Sooooo convince me

[kbs666]

You are misrepresenting what is being discussed in that OGL FAQ.

The OGL is not something you must agree to before you play D&D like a UA at the start of a software installation. The OGL is the license under which anyone may produce content for D&D without directly negotiating a license with Hasbro first.

So of course the OGL assumes that the material being discussed has been sold and includes an FAQ entry about what happens if you break the rules.

[Exmortis]

Something that needs to be said here.

Fair use (fair dealings in Canada) is at work, despite publishers desire to inform you.

You can make as many copies of what you buy for your personal use. That is fair. You can modify what you bought, for personal use, that is fair. To my research no ne has been ever convicted of this in court. But please cite them if this is the case.

Publishers will ensure to scare you into thinking that you have no rights when dealing with copyrighted material, but that is just not the case. Each country is different, Canada actually allows you in law to make as many copies of music on as many mediums as you wish, as long as it is for your personal use as an example.

If you buy the MM, take a beholder, modify it and then use it in your campaign, the publisher can do nothing about it. However if you then make that available to others, even free, you are indeed breaking the law.

So inputting a module you own into RW and modifying as how you see fit, is not going to get the lawyers after you. But sharing it within the market, can, and LWD can also be held accountable if itcould be shown as not taking steps to stop it.

Likewise allowing modification of a purchased module that cannot be shared is fair and in the publishers best interest. You still need to buy it, they get their money. As they did for a song, book, or what ever.

The quantifier for copyright law is essentially; does your use degrade its value. Giving it away sure does, but using it personally, however you do it, does not, as you paid its value and have in no way degraded its intrinsic value to others.

I am not a lawyer but I have been reading on this, researching it because as one can imagine with so much IP now in my RW, I want to know what am I allowed to do.

Also as anyone who followed the RIAA's draconian "take everyone court" years led to almost complete failure, what publishers want you to believe is not really true.

[Dakadin]

Originally Posted by Strategon

Possibly, but IP holders general don't give the medium of transmission (Realm Works) a carte blanche license to redistribute their property without protecting it. Not to say that they aren't working out special agreements to do so, it's just not a conventional practice.

As Rob stated earlier, I have -0- knowledge of what agreements LW has obtained to redistribute IP; only mentioned it because it FG went through a lot of work to obtain their licensing for WOTC products and there are lots of stipulations, including not allowing any of the content to be altered in any way.

You can modify WOTC products in FG. It works similar to the way they are saying it will work in RW. You can't export their products and they encrypt the modules. You can make changes to them within your current campaign but some items like NPCs need to be moved from the module to your campaign before you can make modifications.

I've done it with 5E modules in FG. It's great because my group is larger than the usual recommended size and I can prep the changes required ahead of time if I want.

[ColinBuckler]

Originally Posted by Bebberino

I would really like to run a campaign that is as interlinked as the 3 Pathfinder games I am a part of are. Now what do I mean by that, well in 2 games I play siblings, one game has one sibling, the other their younger brother. In the game I DM it is set a few years later and one of their nephews is in it.

I want to be able to emulate that, if possible.

I want to have it so other DM's that run games that I know and agree to it can input their information for their games also, with appropriate access given to the people that have a 'need to know'.

Specifically I am curious if have Golarion, it will show who is the ruler of Varisia, who rules Cheliax and what not.

Now I do understand that a good portion of that will be purchasable content, BUT is it possible.

You in essence need a database to contain this information and access it which will then provide access to your users and allow them to only see the data they have the right to.

RW does a good job doing a front end to this - but then you have the ongoing licensing costs as well as well as potential issues in linking the data and allowing the other users to manage it/update it. You could be looking at 3 accounts for each DM, each needing a license cost.

Roll20 and FG are completely different products as they are VTT's and should not really be compared to RW - though yes they could roughly do what you want.

Have you thought about looking at a Wiki?

