I am making/modifying a Google sheet to be a semi automated character sheet, and since I'd like to be able to share it with others if they're weird like me I want to make sure I'm not going to get into any trouble. Part of the automation is I plan to have a little database of the spells and feats for the sheet to pull from so it can fill in descriptions, actions etc automatically... Am I allowed to have this data in my sheet? Is there any kind of pre filled data I should avoid having?
Note: Yes, I know Pathbuilder and Wanderer's Guide exists. I prefer something with a little more customisation plus this is a hobby for me to make these and practice new skills.
How much data can I put in Google Sheets?
and Documentation for files you can store on Google Drive
Google Support pages can answer a lot of questions about Google products.
Keep in mind that all your information (data, photos, emails, etc) that you store in your Google account is lumped together for your total storage useage. Each Google Account has a 15 GB limit.
Sorry that's not what I meant! My bad for my lousy choice of words. What I meant was is there any like pathfinder paizo text I should avoid using in my google sheets database to avoid any like copyright issues? Since I want to have prefilled data from spells and feats and maybe other bits and pieces.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You need to avoid anything that has intellectual property tied to it so anything that contains descriptions of setting information, lore, proper names of places/people/organizations, and the like.
A good way to see what I mean would be to peek at how they handle things at the d20pfsrd project which stips ALL of that out and has to rename a ton of things since they don't have a proper license for the IP compared to how that same info is available on the Archives of Nethys which has the blessing of Paizo officially to support their material and use the proper and full text and IP where applicable. As for detailed information on what the dos and donts are I'm not sure there is a great singular place you can brush up on the nitty gritty that's centralized, at least that I'm aware of but I may be wrong about that.
You need to avoid anything that has intellectual property tied to it so anything that contains descriptions of setting information, lore, proper names of places/people/organizations, and the like.
A good way to see what I mean would be to peek at how they handle things at the d20pfsrd project which stips ALL of that out and has to rename a ton of things since they don't have a proper license for the IP compared to how that same info is available on the Archives of Nethys which has the blessing of Paizo officially to support their material and use the proper and full text and IP where applicable. As for detailed information on what the dos and donts are I'm not sure there is a great singular place you can brush up on the nitty gritty that's centralized, at least that I'm aware of but I may be wrong about that.
So I'd have to be careful of like the Avatar spell since it's chock full of names to the deities for instance. Or Devrin's Dazzling Diversion both the name and the description has the character Devrin.
Maybe it'll be simpler to drop the database autofill idea and just let the users fill everything in manually.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
That's precisely right. You can represent the spell MECHANICS exactly as-is but the naming convention of the forms would need to be made generic and descriptive of what the form you're taking is, in fact, that's a PERFECT example, take a peek at the d20pfsrd version for FP2 and you can get a good idea of what needs to be done.
Generally speaking, depending on HOW automated you make things you should be able to add a number of filters to flag and replace with placeholder text you can easily identify and fix in batches for all of the various words of things that need to be removed. Not sure exactly how you're handling the project but depending on the scope of things you might even be able to reach out to the people behind the page I linked to ask for advice on what best practices they use as they've been at it for a long time and could probably offer some wisdom.
Making a filter to replace words/phrases with sounds like a grand idea. Ideally I want to automate this as much as possible, because I'm a programmer and I like automating things. I feel like my project might be too small scale (I doubt this would have a large audience of any kind) to ask such a big group as the d20pfsrd group but maybe I'll muster up the courage to. ^^
I may be misreading, but themetricsystem seem to be answering on the unstated assumption that your sheet will use the OGL (although they appear to be confusing IP with PI). Which may be the route you go down, but then you need to make sure you include a properly completed copy of the licence in your spreadsheet (including all your sources, and all your sources' sources, in section 15). You would also need to comply with the rules and restrictions that the OGL imposes, the most significant in this case being no mentioning of trademarks (like, for example, "Pathfinder"). So you would probably also need to use and comply with the Compatibility Licence.
I did briefly wonder if you would be better off looking at the Community Use Policy, but that does not appear to help in your case.
(IANAL, TINLA)
To be honest, I have no idea if I need to use the OGL, I assumed based on sheet builders like Pathbuilder and Wanderer's Guide that I need to follow at least some aspects of it to not get into trouble if I want to share the spreadsheet. I am very dumb and unsure of how this stuff works lol