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Make it yours

The short version: the words are yours to take. This page explains what that means, and how to do it.

The text

Everything written on this site — the rules and the examples — is Does Play Dice by Jeff Adams, licensed CC BY 4.0.

You can copy it, change it, print it, teach from it, and sell what you make from it. You do not need permission and you do not owe anyone money. The licence is irrevocable: it cannot be taken back later, by Jeff or by anyone who comes after him.

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. See What is not covered.

The one condition is credit. Something like this is enough:

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

What is not covered

The name "Does Play Dice" and the Does Play Dice logo are excluded. They are held as marks and are not part of the CC BY grant.

This is the one piece of deliberate friction in an otherwise open licence, and it exists for a specific reason: it means anyone can publish their own version of these rules, but nobody can publish a different game under this game's name. Call your version whatever you like, say what it is based on, and you are well inside the line.

Why this licence

We wanted a licence that was familiar, tested and well supported, and not one written for a single industry. Creative Commons licences are used across publishing, education, music and the arts. Writers, publishers and lawyers already know what they mean, so nobody has to learn a new set of terms to build on this game. That's why we chose CC BY.

We left out share-alike on purpose. It would have required anyone building on the game to open their own work too. That sounds protective, but it would block exactly what we want to see: people earning a living from what they make.

How to take 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 and the footer in wiki/mkdocs.yml, the logo in wiki/overrides/partials/masthead.html, and the app name in wiki/docs/manifest.webmanifest. 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. 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.

Built with

The site is a static one, and it makes no third-party requests — everything below is served from this domain.

What Licence
Material for MkDocs MIT
MkDocs BSD 2-Clause
Archivo Black, Literata, Familjen Grotesk, JetBrains Mono SIL Open Font License 1.1

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