#dungeons and dragons open game license

[wizardcastslightning]

DND COMMUNITY! DELETE YOUR DND BEYOND SUBSCRIPTION!

WE ARE AN "OBSTACLE TO THEIR MONEY"!

WOTC only views us as dollar signs and if we want them to hear our voices we need to hit their wallets!

[entropyrpgs]

So Wizards of the Coast has released a statement on the Open Game License. They claim it was "just a draft" (which there was no evidence of) and that they are still working on it. My favorite part is where they claim that "no you guys didn't win because we had to back down! We ALL win!!!". Honestly? There is a HUGE amount of gaslighting going on here. There's no way this was just a draft. If they wanted feedback from creators then they should have done that before this came forward. They are absolutely lying that this was the plan "all along". I know several creators who were very clearly not consulted and likely would have been. If they really had cared about feedback they would have held listening sessions or reached out individually. They didn't do that. The $750,000 limit probably only covers large corporations, but there was no guarantee that they wouldn't change the limit later and the reporting requirements were clearly meant to allow for later adjustments. I'm curious to see what they're planning to do instead but I know many members of the community are going to be a lot more suspicious now.

Full text for those who can't click through:

When we initially conceived of revising the OGL, it was with three major goals in mind. First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products. Second, we wanted to address those attempting to use D&D in web3, blockchain games, and NFTs by making clear that OGL content is limited to tabletop roleplaying content like campaigns, modules, and supplements. And third, we wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community—not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose.

Driving these goals were two simple principles: (1) Our job is to be good stewards of the game, and (2) the OGL exists for the benefit of the fans. Nothing about those principles has wavered for a second. 

That was why our early drafts of the new OGL included the provisions they did. That draft language was provided to content creators and publishers so their feedback could be considered before anything was finalized. In addition to language allowing us to address discriminatory and hateful conduct and clarifying what types of products the OGL covers, our drafts included royalty language designed to apply to large corporations attempting to use OGL content. It was never our intent to impact the vast majority of the community.

However, it’s clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1. It has become clear that it is no longer possible to fully achieve all three goals while still staying true to our principles. So, here is what we are doing.

The next OGL will contain the provisions that allow us to protect and cultivate the inclusive environment we are trying to build and specify that it covers only content for TTRPGs. That means that other expressions, such as educational and charitable campaigns, livestreams, cosplay, VTT-uses, etc., will remain unaffected by any OGL update. Content already released under 1.0a will also remain unaffected. 

What it will not contain is any royalty structure. It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds. Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won’t. Any language we put down will be crystal clear and unequivocal on that point. The license back language was intended to protect us and our partners from creators who incorrectly allege that we steal their work simply because of coincidental similarities. As we continue to invest in the game that we love and move forward with partnerships in film, television, and digital games, that risk is simply too great to ignore. The new OGL will contain provisions to address that risk, but we will do it without a license back and without suggesting we have rights to the content you create. Your ideas and imagination are what makes this game special, and that belongs to you.

A couple of last thoughts. First, we won’t be able to release the new OGL today, because we need to make sure we get it right, but it is coming. Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.

Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that. We want to always delight fans and create experiences together that everyone loves. We realize we did not do that this time and we are sorry for that. Our goal was to get exactly the type of feedback on which provisions worked and which did not–which we ultimately got from you. Any change this major could only have been done well if we were willing to take that feedback, no matter how it was provided–so we are. Thank you for caring enough to let us know what works and what doesn’t, what you need and what scares you. Without knowing that, we can’t do our part to make the new OGL match our principles. Finally, we’d appreciate the chance to make this right. We love D&D’s devoted players and the creators who take them on so many incredible adventures. We won’t let you down.

[leidensygdom]

So, what is the OGL and why are DnD creators thoroughly screwed?

Tumblr has not been doing a great job at talking about this, but:

With OneDnD, Wizards of the Coast has decided to update the Open Game License (OGL). Said license is what allowed people to create homebrew DnD content and sell it, and even larger companies to use certain sorts of content. Pathfinder, for example, is built on said OGL. This also allows streamers and artists to exist and benefit from said content.

With OneDnD (sometimes called “dnd 6e”), WOTC wants to create a much more restrictive OGL, which will, amongst other things:

Make WOTC take a cut for any DnD-related work (according to Kickstarter, a whole 25% of the benefits)

Let WOTC cancel any project related to DnD up to their discretion

Let WOTC take ANY content made based on their system, and re-sell it without crediting you, or giving you a single cent

And most importantly, revoke the old OGL, which will harm any company or game system that used it as a base, such as Pathfinder. And it means they GET ownership over any homebrew content you may have done for 5e in the past!

It’s important to note that OGLs are supposedly irrevocable. They were planning to use it for OneDnD initially, but they want to apply it retroactively to 5e, somehow. Which is illegal, but lawyers have mentioned there’s a chance they may get away with it given the wording.

This means that anything you make based on DnD (A homebrew item? A character drawing? Even music, according to them?), can get taken and used as they deem appropiate.

These news come from a leak of the OGL, which have been confirmed by multiple reputable sources (including Kickstarter, which has confirmed that WOTC already talked with them about this), and was planned to be released next week.

So, what can we do?

Speak against it. Share the word. Reblog this post. Let people know. Tumblr hasn’t been talking much about this matter, but it’s VERY important to let people know about what is WOTC bringing. 

Boycott them. Do not buy their products. Do not buy games with their IP. Do not watch their movie. CANCEL your DnD Beyond subscription. (Btw, they ARE planning to release more subscription services too!). They do not care about the community, but they care about the money. Make sure to speak through it. 

And maybe consider other TTRPG systems for the time being, Pathfinder’s Paizo has been much nicer to the community, their workers are unionized and are far more healthy overall

[vexwerewolf]

The thing is, D&D is not a game.

