah, yeah.
And also the city of doors, sigil, it's called, I'd never heard of that before.
And I was scratching my head when we were having a, you know, you know.
So in that part of the Lord of the forgotten realms, isn't it, sigil, the city of doors?
Yeah.
Yeah. So I was missing all of this.
And then when I realized that I was missing it, I immediately went, right, I want to know more about this stuff.
So I went straight off and I bought the player's manual, you know.
So it's what's interesting to me is, like, I would say probably 90-something percent of the gameplay could work fine with SRD.
But there was something about the color, the depth to it that once I got into it, I really wanted.
And the SRD wasn't satisfying me.
So I think I've got to say my hats off to the people who thought this up.
They made it possible to use SRD to play a perfectly good game, but gave you a reason to handle your money to them willingly.
It'll certainly, in my case, should you get to a certain point.
So I think what I'm saying is, I think that model seems to sort of work.
Would you agree?
Yeah, I mean, it really is kind of the textbook example of why you would want to give something away for free.
It isn't freemium. You know, it's not one of those things where you get it, but they keep all the good stuff.
Or rather, they keep all the stuff that you need.
They don't cap your level. It's nothing like that.
It is a legitimate, it is the working source code of the game.
And, you know, if you're an enterprising person, and you decide, well, I'm going to take this SRD,
and I'm going to go find other open game content, put the two together, and come up with a sort of a cobbled together larger entity,
which actually, I do, I do a little bit in the SRD that I distribute to my players.
I do add some stuff from other publishers, some open game content, so that they have a little bit more choice
in some of their character creation process.
So, I do kind of cobbled stuff together just to kind of make sure that people have, you know, more options so that they can build what they want to build.
But ultimately, at the end of the process, it's just the quality of the work, and it is the experience that you have that makes you think,
you know what, this is worth putting some money into. Like, I don't have to put money into it.
But I actually see the value, and I see how, how kind of cool it would be to sink some money into this,
whether it's because you just want, you want more information about the extra plans, or the different set of gods,
or you, you want that other, that other feature that someone else was mentioned that you didn't find in your book, or whatever,
or whether it's just because, you know what, you want to support the company that's publishing the book,
and you want to make sure that everyone doing all that work is getting paid, whatever the reason, like you're inspired to pay for the thing,
you're not like forced, you don't do it begrudgingly.
Yeah, so, I just noticed, actually, what you're saying, that the SRD that you emailed to me, actually,
is in the first line of the, the legal chapter, chapter 27,
yeah, it does say 5e, system reference document SRD, for the fifth edition of the world's first RPG.
It doesn't even, yeah, yeah.
So, now, did you say that you had made adjustments to that SRD?
Is it a bespoke one that you created, the one that you sent me?
Yeah, so the SRD, as distributed by Wizards of the Coast, is a PDF,
which they type up in Microsoft Word and publish in that form.
And I don't find that very useful for lots of different reasons.
And so, I decided, when I sat down, I sat down and decided, I'm going to run these games,
I want everyone to have access to the rules so that they don't have to go out,
especially since when I was doing this, keep in mind, well, we're still in a global pandemic,
but I feel like some places have made some progress.
And I just felt, well, I don't know if businesses are going to be able to,
like, I didn't know at the time, would you even be able to get a hold of a book?
Like, I didn't know what the, what the state of commerce was going to be.
So, I wanted to make sure that everyone had a copy of the rules.
So, I sat down and I transferred all of the text from the PDF to a text document,
and I sat there and edited it, edited it into Markdown.
And then I kind of looked and saw, for instance, like, when you're building,
I'm not going to be able to come up with an example right now, if I top my head, I'm sure.
But when you're building, well, no, here's a Ranger, for instance.
When you're building a Ranger, at some point, as you're leveling up,
you get to choose, well, what kind of Ranger?
And what kind of sort of things am I going to specialize in as a Ranger?
Am I going to be a Hunter type Ranger, like someone who's after a big game?
Or am I going to be more of an Explorer or a survivor type of Hunter,
who just knows how to get around in the wild?
And depending on the path that you choose, you know, your abilities in the game
will be better or worse towards certain things.
And the SRD, I think, only has one option, and that is Hunter.
So if you're playing a Ranger, and you have in mind some kind of arrogant type character
who's quasi-magical and sort of all about support and healing and knowing the surroundings,
then the Hunter option probably doesn't really speak to you all that much.
And so what I did was I went out and found on Dungeon Master's Guild and drive through your RPG.
I found third-party content by people who had published stuff under the open-game license.
