DwD Studios

I would suggest making character creation PDF's without the cover and without any other information. At least the majority of information will be protected. You can show them how to play the other rules during combat and challenges.

I just realized. There's a character creation reference sheet included with the game. So I should be able to just use that.

Good idea. But don't forget to instruct them on the generalized nature of the game, Ranks, Descriptors, how DP is earned and spent, and how to determine INIT. (None of which is covered in that sheet.)

While I'm no expert, the creative commons license it does have would cover sharing, yes. You can hand it to your friends, unless I'm mistaken.

EDIT.

Reviewing the license, it does seem to allow you to hand out non-commercial copies free of charge.

3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:

• to Reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collections;
• to create and Reproduce Adaptations provided that any such Adaptation, including any translation in any medium, takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work. For example, a translation could be marked "The original work was translated from English to Spanish," or a modification could indicate "The original work has been modified.";
• to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,
• to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

So I can give people the PDF, but it's probably polite to ask them to buy it themselves if they like it.

It allows us to keep funding new material. :-)

We want you to enjoy the game and create new stuff. Throw it at your players, if they like it perhaps they'll support it.

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The Product License link on the menu above has a "user-friendly" link to the CC license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Oh most definitely. I'm not opposed to passing someone the PDF so they can make characters, learn the rules, etc. But I do expect people to buy it themselves fairly quickly.

Thanks for helping me figure out the CC license. Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not a lawyer!

Have you guys considered making a Player's Guide version of the rules say incorporating just the basic game play and character making rules?

Someone mentioned creating a booklet of the first 31 pages, is that what you are referring to?

Basically, yes. Savage Worlds does this with a lot of their settings books and I've found it's easier to get players to read/use shorter Player's Guides than the full setting books in general.

OK, just so I'm clear a setting book like Immunis's "Campaign Bare Bones Beckland" would benefit from having a Player Guide section (the first 31pages of BBF).

(moore c0ff33 please)

Larry

You may consider also making a quick start page with just the basics of the rules so that GM can hand them out to new players so that they won't be just handing out "free" copies of the entire game to casual players.

Based on prior experience with my usual player base, I will probably create a players intro document, that includes the core rules of the game in 4 to 6 pages as well as some campaign flavour and GM expectations.

The character creation session will be a group session and except for the character creation player ref sheet (included in the basic pdf pack) and additional campaign specific rules, only one actual rulebook should be required to get a 4 to 6 player campaign off the ground.

But that is based on my GMing experience where rules light systems are preferred as most of my players don't read systems and expect the GM to carry a lot of the system knowledge. With a different group I may have a different attitude to such things.

I was talking to Jwhalen about a BBF GM Screen he is working on and offering my thoughts on what it should contain if he was going to do a three panel GM screen (which he isn't). I think you could easily summarize the system crunchy bits on a single page if you included reference page numbers on the document. This is what I had in mind for such a document;