#ogl

[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.]

[adventuresandshopping]

Open Game Licenses - Free League Publishing

Create, publish and sell your own game using the Year Zero Engine with the Free Tabletop License (FTL), or your own adventures and supplemen

[ladytabletop]

A Breakdown of WotC’s OGL 1.1

Here’s some things to consider:

If you created any 5e stuff under OGL 1.0, you can’t keep creating it and the agreement that protected you from copyright lawsuits is “unauthorized”.

But LT, they can’t copyright mechanics!

Yes and no. They can’t copyright a d20. They can’t copyright a character having ability scores, or skills, or rounds of combat. But they can copyright the way it’s presented, and they can copyright the whole framework of all those individual mechanics. So no, scrubbing mentions of 5e out of your work isn’t going to protect you necessarily. Case in point:

This doesn’t just affect indie creators.

So yeah. Pathfinder in jeopardy, folks. And in case you thought the new OGL wasn’t explicitly trying to spite Paizo:

You cannot opt out of the new OGL.

If you create anything other than a print or digital ttrpg book, you cannot sell anything affiliated with DnD. Non-commercial use only.

So nice of them to give creators time to get their products updated:

Jan 13. That’s in 8 days, if you’re counting. I personally have a dozen products that would need to be submitted to the new OGL in that time frame, or changed so much that they don’t violate it. It’s over 1000 pages. To comply with the OGL, I would have to list every single thing that was covered by the original OGL and distinguish it from my original content.

I have a day job. Most creators in this industry have day jobs. This is an unreasonably short amount of time to get into compliance (which I don’t recommend anyway, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly).

Tiers of the Commercial License

So, that Expert Tier: Paizo is gonna fall in that. And if they want a custom deal that doesn’t force them to turn over 25% of their profits to WotC, WotC has to initiate it and set the terms.

Here’s the big kicker. Community surveillance. They’re relying on reporting of people who don’t register stuff. It’s meant to scare folks into compliance, most likely, and it will work. Most small creators couldn’t afford the legal fees if WotC decided to sue, and so have to decide if it’s worth the risk to keep selling without registering. The reason this is a big red flag is because they own, in perpetuity, your stuff. And they can change or revoke the agreement whenever they want.

They covered crowdfunding too:

TL;DR: The new OGL 1.1 is bad for creators and in line with WotC’s goal of wringing profits from DnD.

Source

[tabletop-rpgs]

DnD_Shorts keeps delivering the leaks.

Link to tweets

Text of the new Leak:

These statements are being made by executives and legal based on their assumptions of what will appease the community, not by the team who created the game or the tools.

When the statement is prepared, it is typically posted almost immediately and suggestions from other staff members regarding potential problems with the statement are not taken into consideration. In fact, providing such feedback is considered hazardous.

Numerous employees have reportedly been fired from Wizards of the Coast’s D&D division for nothing more than voicing their opinion when asked for it. People are afraid of speaking out because they fear losing their jobs.

End of leak

To some it may feel like the statement wizards made was a win, it wasn’t. It was them playing dead. They want us to forget and move on. The fight isn’t over yet.

[thechekhov]

thoughts on the huge OGL debacle around DnD at the moment?

mmmmmMMMMMM BOI

I was going to be holding off on commenting until something was confirmed by WotC because I hoped to get more info but. I think we basically got what we need. 

For those who don’t know - the CONTEXT:

Earlier last month there was a leak that made the DnD community peek up out of their little holes like a bunch of meerkats hearing a stampede. Y’see, currently, Wizards of the Coast (a company owned by Hasbro, a corporate giant in board-games) is working on a new DnD version that is meant to replace 5e (5th edition of DnD, the most current one). They’re calling it One DnD, and it’s in play-test right now. But there’s a problem. Along with new stuff, they were apparently planning to revise the OGL - the Open Gaming License which had been a staple of the DnD Era since 2000.

The OGL 1.0 was essentially an open world ticket for third-party creators to use DnD game mechanics to build worlds, create monsters, and expand upon the creative base that was DnD. In 2008 they attempted to publish 4th edition DnD under a different, less open gaming license, which ended up severely hurting their overall standing with the community. When they published 5e, they returned to the OGL and DnD has gained traction with the public thanks to various gaming groups (such as Critical Role) rising to fame. Because of the OGL, many people have made adventures for 5e DnD, making monster manuals compatible with the game, and basically expanding on a huge, growing world. There have been kickstarters for new adventures, new compendiums, etc, which were an incredible creative sandbox for just about anyone who wanted to try their hand at creating.

