Transmogrifier between people

Don't know how easy it would be, but sharing maps and whatnot between DMs would be hugely beneficial. Especially for adventure paths and the like. Just a thought. I love transmogrifier.

Instead of people I would love it to pull from my storage board into another person's campaign or was that what you were meaning?

I know but one can wish. :D

Yep - I definitely see the copyright issue being a problem. Can always hope.

I don't believe copyright is an issue, here. I believe the issue here is more likely a misunderstanding of copyright and lack of knowledge of hosting providers responsibility to copyright.

I'm curious G G as I don't know copyright that well at all. So, could this then work?

It's complicated, but in brief: There's no copyright violation possible when sharing macros : rules as listed in game books are not copyrighted, only the specific expression of them is copyrighted, When you put some rule in a macro, you have changed the wording, so it's not covered by copyright anymore. If you copy huge chunks of gamebooks, put them in handouts, and then were able to share them, that would technically violate copyright. But most people aren't going to be copying huge chunks - if players are copying descriptive text for handouts, the sort of description that you read out when pcs enter a new room, or decsriptions of NPCs, few game publishers will object to this level of use. It's pretty much the same level of use that already happens on fan sites and helps advertise the game, and is easily arguable that it fits within the intended use of the module. If you do large scale copying (like trying to reproduce an entire module in roll20, and then roll20 introduced a sharing feature that allowed everyone using roll20 to download it, that would constitute a strong copyright violation. BUT roll20 could easily avoid liability, by doing the same thing youtube and other content sharing sites do: take advantage of the Safe Harbour Provisions of the DMCA: as long as they include a mechanism for copyright owners to contact them, request a take down of violating material, and have a procedure for following through on that, then roll20 can legally make available whatever sharing facilities their users are asking for.

Kristin C. said: But if you're sharing maps, images, characters or anything pertaining to a specific published adventure path. That's copyright infringement. We really don't have the manpower to handle that can of worms being opened and the Devs have responded that they have no desire to allow campaign sharing anytime soon because of it. Youtube is also a really bad example of comparison right now. There is currently a HUGE freakout over Google's current DMCA protocols (specifically revolving around video game reviewers). Legitimate video creators are getting their channels erroneously shut down because corporations are submitting flags (often repeatedly) on videos that sit well under the grounds of fair use. It's nuts. The youtube example doesn't help your case. Imagine we had the ability to share campaigns the way we can share videos on youtube. Then imagine content creators were abusing the DCMCA and getting stuff removed the way they are on youtube. The simple fact is: we'd still be in a better off than we are currently on roll20 - they wouldn't be removing everything that was shared. You are using the example of content creators freaking out as an abuse - when you are freaking out even worse, by blocking ALL sharing regardless of whether it's in violation of copyright or not. The problem with youtube is it's too big to be monitored, so google uses automated tools without any oversight. Wordpress is a better example. They check that a notice is valid before acting on it. They aren't alone. Roll20 is a small site. The game publishing world is pretty small. You aren't going to be getting publishers freaking out and getting you to remove stuff at such a rate that you can't cope. Most publishers are going to be supportive of sharing, or at least accept it, the same way they do with fan sites that reproduce some of their material. Many have a policy supportive of limited sharing. Because they realise it is a net good for them - it gets people exposed to their material, feeds fan interest which leads to more stuff being bought. It doesn't matter how much effort people put into converting stuff into roll20, it's still not going to be as user-friendly as the pdf or printed books, and someone will have to have them to make full use of roll20.

Though it saddens me, I completely understand the potential copyright issues and a desire to avoid all of that. I do wonder, however, if there could be a way in the future for implementing module packs from publishers. These could be bought in marketplace if that simplifies things, with pre-set campaigns and art assets for running modules. Other than a potential revenue stream I could see such a thing being useful for getting lesser known games out there. For example, I recreated the "Better than any Man" adventure for Lamentations of the Flame princess as a stand alone campaign for my group. This adventure was released for Free RPG Day last year and is available to players to download for free from the publisher. It's original intent was to get people into that rule system. It would be nice to be able to expand to a playing medium like roll20 for something like that for these smaller games where people may have trouble getting a local group together, and for the publisher to be able to release ready to run campaigns would be very useful to that end while mitigating the copyright concerns.

I too would love to see purchasable modules or adventure paths. Could be great revenue for publishers and roll20.

There's also the option of contacting your favorite publishers and letting them know, politely of course, that you use roll20 would love to have easy access to their modules on here. :)

Are you saying then that is something that could be implemented? It isn't worth beating the war drums if it would be put way down the list of the development road map or not all that desired by the dev team. (somehow I completely missed Kristin C.'s post)Some sort of community liason would help as well between roll20 and the publishers since I doubt most of them, especially the small ones, would be able to hire someone to do the module conversions. At least at the outset.

Kristin C. said: Matt S. said: I do wonder, however, if there could be a way in the future for implementing module packs from publishers. These could be bought in marketplace if that simplifies things, with pre-set campaigns and art assets for running modules. That's the idea we're trying to market. We have two commercial adventure modules on the marketplace - A0: Crow's Rest Island and The Breaking of Forstor Nagar . Roll20 would love to offer more campaign packages like this, but it's a matter of trying to get the publishers to understand what we're all about. Nolan certainly has his ears out for entrepreneurs who already use our system and are familiar with it who want to craft and sell their own adventure modules through our marketplace. Tricky part is typically getting an artist to get on board with the project to make all the tokens, portraits and maps. I guess the question is how far does the copyright go, say you write your own adventure using 4e rules, will Wizards be upset if you sell a module because the monsters names or do they even own the concept of AC/Will/Reflex/Fort. Ideally they would let you all somehow link compendium access with roll20 but these days Wizards doesn't seem to care much for online content.

Sarah A. said: There's also the option of contacting your favorite publishers and letting them know, politely of course, that you use roll20 would love to have easy access to their modules on here. :) Couldn't agree more. Thanks for pointing this out Sarah. Many times, and I am guilty of this too believe me, folks forget that they can affect change themselves. To whit, I will be writing paizo this afternoon requesting (begging to be honest) that they begin working with roll20. And I'll even quote the email I got with numbers of players, numbers of hours played ... if you don't mind.

Why not just allow transferring macros and maybe tables/decks (but not images or pages) between people since that's unlikely to cause any copyright issues. It could even allow people to create macro-based game systems and share them with other gamers to run their own campaigns without having to list out and copy-paste all the macros.