I know that sounds insane, but hear me out: D&D is not a game, it is a games console. You don't actually "play D&D." You play "Dragon Heist" or "Tomb of Annihilation" or "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" or "your GM's homebrew campaign" or "the plot of Critical Role Season 1 reconstructed from memory" on D&D.

For quite a long while now - possibly literal decades - D&D hasn't even been the best games console, but it's been "the one everyone knows about" and "the one my friends have" and in fact it's "the one whose name is almost synonymous with the entire medium of TTRPGs," like how "Nintendo" or "Playstation" could just mean "games console" to people who didn't understand games consoles. They might not have heard of a "tabletop roleplaying game," but most people have heard of "Dungeons & Dragons."

For this extended metaphor, D&D is Nintendo back in the 90s, or Playstation in the 2000s. Sometimes you say "oh let's go to my house and play Nintendo" or "c'mon dude I wanna play Playstation" but you're not actually playing Nintendo or Playstation, you're playing Resident Evil or Super Mario Bros or Jurassic Park or Metal Gear Solid or whatever on a Nintendo or a Playstation.

Now, this metaphor is going to get even more tortured, but remember how when the PS2 and the original X-Box came out, they used a standardised DVD format, but the Nintendo console in that generation, the Gamecube, used discs but they were this proprietary tiny little disc format that they had control over? That essentially meant that it was really difficult to make third party titles for the Gamecube that did literally anything that Nintendo didn't want them to do, and also essentially gave Nintendo an even greater ability to skim money off the top of any sales?

So that must've seemed like a smart business decision in their heads. But the PS2 and the X-Box used DVDs. This was a standardized format which gave Microsoft and Sony way less control over who made games for their consoles, but that actually turned out to be a good thing for gaming, because it meant that the breadth of games that you could play on their consoles was massively increased even if some of them were games Microsoft and Sony didn't really approve of. (Also it's worth nothing that the PS2 and the X-Box could just play DVDs, which meant if your household was on a budget, you didn't need a separate DVD player - your games console could do it for you! This was actually a huge selling point!)

What Wizards are currently trying to do now is kinda-sorta the equivalent of Sony suddenly announcing that the PS5 will only accept a proprietary cartridge format they hold the patent on, will control the content of and charge money for the construction of. This possibly seems like it could be a moneymaker in your head because you hold market dominance (apparently the PS5 has 30 million units shipped compared to X-Box Series X 20 million units) and so many people make games for your console, but what it actually means is game devs and publishers will abandon your product. If it takes so much more work, the scope of what they're allowed to do is so much more limited and they're going to make less money off of it, they just won't bother. They'll go make games for the X-Box or PC instead.

To use another computer metaphor, D&D is Windows - it might not be the best system but it's the system most people are familiar with and so it gets the most stuff made for it, but there's is an upper limit on the bullshit people will take before they decide fuck it and get an Apple or learn how Linux works.

TTRPG systems are a weird product because you're not selling people a game, you're selling people a method to play a game. All the actual games are created by the community - even prewritten campaigns needs to be executed via a game master. Trying to skim money off the community will mean they'll eventually give up on you.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Good riddance to the Open Gaming License

Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.

Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History

(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)

https://musicbrainz.org/

Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.

Now, the OGL does not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/26/part3ogl/

The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.

Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.

Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.

In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).

Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don’t need permission to use.

But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:

Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…

Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/openip/#q01

Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.

As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators

But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.

“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”

And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.

According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.

Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”

“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”

Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.

If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.

This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.

That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:

https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/

[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier's 'Eye of Moloch,' the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads 'Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That's Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.' The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail '1.' Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]

[hyliandude]

Oof 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

[knightofburgers]

Nerds Will Defeat WotC

[witheringfears]

Given the situation with the Open Game License going on right now I think it's best if independent tabletop game developers talk to lawyers right away. Whether they have or haven't used D&D related content under the OGL they should still prepare for litigation. Paizo, Green Ronin Publishing, Kobald Press, Ghostfire Games, White Wolf, Fantasy Flight, any and all indie devs should prepare. And if possible they should contact and work together, unite against Hasbro and WotC.

[oldschoolfrp]

(Someone asked for my thoughts about the current OGL debacle, and compared it to how TSR handled its properties in its final years as a company; Tumblr twice ate my reply and deleted the original question)

From the earliest days of D&D a big part of its appeal has been the way it encourages players to create and share their own worlds. The initial appearance of the game sparked the rise of a host of amateur fanzines and third-party small press publishers whose efforts helped increase the popularity of TSR's core product. As TSR grew, it extended various licenses for official supplements, with an uneasy tolerance of ‘generic’ material that didn’t claim to be official.

As competition increased, Gygax seemed more irritated with others engaging with his game on their own terms.  Instead of writing as much about imagination and creativity he often focused on promoting the right way to play. He wasted pages of space in Dragon magazine railing against the small presses and accusing them of making inferior unauthorized products that deceived unsuspecting gamers in the marketplace.

After forcing Gygax out in the mid-80s, Lorraine Williams saved TSR through aggressive expansion, but an attempt at total market dominance helped cause its final financial crisis in the 90s.  The company produced too many of its own new games and official supplements split between too many different genres and campaign worlds, dividing its own customer base among an unsustainable number of products that competed with each other.

That was back then. As for now, I think:

As a consumer of some recent third-party content for 5e and B/X D&D I've been pretty happy with the thriving community of creators making free and commercial supplements, and I hope no one tries to place roadblocks in their way.

That’s about it.  I think I'm not the best person to comment on the details of the allegedly more restrictive leaked OGL 1.1 because:

I have no inside information or contacts with the legal representation of Hasbro, Inc, and

I myself am not a publisher of OGL-based material who would be directly threatened with financial loss by any of the changes that might occur.

