Wizards of the (Baloney) · 5:46pm Jan 11th, 2023
The Open Gaming License is a tentpole propping up the assorted D&D rulesets as welcoming development areas for the community, from individual creatures and item up to entire campaign settings and ways to play.
Wizards of the Coast is trying to chop it down and replace it one that's far less friendly, from drastically restricting the media it covers to tithing profits to surrendering all intellectual property rights to WotC.
I don't usually comment on the missteps of my cardboard crack dealers—I'd have little time for anything else—but this one bears mentioning. Not only because it's a far greater gaffe than most of what they do with Magic, but because there's an efficient way to let them know what the public thinks. The open letter may not do much, but it could hopefully contribute to a PR backlash big enough to inspire second thoughts.
If nothing else, it made me feel better. 
I only became aware of the story this morning, though I gather it's been building since last week.
I keep thinking back to Warcraft 3 Reforged, a game announced with lofty ambitions of a complete reimagining but which was ultimately only a graphical overhaul. But the biggest impact was in the terms of use, which were rewritten to declare that Activision-Blizzard owned all mods created for the game. And then the old version of the game was made inaccessible, for good measure.
The ultimate impression is that the game only existed because Blizzard was sore that the Warcraft 3 modding scene had birthed enormously popular games like DOTA that Blizzard didn't own.
Thinking about it, it's not surprising since someone in the company commented how Dungeons and Dragons was not as profitable as it should be (despite making millions in profits) because -- I think -- not enough people were buying the supplements and modules.
On a separate note, Kobold Press -- one of the companies that works in third party supplements (I have four of their books) -- has announced they're releasing their own open license gaming system.
It's going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
I've seen detailed analysis of the full text of OGL 1.1 and it's so much worse than you'd think it possibly could be.
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A lot of people have said they're making a new game, and there's a real danger of them doing nothing more than fragment the market. Hopefully Kobold Press have the gravity to become the new default system.
I've read the entire leaked document and it's so, so bad.
We here in the MLP fandom are more than familiar with how terrible Hasbro can be sometimes, but this is a whole other level. They're essentially trying to put a monopoly in place for Dungeons And Dragons, where they make all the money, and everyone else pays for it, up to and including legal expenses for potential lawsuits of all things. Under this new OGL, they could take your homebrew content, sell it as their own, and then sue you to make you stop creating your own creation.
If this goes through, it will be death of Dungeons And Dragons as a whole. It has not even gone into place yet, and it has already caused irreparable damage to the brand and company.
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Paizo proved that this was a valid response, and is probably doing at least as much to cut into WotC's profits as the OGL.
Yeah, this is a big deal, even MoistCritical covered the subject. But hey, we'll still have Icon. (The fantasy ttrpg in the works from the people behind Lancer.)
If anyone wants to read it for themselves
I honestly think the long term health of the industry might benefit from D&D sabotaging its complete monopoly like this, like an old tree that still eclipses all light for the entire forest below. I think they'll find that the vines that have woven themselves around its trunk over the years weren't parasitic, but for a long time have been its structural integrity.
You know, one of the worst parts is that, from what I can tell (which may not be correct but it's the impression I'm getting from both my own little knowledge and the variety of more informed opinions), actually enforcing this new OGL would be on very shaky legal ground due to both the text of the previous one and many of the statements, circumstances and legal precedents around it. An actual court proceeding should come down against WotC...
But since when has that stopped a company doing something like this.
Because it doesn't actually need to be legally sound to achieve their aims. It just has to come from a company big enough to scare many smaller companies or individuals into compliance and bully anyone else who can't afford to take things to and keep things in court. Truly, we live in the healthiest of societies.
From what I see there are a few options, ranking in order from good to bad. and I suspect in order from least to most likely.
- We scare Hasbro into changing it to something more acceptable.
- We ignore the 1.1 and keep using the 1.0, with the lawsuits and risks that belong with that.
- We change over to an existing system, if we all go for the same it will beat DnD with no problems
- We make one big new system supported by most and that will beat DnD
- We will splinter in many new systems running cohesion and with that the big market for supplemental products.
I have a few friends who are less than pleased about this, to put it mildly. The most informed of these believes it will fall at the first legal hurdle, but even if it amounts to nothing, the PR damage is done. A lot of third parties will jump ship, and they will take a lot of players with them.
What it's called is 'rent-seeking behavior'. Legalman showed up in his Brooks Brothers cape and figured out a way to make a packet for doing nothing again.
The only reason people are playing Skyrim 10 years+ later is that Bethesda, for all its many faults, realized that they had to play ball with modders. It's a little different in the TTRPG space but not much.
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As a matter of fact, the game was always intended to have as much if not more input from the Dungeon Master as the actual books. OGL was them owning up to that, and you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
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As above, so below. Modding in this context is something you were always expected to do. They eventually stopped having a "primary" setting because it was causing players to miss the point.
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I see more that all third-parties will jump ship. The concern here will not be how it is with to be used or intended to be used, but how it might be used.
And how it might be used is, if you produce a module for D&D, you receive a one-time payment for the work, and no residuals no matter how well or how poorly it does.
The companies that do stay will curb out low-tier crap to make a quick buck. It'll be the early 00s all over again.
For people interested Bundle of Holding has a sale of non-ogl fantasy RPGs that’s good for 4 more days as of this posting. Link
Having people explore the rest of the RPG space can only be a good thing.
Looks like they're backpedaling a bit. We'll have to see what the final result will be.
This isn't exactly uncommon. Warhammer/GW is in the process of attempting to establish control and claim all 3rd party stuff, even non game content and it's strangling all of it as a result. Things like Vox Machina can't be made in this sort of environ.
I do not play tabletop games and am not familiar with this industry, but after a brief perusal of this open letter, it sounds like this WotC is trying to set up a monopoly. Which I believe is illegal in the United States.
So yesterday WotC broke a week-long silence on the story to say that they had heard the outcry and that the new OGL was not going to contain the royalty clause, nor that they would own works created under the license.
For what that's worth. It may be too late for that. Reporting from Gizmodo, which broke the story a week ago, says:
So, I kind of have my doubts that things are going to calm down just yet.
Meanwhile, tech industry observer Cory Doctorow and youtube lawyer Legal Eagle have independently argued that actually the original OGL was itself unnecessary, because it only permits things WotC can't actually legally stop people from doing anyway. Namely, to make and sell game books with mechanics that happen to be compatible with D&D, without using copyrighted materials. Methods and processes, like the D&D ruleset, cannot actually be copyrighted: only specific expressions, like a rulebook, of those processes.
Along the way, major third party publishers have said that they're going to make their own open gaming license
with hookers and blackjackwhich will be outside of any company's control, and on the whole things really does not seem to have gone how WotC hoped they would. From where I'm sitting it looks like the result of this will be a large shift of players away from D&D towards some other alternativeWhen you look back, there's been action to take control of fan made content in one way or another in serval forms of media over the past few years.
I'm trying to cover a horrendous backlog of blog posts. I thought you would have a series around this! Or really, I thought there would just be one more talking about how Wizards had to eat ship and walk it back.