And now it seems like they fucked it up. 

A leak made it clear that WotC is working on OGL 1.1 - which is basically a giant middle finger to everything the original was. They are now demanding royalties from anyone creating new content if they make over 50kᶜᵒʳʳᵉᶜᵗᵉᵈ 750k a year from their creations - which in and of itself isn’t super unreasonable.... except for the fact that they can lower this number at any point. 

ALSO with the new OGL (1.1) WotC would OWN the rights to anything made using any of their content (including homebrew made by creators - yes, they would own settings/character just because those adventures use their system) indefinitely, demand they receive financial reports from anyone making 50k or more.

What’s more, they reserve the right to change their own license at any point, with only 30 days notice. (Which basically means that if at any point they decide to demand recompense from people making more than, say, 20k from their little homebrewed setting in 5e, they can do that with nary a month’s warning.) 

“...according to attorneys consulted for this article, the new language may indicate that Wizards of the Coast is rendering any future use of the original OGL void, and asserting that if anyone wants to continue to use Open Game Content of any kind, they will need to abide by the terms of the updated OGL, which is a far more restrictive agreement than the original OGL..." (source)

So as you can imagine, for the past few weeks, the entire DnD community and the ttrpg community at large have been gearing up for either a fight, a mass exodus, or both. It would not be the first time. 

And then, just recently, we had another comment, this time from inside. An email was sent out, which has been evidently confirmed by one of the recipients as true, describing what is happening inside of WotC. 

[I'm an employee at WotC currently working on and with business leaders on the health of the product line. If you want I can provide proof of this.I'm sending this message because I fear for the health of a community I love, and I know what the leaders at WOTC are looking at:

They are briefly delaying rollout of OGL changes due to the backlash.

Their decision making is based entirely on the provable impact to their bottom line

Specifically they are looking at DDB subscriptions and cancellations as it is the quickest financial data they currently have.

They are still hoping the community forgets, moves on, and they can still push this through

I have decided to reach out because at my time in WotC I have never once heard management refer to customers in a positive manner, their communication gives me the impression they see customers as obstacles between them and their money, the DDB team was first told to prepare to support the new OGL changes and online portal when they got back from the holidays, and leadership doesn’t take any responsibility for the pain and stress they cause others. Leadership's first communication to the rank and file on the OGL was 30 minutes on 1/11/23, This was the first time they even tried to communicate their intentions about the OGL to employees, and even in this meeting they blamed the community for over-reacting.I will repeat, the main thing this leadership is looking at is DDB subscription cancellations.Hope your day goes well,PS will be copying and pasting this message to other community leaders]

(source)

As for my comment in all of this? 

I won’t pretend to be a local expert in legal terminology. Others can probably parse the full leak far better, and I don’t think there is anything to be gained by running around in a panic and screaming...

However. 

The fact of the matter is, Hasbro/WotC are shooting themselves in the foot. I don’t believe they have the right to destroy the original license. Make a new one for OneDnD? Sure, knock yourself out. Try it, see how popular it’ll be. But destroying the community-driven 5e will do only that - destroy it. They will not be gaining any money from the fans which are already plenty used to supporting small-level creators first and large companies second. It’s a supremely counter-culture move which will eat them from the inside out. 

The only ones that I feel for are Critical Role - who originally played in Pathfinder and then switched to 5e and paired up with DnD Beyond.............and are now being screwed over because they’re likely locked in a contract with WotC and are contractually obligated to not speak out negatively against the changes. 

In my heart of hearts, I kinda hope that their tablets all mysteriously ‘break’ for the next few games and they go back to pen and paper instead of barking out DnD Beyond ads as they’re expected to do. But I don’t know if that’s something they can afford to risk. 

(.....though hell, I hope they try to afford it. They have a community that will stand behind them, and that community has MONEY. We won’t know until we know, though, and I know that there are legal repercussions that may go beyond a simple income slap on the wrist.)

Personally, here’s my two cents: 

I think people should cast a vote with their money.

 Cancel your DnD Beyond subscription.

Don’t give any more money to Hasbro or Wizards. Keep playing whatever 5e games you want, but do it using third-party digital character sheets, OR just go old school and do pen and paper. Let me know if you need sources for it. 

Don’t buy the Players Handbook, leave DnD Beyond behind, don’t engage with One DnD. There are resources out there that let you play the game that also don’t require you giving money to corporations that are only here to fuck around and find out. You want an adventure module but don’t want to bow down to the dragon sitting on its hoard? Hit me up. I’ll give you some alternatives. 