It's understandable that independent authors and publishers would be worried about a possible threat to their businesses. It is especially concerning that the company at the center of all this has mostly remained silent for several weeks while anger and fear has been amplified. The last official statement was back on December 21, in which they insisted that independent creators would still be able to keep doing what they have been doing, and mentioned new threats like NFTs as an example of why they felt the old legal language needed an update:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1410-ogls-srds-one-d-d

Unfortunately when I see this topic being promoted on Twitter and YouTube, many of the top suggestions are clearly bad-faith click-bait performance art by people selling anger as entertainment, which isn’t going to help anyone understand the actual issues.  I won’t engage with the worst of those.

There are some good takes on the topic here -- @mostlysignssomeportents explained some reasons why publishers probably never needed the OGL and could be better off without it, and @prokopetz has some observations on why the OGL made people more comfortable about quoting the official rules and where things might be headed.

[saxonvoter]

listen i have some bad news, your boyfriend is now under the OGL 1.1 which means you have to register him with Wizards of the Coast to be able to date him... yeah they'll be able to take part of his salary, too. i'm so sorry.

[theabstruseone]

Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons, and the Open Gaming License (OGL)

So this story has broken out of the tabletop roleplaying community and gotten into the mainstream and, due to outlets covering the story who aren't well-versed in the RPG industry, there's a LOT of misinformation going around. So I'm going to try to clear up what's going on. Short version: The new OGL is a shitshow, but people are treating speculation and rumor as fact and a lot of people are focusing on the wrong problems.

Oh, and if anyone wants to know why they should listen to me about this: I've been covering the tabletop roleplaying game industry for almost a decade and it's been my primary job for over six years. I've also done extensive research on the history of tabletop roleplaying and made several videos about small aspects of it.

First a bit of history.

Side note: Pretty much every sentence in this part is an entire whole-ass Story on its own, so I'm glossing over a lot of stuff to stay focused on the Open Gaming License.

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson wrote a new game based on the Chainmail miniature wargame called Dungeons & Dragons. This is widely considered the start of the tabletop roleplaying game genre. The game was published by a company called TSR Inc., which was taken over by the heir to the Buck Rogers publishing fortune, Lorraine Williams. By the 1990s, TSR dug itself into a deep financial hole. It was on the verge of bankruptcy before being purchased by Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic: The Gathering.

Wizards of the Coast launched a new Third Edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000 and, as part of the launch, released the Open Gaming License (OGL). This license allowed third-party publishers to create their own products based off of D&D 3rd Edition with some restrictions (they couldn't use specific intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast like the Forgotten Realms setting or some monsters created specifically for Dungeons & Dragons rather than based on myth or folklore). This launched a boom of third-party publishers creating their own products under the "D20 System" label.

The primary reason for creating the Open Gaming License was that we almost lost Dungeons & Dragons altogether. If TSR had fallen into bankruptcy, the assets of the company would be divvied up by creditors and likely auctioned off. Meaning the rights could be scattered to the wind or picked up by a company with no intention of developing a new game or keeping old material in print. Or worse, the rights could have been chopped up so that it became a confusing quagmire to figure out who owns what precisely. This actually has happened in many cases in tabletop roleplaying over the decades with several games currently (and likely permanently) out of print because nobody knows who owns the rights to them.

With the OGL, it was ensured that, at least in some capacity, Dungeons & Dragons would survive.

When Wizards of the Coast decided to update the game to the 4th Edition, they decided not to release 4th Edition rules under the OGL, but offered publishers an alternate but more restrictive license called the Game System License (GSL). This license was so unpopular it's difficult to even find a copy of the license online anymore.

As part of this move to 4th Edition, Wizards of the Coast canceled their contract with a company called Paizo to create the official D&D magazines Dragon and Dungeon. Paizo, who were also publishing campaign collections called Adventure Paths under the OGL, decided they wanted to keep making material for D&D 3rd Edition. So they created their own version of D&D called Pathfinder. Pathfinder became very popular in the gaming community as an alternative to D&D 4e. For modern fans, the home campaign that eventually became Critical Role started out as a Pathfinder campaign.

Due to a combination of factors, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition was not as successful as Wizards of the Coast's new owner, Hasbro, hoped it would be. It was not a "failure" in terms of a tabletop roleplaying game as it sold very well for a TTRPG and maintained its spot as the highest-selling RPG in the industry through mass-market channels throughout its lifetime (even if Pathfinder did spend a year out-selling it in hobby channels like comic book and game stores). But Hasbro is a multibillion-dollar corporation and they expected D&D to perform as well as their other large brands and it underperformed to that expectation.

So when Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition was in development in 2014 under the name "D&D Next", expectations from Hasbro were lowered and far more realistic. They were more hands-off and less focused on aggressive monetization of the brand. This meant that D&D 5e was released under the OGL. A new boom of third-party content resulted. Several companies ran Kickstarter campaigns for D&D 5e-compatible material, some raising hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

Then, thanks to huge gains in the audience from live streaming, YouTube, and podcasting, Dungeons & Dragons became a major hit again under 5e. The game experienced a revitalization and managed to meet the high expectations that Hasbro had for 4e.

The New Open Gaming License

In 2022, Wizards of the Coast announced they were "refreshing" D&D 5e with a new product codenamed "OneD&D". This would not be a new edition, just an update to the previous edition. All 5e material would still be compatible with the new "OneD&D".

In December of 2022, rumors started floating around that Wizards of the Coast was going to "abolish" the Open Gaming License. These rumors were based on pure speculation and "insider information" which turned out to be only partially accurate. Just before Christmas, Wizards of the Coast made a blog post on D&D Beyond (their online portal for D&D) explaining that OneD&D would still use the Open Gaming License, but an updated version of the license.