And I extracted their rules.
I looked at their product identity to make sure that I was able to, you know,
what I could use and could not use.
So in some cases, I had to change the names of certain things, like instead of,
you know, sort of vengeance.
I would just call it vengeful sword or something silly like that.
But I would take their content and paste it in to make up for things that the SRD had purposefully omitted
from the pages for whatever reason.
So yeah, I did modify a little bit here and there.
Yeah, okay, I didn't realize that at all. It was quite interesting.
But your name doesn't appear, you haven't indicated that on that PDF that you sent me anywhere.
Have you, you haven't said you haven't attached your name to it?
That's very true. I don't remember if I did that on a humility or out of a fear of legal repercussions.
I mean, I don't recall with which why I remained anonymous on that.
But yes, that is correct. I did not, I have not credited things correctly.
This is also kind of a work in progress.
I mean, I only did this when we started playing the game.
So as I go through and someone else, like on my Monday game, someone started playing a Ranger,
which is why that came to mind.
And I realized as I looked through it, I was like, oh, they'll only give the players like one option for the Ranger path.
I should, I should real quick find at least two more options so this person has something to choose from.
So it is kind of a, it's not a done deal yet.
I'm still kind of working on it.
And it really is just meant for my own players.
This is not something that I intend to, I certainly don't want to compete with Wizards of the Coast.
And yeah, this is just something I'm maintaining for my players because I think it's useful.
Yes, indeed. Okay, that's really interesting.
Now, you've mentioned DMs Guild.
Now, as soon as I started looking up,
stuff about the SRD and the open gaming license,
I came across DMs Guild.
And I was a bit surprised, to be honest, that when I first saw it.
I think the first blog post I read really did give me a bit of a jolt.
And I suppose where we're going now is the difference.
Maybe between GNU and free software and open source, maybe in that direction.
I don't know, but you can correct me.
But what I read in that blog post, and it was a blog post,
it was a blog post meant to get attention.
So it put it more dramatically than it needed to.
And that filtered its way into the email I sent you where I said something to the effect of.
You have to watch what you put in your content because you might fall off the law.
And what I meant by that is that if I went ahead and used the beholder in a story
or a campaign I created and published it under the open gaming license
by using the monster, the beholder, in that, as I understood it,
and trying to distribute it under the OGL, I would be breaking the law.
So that's what I meant is that would that be correct then based on what you've said so far?
So yes and no.
So it depends on what avenue you take.
So there's the open game license which has everything in this work is open
except the stuff identified as product identity.
Unfortunately, the cascade of product identity, I mean that is kind of on you as the author technically speaking.
So that's kind of, I mean I don't know if that's why the dungeon master guild exists.
But it's certainly a benefit of the dungeon master's guild is that that grants people a community use license
which I don't have the text of that and I don't even know if that's a thing or if it's just like a handshake and an agreement.
But it's basically says on, if you're publishing on DMs guild, you can publish your work there and use wizards of the coast IP.
So you could publish something with a beholder in it.
You can reference the beholder stats and all the things that you want to do.
You can even use artwork from provided by wizards of the coast.
They are licensing artwork to its publisher to people who publish on their site so that you can have a picture of the beholder in when you mention it.
And it'll be beautiful.
It'll be by some of the art from all of the books from the history of D&D.
But what's happening there is that you are now no longer publishing open game license content.
You are now publishing something that is copyrighted and basically has a sort of a grant from wizard from DMs guild from wizard to the coast saying it's okay to use this stuff.
But it's all sort of acknowledged as product identity.
You can still say it's OGL and this is where it gets a little bit messy.
But you should then identify all the product identity.
And the way that most people do that is with a quick copyright statement at the beginning, which you can pretty much copy and paste from a lot of the wizards of the coast stuff.
And it just kind of says hey D&D wizards of the coast blah blah blah blah blah blah.
That's all product identity.
But it is the cascade effect is a little bit difficult because while you could say yes this work is OGL.
Really the product identity should be called out explicitly.
It rarely is I think.
And that's just kind of one of those things where you're inviting normal people who don't want to think about licensing into right cool adventures for people to play.
And you just can't realistically expect them to go through and list every single thing.
But yeah, so yeah, the DMs guild grants you a little bit of a.
So if I yes, so if I did that through DMs guild, that will be okay because I get I would get to publish my campaign.
Yeah, but if I distributed it through, I don't know, McNally's dodgy D&D store, you know, then I would probably get into trouble because I'd have no right to use the beholder name in that context.
