iollmann's page

Open letter:

Dear Erik,

I saw you on Roll for Combat today. Thank you for taking what was quite a lot of time to keep us up to date with the progress! I was excited to see many including Mongoose Publishing, Necromancer games, and of course Paizo taking part in this effort.

I am writing because I am a recently retired software engineer (Apple) and have been looking at what I would like to do for the next few decades. One thing that strongly appeals is to write digital tools for my favorite TTRPGs. These might be things like digital character sheets or random encounter + treasure generators for the iOS store.

As I look into this — the current kerfuffle could not be a better education! — I find that in an effort to protect their core IP from competitors, many game developers have walled off enough of the specifically valuable parts of their games that it is quite difficult to produce quality digital tools. For example, if I want to write a character sheet for a 5e wizard, I am only licensed by the SRD to assist the user if their character belongs to the evoker subclass, and not any of the others. Obviously, this would be quite a disappointment to most players, especially once they realize they can not advance beyond level three! If we wall off the specifically recognizable and maybe even trademark-able parts of the game from the digital character sheet, we in a specifically targeted manner damage the player experience.

(I do not dispute the authors’ right to do this. I am just questioning the state of the art that drives them to hobble their own creation in this way.)

Some digital character sheets work around this problem by having an independently downloaded library of additional content produced with months or years of effort by shady individuals / devoted fans. However, this does not ensure that the original content producer is properly paid, or the content is accurate or complete or is current with errata. Finding and installing such hacks is dreadful user experience! Few have the chops. The hacks do not well present the game.

We should do all we can to ensure the game is properly paid for and licensed. What we have here is an unsolved interoperability barrier between the game design world and the software world. I may be premature, but I feel that even many Grognards have come to see the value in computers for TTRPG play. It may be time.

Perhaps in your effort to provide an open game licensing agreement, you might find additional value if it also provided an optional means to ensure that content can be used legally by players’ third party digital tools. For example, in addition to buying traditional OSE content on DriveThruRPG, could not one also purchase a XML file with the copyrighted content suitably categorized for use in a third party digital tool, thereby allowing the digital tool to be published without violating copyright, and the user to use the tool to enhance the TTRPG experience legally, to the benefit of all involved.

Toward this end, I’ve identified a few items that could be considered to be included the ORC effort that might help:

Add licensing language specifically for “deep reader” apps to allow them to escape legal difficulties from simply presenting paid content in useful ways. To illustrate, consider a slippery slope argument starting with a PDF reader or web browser. You publish your game design as PDF or HTML. The reader draws it on the screen or the page. However, it adds its own value added features that would not be present on the bound work. It is now searchable. It can be reformatted to be printed bigger or smaller. Maybe it can be repaginated or the text flow differently around a graphic pasted on the page width. It can be annotated. I possibly could even write my own PDF reader and sell it for $5 without triggering complaint from the game author for copyright violation, even though from one perspective my product has clearly republished his work for personal profit. However, continuing to advance down our slippery slope, there could be a complaint if my PDF reader also learns to roll virtual dice where it detects something with the form “6d6+12” in the text, or draw magic missile animations in the margins on pages where those words appear. Inching further, suppose it scrapes the PDF content and through some AI or clever heuristics makes the included embedded character sheet automatically calculate ability bonuses or perhaps add a pop up menu for each empty spell book line to populate it with known spell names and descriptions found later in the document. At some point, we must ask how different is all this from a digital character sheet? Why is it permissible for a PDF reader to dully and unimaginatively reproduce static work as such, but it is impermissible for a smart reader to add value? Does a musical artist litigate the maker of an amp with a digital equalizer?

As a software designer, I find these cutoffs confusing and completely arbitrary. The gaming world’s inability to reach consensus or even well describe what is permissible and what is not makes it impossible to make good tools for fear of expensive legal consequence. I would even go so far as to suggest this is why we have never had really good character sheet apps (outside of specifically licensed games and VTT apps), even though this is clearly to the benefit of player and indie game publisher alike. The ORC would benefit from some well thought out rules as to what a “deep reader” app for game content can do without threat of legal sanction.

Along these lines, if ORC specifies a game description file format (e.g. XML with some suggested tags) that the game SRD can use, defining a loosely structured file containing descriptions and quantities associated with equipment, classes, spells, and other discrete items that the player might need, this would save the game community months or years of legally questionable work duplicating the content for use with their favorite tool. Note that I am not suggesting a fully architected file format that drives a computer game. To escape copyright, what we minimally need is just a file containing a list of copyrighted text snippets that it is permitted to use and maybe some associated numerical values for various game elements (e.g. “to hit bonus” = +1) indexed by appropriate keywords (“name” = “long sword”.) that the player can call on to void typing in game content when they need it. One such file format is here: see https://github.com/kinkofer/FightClub5eXML collections, but something like XML would suffice just as well and there are good tools available for that.

Finally, if there was a store where such files could be sold, maybe with a scheme to enable tools writers to securely and privately respect and support game authors’ rights to profit off their work, it may be that such an additional revenue source would drive interest in widespread use of the ORC simply beyond the desire to do the right thing.

It’s well past time the game world and the software world had a rapproachement. I hope you will use this opportunity to do just that.