This new version of the license would function less like the GNU Public License for open-source software on which the OGL was based on, but more like the license that Epic uses for its Unreal Engine for video games. Companies could still use the OGL, but would have to register their sales if they make more than $50,000. If a company makes more than $750,000 a year in gross sales, it will have to pay a royalty to Wizards of the Coast.

In January, "leaks" of this new OGL appeared online via YouTube channels reading select pieces of it. Speculation and rumors ran rampant once again that Wizards of the Coast is "revoking" the OGL.

After almost a week of this, the actual Open Gaming License v1.1 document was also leaked. This was sent to some third-party publishers to get feedback and make them aware of the changes in advance of a public announcement under NDA. The document was split into two sections, the actual License itself which was written as a legal document and a commentary section that is not-legally-binding explanations of the intent of the legalese in that section.

Much of the speculation was based on early leaks, which focused on the not-legally-binding commentary section rather than the actual legal terms of the license. The one that caused the most concern was a statement "de-authorizing" all prior versions of the Open Gaming License.

This story broke out of the tabletop roleplaying news outlets and online community, who began to cover the story as well including outlets like Gizmodo, iO9, Polygon, and Forbes. In many cases, these outlets do not normally cover TTRPGs and Wizards of the Coast had yet to comment, so they ran the story with the version full of speculation and rumor framed by people who had a long history of criticizing Wizards of the Coast (for reasons justified and less so) because it was the only story they had.

Legal experts began to weigh in as well, with a decided split between those who believe that Wizards of the Coast COULD revoke the OGL and those who believe that Wizards of the Coast could only do so for those who agree to the new OGL v1.1 but NOT for people who did not agree to this license.

In the fallout of these events, several tabletop roleplaying companies began making announcements to stop producing third-party material for Dungeons & Dragons. Some announced a new focus on their own original systems, and others stated they planned to develop a version of D&D that they could legally publish without using the OGL.

And, as of January 11, 2023, this is where we're at. Wizards of the Coast only released a "We're working on a statement, please be patient" style statement only posted as a tweet, but no other comment since December.

So...CAN They Revoke the OGL? AKA I, Someone Who Is Not a Lawyer, Explains Legal Issues

When the rumors started in December, I spoke with a couple of lawyers I know, one of whom works in the TTRPG industry as a side-gig and one who works often with open software licenses. Other legal experts have weighed in as well. And the answer to that question is "...maybe?"

The entire case for revoking the OGL is based on a single clause in the original Open Gaming License that allows for the updating of the license. This cause states that, if the license is updated, creators may use any "authorized version" of the license.

However, the license itself does not state who authorizes the license or a process for making a different version of the license no longer authorized. Also, the OGL v1.0a (the older version) only has a process for revoking the license if one party violates the license. There are no other conditions for revoking the license listed in the OGL v1.0a. Also, case law exists for companies attempting to revoke rights under the GPL and other open-source software licenses where they were not legally allowed to.

However (again), the OGL states that the license is "perpetual", meaning it does not have an expiration date. It does NOT state that it is "irrevocable". Meaning that some legal experts believe that it CAN be revoked.

However (again again), when dealing with lawsuits over licenses and contracts, there are two things to keep in mind. In general (and varying on jurisdiction), ambiguity in a contract is generally interpreted as the fault of the side who drafted the contract and so, if the terms of a contract are unclear, the courts will generally side in favor of the one who did NOT write the contract. Yes, I said "generally" a lot because it all comes down to details and we won't know for sure how this will play out unless it goes to court.

Secondly, courts will examine things like industry standards when determining the validity of an interpretation of a contract, and the established industry standard within the TTRPG industry is that the OGL could not be revoked, a standard established by Wizards of the Coast themselves in 2006 when they stated so clearly in a FAQ about the license (formerly on their website, now only available via the Wayback machine...and this isn't because they're trying to hide it, but because they revamped their entire website several years ago and a whole lot of posts and documents from the 2000s were removed).

Finally, the Open Gaming License is used by companies beyond Wizards of the Coast. I don't even mean like Paizo (Pathfinder/Starfinder), Pelgrane Press (13th Age), and EN Publishing (Level Up) who made D&D derivative games, but systems like Basic Roleplay from Chaosium that powers Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, FATE which powers the licensed Dresden Files RPG, D6 System used by West End Games before that company collapsed for Ghostbusters and Star Wars, and several others. The systems released by these companies have NOTHING to do with Wizards of the Coast or Dungeons & Dragons, so "revoking" the OGL would directly affect them despite not interacting with Wizards of the Coast's IP in any way.

So CAN Wizards of the Coast revoke the Open Gaming License? Maybe, but probably not. But the bigger question is...do they actually WANT to do it? I mean, yeah, they probably WANT to, but what I mean is do I think it is their actual plan to revoke the OGL?

What I Think Wizards of the Coast is Actually Doing AKA It's Bad in a Different Way

Wizards of the Coast purchased D&D Beyond, a website that acted as a character builder and digital storefront for official Dungeons & Dragons material, last year for several million dollars. They also announced their own virtual tabletop (VTT) is in the works, a system that allows people to play RPGs remotely by simulating the tabletop experience on a computer or tablet. They also have a licensing deal with OneBookShelf (the company that owns the VTT Roll20 and the digital storefront DriveThruRPG) for Dungeonmasters Guild, a site that allows community content creators to make their own D&D products under a license more permissive than the OGL in content (you can set your adventures in Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft and use characters like Drizzt and Raistlin) but that requires payment of royalties to Wizards of the Coast.

I believe that Wizards of the Coast wants to encourage third-parties to sign the OGL v1.1 in order to gain access to their walled garden digital storefronts. Because D&D Beyond and the VTT are first-party products and Wizards of the Coast has a far larger marketing budget, they can easily create an environment where the vast majority of the tabletop gaming customer base uses their marketplaces. Meaning if you want access to millions of customers, you HAVE to go through Wizards of the Coast and agree to their royalty terms.