Correct. I mean, I can't obviously speak for wizards of the coast's legal team.
They would certainly have a right to say, hey, you're not allowed to use that beholder without without purchasing a license from us to use our IP.
And you know, basically it become a partner of wizards of the coast as a publisher and I'm sure there's lots of exciting fees associated with that.
But yeah, you they would they would have the right to call to call you out on that.
Yeah, I mean, that's that's fair enough.
But I think what is interesting is they've made it quite easy for you and quite clear for a person actually to know if you take a bit of time to read up as I've now done.
I think it's not that difficult to figure it out what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do.
And as you see, there's probably quite a lot of great area, but you just have to, you know, well, some level of trust involved in all of these things ultimately.
But I said, what we should see is we should probably explain what DMs the DMs guild actually is.
So can you, you know, for some days, not heard of it before. Can you give it a quick description?
Yeah, yeah, DMs guild is a website set up by well, it's technically a project of a thing called one bookshelf.com.
I think is what the big parent company is.
And one bookshelf runs a couple of different websites, one of them being drive through RPG, the other one being DMs guild.com.
And they, the DMs guild specifically is sponsored and main, yeah, sponsored and sort of overseen by Wizards of the Coast who owns Dungeons and Dragons.
And it specializes in content written by third party producers, whether it's a company with an LLC and, you know, one or two employees or five employees or just some random person on the internet, like me.
Who decides to write something up for D&D. And when I say write something up, that could be any number of things.
It could be a new class for D&D. It could be a new background or a collection of backgrounds for your D&D character, which is a thing that you have to choose when you're building your character.
It could be an adventure for a dungeon master to follow as they run the game for their friends. It could be a book of explaining some, some part of D&D lore.
It could be lots of different things. And it's basically all granted this, this permission to kind of intrude upon Dungeons and Dragons lore.
Just for use on this website and people can go in and download stuff. Sometimes things cost $0. Sometimes they cost $2. Sometimes they cost $20. It really depends.
And, you know, with modern publishing, you can get some of this stuff print on demand. So you get a physical copy. I tend to like my RPG products as physical books myself just because that's kind of, you know, what you're used to when you're playing as a kid.
The books that you can flip through under the table at school. But, you know, you can get them as PDFs, you can get them as actual paperbacks. And yeah, it's got a lot of, a lot of options there. And it just kind of shows, I mean, just like open source, it does, it shows a lot of how diverse this, this ecosystem can be both in terms of imagination.
And in case, in the instance of just economics, you know, because people are making money off of this, I mean, I've, I've, I make store credit on random stuff that I post there. And with that store credit, I then get to go and pass that on to someone else for the work that they did, you know, and I pay with my store credit and I get some PDF that has a new class that I can then offer my players. It's, it's a nice little self-sustaining system.
I mean, I did notice that I was going round in kind of a loop when I was trying to figure out, when I came across drive through RPG well before we started playing the HPR Dungeons and Dragons.
I'm trying to think way, almost a few years ago. And then I noticed it was owned by, as you said, by one bookshelf and also one bookshelf, they wouldn't drive through RPG, D&D classics, Dungeon Master's Guild.
And then when you write for the guild, you, I think you get 50% of the sale price and one bookshelf and wizards of the coast get the other 50%, which actually, frankly, if you've been any publishing, if you've published anything like I have, it's not bad.
Oh, I mean, the first book I published, I got 10% of the sale price. So, you know, 50% and getting an internet age, some people might not might think that doesn't sound so good, but I think it's pretty reasonable at first sight.
So the, so I think then the DM's guild, as I was hinting at before, is a bit like something that uses what you might think of as an open source license, as opposed to a free software license.
For example, as I understand that OGL cannot be revoked, if you've done, if you've released something under OGL, again, under OGL, you can't kind of go back and say, I've changed my mind, I'm going to make it more restrictive now.
But obviously, that is very much the grip that wizards of the coast have on their gotten realms content and lore is a lot tighter than that.
And I think this actually, I read, but I didn't quite understand, it links back to the history of what happened when they tried to, was there the coast tried to drop the OGL and replace it with something else?
So, I mean, there's almost like, look to me, just very superficially, like we always had a bit of license wars, reminiscent of like BSD and MIT licenses and the software side of things.
Yeah, I mean, I think what happened was that at some point, well, at a very precise point, which is fourth edition, D&D, which I mean people will talk about fourth edition of D&D for lots of different reasons, but one of them is the licensing reasons.
And wizards of the coast decided that the open gaming license maybe wasn't, was maybe, I mean, I wasn't there, obviously, so I don't know what they were thinking.
