I have a question, though I'm really not sure if this is the right place to post it. First of all I want to say that I don't know much about copyright laws, and I find my english too limited to understand the agreements on this subject at times.
I live in Switzerland, and there's a kind of graduation project at the end of 13th grade here, or wathever you'd call it in english. Now I would very much like to design an Adventure Book (something the size of the official ones, e.g. H1:Keep on the Shadowfell), but I am not sure about the legal situation. Of course the document will probably never be published, at least not commercially, but there would be a documentation of my work in the school archives, which every student has access to. Any references to the rulebooks would be clearly marked as such, but I would be forced to reference rather heavily in the "theory part" of the documentation so the reader would understand what the hell I'm talking about.
I'm confused, does this count as "fair use"? We are taught how to properly cite any source of information we use for our projects at school, but there never was anything about actually asking for permission. Same goes for pictures: cite properly, use anyway. This can't be right.
By the way, this is still purely hypothetical. I haven't got a teacher to approve of my project idea yet, since I'm quite sure that the question of copyright will arise at once and I prefer to be able to answer it.
I believe that legal trouble really only occurs when you blatantly plagiarize a source without citing it -or- if you intend on selling the piece without coming to some agreement with the company who owns rights to the original product.
You aren't selling this piece right? I think as long as you cite your sources you should be okay.
Also, it would help to know more about the specific project. If you are just making an adventure to be played in the D&D game, AND you're not actually selling it AND you're citing sources... I think its totally okay.
If you are planning on writing a new players hand book and taking all the credit for it... well then you have a legal problem.
No, I'm really just planning to write an Adventure for the game, possibly situating it in Fâerun. Most of it will be my own creation, I'll just touch up the rules (citing, of course!) which won't even be in the final product, but in the documentation of my process.
I'm worried about images, though - Monster statistics and such, which would be very convienient to use from the Monster Manuals. This is what they were written for in the first place, anyway. Of course, it would be an option to just refer to the monster and have the reader look it up in his/her own copy of the books. But that would complicate things, since I can't expect my teachers to have one.
Then again, I guess my worries are all moot, since Wizards probably wont care as long as I don't intend to sell it or otherwise spread it around. Which I won't consider until it's finished and I can make an educated guess if it's even worth trying to get a license for it.
Fair use is best explained by your government's copyright office. Generally speaking, limited use of examples or excerpts of a work in an academic paper for research is acceptable, but I have no idea how Swiss law treats fair use. In some countries it's extended as a right, in others it's a form of legal defense.
However, I have trouble understanding the educational value of just an adventure module. Are you creating this adventure as part of a project to document the creation of a game? If so, there are still legal pitfalls to deal with, and things you should do to improve the integrity of your project (which I'd be happy to describe if this is the case; just be aware that I'm not a lawyer, especially not in Switzerland). Alternatively, you can hope that your English teacher or whoever will be approving and grading it has no idea about any of this legal nonsense, and try to enjoy yourself.
As an aside, images are just a different type of content, not really any different from a paragraph. Furthermore, a monster stat block is just a dressed-up table, which is text and numbers.
Isn't copyright fun?
Hm. Educational value. That would be a good question, and I'm sure I'll have to conjure up something of the sort to get it approved. But I fail to see the value in writing a short story, or a play, or making an animation film, or any number of "creative" projects that end in a sculpture, a painting or whatnot. We've had less sensible projects - like having some kids perform Harry Potter on stage.
And this is so much more that a story. It's more like a play, but one where the lead characters don't have lines and the writer must anticipate any move they might make. I've seen the official Adventures, and some of them are truly horrible, as in giving a single course of action with little or no alternatives. There is not a single skill challange in all of H1:Keep of the Shadowfell - this is not what I'm going for. I'm trying to tell a story that can develope in as many unexpected, different ways as I can manage.
I guess in the end I'll just document the process of designing an adventure and call it educational value.