After a few years, this would give Wizards of the Coast the same dominance in the online tabletop gaming space as they have in the mass market space through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and other mainstream retail stores. And when the eventual Sixth Edition is released that is no longer compatible with 5e, they can release that document under the OGL v1.1 and cut off anyone from creating products without agreeing to the terms.

However, I don't think they want to eliminate the OGL v1.0a for ALL creations. It would be an iffy legal case and, as you've likely seen, would be a public relations nightmare. It would also be a bad move for Wizards of the Coast as the company (like all TTRPG companies) relies heavily on freelancers. Freelancers who typically get experience by writing and publishing on OGL material. I'd be utterly shocked if there was anyone working at Wizards of the Coast right now in a game design capacity who did NOT, if not getting their start in OGL material, at least published something under the OGL for D&D 3rd Ed, 3.5, Pathfinder, or 5e.

Not only would revoking the OGL v1.0a entirely be a costly endeavor, it would be a fruitless one. You may have seen in the various discussions the phrase, "You can't copyright game rules". This is true - game mechanics are covered in intellectual property law by patents, not copyright. You cannot copyright a set of game rules, you can only copyright the expression of those rules.

Side note: This is also the reason why every online recipe starts with an overly-long blog post about the recipe's role in the author's life - they can't copyright the actual recipe because it's just a list of ingredients and a description of the steps. They CAN copyright the story surrounding the recipe though, so if some bot steals their blog post and reposts it, they'll know because the story that IS protected under copyright was likely stolen as well.

While it isn't necessarily an easy process because it requires interpreting what is and is not a "creative expression" of describing the rules, it IS possible to recreate pretty much any game's core system in a way that is perfectly legal under copyright law. Kit Walsh wrote about this for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (though I disagree with some of her other conclusions here, that part is a pretty accurate explanation).

Side note: The EFF formed thanks to tabletop roleplaying games. The US Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, the publishers of GURPS who eventually went on to create the card game Munchkin. A group of lawyers represented SJG in their lawsuit against the government, and those lawyers decided to form the EFF as an organization to continue defending digital rights. I did a video about it a few years ago.

The OGL's primary value is that it addresses this hole in intellectual property law. While it's possible to publish compatible material for a game system without a license or even recreate the entire game system, it's not exactly easy. There are many ways that creators can accidentally violate copyright without realizing it.

For example, many Old School Rennaissance systems attempt to re-create the rules from older editions of Dungeons & Dragons which were NOT released under the OGL by using the material that IS in the OGL. However, they are limited in using some terms because they are too descriptive rather than functional, therefore falling under a creative expression. Like in previous editions, each level of a character class had its own title. Like Thieves in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition went from 1st level Rogue to 2nd level Footpad to 3rd level Cutpurse and so on. Those cannot be reproduced, but most other aspects of level advancement can.

The OGL solved the problem by giving clear guidance on what could and could not be used. Meaning Wizards of the Coast didn't have to worry about a dozen different versions of the 5th Edition of the D20 System popping up under different names -- completely bypassing their core rulebooks -- because it was unnecessary.

So I don't think Wizards of the Coast plans to announce a complete unilateral revoking of the OGL v1.0a nor never intended to do so. I think the plan was to introduce the royalty-based license first, using access to their walled garden as the benefit, then eventually switch entirely to the new license for Sixth Edition a few years down the line.

So What IS So Bad About the License?

The Unreal Engine license from Epic is a godsend for independent developers. The number of patents, copyrights, sublicenses, and so on involved in a video game engine make it necessary to obtain a license. A license with no up-front cost that only charges royalties after a certain level of gross sales is AMAZING for small developers because they can start working on a game and take risks because of lowered start-up costs of obtaining a license. It also means that, if the game isn't a big hit, the company isn't still on the hook for royalty payments off the paltry sum they make in sales.

None of that is the case in tabletop roleplaying games.

All this license does is allow Wizards of the Coast to start skimming profits off of other companies. If a creator's product makes more than $750,000 in gross sales, they have to start paying royalties on amounts over that. So say my Kickstarter takes off and funds for $800,000, I only owe royalties on $50,000 not the full $800,000.

However, part of the license makes clear that ALL FUNDS RAISED through a Kickstarter have the license applied. The thing is that most of the TTRPG Kickstarters that make over $750,000 do so through selling things other than the game product itself. Miniatures, sculptures, t-shirts, art books, personalized videos, creators running the game for backers, stuff like that which are products that ARE NOT licensed under the OGL. They don't include any material from the game so are not OGL material. BUT under this license, Wizards of the Coast gets to skim money off of those unrelated products.

On top of that, the license includes a sweetheart deal for Kickstarter. If you use Kickstarter to crowdfund your game, you only have to pay 20% royalties rather than the normal 25%. This comes on the heels of multiple competitors to Kickstarter gaining traction, such as BackerKit and GameFound. This is anti-competitive behavior.

Finally, if you don't pay royalties on time, you have to pay interest. Okay, sure...but the rate is 1.5% PER MONTH. That is a 19.56% per year interest rate which would be shitty for a credit card, let alone just for late fees on a royalty payment. If you screw up and underpay by 10% or more (easy to do when there's two royalty rates for different outlets between Kickstarter and all other sales), you're responsible for paying the costs of Wizards of the Coast auditing the account to determine the amount. How much these costs will be is not stated.

The OGL v1.1 also changes how material is used. While the OGL always had a share-a-like aspect to it so that, if you created an awesome class or feat or whatever, Wizards of the Coast could use it as well in their products...so could anyone else. For example, if I made a really cool Pirate class in my OGL book, you could use that Pirate class in your own book. Under the OGL v1.1, this is no longer the case. The flow of content is one-way ONLY to Wizards of the Coast. THEY can use any material created under the OGL, but no one else can.

