The Gaming Den

So the TTRPG Humble BundleTabletop Drop thread brought this to my attention. And apparently you can totally sell games based off of D&D 3.5 and not have Hasbro lawyers jumping down your throat.

Does anyone happen to know how far this goes? Could Tome actually get sold as is, or would there need to be some additional changes, ie, more degrees of separation from 3.5 to be legally salable?

You can't copyright game mechanics. Like, at all. This is why retroclones have to be suffered to exist.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess has the balls to be sold for actual money for "like someone else's commercial property but", so the Tomes probably could - though given Frank's prior behaviour I'd be surprised if they were being sold for $TEXAS rather than $0.99 to cover print and/or postage.

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of taking Tome, polishing it a bit more, using some "not Denizens who kind of like rocket launcer tag/playing at the Transmuter lever" player feedback, and then publishing it through crowdfunding. Ebooks can go for maybe $5, and actual hardcopy books could go for more.

The thing is, people who want "close enough to D&D" already have Pathfinder. They have a festeringthriving online community, they have books being released still, they can find groups that play it. You'd have a very hard time drawing interest, and speaking of drawing, you'll want an art team that make pretty pictures to rival those of Paizo.

The big thing is that Tome uses WotC IP references all over the place, and you can't use ANY of that in your thing you're selling. Mostly you just have to go over it and take those out, which is a little small edits here and there.

You can sell a thing based on the SRD, because the SRD is Open Game Content under the OGL, which gives you a license to use it including selling it. HOWEVER, anything that you can't point to in the SRD though, or as Open Game Content in some other OGL work, you can't include in your product (unless you license it separately).

So the big important parts of the game that the SRD doesn't cover are "when you level up" and "how to level up" and "how much wealth you should have when starting above 1st level". You have to come up with your own versions of those (not hard). Then you have to stick the whole SRD into a single PDF or whatever and update each spell / feat / whatever to make sure that it truly all jives together (simple but EXTREMELY time consuming). Then you add in all your Tome essays and stuff (that final step is easy).

Publishing it as a bunch of class replacements and rules tweaks for Pathfinder could get you some sales. Hell, do a whole series of them as micro-ebooks. Tiered feats, undead that are less stupid, Fighters and Monks, .... Paizo will even distribute it through their website for you if ... actually, I don't know how you get on there, but bunches of crappy 3rd party stuff is, so it can't be that hard.

If you want art, everything produced before the 20th century is public domain, and there's some pretty amazing artwork from that period if you google around. Then there's just layout and proofreading and checking all the tomes are actually OGL (which is the first thing you need).

Pathfinder even has nice art you can use, for free, to show how compatible you are.

Prak_Anima wrote:Well, I was thinking more along the lines of taking Tome, polishing it a bit more, using some "not Denizens who kind of like rocket launcer tag/playing at the Transmuter lever" player feedback, and then publishing it through crowdfunding.

I'm pretty sure that type of feedback would just make it terrible. Most of those players are either unaware of the Tomes or they completely reject it and respond with knee jerk reactions.

tussock wrote:Publishing it as a bunch of class replacements and rules tweaks for Pathfinder could get you some sales.

That would actually be really funny to see PF get the Tome treatment.

I've oft-wondered what would happen if you made a PHB where you excised the bad feats (or as many as possible) and included the various good ones spread across the game's supplements. Rename them as appropriate, but refrain from going heavy on actual changes to the rules.