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lunes, 26 de julio de 2021

Personas y dados: Dice, licenses and game systems


Following with the non-official companion of Personas y dados I'm writing with this series of posts today I will talk about the type of dice used in role-playing games, the most usual licenses and some of the rulesets which can be used to create your games without having to start from scratch.

To read the review of the book you can follow this link and this other one to read the post devoted to litery and game design resources.

Tipos de dados

Dice images by Peng (Public domain) and Diacrítica (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Perhaps it's the first time you have listen about role-playing games or perhaps you have reached the blog by chance, if this is it here you have a little explanation about the most common types of dices of this kind of games, being no more than polyhedron (most of them platonic solids) that allow referees and players to obtain random numbers when throwed that, with the rulesets of the games, determine if characters are successful in what they are proposed to do.

D4 (Tetrahedron) D4 (4-sided dice)
Tetrahedron
With a pyramid shape, be careful not to step on them barefooted like a hobbit (it usually hurts a lot).
D6 (Cube) D6 (6-sided dice)
Regular hexaedron
The lifelong cubic dice, used in games like parcheesi and the goose game among others, its sides can have points or numbers although in other cases they can have other symbols or be empty (like in the case of Fudge and Fate dices, having s sides marked with the symbol +, two more with the symbol - and the other empty).
D8 (Octahedron) D8 (8-sided dice)
Regular octahedron
Commonly seen in nature's crystalline forms, like diamonds.
D10 (Pentagonal trapezohedron) D10 (10-sided dice)
Pentagonal trapezohedron
These are usually used to make percentile rolls (with two different color dice for tens and units) and at first weren't the most common dice (although these were pattented in the USA in 1906), in fact Mike Pondsmith (author of the role-playing game Cyberpunk) explains in this thread in one of the rpg.net forums that hte first ones he used were imported from Japan being a remnant of dice used by Imperial Japanese Navy in Second World War in their wargames.
D12 (Dodecahedron) D12 (12-sided dice)
Regular dodecahedron
An intriguing example of dodecahedron, nowadays with an unknown function to us, is the Roman dodecahedron.
D20 (Icosahedron) D20 (20-sided dice)
Regular icosahedron
The quintessential dice used in all the basic rolls of games like Dungeons & Dragons and OSR retroclones, it's also possible to find virus in nature with this shape as well as many examples of dice used in divining practices during the era of Classical Greece and Rome, like those found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York (1 and 2)


Licences


Before recommending rulesets you may use as a base to create your games I think it's important to be clear about the following (and for the record, I'm not a lawyer, I'm only using common sense): one thing is to prepare a role-playing session for your friends at home or in your club, using the games you have bought and mixing concepts, mechanics and stories (something that is often done) and another very different one is what can do an author willing to use an already published game as the engine of his creation instead of his own system, having planned to obtain an economic profit selling it.

This takes us to a question that always ends appearing in role-playing games creative circles: game mechanics can be copyrighted?, are patentable? The answer is that mechanics as such can't be (you can't, for instance, pattent the idea of rolling a dice to obtain a random outcome), what can be pattented are the texts used to explain those mechanics in the game (something that Jorge Coto Bautista clearly explains in page 9 of Personas y dados), so it's usually a very bad idea to literally copy these texts in our work if you don't previously have permission from the rights owner (the author or the publisher) because you can incur in plagiarism that logically will carry many problems to the creator trying it.

What can the game designer do if he want to use mechanics of another game he likes? He have some options:
  • Ask directly to the game's author to obtain his permission to do it (something relatively simple in case of independent creators).
  • Explain in the game these mechanics without using the same words in the ruleset inspiring us.
  • Resort to a game with mechanics available under a license allowing to reuse them.

This last point leads me to talk about of the most common types of licenses role-playing designers can use which I list below:
  • Open Gaming License (OGL)
    Publisher Wizards of the Coast (Wikipedia | Website) bean to offer the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons under the Open Gaming License (OGL) v1.0 in the year 2000, allowing to all those interested to use part of the contents of the game to create supplements and derived works.

    This license helps to establish:
    • The Open Gaming Content (OGC) which can be reused in your creations
    • The not open content, which will be considered Product Identity (PI) and will be protected by the license chosen by the creator of the gaming material (it usually will be a closed license disallowing using it)

    From January 2016 Wizards of the Coast offers the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons under the OGL v.01a and also there are other publishers and creative groups taking advantage of this license to give others the opportunity to use his products in games creation.
  • Creative Commons (CC)
    This non-profit organization (Wikipedia | Website) established in 2001 is devoted to promote access to culture and education and to expand the range of creative works on which others can legally create derived works.

    These licenses are constituted combining 4 modules:
    • Attribution (BY): requires a reference to the original autor of the work.
    • Share Alike (SA): allows derived works using the same license or related.
    • Non-Commercial (NC): mthe drived work must not be used with commercial purposes.
    • No Derivative Works (ND): the work can't be modified by no means.