This specific clause also causes problems for companies making licensed work. For example, Cubicle 7 released an OGL 5th Edition version of their Doctor Who roleplaying game, while Free League Publishing came out with a 5e Lord of the Rings RPG. Because of this clause in the license, those products would be impossible to make because Cubicle 7 doesn't own Doctor Who. The BBC does. Free League doesn't own Lord of the Rings, the Tolkien Estate does (technically, Embracer Group bought them, but that's a whole other mess). Cubicle 7 and Free League does not have the right to give Wizards of the Coast access to that intellectual property, but the OGL v1.1 REQUIRES that they do so.

OGL games using licensed properties have been a staple of the OGL since it came out. In the 3rd Ed era, there were D20 System RPGs for Babylon 5, Farscape, Warcraft, Stargate SG-1, Conan the Barbarian, and a lot more. It was a good way for smaller companies to grab licenses that weren't used and make a big splash as well as to allow customers access to games set in their favorite fictional settings without hoping Wizards of the Coast would show interest (as they did, making D20 versions of Wheel of Time, Star Wars, and a few other licensed properties during this era).

Further, there's a clause that allows Wizards of the Coast the right to revoke the OGL at their discretion. This is framed as allowing them to revoke the OGL from anyone publishing offensive material that's racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. but that is NOT spelled out in the legally-binding section of the document. Meaning that if someone at Wizards of the Coast doesn't like something a creator has posted on social media, they can pull the license. This clause also eliminates all rights to challenge this: You cannot sue and there is no arbitration. Wizards of the Coast decides what material is and is not offensive.

And even if it WAS enforced as stated, there have been recent controversies with "ethics clauses" like this being enforced against women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and other marginalized groups describing the bigotry, prejudice, and oppression they suffer under claims it violates the terms of the license. I'm not saying Wizards of the Coast WOULD do that, but at the same time, they don't have the best track record in these matters...

Then there's a new Indemnity clause. This means that if a creator publishes something under the OGL that gets them sued, Wizards of the Coast can decide the creator isn't defending the lawsuit well enough, take it over, and then bill the creator for all legal fees. It would be a rare situation (someone would have to work hard to get a claim that would involve the OGL itself in court), but the fact that Wizards reserves the right to take over a lawsuit and stick the creator with the bill isn't a good thing.

Then there's the "Other Products" section that expressly forbids the use of the OGL in the creation of any product other than a tabletop roleplaying game product. The comments section (the "not legally binding" bit) clarifies a list of products this covers including "videos, virtual tabletops or VTT campaigns, computer games, novels, apps, graphics novels, music, songs, dances, and pantomimes."

Of all of these, the only ones in which the OGL would even remotely apply would be virtual tabletops, apps, and computer games. And even that would be very specific cases where they recreate game rules from D&D. A novel doesn't include game rules. A video doesn't include game rules. A song doesn't include game rules. NONE of this stuff requires using the OGL in the first place so I have no idea why any of this is included (or rather, excluded) unless there are some further legal shenanigans planned for the future that affects Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok.

So yeah, this license is a garbage fire that's not good for creators and not good for the long-term health of Dungeons & Dragons as a game. Even if I don't believe that Wizards of the Coast plans to eliminate the OGL v1.0a and destroy a large portion of the tabletop roleplaying industry in the process, I do think their plan is detrimental to the hobby and reflects long-term plans for further anti-competitive behavior.

What Happens Now?

As of right now (early afternoon in North America on January 11, 2023), we're still waiting on an official statement from Wizards of the Coast. Until they make some official move, everyone in the industry is in a bit of a holding pattern or making plans for the worst.

For the vast majority of Dungeons & Dragons players, none of this means anything. There are millions of people who just play their regular game, use material from the core books, and that's it. They don't follow the industry, they likely don't even know that dedicated tabletop game stores exist let alone ever been to their local store because they bought their books from Amazon or Barnes & Noble and their dice from Target or Dollar General. They've never been on DriveThruRPG, aren't aware Pathfinder exists, and have put exactly as much consideration into following Wizards of the Coast accounts on social media as they have in following Starbucks.

However, the online tabletop RPG community has made a LOT of noise about this. Like I said earlier, more mainstream outlets have picked up this story. Hashtags related to it have been trending off and on all week on Twitter. People like @wilwheaton and Gail Simone are talking about the controversy. Some of these players, who make up the vast majority of the customer base for Dungeons & Dragons, might get curious. They won't understand what the OGL is or why it matters, but they'll come away with the impression that Wizards of the Coast did something that hurt small publishers and people don't like it.

Whatever happens, keep your friendly game designers in mind. Even the ones working for Wizards of the Coast. Many publishers have serious questions about their ability to continue as a business, and many creators are facing stress and burnout seeking off-ramps out of tabletop RPGs. Some other independent creators and their fans are taking the opportunity to be assholes by gloating over the situation, something which helps nobody. Designers who work for Wizards are being harassed even though this is very obviously a corporate-level decision that the people writing the game have absolutely no control over.

In short, the future is uncertain and it costs nothing to be kind to the people suffering right now.

Edit for a Post-Script: I've seen a post floating around Tumblr about this situation that tries to play off this situation as Good Ackshually because the OGL always involved signing away rights to gain access to something you already had. I want to reiterate a point I made above: "You can't copyright game mechanics" is far more complicated than a simple statement. Even the post itself explains all the legal pitfalls with that assumption by pointing out issues of mingling and other ways rules can be protected under copyright law. What the OGL did was allow independent creators with no budget - which is every single tabletop roleplaying game company outside of WotC, Paizo, and maybe a handful of others owned by large companies like Edge Studios (Azmodee/Embracer Group), White Wolf (Paradox Interactive), and a few others and even THOSE are tiny subsidiaries in a larger corporate umbrella. Pretty much every other roleplaying game company on the planet is under 10 total employees (often just one or two) and a bunch of freelancers.