Well, at least I can count on the teacher not having any idea what the hell I'm talking about. Imagine having to explain pen and paper to someone who doesn't know about computer games in the first place, does not read fictional stories and has no imagination. Try explaining "fantasy" to a teacher.
I hope I can explain enough to get it approved.
Yeah, copyright is fun.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that your teacher doesn't know about Dungeons & Dragons - plenty of bookish folks, as long as they lived through the 70s/80s, will have played tabletop roleplaying at least once; especially teachers, in my experience. On the flip-side, there's always the chance that they think it's devil worship, too.
Sounds to me like you're (we're?) over-thinking this.
Yeah, I guess we are. I've got two, maybe three teachers willing to look into the project already, and one of them's really interested. Lucky me.
... I am actually applying to graduate school for art, one main reason being that I would like to obtain a Masters in Fine Arts so that I have the credentials to teach art (look a future teacher who plays D&D here!). The other reason being so that I have time and space to focus on the development of work.
It is my experience that every topic has some sort of educational value that can be associated with it. If you think about art projects (sculpture, painting, etc.) it might just be a study in esthetic value. Conceptual art can be more about the process of creation than the final piece itself. Or maybe it is more about the idea pertained behind the piece. Anything that you can argue has value creates a discussion and the dialogue is where the educational value should aim to stem from.
I guess the question I have for you is, what sparked your interest in creating this project? I think if you ask yourself that question, you will be able to come up with a list of values that you claim the project has. Then you will probably be able to predict what questions people will have about your claims. From there you have to figure out the answers you might give people or change the project to reflect your claim better.
So what department is this project for (or most closely associated with)? D&D is something you could actually associate to more than one department, depending on what aspect(s) of the game you want to focus on.
Since the teacher I got for the project is form the information technology department of our school there had to be some programming aspect somewhere so she can grade it. I experimented with applying software engineering techniques to the original idea, but in the end I threw the whole adventure concept overboard. So what I'm doing now is adapting the rules as a computer program.
What it does:
It's essentially a digital playgrid. The program does nothing more than rolling dice, calculating attributes and keeping track of all those effects and when they end. There still is a dungeon master and any number of player, though the players (hopefully) only see what their characters see (I'm not sure if there'll be time to implement it, though), eliminating the pain of trying to determine range of sight, lighting etc. by hand. I figured it would be really fun to take this into a network, so players who don't actually live near each other could play anyway.
THE PROGRAM IS ESSENTIALLY USELESS WITHOUT THE PLAYER'S HANDBOOK!, since players are forced to manually insert the data for all classes, races and especially powers. There won't even be a way to save this data between play sessions.
The program would also never be published, except in the project I hand in. And even there I could probably exclude vital parts of the source code and limit the software to a demo version. And I'd be happy to let WotC reuse my work if they should express any interest in it.
Now, I have no idea if I can do this. It's for educational reasons, that should count for something... The problem is, I've already signed my project contract because I was running out of time. And I can't even FIND the copyright terms of WotC. I need a laywer.
Personally, if I was worried about Wizards/Hasbro's lawyers, I would just make a generic game table: put moveable images in squares that maintain a kind of notepad (where you'd write HP, status effects, etc. for that particular image), include a dice roller, chat log, allow the host (DM) make changes to anything at any time. It doesn't do any rules interpreting so you can play it with any game that uses pieces on a board, and it's still quite a project. Demonstrating its versatility (it could be used for chess, D&D, Clue, anything really) would probably be a plus, grade-wise.
By the way: having to tie it in to IT department? I totally saw something like this coming in post #7:
I still don't know what kind of class (or department) you're doing this for.
I could have done it with one of the english teachers, instead. But the IT teacher promised me I could do what I planned, I'd just have to include some theoretical aspects from her subject. It ended up something mangled in between and I had to pull a stop somewhere. I'm a bit pissed, but this is a very interesting project, too.
Do you think I should write Wizards for permission? How are my chances?