E.g. Dungeons & Dragons has a SRD licensed under OGL (Open Game License), for the 3rd and 5th editions, but not all classes are in the SRD. Are the overall characteristics (not just the description texts) of the classes not part of the SRD protected by copyright to prevent reuse (even in non-OGL RPGs)?
[RPG] Are classes from a tabletop RPG copyrightable
intellectual-property
Related Solutions
Yes, originally expected in 2015, 5e OGL and SRD arrived on Jan 2016.
OGL is now embedded in the SRD, available here:
http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/systems-reference-document-srd
5e OGL is essentially the same with 3r OGL word for word (see below).
Like 3r SRD (and unlike 4e's), it contains de-flavored basic player and DM resources that you can use to create other OGL materials. Please keep in mind that Basic Rules is not SRD5, and SRD5 is not 3r SRD. For example, SRD 5.0 includes experience table (under "Beyond 1st Level", page 56), but simplified all classes to their archetype, and contains only one feat.
Wizards of the Coast has also created a new online market, Dungeon Masters Guild, that allows you to extend proprietary materials such as Forgotten Realms and sell them, sharing the profit with Wizards.
Otherwise, what you can do with the SRD and what you cannot do remains the same as 3r. You can still distribute (and sell) your SRD based OGL materials, outside the guild, as long as the materials does not use "Product Identities" and does not violate other copyrights.
Differences between 5e OGL with 3r OGL:
- Term 7, last sentence, rights are now retained for Product, not Product Identity.
- Term 15 now refers to
System Reference Document 5.0instead ofSystem Reference Document. The years and authors has also been updated. - Legal Information, Product Identity list now includes "Underdark", and also refers to new SRD 5.0.
Historically, the plan was an announcement @ 2014 fall and release in 2015.
Here is an official post about it:
We want to ensure that the quality of anything D&D fans create is as high as possible. Basic D&D is aimed at new players ... not for material that you want to share broadly.
It'll take time for everyone to absorb the rules and how they all interact.
While the details are still in flux, we can say that we plan to announce the details of our plans sometime this fall. After that announcement, we plan on launching our program in early 2015.
This matches some other third party comments, which hints that they want to do something different from OGL:
Mearls' plan for D&D is largely the same goals that were created for the OGL. The difference was that the OGL (assumed) that publishers would create a better game by cooperating through iterative design; instead, authors were motivated to ignore each others' innovations and recreate the same rules so that they were paid additional cents per word.
It may be related that Wizards has not granted any translation license yet. Perhaps the developers are focusing on core rulebooks and neglected licenses. The real reason may be unrelated, of course.
As far as I know, as of 2016 Aug, there is still no official 5e translation. Everyone may translate and release SRD5 under the terms of OGL, however, which is what Hobby Japan do.
(Update 2017 March: Finally, after 3 years, Gale Force Nine will translate D&D 5e into multiple languages, starting with French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese. This stands in contrast with previous editions where a local publisher would buy the right to translate and distribute the local language.)
Short version: Str/Con/Dex/Int/Wis/Cha appears to be available for use, but tread carefully.
This is a very gray area, and any advice you get isn't worth much, unless it's from your lawyer.
If you copy all of D&D's design, your work clearly infringes on their copyright, and they can easily succeed in a lawsuit against you. If you copy none of their design, your work doesn't infringe on their copyright at all.
The problem comes when you copy some of their design. If your work is substantially similar to theirs, it's considered infringement. But how similar does it have to be? Courts have come up with many different answers on this, using many different tests.
Short of talking to a lawyer (which is generally a good idea when worrying about legal issues), it might be helpful to look at what other people have done. As you noted in your question, both Pathfinder and Dungeon World have re-used the Str/Con/Dex/Int/Wis/Cha concepts from D&D. This suggests three possibilities:
- This may be such a small thing to copy that it's not infringement.
- It may be infringement, but the copyright owner hasn't bothered to take action.
- The owner of D&D may have licensed the concept for use. (They have licensed some things.)
