I’d be willing to pay people to build mods so long as I’m not breaking any rules
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It’s a good question. I’ve wondered myself what the rules are. Given it has been so many years since the game was released and when it was, things like patreon/kickstarter etc didn’t exist. It could all be a bit of a grey area, who knows?
Personally, I would like to spend a year working on a 20+ hour campaign for nwn2. It’s a massive undertaking and very little incentive to do it, as it stands. Life here down under, has become stupidly expensive the past few years since the… scamdemic (if this word triggers you, please don’t feel the need to tell me and I apologize now for having used it, if it offends you).
Anyway, I have wondered if Patreon would fall outside any “rules” that were put in contract, however many years ago when the game was released. If I had a patreon page for example and people were paying “for my time” and not for “the end product”, then would that not be a loophole? It would just so happen that I would choose to spend my time on building a campaign 
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I know many persistent worlds take money to defray server costs - that’s not going to development per se however.
I am not a lawyer, but my general read is that if your module is an entirely original work, ie you make all the assets etc yourself, just using the tools provided, then you’re likely in the clear.
It’s also been established that modules in D&D settings is fine too since some user modules were promoted by Bioware back in their day.
However, when you are using any of the D&D licenses, it’s worth remembering that just because you can now, doesn’t mean you can 5 seconds, 5 hours, 5 days, or 5 years from now. It is not your IP, so you live or die by the decisions of the IP holder.
Wizard of the Coast’s Fan Content Policy explicitly stipulates that the content must be freely available - ie it cannot be behind a paywall or other situation where you must pay for it - but you can subsidise it with donations, sponsorships, etc.
So in other words, I read this as, you could for instance have a patreon to fund development, but you could not make it patreon-only content. You can take those subscriptions, but you cannot make it exclusive to subscribers.
It has other stipulations, and please read the policy in full, I am not responsible for your legal situation, but a quick run down:
- You must indicate the fan content is unofficial.
- You cannot crossover D&D content with other content without permission of the authour of the other content.
- Don’t have anything that would be “harmful” to D&D/WotC
The latter is where the sign “here be dragons” would be placed, especially in a modern age of pandering to all manner of arbitrary whims of capricious social media. I cannot advise what would be best to avoid that, that’s going to be straight into PR manager/lawyer territory, and I am neither, just a hobbyist.
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BlankSlate15… That’s a long term investment you’d have to pay up front if you expected somebody to go all in and then what if you didn’t like it and it wasn’t exactly what you wanted or the builder took too long in your opinion ? How much do you pay ?
Even minimum wage for 100 hours is going to be quite a bit. What happens if the person you paid came on here for help with something like a script ? Does the person that helped then get paid ? The whole thing gets ugly fast. Personally I think you’ll get a lot more out of making it yourself.
But surely the whole idea of involving money is ruining the spirit of the whole thing ? I wouldn’t be prepared to take money on principle alone, forget the legal crap that doesn’t bother me… And sorry but I’m not making anybody’s mod, that wasn’t an offer.
tfunke… The incentive is the act of creating something watching it grow out of nothing and giving it away for people’s enjoyment, that’s it, you enrich yourself not your wallet which is worth far more… +1 to the you know what.
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For me that sounds like time enough for a couple of rooms, one conversation and a handful of combats. 
(See bottom of post for reason.)
Joking aside, I think that unless someone is prepared to do something for free, then it starts to get complicated. I tried to think of a reasonable way to have some kind of consideration for the time and energy used (read money for electricity used and hardware acquired over the years) during the time I have been writing my campaign, but to be honest, I concluded that I’d rather bite the bullet, and just do it for the love of it. (Unless, of course, someone said they wanted to chuck some thanks gifting my way, and it was not illegal. 
)
Basically, otherwise, it becomes complicated, potentially binding, and eventually no fun. For example:
My first NWN2 module of campaign took 8 years to make. (Ignoring all patching since 2016 release.)
My second (current) has taken around 6 years so far. (But had core code from module 1 in place.)
My third (DV) has minimal work to date. (But has core code from module 1 and 2 in place.)
So my campaign has taken around 14 years to date. Admittedly, I suffer with health problems, have taken some periods off now and then, for health, holidays, life situations, etc. First module plays around 40 hours approx, and second is currently unknown, but (hopefully) longer.
How can you even begin to quantify a value on that?
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Your argument appears to make a moralistic argument that one should not pay others for a module to a game they enjoy. I can accept that if you are risk-adverse the possible problems about negotiating particulars of such an arrangement, that is a fair concern. I do not accept the moralistic argument.
First of all, expecting people to produce labour free of compensation is unethical. They have bills to pay, family to take care of, and food to put on the table. Expecting them to undertake a grand work [1] for you without any enrichment is morally objectionable on its face.
Sure, there are people that do that anyways, but speaking only for myself, I am not doing it because it’s expected of me, and part of why I lob as much as I do into the vault is because my health and financial circumstances mean I may not be able to commit to this venture indefinitely, even if it is a labour of love, so to speak, for me. Making these things available on the vault for future developers ensures that even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, or I fall upon even harder times than my present financial circumstances, people can still make use of my works. I agree that I find this fulfilling, but I disagree that it should be the expected behaviour. People have to take care of themselves, and their families, first.