But apparently, they thought that it was not something that they wanted to continue for fourth edition, and they dropped it.
And that literally led to a schism whereby a publisher that was partnered with wizards of the coast called Pizzo, PAIZO decided, well, if they're not going to support the open game license, we'll take this third,
what they call the 3.5 edition of D&D, which was the third edition with a bunch of erata added to it.
We'll take that and we'll make our own D&D, which they call Pathfinder, which exists still today. And I think legitimately you could argue that Pathfinder kept D&D alive throughout fourth edition.
People could argue with me on that, and I wouldn't, I don't have the numbers to prove it, but I think 3.5 carried everyone through sort of that dark period of fourth edition.
And then when fifth edition came back and sort of reinstated the open gaming license, open game license, I think that people sort of started returning to the D&D brand rather than the Pathfinder brand.
But yeah, I mean, the dropping of that license, I think, spoke volumes in terms of what kind of community, at least the tabletop RPG community is.
I mean, it's a creative bunch of people with disposable income who want to make up stuff and buy stuff and sell stuff.
It's an economy and the open game license enables that economy, which I think that goes against what a lot of people think about the open.
I mean, just like how can you be open and support commerce? Like how does that work? Well, apparently it works quite well because that's what they've gone back to now.
Yeah, so, I mean, again, early impression of mine is that the whole set up almost as the coast is quite a, they're not just a bunch of, you know, I've got this image of like early 70s, Harry, the pursuit of the face, hippies, rolling dice and a garage somewhere, a garage.
Yeah, they're not like that. They've hired lawyers. They've listened to the players and commit with 5E. They're quite sophisticated. They've got quite a sophisticated set up, quite a clever set up actually as well.
And to my mind, it looks a little bit like an apple or a Google.
But do you, and on the other side of the fence, you have this, you know, the open gaming license stuff looking much more like, as you said, GNU and free software.
Is there a, it's just as there's a, you know, there's a, she like a lot of tension between, maybe even the worst hostility between people who are pure about free software versus open source software.
Is there a tension there in the gaming, a role playing gaming community?
I mean, there's probably a dozen different opinions on that or different ways to look at that. I honestly don't, I'm not that I detect, I would probably say that it's more like, and this maybe this is being way too charitable.
But if I was going to compare to something, I would say it was more like a Mozilla, just for that, for that same kind of idea that, well, yes, they have the stuff that they want to identify as, like, they've got that Firefox icon.
And they don't want anyone using that Firefox icon because they know that that's representative of who they are.
Like, this is Firefox. And when you see that icon, you know that you can expect this amount of quality and so on. And for D&D, I think it's kind of the same thing.
If you're using lore from forgotten realms, I mean, aside from the fact that it's all copyrighted by dozens of properties, I mean, it's in the book, it's in books.
It might be in movies at some point in the near future. It might not be. I'm just guessing. And, you know, they don't want people adding to that lore or, or abusing that lore and so on.
Whereas the numbers that create the game, you know, if you roll a one, that's a failure, if you roll a 20, that's a success, no matter what else, anything, anything else says that, you know, the mechanics of the game, those are quite open.
They apparently, as far as I can tell, acknowledge that a lot of their, a lot of the storytelling elements that they use are drawn from real world myths, right? You know, you've got dragons. I don't know what culture lays claim to dragons, but certainly it's not wizards of the coast.
You know, they didn't invent the concept of dragons, and they acknowledge that. And so the stats for dragons are completely open and free, and you can integrate that into any of your games, the chromatic, the sort of the rule of how dragons are, if they're color full dragons, they're bad, and if they're metallic dragons, they're good, and so on.
All that stuff is open game content. So I don't really see them being super restrictive or benefiting or monetizing off of the restrictions. I really think as we said earlier, I think that they, they, they acknowledge that they're added value is that the fact that they have a bunch of really great storytellers being paid to sit around and come up with really fun stories.
If you want to, you want to use that, if you want to kill for those ideas or play through those games, or those scenarios, then you can throw money at them and they'll let you do that.
If you want to just use the numbers and the mechanics and come up with your own stories, they, they're fine with that as well. But I think in the end, I think they're kind of secure that ultimately a lot of people are going to pay for stuff because it's just, it is. It's good quality.
Yeah, no, I have to say that the book that I got through the players manual, which is hard back. It wasn't cheap. It was 30, I think it was 30 pounds. So I got out. I've not kept track of what exchange rates are, what exchange rates are like.