Sure enough, Str/Con/Dex/Int/Wis/Cha is part of the d20 System, a set of content published by the owner of D&D under a particular license for others to use. Pathfinder explicitly references this license as the source of their authority to use this content.
But if you're going to use the same license, be very careful to read exactly what is and is not covered. Many licenses allow you to use certain content, but only in certain ways. Many require you to license your derivative work according to the same rules as the original work.
Looking at what other people have done only gets you so far. In the end, if you're not sure whether your work is legal, talk to a lawyer.
Best Answer
Technically no, but be careful with what that means
You cannot copyright ideas. That means you cannot copyright the concept of small folk from a quiet village traveling deep into the wastelands of evil with an ancient artifact to confront a villain reborn, or an orbiting military academy where children are forced to compete in a brutal zero-gravity combat simulation, or a spellcaster whose magic comes from their bloodline.
Copyrights apply to expressions of creative ideas. That is, you don’t copyright the concept, you copyright the text, the images, the tables, the whatever-it-is that expresses your concept to others. So those concepts aren’t copyrighted, but The Lord of the Rings, Ender’s Game, and the Player’s Handbook are. The text of D&D is copyrighted, and none of those copyrights are due to expire any time soon. That’s why you need a license—like the OGL—from the copyright holder in order to use any of that text.
Moreover, copyrights include rights to derivative works—which means that, if your work is based on copyrighted work, even if you don’t actually use any of the copyrighted text, tables, images, etc., it still falls under their copyright.1
All of which means that, in casual speech, “copyright” is often used to extend beyond its strict, legal definition. We might speak of Frodo Baggins being copyrighted, when in reality the copyright applies to the text of The Lord of the Rings as well as to all derivations of that text—and any other text that uses the Frodo Baggins character will, in fact, be a derivation.² In fact, even if you changed the name, if a court decides the character is recognizably Frodo Baggins with the serial numbers filed off, that might still be considered a derivative work.
So can an RPG class be copyrighted? No—an RPG class is a concept, an idea. And class names are often real words, which no one can lay claim to, so you could certainly publish an RPG class named fighter, sorcerer, or wizard. But the Player’s Handbook text describing them is copyrighted. And that copyright extends to all derivations of that text—if you base your work on the D&D text and just change the words to synonyms, you are still derivative work.
On the other hand, “sorcerer” is a real word. The concept of magic derived from one’s bloodline goes back to antiquity. Wizards of the Coast probably couldn’t make a case just because you have a “sorcerer” class with a “bloodline” feature. But if you very obviously recreated the D&D sorcerer—down to specifics—in your new system, then they might have a case, even if you write new text and reference new mechanics. Even more so if you went and did this with every PHB class and subclass. But we can’t really know for sure; sometimes very obviously derivative things have gotten a pass.
For an example of this, consider The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. It has very strong parallels to The Lord of the Rings. My description in the first paragraph could have applied to The Sword of Shannara as well as it did to The Lord of the Rings. As Wikipedia puts it, “Some accused Brooks of lifting the entire plot and many of his characters directly from The Lord of the Rings,” which I would agree with (and I liked the book well enough, and think it has some minor independent merit—as Wikipedia continues, “others praised its execution despite the lack of originality.”) But The Sword of Shannara was published, and the Tolkien Estate—famously litigious—didn’t sue. So there is some room here, though it’s notoriously difficult to find.
Ultimately, copyright law is subjective. We can’t know for sure how a court will decide any given case. And even if you would prevail in the end, defending a lawsuit from Wizards of the Coast would bankrupt most people. Your best defense is to use the OGL, but that comes with requirements. Your next-best defense is to make sure your RPG is very clearly unrelated to D&D.
Note: in this scenario, you have copyright too—you can’t publish your work because it is derivative of their copyright, but they can’t publish it either because your new derivation is something you have a copyright on. In this situation, you have to either come to an agreement wherein one of you allows the other to publish it despite the other’s copyright, or you publish it jointly somehow, or you simply agree to disagree and no one publishes it.
Some derivative works could fall under fair use, e.g. for parody, but there’s a lot that goes into fair use and basically none of it applies to creating RPG material.