Moreover, I find the implicit argument that there is some greater moral value to works undertaken for free to be a notion that has great harm to society. A classic example of this is artists. People often expect artists to spend hours to days working on pieces for which they want for free, or for relatively little. Most artists essentially work for much less than minimum wage, when you consider the amount of time and effort that go into these pieces. At present, I have spent just short of a thousand dollars on artwork which will see use in my own module, and I think expecting that value of labour to be freely given is patently ridiculous.
Additionally, a specific concern within the NWN space is persistent worlds - the servers required for persistent worlds don’t come for free either, and while you can usually find decent specification servers for relatively cheap these days (mine is 29$/mo). Does it reduce the value of my works, if I ask the community around my persistent world for assistance in defraying those costs? My day job is as a writer, I am not precisely flush in cash. But I am someone who: a, has a genuine passion for the thing she’s making, so doesn’t mind the expendiatures of her disposable income, and b, believes that I have a moral imperative to compensate people fairly for their work.
As to whether you enter into financial arrangements for the compensation of work in NWN or NWN 2, that’s a judgement call, and certainly we can share our opinions that they may inform the original poster’s own, but that’s the OP’s decision to make, not any of ours.
[1] this has a specific meaning where I live of a work that requires beyond a certain amount of time and resources
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I didn’t say that there is some greater moral value to things that are free but that the benefits are greater to the one giving than financial ones ever can be. But you are saying that society demands everything has a price and people should be compensated for doing something to help/ please others or it will collapse. That is the lie we are sold.
Personally I’ve jacked my job and pretty soon I’ll be giving our wonderful “society” the middle finger as I’m leaving the UK to work as a volunteer on all sorts of things in South America. I’m letting my ex wife live rent free in my property and have given away a lot of my things because I refuse to buy into the bullshit, look at where it has got this great “society,” it’s going down fast. Places like this full of people that do things for free and give them away for other people to enjoy are a beacon of hope.
As a wise man once said “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it”. Don’t believe the hype… No I’m not quoting Public Enemy now !
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I had a long response here, but it’s probably wiser not to derail the OP’s post with moral grandstanding.
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@Maiyannah and @Tsongo
I think you both make excellent points and to be honest, you are both right in your respective perspectives. At least it seems that way, to me. I suspect is is all a bit of a grey area at the end of the day.
@Lance_Botelle - I hear you. It’s a tough one, because on this subject I do have a lot of history with this game. Having spent thousands of hours building 60-70 areas for an online persistent world over the span of about 8 years (all volunteer), I have a lot of experience with not getting compensated for my time and efforts with this game. So with that said, I can honestly say it would be a nice change to be compensated instead, were I to commit to such a large endeavor as a campaign. I won’t be going ahead with a Patreon, but it’s nice to imagine.
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At the end of the day, the question that OP presented isn’t “is it moral to pay someone for modding NWN,” but rather “what are the rules concerning commissioning someone to do so.”
Ultimately, there are two potential sets of rules here: Wizards Fan Content Guidelines, and any additional rules which NeverwinterVault as an enitity wishes to place on that. For the latter, I am no spokesperson. For the former, the guidelines are openly available on Wizards’s website, and I posted my summary above.
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I cannot express how strongly I agree with every word of this. Thank you.
It describes perfectly how I feel about creating for Neverwinter Nights. (Right down to the financial challenges, actually, and a [retirement] career as a writer that doesn’t [yet] provide great means to alleviate them.) If I create for free, it’s for personal reasons. It’s not out of a sense of moral obligation to work without compensation. (Indeed, quite the reverse.)
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Actually you missed one - the Eula (End User Licence Agreement) that you had to agree to when you installed the game. IIRC, by the Eula anything that you or anyone other than the licence holder, create using the provided tools, may only be distributed for free. So any module created using the toolset cannot be charged for.
Now don’t quote me on this but I seem to recall that Trent (AKA Beamdog CEO again I think) said (on a livestream) that patreon was alright as long as it wasn’t for a single specific but rather over a period of time. But I may have got this patreon thing wrong as it was a long time ago.
TR
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Fair point, and this is consonant with Wizards’s Fan Content Guidelines (likely due to 2, below) but to that I’d raise two counterpoints:
1] EULAs are actually of tenuous legal standing at best in many countries, since you have many rights you cannot surrender with a contract of adhesion. This is in “talk to a lawyer” territory of nuance in most cases however, except here in Canada where they have been ruled unenforcable unless you can view the EULA prior to buying the game, by our Supreme Court. This is why some retailers had a trend of doing this for a bit, but it died out after a few months. Because of this, I generally don’t actually concern myself with EULAs, but your country’s laws may vary.
2] The EULA cannot extend rights that the IP rights holder does not wish to, nor can it withhold rights that the IP rights holder extends to you. So for example, if Wizards of the Coast are saying “its okay to have a patreon for funding the needs of your project” and Beamdog came back and said “actually for NWN it’s not okay”, Wizards of the Coast would overrule them here, because it is Wizards of the Coast, not Beamdog, whom has licensing rights over Dungeons and Dragons, and Neverwinter Nights is a licensed, derivative work. Wizards is the ultimate authority over its IPs, for good or for ill.
Of course, the problem with this kind of conflict is you would have to take it to court to assert those rights, in that case, and few people in our community would have the kind of resources to do this. It’s best just to keep your head down and keep everyone happy.
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well I screwd this up royally. I keep forgetting that “mods” means something different for neverwinter nights 2 than for a game like morrowind/oblivion/skyrim or minecraft. Sorry guys.
So what do you need, scripting help? new models?