Hi folks,
Not sure if you're aware of Roll20.net, but it's a fairly excellent virtual tabletop with an active development team. Seems like a place with Pathfinder Organized Play might be played.
They just announced a character sheet engine that allows HTML/CSS character sheets to be created and shared between players. Was wondering if Paizo would be kind enough to give official permission for a character sheet based off of the Pathfinder Organized Play sheet. Ideally, I'd imagine that it would be identical (with the exception of e.g. auto-roll buttons) so that a player could transition between virtual and physical tabletops with a minimum of confusion.
As it stands, the legal issues are sort of fuzzy at best anyway (the system is open, and it's hard to "copyright" the exact layout) but given that PFS play is *supposed* to use that sheet, could we get official permission for it to exist?
Thank you in advance.
Chief Technical Officer
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Please see if the usage you're talking about fits within our Community Use Policy.
Roll20 as an entity doesn't create the character sheets, players do. So RAW, that sounds like Community License.
On the other hand, at present the ability to use character sheets is supporter-only (advanced access, complete with all the bugs that entails, is provided to those who donate). They've announced they plan to release it to all users in May, and it's all of two days old for supporters, so it's a lot more like "beta testers that pay us because they like us" than "pay for access to this system." And there's no plan for permanent charges as far as I can see.
But sometimes lawyers are...well...lawyers. It'd be a little difficult to sue someone for "charging money for providing access [to Paizo property]" when in fact they've charged money for advanced access to an HTML parser and people have written their own HTML code to make PF character sheets. But I imagine we'd all feel better to have your official okay.
Do I read you right that the potential "charge for access" issue goes away in a month? If so, I'd say feel free to prepare for when that issue goes away, but don't do anything until it fits comfortably under Community Use.
That's my understanding, yes.