This industry does not have the capital to hire a lawyer every time they want to release a new product to ensure the IP doesn't violate the law. The OGL allows those companies a clear framework to publish compatible material with the game system used by at LEAST 80% of the customer base of the industry without fear of legal threats. This is the difference between theory and practice. In theory, publishing without a license is better but in practice, it's a money sink and legal minefield. And telling publishers and professionals who have been working under the license for two decades now they should be thankful the entire industry is under threat of being upended is condescending at best.

Edit Part 2: I knew I'd forget some things that are terrible about the OGL v1.1

First, there are now two licenses, a Commercial and a Non-Commercial one. I still haven't figured out the purpose since it's the same license only the Commercial one has all the bits about royalties. It seems redundant because if someone's not making money, they wouldn't meet the threshold for reporting gross sales anyway since they don't make money.

Anyway, to the actual issue I forgot: Information gathering!

You have to register every single product you release under the OGL v1.1 with Wizards of the Coast. You must describe the product, state where you will offer it for sale, what price you will charge, provide contact information, and "filling out a form" (they don't state what other information will be on this form). There are no restrictions whatsoever placed on how Wizards of the Coast can use this information. Even the most benign version of how this information can be used is anti-competitive as it would give Wizards of the Coast free market research - if all products have to be registered but only products that make $50,000 in gross sales must have their sales reported, then Wizards of the Coast knows what products are selling and which ones are not.

The RPG industry has horrible market research information. There are only a handful of places to track what people are actually buying or playing. Few companies release sales information. All you can do is check Kickstarter yourself for what products are crowdfunding well, use ICv2's reporting which is limited to physical sales only at participating hobby game stores in North America (leaving out any store that doesn't participate, mass market outlets like Amazon, direct sales through a publisher's website, digital or print-on-demand sales from DriveThruRPG, etc.), and quarterly user reports from virtal tabletops Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. That's ALL we have to judge where the market is. Having access to that kind of information would give Wizards of the Coast an even larger edge in the RPG market, which they already dominate.

And that's the benign reading. For example, there are no restrictions in the OGL v1.1 against selling that information to third parties. Granted, the European Union would have some things to say about that. Also, remember that the OGL v1.1 flows one-way. Wizards of the Coast can republish anything they like with no compensation or even credit provided to the previous author. If they see a particular product is selling well, they can just republish it themselves.

Edit 3: Wizards of the Coast FINALLY released a statement and...fuck me, I did NOT expect them to give up on the royalties. I figured that was the primary motivation for the license update. They're also changing the terms to make clear that Wizards of the Coast does not have the ability to publish material from third-parties (that part of the license was meant to protect them in case of convergent design, where somebody's third-party published adventure or sourcebook coincidentally has the same elements as a new sourcebook or one of the new big-budget TV/film/video game projects and just overreached according to the statement).

They still don't address the actual "open" part of the open license that would allow third-party publishers to share their material with other third-party publishers. There have also stated that content already released under the OGL v1.0a will not be affected by the change to a new OGL license (rumors are they're changing it from "OGL v1.1" to "OGL v2.0" but that's not in the statement), but have NOT stated whether they believe they have the right to unilaterally prevent anyone from continuing to use the OGL v1.0a if they do not agree to the new OGL. Both of these are major concerns with the new license.

However, we DO have a good update: Paizo is spearheading a new open license called the Open RPG Creative License or the ORC License. You can read about it in the link, but the primary points are that Paizo will NOT own this license nor will anyone else who makes money publishing RPGs - it will be managed by a non-profit to ensure that no company in the future can exact unilateral changes that affect the entire industry. The license will be perpetual and irrevocable. So far, major TTRPG companies participating include Paizo (Pathfinder, Starfinder), Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest), Kobold Press (prolific 5e OGL publisher), Green Ronin (Dragon Age, The Expanse, Modern AGE), Atlas Games (Ars Magica, Over the Edge), Legendary Games (third-party OGL publisher of 5e, Pathfinder, Starfinder, and Savage Worlds), Pinnacle Entertainment Group (Savage Worlds, Deadlands), Rogue Genius Games (Owen K.C. Stephens' company), and I don't know how many others since the announcement was made.

We won't know for sure how this will shake out for the industry until the terms of the new OGL and the terms of the ORC License are made public, but either way, a trust has been broken as a multibillion dollar corporation came after small publishers trying to scrape together enough to make any money at all off their games, and the industry won't forget that easily.

EDIT FINALE

It's now January 29, 2023, and there's been a huge update that should close out this entire saga.

A couple weeks ago, Wizards of the Coast released a draft of the OGL v1.2 along with a survey for public feedback. The new version dropped the royalties entirely along with any claims of ownership to content created under the license and the registration requirements. It did keep the "morality clause" that was vaguely worded and overly broad allowing them to revoke the license from any company producing a product they considered "harmful", "obscene", or "illegal" without defining those terms. Meaning they could revoke the license from a company if LGBTQ+ content is deemed as "obscene" (which has happened before with licensed D&D content), or "illegal" if it includes queer content in some countries or "Critical Race Theory" in some American states, or "harmful" as "this is harmful to our profits because it's selling too well". The new version of the OGL also maintained that the OGL v1.0a would be "de-authorized".

The other attempt to placate critics was releasing 58 pages of the SRD 5.1 (the document that outlines what parts of the rules for Dungeons & Dragons were considered Open Gaming Content under the OGL v1.0a) would be released under a Creative Commons license. The pages included rules for combat, ability checks, monster abilities, and a few other aspects of the game but would NOT include races/species, classes, backgrounds, spells, magic items, or monster stat blocks. Basically, these 58 pages were functionally useless on their own as they referenced rules that were not included in the CC-licensed content. It would be impossible to create adventures (no monsters or treasure) or sourcebooks (no classes, races/species, or spells) under this license, which makes up the vast majority of third-party OGL content for 5e. I should also note the SRD 5.1 is over 400 pages long, meaning they released just over 10% of the already-stripped-down rules.

