Official OGL Discussion Thread

[Tanarii]

I think that damage is already done. Even if they walked back completely, I expect everyone would move to ORC going forward. If they wanted to regain my trust with respect to open gaming, they need to switch to ORC.

Ha! Yes, that would probably be a move that would probably save Hasbro the tanking of revenues and stock value.

[Psyren]

I think that damage is already done. Even if they walked back completely, I expect everyone would move to ORC going forward. If they wanted to regain my trust with respect to open gaming, they need to switch to ORC.

I'm certain they won't, and that's their right. And it's our right as customers to not support companies that treat us poorly.

If ORC is successful enough then they might, otherwise they have no reason to.

I'll echo something I said in the thread that got locked re "WotC doesn't read the surveys". Many of us are primed to believe bad news about WotC because we're angry right now. As with any situation, there are people willing and able to take advantage of that. So read everything with a grain of salt. I'm not in any way a fan of how WotC is handling this, but I'm not going to buy any allegations that come out hook line and sinker.

Of note, WotC had just come out and said they were going to treat the changes to the OGL as UA content, and get our feedback through surveys. Suddenly we get a leak that they don't read the surveys and don't care about our opinions.

As usual, tread carefully. Some of this stuff will be real. But seems to me some staffer at WotC wants us all to write the company off. Many people already have, and if you do, that's fine. Just make sure it's for real reasons.

EDIT: Not sure if this was shared but here's a twitter thread from DDB concerning misinformation.

Thanks for the official link! Deep breaths everyone, we'll make it through.

[Lemmy]

Well, as long as they keep pushing the idea that the 1.0 can be "deauthorized" (which definitely goes against its spirit, even if it can be rules-lawyer'd in a court of law, and I'm not sure it can), I'm definitely not supporting anything D&D-related that WotC puts out.

The OGL is the only thing that kept D&D alive all these years. Stranger Things, Critical Role and the pandemic brought a lot of fad-players, but as expected, they left pretty quickly (as seen by the huge decrease in WotC revenue last year).

Stranger Things won't last forever, and CR now has all the incentive in the world to drop D&D and use their own material. Neither of those shows is watched because of D&D, au contraire, people tried D&D because of those shows (and then dropped it a couple years later)... There's no incentive for the producers of those shows to continue to use D&D unless WotC gives them VERY favorable terms.

Well... Long-term, I really don't see this going well for D&D, WotC and Hasbro.

[Idkwhatmyscreen]

Well... Long-term, I really don't see this going well for D&D, WotC and Hasbro.

Yep, it's a right proper mess they have gotten themselves into. Heck at this point it may even be too late to prevent a forking. I imagine a decent number of players and content creators are turned off of One dnd at this point by spite alone. Certainly, if the Orc pans out.

At the very least, it's going to be super interesting to see what they end up putting out for the first public "playtest" of the new OGL.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yep, it's a right proper mess they have gotten themselves into. Heck at this point it may even be too late to prevent a forking. I imagine a decent number of players and content creators are turned off of One dnd at this point by spite alone. Certainly, if the Orc pans out.

At the very least, it's going to be super interesting to see what they end up putting out for the first public "playtest" of the new OGL.

Yeah. Kobold Press has posted a followup to their Project Black Flag saying "yeah, it's still on." So I'm fairly sure they're not going to be going to great strides to publish OneD&D material. Or even likely much more 5e material, depending on how the playtest of PBF goes.

[Psyren]

The OGL is the only thing that kept D&D alive all these years. Stranger Things, Critical Role and the pandemic brought a lot of fad-players, but as expected, they left pretty quickly (as seen by the huge decrease in WotC revenue last year).

Stranger Things won't last forever, and CR now has all the incentive in the world to drop D&D and use their own material. Neither of those shows is watched because of D&D, au contraire, people tried D&D because of those shows (and then dropped it a couple years later)... There's no incentive for the producers of those shows to continue to use D&D unless WotC gives them VERY favorable terms.

Ehhh... even in the depths of 4e's struggles, D&D was the 2nd-most popular TTRPG in the world. That might have seemed like being on life support compared to 3.5, but I can assure you it was not. And it will survive just fine in a post-Stranger Things and even a post-Critical Role world too, especially since OneD&D is not trying to upend the whole apple cart (read: the ruleset) the way 4e did.

And even if they fail to revoke 1.0a and someone "forks" 5e - or they succeed and someone finds a way to do that later on anyway using ORC - I still maintain that OneD&D will be both close enough and high-profile enough that many tables, even most, will pick up the player-facing material to put into their 5.1e games.

[Rynjin]

I, for one, look forward to the clownfiesta when White Wolf sees their opportunity to be top dog and sells the rights to a Vampire the Masquerade tv series to Amazon or some **** and suddenly becomes the most popular RPG in the world.

[Psyren]

I, for one, look forward to the clownfiesta when White Wolf sees their opportunity to be top dog and sells the rights to a Vampire the Masquerade tv series to Amazon or some **** and suddenly becomes the most popular RPG in the world.

