Exalted: Is it safe to create this ruleset?

[Bardlebee]

I have been playing with the idea of creating my own ruleset as I see the community does that a lot here. I am wondering if that is a legal thing if I were to make a ruleset with Exalted.

Those of you who are not familiar with exalted it is a high octane fantasy game full of epic scenes and grand battles. It involves a lot of Greek god like themes and the world is very rich and interesting to go around in. The down side is that the system is... complicated. That is to say when using the nWoD skill sets you start out as super humans and your skills will regularly reach above 10+ d10's. To top that off you have "Charms" which gives you awesome abilities but it can complicate combat a bit.

I was hoping by making my own ruleset I can condense a lot of these things together and make it a more streamlined experience. Of course, being that there are so many charms in the main book alone this may take awhile. But, I hope for the best.

Has anyone ever played Exalted or is interested in it?

[Moon Wizard]

I don't play Exalted.

However, in general, you just have to stay away from using copyrighted images or game data within your ruleset. From what I have seen online, mechanics and character sheets are not covered under copyright protection. I am not a lawyer, so you should do your own research on the topic.

Regards,
JPG

[unerwünscht]

Here you all go, everything you need to know about copyright and games.
https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

[madman]

I thought there was a Exalted ruleset on the wiki? Not sure it still functions or not?

Chris

[unerwünscht]

Yea, it is still there: https://oberoten.dyndns.org/fgwiki/index.php/Exalted
But I have no idea how 'complete' it is.

[peterb]

A RPG book is most often protected from direct copying (either by printing or by scanning) because the collection of elements that makes up the book (even though some of those lacks copyright protection) can be arguably be seen as an original collection (and thus as a copyrightable work).

However, copyright law does not protect the ideas, methods (ways of doing things), styles, facts (and most probably including fictional facts), mathematical formulas and algorithms used in a game.

What copyright protects is the way an idea, concept or method has been expressed or explained, provided that the expression is original. Unfortunately the definition of the concept of originality varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It should be noted that courts in several western jurisdictions have rejected claims of a copyright of the expressions of the underlying ideas and concepts of (as well as the methods used to play) a game.

The bottom line is that as long as you express the rules of a game in your own words you should be OK. And when you express them in a programming language, such as LUA, you will be expressing those ideas with your own words. It's another matter that those expressions are unlikely to be seen as original...

/Peter