Bazaar: My current task is to work on the Bazaar. The Bazaar is the “Systems & Modules Installer” of The Forge, or you can also think of it as the “marketplace”, but I don’t like that term because it implies buying, but the Bazaar will be a mix of many things, and most of those will be free.
Question here, while you don’t like to imply buying - one of the concerns on Foundry on general users, esp. migrating users from other VTT is the dearth of 3rd party productions. In talking to some content creators, Foundry has a bit of a negative perception for releasing of custom creative content. Will the Bazaar also have the side-effect of ‘obfuscating’ some of this (which could alleviate content creator concerns) or will the items retrieved from the Bazaar be exportable?
It’s not that I don’t like to imply buying but rather, I don’t like to associate the Bazaar with paying stuff, since all current systems and modules are going to be there and they are free. Someone saying “you need the dnd5e system from the marketplace” will think they have to buy it, rather than “install it from the bazaar”… Yes, a bazaar also sells stuff, but maybe it’s me, maybe it’s cultural, but I feel like the connotation of “you need to pay for it” is different. Anyways, that was just about why I chose the name Bazaar (had a discussion/poll about it on discord a while back and that ended up being the best proposed name).
With regards to 3rd party productions, you can’t expect content creators to make content for a product that doesn’t exist yet, and content takes time to make. Considering that Foundry only released 3 weeks ago, that makes sense that there isn’t yet a lot of stuff for it (other than all the community systems & modules), but look at the 3 exclusive contents from adventure maps, michael ghelfi, miska’s maps, those came around within the first week or two. Then there’s the Kobold adventure that Atropos released in collaboration with DMDave, Paper Forge, Cze and Peku, etc… creative content will come, I’m not worried about that, just give it time.
As for exportability. I’m not sure if I understood the question correctly, so I’ll answer to what I think you’re asking (Would bought content be un-exportable because of fear from copyright infringement).
I plan on making all worlds exportable, I don’t see a reason against it. Exporting, or backing up your own content (bought or made by yourself) is not an issue and doesn’t break any copyrights, it’s distributing it that’s a problem.
If I make, let’s say, for the sake of example, Curse of Strahd, an available adventure on The Forge, through some partnership with WotC (completely theoretical at this point), you buy it and that’s impossible to export… that’s in no way more “risky” than someone buying the content on D&D Beyond and copy/pasting the content into journal entries and copying the maps into their scenes and creating the walls/lights/tokens/etc… manually then exporting their own self-created world.
Hopefully that answers your questions, but if I missed your point, please clarify
Then there’s the Kobold adventure that Atropos released in collaboration with DMDave, Paper Forge, Cze and Peku, etc…
Indeed, it was quite a good publicity release for Dave and for Atropos. DMDave’s group is also one of the ones that mentioned reservations about releasing paid content on Foundry (they have paid content on R20). The main concerns in specific were no current means of distribution (marketplace, bazaar, loppis, what-have-you) beyond their current model (Patreon) coupled with the fact that it is fairly simple to share/install that content at the moment - point to json, profit.
Exporting, or backing up your own content (bought or made by yourself) is not an issue and doesn’t break any copyrights, it’s distributing it that’s a problem.
Sure, I don’t disagree.
that’s in no way more “risky” than someone buying the content on D&D Beyond and copy/pasting the content into journal entries and copying the maps into their scenes and creating the walls/lights/tokens/etc…
I don’t agree here - it’s degrees of difficulty difference. If I were scoring risk, the risk of something being easily shared and distributed definitely factors into the equation.
Copying text out of a PDF or Website and manually creating all of the journal link+spells+items+feats, recreating all of the stat-blocks, monster icons, gridding and lighting all of the maps, manually creating new spells, items, loot, feats, etc. and then redistributing it; or
Pointing people to an exposed manifest.json to install with all the work being done by the profession group/rights-holder and well polished.
The second is riskier especially if competing vs. the actual marketplace product of better quality then LimpingNinja’s handmade version. The handmade version also diminishes the value of the marketplace version less then the actual version released does.
That’s where my question was leaning from, you could obviously still disagree with that premise and that’s fine. It’s just as an explanation for when I say ‘side-effect of obfuscating this’. My assumption was that the bazaar would likely hide/obfuscate the link to a manifest.json so that it couldn’t be shared out freely for purchasable items (i.e. #2 above).
Situation #1 is, as you point out and readily visible, almost unavoidable.
Yeah, I hope the Bazaar will help with that. A central place for creators to supply their content and make it easily accessible to users. At the moment though, I’m looking more at the specific aspect of a central repository of systems and modules (which Foundry already has) with the added benefit of not providing you just with a manifest URL but with a pre-downloaded package that gets symlinked into your data dir. I’m seeing instant installations for modules and systems, even the huge ones (of course, it’s a symlink!) and that’s really cool But I also want it to be optimized versions, so your dnd5e icons are downloaded from the worldwide CDN rather than from the local data server.
Distributing with just a link to the json, yes, that’s not a great method for that, because you’re “sharing a link”, not “distributing it”, so it makes things too easy indeed for piracy.
No, you wouldn’t be competing against that, but rather the LimpingNanja’s handmade version would still be a copyright-violating piracy version of the same content. My point wasn’t that you could buy this version or download this handmade version (or make your own), but rather preventing a world from being exported because it had some ‘bazaar’ content in it is not going to make a bit of difference to the actual risk. Whether the user exports their handmade version or the purchased version, both would be piracy to distribute.
Ah yes, see, that’s what I misunderstood. I thought when you said obfuscating the content, I thought you meant that either :
A world that was purchased would not be available to export from The Forge, or
An exported world would not be able to run anywhere but on the forge (DRM lock in basically)
And that’s what my answer was about. But to answer your specific question, yes, with the Bazaar, you’d be able to purchase and install content without having a manifest URL to share and it would be hidden and linked to the user account instead.
To me, if someone can easily go on D&D Beyond on a purchased source book, hit Ctrl-P and print/save the whole thing to PDF for offline reading, then I don’t see why I would need to make extra efforts to limit user’s freedoms by not making their world also available for offline use if they had bought it.
I hope that clears it up!
Also, I see your status changed, so welcome to The Forge
Thanks, that essentially answers all my questions on it. Looking forward to the Bazaar coming out and Forge+Foundry becoming a great platform for lazy-ass DMs like me
Also, I see your status changed, so welcome to The Forge
Indeed! I was trying to get my timing right for the purchase to line up with the payday in-country (25th) but then I forgot, but it’s good enough
But I also want it to be optimized versions, so your dnd5e icons are downloaded from the worldwide CDN rather than from the local data server.