You can have a Wiki with different permissions for other users making some data available to you, public or named registered users.

A wiki can be online (web server) or offline (WAMP server).

You could potentially host a single wiki database and partition it, or several wiki databases - one per GM with an overall database for the world.

I have used DokuWiki in the past for RPG (see: http://www.cannockgamesclub.co.uk/wi...er:lewis:start covering a 7 year campaign with links)

The best thing about it - DokuWiki is free.

Only cost you may occur is in a public hosted web site.
Offline you can use WAMP (which is free) to run a web server/php on a USB stick and install DokuWiki (which is also free).

See:
https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WampServer

[kbs666]

Originally Posted by ColinBuckler

You could be looking at 3 accounts for each DM, each needing a license cost.

I cannot for the life of me imagine a scenario where anyone would need or require more than one RW login.

[MNBlockHead]

I looked at using a wiki, it is no where near as convenient and powerful as RealmWorks. A wiki, OneNote, or Evernote are better than paper or word-processing docs,but none are as useful for world building and actually running your game as Realm Works.

[ColinBuckler]

Originally Posted by kbs666

I cannot for the life of me imagine a scenario where anyone would need or require more than one RW login.

I ment to say 1 for each DM so they can record their unique notes and restrict access to the other potential DM's when playing as they all share and DM in the same world. He did say he wanted to do this in his original post.

So if RW can have campaign partitioning between different DM's hiding campaign sensitive information from each other and a public area for all to use then it meets his requirements as set out in the initial post.

In my opinion none of the 3 products cited will do this, which is why I suggested DokuWiki as an option. A wiki does have its own issues and limitations accepted - but I was working on his original requirements.

I accept for a single DM RW would most likely be the best product unless he wanted a VTT then he should look at FG, Roll20, Maptools.

[Silveras]

Currently. a Realm can have only 1 owner... no "co-DM" support in any way. I don't see that changing anytime soon .. it is pretty core to the design of access in Realm Works. It would likely be faster to start over.

As the Content Market gets more fleshed out, and other planned features get some attention (specifically such as per-character control over revealed information), then one Realm representing 2 or more campaigns of separate characters in the same world becomes more possible.

Being able to Copy and Export/Import now would allow the same base campaign world to support 2 or more separate games in the same setting. The owner of the base would need to incorporate changes from the other two, and managing conflicting merges, but it would be do-able. So GM1 can run a campaign in "MyWorld A" and GM2 can have a campaign in "MyWorld B" ... and even exchange updates to Topics between them.

The key is the IDs. If the original MyWorld is exported and then imported by the GMs into MyWorld A and MyWorld B, they can export updated Topics and exchange them with each other ... while the original MyWorld remains unchanged (or they can also share the changes with the original world).

This is not so good if the two MyWorld A and B versions can have conflicting changes.. but new content added to the original MyWorld can still be sent as an updated export to the GMs of MyWorld A and MyWorld B.

The keys to successfully doing this are: a) planning and b) discipline. This isn't something that is going to work well if the people involved get careless. But it CAN be done.

Of course, the other factor is you can't export purchased (protected) material... but if it is your homebrew material, you can do that as much as you like.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by Silveras

So GM1 can run a campaign in "MyWorld A" and GM2 can have a campaign in "MyWorld B" ... and even exchange updates to Topics between them.

I think the main issue is to ensure that only one GM is response for each particular topic; since each topic gets tagged as to which export file it belongs in.

[Talley Darkstar]

Originally Posted by daplunk

You know what though... I'm going to think on this further...

How can RW be used in conjunction with the big name VTT's via a network...

Let me ponder on that for a while.

Ya know what daplunk, I'd like to see this too. With the tools that I'm using, RW into a VTT is something I've been pondering as well and seeing someone who actually can use RW (I've got the player edition and have been waiting quite some time to update to the GM version) and see what can be done.

In my limited knowledge, copy/paste. LOL