    The previous modules, with the addition of the special option CC0 ("Without reserved rights"), originate the following licenses:
    semaforo-CC-en.png
    File:Creative Commons Semaforoa.svg
    by Marko Txopitea "Txopi" (CC0 1.0)

    Copyright
    Copyleft
    Anticopyright (Criticism of Copyright)
    Free Cultural Works
  • GNU licenses (GPL and GFDL)
    These licenses are promoted by the Free Software Foundation (Wikipedia | website), a non-profit foundation founded by Richard Stallman (Wikipedia | Personal website), responsilbe of the GNU Software collection (Wikipedia | Website).

    Although these are usually used in the free software environment (that can studied, modified and freely used for any purpose and redistributed with changes and enhancements) in some cases also came to the world of role-playing games.

    The licenses in its actual version are the following ones:
    • General Public License (GPL) (Wikipedia | Website): it's the license applied to software
    • GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (Wikipedia | Website): it's the license applied to manuals and explaining texts of software
  • Other licenses
    Some publishers and creative groups had prepared their own licenses allowing to reuse the contents of their rulesets, as these depart form the general licenses I commented before and are very specific (they usually ask the interested author to contact them) I will briefly comment them when necessary.


In addition to the previous information you can also be interested in reading the following links if you want more information about this topics (you may also consult a lawyer if needed):

Rulesets to use in your games

After reviewing the more usual licenses finally I offer you a list of different styles rulesets which may be used as the base of the mechanics of your games.

The following list is divided in categories regarding the type of general mechanics used and each one of the entries features the name, where these can be obtained, the language in which these are written and the license under which these are available.

There aren't all the available possibilities but there is a number more than enough to start working on your game (to see a more extense list you may read Tabletop Games (Common Content), Tabletop Games (Libre) and the games appearing listed at Sinergia de rol).

Dungeons & Dragons, D20 and OSR ◄◄◄◄


Since Wizards of the Coast began to offer version 3.1 of Dungeons & Dragons under the OGL until version 5.1, the most up-to-date version, there have been appearing many websites offering the different Source Reference Documents (SRD) explaining the basic mechanics as well as the derived ones and also a certainly important renaissance of the first versions of the game have been seen, taking advantage of said license to offer the retroclones in the Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement as well as all kind of games.


D100 ◄◄◄◄


Another kind of games, very popular for their mechanics, are those where characters use skills expressed as percentages (for instance: Archaeology 75%) and its use is usually resolved rolling 2 10-sided dice (d10), one for the tens and the other for the units, if a roll equal or less than the skill percentage (once modifiers due to the action difficulty are added or substracted) is obtained the playing character will be successful.
  • Chaosium - Basic Roleplaying
    Subjet to the BRP Open Game License, Version 1.0 (very similar to the standard OGL), to have more information about it you may consult this link, for details about lcences (fan and commercial) you may consult this other one.
    Language: English.
  • Generic Old-school Roleplaying Engine (GORE™)
    Available under the OGL license and with a free license allowing to create third parties' contents compatible with GORE™ and other games using a mechanic based in percentiles or similar.
    Language: English.
  • Cthulhu d100
    Available under the OGL license, the Providence Edition is available from the downloads section of Shadowlands Ediciones and the previous edition, by Three Fourteen Games, is available from DriveThruRPG and Sinergia de rol.
    Language: Spanish.
  • Mythras Imperative | Mythras Imperativo
    Document with the basic rules of the game Mythras taht can be freely downloaded and distributed, being able to be used as the base of your own games thanks to the Mythras Gateway License, to know more details of this it's necessary to get in touch with The Design Mechanism or with 77Mundos, the publisher with the license for Spain (in the download for both languages is included the neccessary contact info to deal with questions related to the license).
    Languages: English (downloads section of The Design Mechanism) | Spanish (downloads section of 77Mundos).
  • Revolution D100
    Universal game system available under the OGL license.
    Language: English.
  • Hardboiled
    Games system focused in police and investigation adventures, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
    Language: Spanish.
  • Renaissance - D100 black powder SRD
    Free role-playing system available under the OGL for fantasy and historic games in the era of black powder weapons.
    Language: English.
  • Action D100
    Universal role-playing system available under the CC BY 4.0 license.
    Language: Spanish



D6 | dice pools ◄◄◄◄


Another of the most common game systems is the one with rolls of a set of dice, frequently 6-sided dice (d6), and the sum of the results is compared with a number of difficulty that must be equalized or overcome to succeed:


Savage Worlds ◄◄◄◄


Finally, but not less important, I will talk about the ideal system for thrilling gaming sessions looking to imitate action cinema topics: it's Savage Worlds by Pinacle Entertainment, published in Spain by HT Publishers.

Pinacle Entertainment allows to create your own material for Savage Worlds if publisher's licenses and conditions are respected: In both cases, if you want to sell your works, tou must read the conditions exposed in the Aces section.
If you are interested in the operation of Savage Worlds you also have the following downloads:

Downloads in English Downloads in Spanish



Next installment


I hope this lists of game systems and rulesets I have given you in this post will be useful when creating your own game, in the next post I will talk about software which can help role-playing designers.

This entry it's also available in the following languages:
Castellano Català

en

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