John
DQOS is an ongoing Internet volunteer project to develop an evolving rules set based on the DragonQuest Role-Playing System.
Copyright Notice & License
The Material contained herein is Copyright (C) the DragonQuest Players Association and their respective authors, 2000, all rights reserved. Unless otherwise stated, permission is granted by the individual authors for the inclusion of their intellectual property into the work known as DQOS or DQ 4e in perpetuity and that those rights are transferable to any subsequent release of the above work as long as the work remains free of charge under this agreement.
English Translation: This is everybody's stuff if you choose to contribute you give us the right to include your stuff in this work forever, as long as we give it away for free.
Distribution
This game is available free of charge from the several online archives. This game may be freely reproduced & distributed electronically or in hardcopy, provided the following conditions are met:
Leave all copyright, distribution, attribution, and DragonQuest Players Association information intact. Permission expressly granted for translation to other languages and conversion to other formats.
English Translation: Leave all this legalese on the product so that others know where it's coming from and if you want to translate it more power to you, go for it.
For-profit distribution of printed versions of the guide is forbidden. However, you may print out copies and recoup the cost of printing and distribution by charging a nominal fee (the cost per page of copying).
English Translation: This is a free work keep it that way. Ok, if you want to make bound volumes for all your friends you can do that and you can even try to get them to cough up the cost of printing (but I wouldn't count on it if your friends are like mine).
Any for-profit non-paper distribution (such as shareware vendor diskettes, CD-Rom collections, etc.) must be approved by the DragonQuest Players Association (time and usage-based access fees of online services, bulletin boards, and network access providers are specifically exempted).
English Translation: If you are going to include this work in a software collection please tell us so that we can determine that you are giving this work away for free and, by the way, putting it on a web site or posting it to a board is just fine and dandy.
You may not charge a for-profit fee specifically for this work or any part herein, only for a collection containing the work for which a fee is attributed to the rest of the collection, with the execeptions of nominal copying charges and online usage fees as exempted above.
English Translation: Again we are giving this away for free so make sure you are charging only for the cost of copying and any other for profit stuff on the disk and not this work.
Qualitative modifications of this work must include the following disclaimer on the title page:
"This document is a user contributed work designed for use with or in lieu of the DQ 4e and DQOS . It is not endorsed or otherwise acknowledged by the DragonQuest Players Association."English Translation: If you make changes to this work, at least do not try to pass it off as the original. Better yet, make your changes into form of pluggable/unpluggable or "popNdrop" modules and submit them for inclusion in the next release.
Design Philosophy
DQOS, roughly defines itself as an "open source" project. The intent of the Open Source is to ensure that material distributed under an open-source license will be available for independent peer review and continuous evolutionary improvement and selection, reaching levels of quality and power no closed product can attain.
The essence of open source is that the product is freely distributable usuable and changeable. The main emphasis with DQOS is freely and according the rules of copyleft this material is forever and always free. Some restrictions may be placed on modifying "core rules" as are laid out in these guidelines.
DQPA House Rules, DQOS, DQ 4e, are all terms used to describe the DragonQuest Open Source Movement.
The principles of the movement are:
1. To remain true to the development principles of the original game designers by adopting the original three themes of DQ development.
"Three general themes guided the design and development of DragonQuest and make this game different and (we think) an improvement on all other role-playing games. First, DragonQuest was designed to impose as few artificial restrictions on the Gamesmaster (GM) as possible. For example, a character is not limited to a particular group of abilities (known in the genre as a "character class"). A character class imposes certain arbitrary restrictions upon a character, forcing him or her into molds which have to fit, regardless of the inclination of the player. These classes came into being in other games as balancing tools, to make it just as advantageous to be a human fighter as to be a dwarven priest. In order for a character in a DragonQuest world to have as much freedom of choice as possible, anyone can be anything. Of course, the player who tries to have as versatile a character as possible will be correspondingly handicapped when he tries to rise in power. The important effect of this theme is that any character from the pages of fantasy literature can be re-created (in game terms) without causing aberrations in the game system.2. To define the core or "kernal" rules of DQOS project and to safeguard them from extensive modification, unless it can be shown that by doing so constitutes a lasting benefit to the DQ community. Sanctioned "official" variations on core rules must be in the form of pluggable/unpluggable or "popNdrop" modules.Second, almost all creatures and magics are drawn from sources existing in myth, legend, or literature. We do not pretend that our fantastic inventions can compete with those reaching across the gulf of time to us, being the stuff of our heritage. Rather, we have attempted to imbue as much verisimilitude as we could, to allow those who play DragonQuest to live on a gaming table those worlds they have only been able to vicariously experience before. The fantasy of northern Europe is prevalent in these rules, because it is the common reference point shared by most of the people who will play DragonQuest. When a specific mythic creature or type of magic is reproduced, it is given all the characteristics ascribed to it in legend. When discussing the imaginary, brief mentions were often thought to be sufficient; in such cases, we try to explain as best we can. The few liberties taken were to fill the logical "holes." Norse legend and the Lesser Key of Solomon (to name but two examples) are not entirely compatible. We have attempted to give the GM a solid base to which he may add his own or other cultures' legends and magics.
A third concept in mind during the design process was to maintain the game's flexibility, and allow the GM and players to expand on the original rules. The modular presentation of skills and magic colleges makes the introduction of new ideas easy; adding a new skill or college does not necessitate changing the original ones. "
While this is not intended to stop others from defining their own "house rules" that modify core rules it does say that all material developed for inclusion in this project must be workable with the core rules as defined by the project.
3. To develop guidelines for developing additional material for DQ that can be plugged in to or unplugged (popped in or dropped out) from the core rules without effecting the playability of the DQ system.
Some examples of additional material include: New Skills, New weapons and armour, New Monsters, New Magical Colleges, popular variants to core rules.
4. The DQOS project shall consist of an oversight group responsible for coordinating and communicating the project's various activities. The oversight group will report to the Internet community of DQ Players on an at least Bimonthly basis. The oversight group will resolve any rules dispute that may arise from the project taking into account the above working principles. The membership this group shall not be less than 2 members with an additional designated and project approved DQPA representative to resolve conflicts in case of a tie. In all cases, the DQPA representative is bound by the above working principles in formulating a tie-breaking decision. In the case that either party feels that they have been unjustly treated, they may appeal to the DQPA executive as a whole and have the right to have the dispute reviewed by a panel of peers chosen from DQPA membership that are neither part of the project or current DQPA executive.
5. The DQOS project will consist of several working groups as defined by the project members. It is the responsibility of these working groups to define core rules and develop rules variants for inclusion in the current DQOS release. The working groups will report its activity to the oversight group on an at least monthly basis. It is also required that the working groups garner input from the online DQ community at large regarding their activities (through the WebRPG Forum, DQN-list, and DragonQuest Newsletter). This input gathering must be logged and note made of any action arising from the feedback process. In this way, we allow the community to have a say in the direction of development.
6. The mandate of this project is for 1 calendar year starting March 01, 2000 and ending March 01, 2001. At which time the project group will review progress to date and suggest improvements, revisions, or even abandoning the project entirely if the group collectively feels that the project has not accomplished its goals. The mandate can be renewed but only on a year-by-year basis.