Rule of Rules

Hello everyone,

Just a question. i saw a couple of GM asking to look for the rules of a game (character creation mainly) directly on the digital version of the Corebook (or more books, sometimes).

While i understand that copying all those books could be at least troublesome, and of course, putting a link to a pdf version of the corebook would be illegal, i find that it's a little rough to ask my potential players to buy the books i need to run the game.

I have no problem with that when i'm a player, i can find most of the books quite easily, so no worry here.

But as a GM, i'm wondering if there is any rule here on GP that would prohibit us to copy the part of the books needed to run a game, like the character creation and the basics of the gameplay system.

I plan to run a game based on Fate Core, The Secrets of Cats, and for that, i'd like to write the rules from the corebook to a subforum section. Is that ok with the GP's lines ?

Thanks,

The pdf for Secrets of Cats is PWYW. The pdf for Fate Core is also PWYW.

As saevikas said, for some games your players should have no difficulty finding the material. But there are other games where it isn't as straight forward.

For The Strange which I ran in early days, I recreated the bulk of the system in a forum. The nuts and bolts of how dice rolls work, difficulty classes, and spending resources, critical rolls, GM intrusions, spending xp, etc. I then copied it into an email and sent it to Monte Cook Games telling them what I had done (within a private forum). They never responded, so I kept the material up. That was probably over kill.

Nobody here should advocate piracy, as the health of our hobby depends in part on fair dealing. There are legal sources for many books online, SRDs for many popular games, and illegal sites that share pdfs. Many of us view the illegal sites as try-before-you-buy, but even that is morally questionable.

Lastly, Kickstarter gives backers early access to material well before it is commercially available. The material sent to backers has formed games here, with no source, legal or otherwise, for players to gain access. Trusting GMs may share their early draft manuscript, but that should never be expected.

Is tricky, balancing introducing players to a game they may never buy without prior play, to legitimately protecting our friends in the industry from predatory practices.

As saevikas said, for some games your players should have no difficulty finding the material. But there are other games where it isn't as straight forward.

For The Strange which I ran in early days, I recreated the bulk of the system in a forum. The nuts and bolts of how dice rolls work, difficulty classes, and spending resources, critical rolls, GM intrusions, spending xp, etc. I then copied it into an email and sent it to Monte Cook Games telling them what I had done (within a private forum). They never responded, so I kept the material up. That was probably over kill.

Nobody here should advocate piracy, as the health of our hobby depends in part on fair dealing. There are legal sources for many books online, SRDs for many popular games, and illegal sites that share pdfs. Many of us view the illegal sites as try-before-you-buy, but even that is morally questionable.

Lastly, Kickstarter gives backers early access to material well before it is commercially available. The material sent to backers has formed games here, with no source, legal or otherwise, for players to gain access. Trusting GMs may share their early draft manuscript, but that should never be expected.

Is tricky, balancing introducing players to a game they may never buy without prior play, to legitimately protecting our friends in the industry from predatory practices.

Yeah, that's my point Qralloq. I don't want to advocate piracy, i know the Fate Core as a SRD easy to use on the web.

Ok then, i'll write the rules specific for Secrets of Cats, linking to the drivethru if anyone want those, and a link to the SRD Fate Core.

That will do, i suppose.

Thank you a lot.

Sometimes searching on the internet to see if the SRD has not been posted somewhere can greatly help. Not all games do that, but there are a still a surprising amount of games that do.

FYI: A list of known game SRDs.

Some games are also taking up an odd policy that the player-facing rules are free, while the full rules need to be purchased. Lancer is one such example (side note - very excellent mech system). Stars Without Number has a similar thing, where they offer a free version and a paid version of the main pdf.

The one piece of advice I would give is that in the case of any system you may run is to provide (legal) links to the ruleset. Free or paid version. If players do not or cannot purchase the rules, if need be, then that's just how it rolls.