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Take it

This page is not a formality. It is the reason the game exists in this form, and it is meant to be used.

Why this page is here

In January 2023, Wizards of the Coast attempted to revoke the Open Game License — the OGL, the agreement the tabletop industry had built on for twenty years. Games that thousands of people were actively playing were, briefly, at the mercy of a decision made in a boardroom.

Does Play Dice is Jeff Adams's answer to that. The point is not that the rules are free to read. The point is that nobody can take them back — not a publisher, not a future owner, not Jeff.

That claim is only worth something if you can check it. So: here is how to take the whole thing.

What you are allowed to do

The text of this site is licensed CC BY 4.0. In plain terms:

You may

  • Copy it. All of it, anywhere.
  • Change it. Rewrite any rule. Contradict us.
  • Sell it. Print it, bundle it, charge whatever you like.
  • Build on it. Adventures, settings, apps, translations.
  • Keep your version closed if you want to. There is no share-alike clause.
  • Do all of the above forever. The licence is irrevocable.

You must

  • Give credit. Say the game is based on Does Play Dice by Jeff Adams, link the licence, and note if you changed things.
  • Use your own name. Does Play Dice and the logo are held as trademarks and are not covered by the licence. That is deliberate: it is what stops someone shipping a different game under this name and confusing players — the same arrangement Ubuntu and Canonical use.

The attribution line, if you want one ready-made

Based on Does Play Dice by Jeff Adams, licensed CC BY 4.0. Changes were made.

How to actually do it

This site is deliberately boring underneath: plain Markdown files in git, built by a static site generator. There is no database, no server, nothing that only we can run. That is what makes the promise real rather than rhetorical.

1. Fork the repository. github.com/doesplaydice/doesplaydice → Fork. You now have every word of the game, its full history, and the machinery that publishes it.

2. Rename it. Change site_name in wiki/mkdocs.yml and the wordmark on the home page. This is the one step that is not optional — the name is a trademark and it is not yours.

3. Turn on Pages. Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions. The workflow is already in the fork.

4. Push. Your copy is live in about a minute, at your address, under your name, building from your markdown. Nothing points back at us.

That is the whole thing

No permission to ask. No key we hold. If this site vanished tomorrow, every fork keeps working, and the game survives in as many copies as people cared to make.

If you would rather not use git

The licence does not require a GitHub account.

We would like to know, but you do not owe us that

If you build something, tell us and we will link it. If you would rather not, that is entirely your right, and the licence says so.

The measure of whether this worked is not how many people come back here. It is how many versions of this game exist that we never hear about.