Last time we looked at some approaches and resources for digging into our writing. In this weeks blog we’re going to go a little further and look at just a few specific resources that are available to us as fledgling game designers through the DriveThru RPG website. DriveThru RPG is one of, if not the, largest RPG marketplaces on the Internet, containing tens of thousands of fan and professionally made RPG products for a wide variety of game systems.

Our previous discussion regarding the relative openness of certain RPG systems also provides the jumping off point for our discussion today. You may want to check that one before we continue. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Great let’s go.

DriveThru Community Content

The Community Content program is a series of licenses provided to DriveThru RPG from a variety of publishers for the limited use of their RPG systems. These licenses stipulate allowable content from the core system for each game that can be used by any drive through RPG community member. This content can be used to create their own game content and to claim it as compatible with a published rule set.

Typically, these systems don’t provide any other kind of third party licenses, limiting us to Drivethru RPG if we want to develop for them. However this Community Content program comes with one major advantage when we’re talking about writing and formatting our documents.

All of the systems discussed previously as well as all of the other systems not mentioned (but listed here) typically provide both Word and InDesign templates for use when designing and formatting your content for publishing. Typically these templates provide a visual appearance that is similar to what can be found in official products for any of the game systems on this list, though distinct enough to not infringe upon them. They are basically also offered up to us with the blessing of each games designers/owners to use.

Trade dress

It’s important to mention here that this is noteworthy because typically trade dress, or the visual appearance of a written and published work, can be copyrighted if it is sufficiently unique. This can cover a lot of things such as font choices for body text or headings, it can apply to borders on sidebars frames and illustrations. Anything really that contributes to a unique product identity. An example of this involves the 5E SRD put out by Wizards of the Coast.

In this document are a complete set of rules that will get you up and running 5E which you can take and republish verbatim, with any custom layout and trade dress you like. However if you use a visual style similar to what can be found in 5E Dungeons and Dragons books from Wizards of the Coast, you would run afoul of their trademarked trade dress.

Therefore, the fact that these templates have been provided is not only useful for thinking about how we may wish to structure our documents but also how we may wish to present them visually. Furthermore, it provides a way to present our work in a manner that resembles an official product’s layout, if we should wish to do so.

The DM’s Guild

The DM’s Guild is unique in many ways, as we’ve covered previously. One of those ways is that while they do provide a template (like the main DriveThru site does for different systems) that template is particularly close to the style found in official 5E books. But it’s not identical. Notably, different fonts are used in the template compared to those in the official books. How much Wizards polices trade dress on the Guild is unknown, but if you’re using the provided template, or changing it to your own custom styling, you likely won’t run into any issues.

(More) Starting Points

In the end, the templates that we can access on DriveThru RPG gives us a great starting point for product design. This is especially true for new designers without a lot of visual design experience. The templates create an easy to follow format that is visual appealing and comes with the confidence that is acceptable to use, as it is provided by the games publishers. This is of great benefit to a game’s designer as they now only need to focus on the content of their supplement.

It also provides a great place to learn about layout and visual design. Topics we will begin looking at some more next week.

As always, good gaming!

– Mike