The survey went out about a week ago and, on Thursday, D&D Beyond announced on Twitter the results were pretty obvious the OGL v1.2 wasn't helping matters. And on Friday, January 27, the company announced that the survey would be closed early (it was originally scheduled to run until February 7) because between 85% to over 90% of people participating responded negatively to the questions posed in the survey. In response, Wizards of the Coast stated:

The Open Gaming License v1.0a would be left in place completely untouched as it has been since 2000.

The SRD 5.1 would be released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

This is not a "we will do it at some point in the future pinkie swear" thing. As of that posting, the SRD 5.1 is now available under the Creative Commons license.

So the situation is resolved. Not only did Wizards of the Coast back down from their plans, they released more of the game to the public than was originally released.

This won't stop Wizards of the Coast from trying something similar in the future, but they'll have to do it with an entirely new and incompatible edition of the game. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is now freed as the rules are permanently and irrevocably part of the Creative Commons with no legal method for Wizards of the Coast to take it back.

[lost-carcosa]

Paizo announces System-Neutral Open RPG License

[entropyrpgs]

Kobold Press, one of the largest DnD creators, is creating their own system due to the recently announced changes to the Open Gaming License (OGL 1.1). Above is the video announcement on Twitter. Here's the blurb from the website:

As Dungeons & Dragons moves toward the 50th anniversary of the game, foundational changes are afoot in the tabletop roleplaying game arena. While we wait to see exactly what shape the Open Gaming License might take in this new era, Kobold Press is also moving forward with some clear-eyed work on work on a new Core Fantasy tabletop ruleset: available, open, and subscription-free for those who love it: Code Name — Project Black Flag. To receive future announcements and to register to playtest this ruleset, please sign up using this form.

When the new Open Gaming License and an updated System Reference Document are made public, Kobold Press will review the terms and consider whether they fit the needs of our audience and our business goals.

The kobolds are looking forward to the continued evolution of tabletop gaming, and we aim to play our part in making the game better. Rest assured Kobold Press intends to maintain a strong presence in the tabletop RPG community.

The form to sign up that is mentioned above is located here: https://koboldpress.com/kobold-press-announces-new-core-fantasy-experiment/

This could easily move the needle on how WoTC goes forward with this plan, but no matter what I think they've lost a lot of trust with the community.

[leidensygdom]

(Check the link for the post itself! Here’s a screenshot of the same content available in the page, though)

Wizards of the Coast has finally made an official statement about the new OGL, and as expected, it’s an attempt to douse the fire with sweet corpo speak. So, here’s some key points about it, so we don’t forget what actually happened.

They repeated thorough the letter that this was to avoid bigoted content. About three times. Don’t let them lie to you: This was NEVER about preventing bigoted content. (In fact, please remember that WOTC released the hadozee on 2022, and has a lot of unresolved sexual harassment case allegations)

They also mentioned the NFT thing. Again: This is another buzzword, given how nowadays most people dislike NFTs openly. It was NEVER about preventing NFTs

Most importantly: They are blatantly lying about the leaked OGL being “up to revision” and them having planned “to accept community feedback”. The leaked OGL was sent as it is to implied third parties, alongside with contracts. THEY FULLY PLANNED TO HAVE PEOPLE SIGN IT AS IT WAS.

They have been saying they’ll backpedal on some of the choices. DO NOT BELIEVE THEM until we see an actual readable OGL of whatever changes they are promising. They are trying to, desperately, calm down the storm.

KEEP pushing, in fact. Keep unsuscribing from DnD Beyond. Do not buy their products, don’t watch the movie, etc. If this PR stunt makes people suddenly calm down, they’ll try to get away with the OGL as it is.

Also, here’s some segments I want to highlight, just to show how thoroughly filled with horseshit they are:

And third, we wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community—not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose.

This one is probably a jab at Paizo, but they certainly didn’t care about all the third parties affected by this. The “aspiring designer”, the “homebrewer”, the “content creator” are all people who probably have a foot in the industry and are working with smaller TTRPG companies, or third parties. Most third parties have a very limited number of employees (or quite literally consist of just one person), and hire freelancers as needed. These were quite literally the most hurt by this new OGL. Let’s not forget they were content trying to put an end to that.

It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds. Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won’t. Any language we put down will be crystal clear and unequivocal on that point. The license back language was intended to protect us and our partners from creators who incorrectly allege that we steal their work simply because of coincidental similarities.

They made a section in the OGL that allowed them to steal content. Of course, they are claiming that is not true now, as it would give them a bad image. And yet, they have the nerve to claim they are just defending themselves when they release copied content.

Finally, we’d appreciate the chance to make this right. We love D&D’s devoted players and the creators who take them on so many incredible adventures. We won’t let you down.

This is obviously that sweet corpo speak that ties everything together. They never wanted to make this right: Again, the leaked full OGL was never a draft. They were ready to fuck the entire community over (and still are, most probably) over a greedy cash grab. Do noT forget, and do not relent now: The fight is not over.

We don’t need a “compromise” over the new OGL. I wouldn’t care if they applied this new OGL exclusively to OneDnD, but there is still a lot of people who have built a living operating under 5e’s OGL, and they should NOT be taking that from people. 

(As always, reblog for awareness!)

[therightdragoneye]

The stuff that's going down now is awful and serious. Here, have some shitposts to cheer you up.

[goblingrowlart]

Working on an Astrologer class for w/e system we all shift to, be it Pathfinder 2e or ORC or w/e, and since I can't really do the math/stats until the move I decided to work on some concept art for them. Whatcha think?