I guess it's not very far away from 30 euros or 30 dollars at the moment. So it's not cheap, but it's really good quality book. You know, it's, it's really nice and, you know, I can't, I actually can't fault it.
I've seen a typo in it yet, for example, which is a big bug bear. I mean, there's very few books that I buy now that are typo free. So it looks, it looks great. I actually like, I actually like you prefer the physical book. I actually prefer the physical dice. I really don't want to be rolling dice on my phone. I will do it if I have to.
But it's to me as part of the whole part of the whole thing. Okay, I mean, that has actually pulled together a load of little bits and pieces that I sort of knew with a lot more that I didn't know.
So I have to thank you for that. Is there anything before we end to say anything else you think is worth mentioning in this context that we didn't, didn't cover.
Very much. I'm not a law. Don't take my, don't take my interpretation of any of this as court worthy. That said, I've, you know, like the game license is not a long document.
You should, but we'll include a link to it in the show notes. I'm sure you should read through it. It is literally 15 points and one of those is a copyright notice. So it's like really, really short.
It's been, it's been hanging around since 2000 and people have been using it with much success. So I feel really good about it.
And yeah, I think, I think it's fun to game and I think it's important to remember, you know, kind of what, what needs to be open versus what doesn't necessarily need to be open and the gaming mechanics makes it possible for anybody to play.
And that's the important part. The rest of the stuff, the imagination driven stuff. I mean, we can take care of that if we don't have the money for it. You know, we don't have to play in the forgotten rounds. We don't have to play in sigil or other places.
So, yeah, I think, I think they're doing a pretty good job. And it's important to note that the open game license doesn't apply to just dungeons and dragons. There's a bunch of games out there that are open game license that have nothing to do with dungeons and dragons.
There's a system called Open D6, which uses just six-sided die. So you don't need the fancy D20s. There are, yeah, there's just lots of games out there under the OGL. So if you're, if you look hard enough, you'll find all kinds of open source gaming materials.
Yeah, I can't wait to look. I said, one interesting thing you just said is that what's different now from when I first got into dungeons and dragons in the early 80s is that there isn't a cost barrier.
I can give you an actual quick anecdote. I went round to a, to a friend. So it was the first time we could actually go round to a friend's garden during the lockdown and meet and stay two meters apart and all the rest of it.
I was just a few, a couple of weeks ago, we could do this for the first time. And we're talking about dungeons and dragons. And she was, she was almost the same age as me, but she said she was so interested in dungeons and dragons at the same age in early 80s.
Early mid 80s, but she just didn't have, she couldn't save up enough pocket money because it was too expensive. So she never got to play it. And to this day, she still not played it. And when I suggested that, oh, maybe we could play it, she's going to let.
Oh, no, no, no, no, I couldn't now, you know, as I've been in your 40s, it's too old to learn something new like this one.
But I think if I had, if this, if that happened now, if, you know, if I said I didn't have any much money, you said, hey, hey, bear folk wants to play.
You know, I wouldn't have needed anything other than the, you know, not some access to the internet, obviously, but I would need to spend 30 pounds in the manual even.
So it's a great thing. I think what you've just described the whole SRD, the open gaming license, you know, whole thing, DM's gold.
I think it's just opened up a new world to me, which I knew nothing about until I'll tell about a few weeks ago.
Yeah, I mean, outside of commerce and stuff, I do, I think that's a very salient point.
I mean, so many of us, I feel in open source and in hacker culture in general.
I mean, one of our motivations, it's not everyone's motivation, but I find a lot of people say one of their motivations is accessibility, making sure that anyone can play.
You know, like it doesn't matter where you're from, what you know, where, how you got started, you're welcome here.
You can, you can do the thing with everybody else.
And for gaming to get in on that and be like, hey, it doesn't matter.
You know, whatever you got, just come to the table, we will provide everything that you need.
If in the future, you can afford to pay for what we're giving you, that's great. You can do that then.
But for now, we'll give you whatever you need to get started. And I think that's hugely important.
I think it goes along with a lot of our sort of collective ethos.
And I'm glad that that's a part of, I guess, general geekery and nerdery. I think that's something to be proud of.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think that's probably a very good place to end the show.
And of course, being Hacker Public Radio, if you heard anything that was said that you disagreed with,
or you think you could explain better, why not make a show, or you could leave a comment, I suppose.
But, you know, making a show is always the better thing to do with Hacker Public Radio, isn't it?
Yeah.
Okay, well, thanks very much, Claire, to and thanks everyone for listening.
Yeah, thanks for bringing this together. Bye everybody.
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