This #FreeRPGDay I'd like to talk about RPGs that are Free as in Free Culture!

This thread talks about some options to use open licensing to foster a community of collaboration and shared innovation and offers a legal hack to tailor CC sharealike requirements to our medium

FATE and Masks are both popular games that offer their text under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). This means that others are free to distribute the text and to make their own games incorporating the text, as long as they give proper attribution.

I adored many aspects of the Conditions system in Masks; rather than rewriting the noncopyrightable system in my own way to avoid using their copyrightable expression, I was able to instead rely on the CC BY license and not worry about whether my version was too similar to theirs

Other creators are troubled by the idea that someone could build off of their work and not re-share the end product. I'm going to put an open license on the text of Thirsty Sword Lesbians when it's complete, but I'm not obligated to even if I rely on the CC BY license for Masks.

This is where the "sharealike" licenses come in. CC BY SA works like CC BY except you have to license the works you create under the license under "sharealike" terms. This is common in free software, where creators want those who use their contributions to share back

None of this means the community can't make money off of their games! There is a noncommercial license option, but generally creators want people to be able to make money when they build on their creations. A nice feature of sharealike is repelling big commercial operations

Disney isn't likely to do anything under a sharealike license. If they want to publish a version of your game tailored to media they own, they'd want a different license to do that, and they'd have to pay you.

BUT sharealike can be plausibly read to mean that you have to share the entirety of your game hack, not just the text, because your rulebook (art and all) is a derivative work that is licensed, with sharealike obligations. What if you just want people to share their text?

"The text of this work is offered under a CC BY SA 4.0 license. Also, the text of this work is offered under a license having the terms of CC BY SA 4.0, except: (1) if the Adapted Material is a literary work, then the Adapter's License need only be applied to the text (cont'd)

and (2) you must include this and the following sentence in your licensing terms. The CC BY SA 4.0 license is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"

(I'm not your lawyer, I made it fit in a tweet, retain your own lawyer, etc)

For those curious, this is the bit of CC BY SA 4.0 that is ambiguous here. Maybe you can use a sharealike work and only reshare your text? But clarity is good and ideally common use cases will be unambiguous under a community's licensing regime

Also "system" in RPG parlance and "system" in copyright parlance aren't always used exactly the same way. Under US law, a "system" cannot be copyrighted, but expression describing a system can be. Most RPGs are copyrightable expression of a noncopyrightable core "system"

tldr copyright law is terrible but we can build a resilient commons with a bit of planning! Also no shame for creatives who just want to retain default copyright; there are plenty of reasonable reasons to do this.

If you want people to hack it, though, consider Creative Commons!

oh also to avoid any doubt, I dedicate this license hack to the public domain per CC0. you're free to use and adapt it, no attribution or sharealike obligations

I don't think it's actually copyrightable, being functional legal language, but lest there be any doubt, public domain