Forum:Multi-licence strategy needed

With Wikia considering following Wikipedia down the route of switching from one license to another, I've been doing a bit of thinking about the licence attached to wiki pages (specifically RPGs). Some Tabletop RPGs come with licenses that allow for content reuse. The most famous of these licenses is Wizard of the Coast's Open Game License (OGL), but it is not the only one. Another licence is a Mongoose licence that allows people to create RPG material that is compatible with Traveller. There are several others out there and I do not know if I know all of them yet.

Doing this with one external license
I've been wondering about the best way to get non-GFDL/non-OGL material onto a wiki. I think that some sort of template (like Template:OGL) could be added to an individual page, so if a Tabletop RPG wiki, just wanted to work with one external licence, that would be fairly easy to work out.

I think possibly, Wikia might also be willing to allow an individual wiki to be run under the OGL (or another gaming licence) instead of the GFDL/CC-SA or whatever. However, a move like that would be a one-way street as colaborative content would be locked into that single licence. (This sort of thing would also make it impossible for an OGL using wiki and a Traveller-licence using wiki to swap content.)

Doing this with as many external licences as desired
I've recently been talking to a group of people who want to release some gaming material under the CC SA licence. But I realised that the wording of various licences generally want to tie your content into their licence. Adding severeral templates to a page (i.e. Template:OGL and Template:Traveller) would not work as WotC have specifically put something into their licence that prevents you attaching two licences to work published under the OGL. However, the OGL, does not forbid you from publishing the same thing twice (once with the OGL and once with another licence) or rebublishing the same things as many times as you want to allow people to access the content from any licence you choose to give it to them under.

What I'm looking for is a way to set up a wiki with CC SA content and then somehow republish that under the OGL, the Traveller licence and any other RPG compatability licence I can think of (or find later). The reason I want to investigate this, is that I want to be able to create a RPG campaign expansion that can be modified, so that it can be reused with any commercial RPG system that has a license to allow this sort of thing.

People that talk about (Tabletop) RPGs sometimes divide them into two things:
 * Fluff (which is background material) and
 * Crunch (which is gamerules).

I think that something like a campaign setting background (the fluff) could easily be republished under every different RPG licence. The rules (the crunch) would need to be added on, on a system by system basis.

This almost needs something like a backwards approach where each RPG licence gets its own namespace and the "core content" goes into another core namespace which can be added in, just like a template can. But just the logistics of designing the setup are almost beyond me.

This issue probably isn't so relevant for the encyclopedic wikis (that list canon of existing RPG settings), but I think it could be very useful for anyone with a great idea for a 'homebrew' campaign setting, as it could make it a lot eaiser (in the long term) for people to build new worlds via a wiki and then extract that information into a PDF.

Even if tabletop RPG wikis only want to use one of these third party RPG licences, I think it might be worth Wikia Gaming sorting out how a multi-licence wiki can work. David Shepheard 23:27, 14 May 2009 (UTC)