Hell, I myself will be looking into Pathfinder 2e because I’ve heard good things, and if I need to switch any future games to a different system because Fountry VTT or Roll20 will stop offering the 5e presents, it’ll be a very good alternative. Paizo just came out with a statement that they will write their own version of the OGL which will keep the spirit of the open game alive, and Kobold Press is gearing up with their own stuff. 

I won’t be throwing out my own games, and I don’t feel there’s a need to stop playing 5e. I have a Curse of Strahd game to finish, and that game belongs to me and my group now. We don’t need the module - it needs us. 

... all that is simply to say - Wizards may soon be realizing that when you live on the Coast... pirates are never far. 

(edited thanks to corrections from @magpiesarefluffy )

[dailyadventureprompts]

Alright, guess it’s time to address the apocalyptic legal elephant in the room:

For those who might not know, WotC plans were leaked to “update” the OGL in what is basically a scorched earth policy with regards to 3rd party material/creators in the hopes of cutting out the competition and forcing people to use their new products. 

As someone who lived through the 4th edition/pathfinder schism, the situation is laughably similar:  D&D is flourishing more than it ever has (thanks primarily to the OGL) but the execs at Hasbro want more of the money spent on the hobby to wind up in their pockets. Oblivious to the fact that the opensource nature of the game is what draws people to it,  they task the design team with creating a proprietary virtual tabletop through which they can sell d&d content without having to worry about books or pdfs being pirated. This rightfully outrages the fandom and burns every scrap of good will they had towards WotC, resulting in a dead edition that’s maligned years afterword as folks hop to the newer, easier game system. 

The thing that’s different this time is that the d&d playerbase has grown exponentially since the days of the first OGL, with 5th edition being the easiest version of the game to run/pick up and so many resources online, there’s almost no barrier to entry besides finding a stable/accommodating group.   Hell, with the explosive popularity of liveplay series you don’t even need to be actively playing in order to be in the fandom.  All of these people are networked together in a fandom hivemind spread across twitter/reddit/youtube and WotC just made an enemy of every single one of them with its shameless and destructive cashgrab.  No streamer or 3rd party publisher wants to give Hasbro 25% of their revenue, to say nothing of having their project “cancelled” if WotC sees it as a threat to any of their current projects ( see the huge number of spelljammer materials published after the company dropped the ball). 

It took about two years after the announcement of 4th edition for Paizo to come out with pathfinder, and I have no doubt the OGL leak kickstarted every major 3rd party publisher brainstorming some legally distinct version of the 5e ruleset. In the coming months I expect to see a number of these surrogate systems floating around the internet in much the same way that the onednd playtest content, but spurred on with the added “fuck you Hasbro” energy. After that, it’s only a matter of time till one of the big streamers picks up one of these systems and popularizes it, not wanting to pay the 25%tithe to WotC. Personally my money’s on Critical Role: they were one of the major factors in popularizing 5th edition and they’ve got the fandom pull to legitimize any claimant to the throne. 

To step away from playing oracle for a bit, I’d like to finish up this post by dunking on WotC:  

*ahem*

HOW FUCKING DUMB TO YOU HAVE TO BE TO TURN YOUR ENTIRE CUSTOMER BASE AGAINST YOU IN ONE NIGHT? This is some new coke/Reynolds pamphlet/invading Russia in winter levels of shooting yourself in the foot. Wizards was on shaky ground to begin with given that they’re coming off a series of notably disappointing products AND trying to launch a new edition/virtual tabletop/battlepass system, but to follow that up with a retroactive rules change that lets them outright steal from or shut down creators? It’s laughable.  Maybe, MAYBE they could have made this work if they were knocking it out of the park with new releases every year and cultivating a base of diehard WotC loyalists, but the fact of the matter is that aside from the brand name, the hobby has largely passed them by. Everything that Wizards does, from player options to settings to monsters to rules modules, someone else does better because they’re willing to take risks and put in the effort. Aside from the elegant simplicity of 5e’s base system, I can count maybe two pieces of actual game design (piety from Theros, ship combat from Saltmash) that I consider usable at my table, which is SAYING SOMETHING considering we’re nearing the end of the game’s ten year golden age. 

I know we’ll weather this storm, we always have, and regardless of what happens I still know my friends and I will enjoy gathering around the table and slinging dice even though we might not be playing “dungeons and dragons” in a couple years time.  I’ll keep my eye on the horizon, and let you know where I find safe harbour.