Until people actually play it

I mean, it could happen, but judging by their most recent attempt to capture a general audience they have a bit of an uphill climb.

[Rynjin]

Until people actually play it

Kek. I don't ENTIRELY disagree, but I'll say WoD is still one of my favorite games to THINK about playing, which may be enough to at least let a show do well lol.

I mean, it could happen, but judging by their most recent attempt to capture a general audience they have a bit of an uphill climb.

To be fair, I don't think that was a really "swing for the fences" kind of game, just a little fillery game to tide people over until the main event. Bloodlines 2 will be the really big test of whether VtM can still capture minds. It...doesn't look promising at this stage, but Cyberpunk 2077 plus Edgerunners showed that there can be massive crossover appeal between video game fans, anime fans, and tabletop fans if a property is done well enough.

(Side note, the user reviews seem a little...suspect. I'm not normally one to call out "review bombs", but it's a little weird that half the reviews are either in Russian or complaining about SJWs.)

[P. G. Macer]

I’m late, but a hearty thank you to the forum staff for providing us with this environment to discuss the OGL issue provided we stay within the bounds of the forum rules.

I’ll admit I fell for the not-reading-surveys misinformation for the few hours it ran rampant, but in my case it was more due to conceding the logistical difficulty rather than anger at WotC (though that definitely clouded my judgment, I don’t think it was the deciding factor that fooled me), simply because WotC probably received tens of thousands of survey responses even prior to the One D&D play testings, so I thought they may ignore it just because it isn’t feasible to cover all of them. I’m not a statistics guy, so I wonder what sort of sampling method they use, if any, to determine which responses show up on the screens of the survey recorders.

On the whole, though, I think my time with D&D may be coming to an end, for the breach of consumer trust reasons mentioned upthread. I’ve been looking more into Pathfinder 2e, and while a certain maxim about consumer ethics that I won’t repeat here comes to mind when choosing where to send my dollars, I feel more confident for the time being about supporting Paizo than Wizards—yes, I’m aware the former also has its skeletons in its closet, but the earlier maxim is apt here, so I’m trying to make the best of an admittedly not-ideal situation. I also find PF2e interesting as a system in its own right, of course.
I also will continue to support 13th Age as it gears up for its second edition, and am still trying to find a Scion 2e game, but games in those systems are hard to find IME.
Furthermore, I won’t be quitting my current D&D 5e games, primarily due to not wanting to break social contracts, but this also gives WotC some time to get their act together and possibly turn things around, though I’m not holding my breath on that second point.

[ToranIronfinder]

I've been thinking about something in last week's non-apology statement.

"not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose."

Most commentators have read this as being complete lies, or as talking about Paizo and the other 3rd party publishers. I wonder if they're worried about much bigger fish--the trillion-dollar tech giants.

I don't think decisions at WOTC are being driven by TTRPG people. I think they're being driven by Hasbro/ Wall STreet people. We think about D&D as a game, they see it as a "brand." An undermonetized brand, but a brand.

I don't think the revenues of the entire non-WOTC TTRPG industry mean much at all to WOTC's grand strategy. I think they want to "monetize the brand", probably though some sort of pay-to-play, pay-to-win, recurring revenue type system.

Say Wizards is developing OneD&D and D&DBeyond as something more like a MMORPG than a discord chat. AI DMs, etc etc. Yes Pathfinder put out a video game. So what, there are tons of video games, only Pathfinder geeks and hardcore video gamers are going to even know about a Wrath of the Righteous CRPG.

But if Amazon or Facebook/Meta or Alphabet /Google or Microsoft /Activision rolls out a clone of whatever Wizards is trying to do with OneD&D and D&DBeyond, using the OGL, they have the resources to blow WOTC out of the water.

Of course, if they were so inclined, any of the trillion-dollar tech companies could just do that anyway, running some other game engine that isn't d20 based.

But if I'm WOTC, if I'm any billion-dollar company frankly, I'm worried about how the trillion-dollar tech giants might eat my lunch 5 years down the road.

Interesting theory, mine is a bit different. The OGL didn't build the industry, it moved other systems to the fringes, but there were thriving non-DnD systems Long before WOTC. Due to the OGL, even game worlds that were established as something other than D20 had either an ancillary product to translate the game to D20 or they replaced/mothballed their in-house system. Other companies who produced spectacular products, unfortunately weren't run by people who were good at business, and went under.

If you didn't use some of those competing systems, if you never played a scifi TTRPG in the mid to late 80s, likely you would think the entire industry was built around D20 from the brginning, which just isn't true. As I noted, much of the skill system and really the BAB system looks like it was adapted from competitors, and abandoned much of the mechanical guts of TSRs version. (This being an issue I have with reneging on the OGL, too much of 3.X's approach to ability/skills system appears to me to be borrowed from approaches taken by WEG and FASA, that it seems difficult to suggest it is actually theirs rather than something they modified from a common core of assumptions in non-TSR games. What 3.X seems to do is adapt a class based advancement system on top of the mechanics of a skills based, roll over system adding something I hadn't seen elsewhere called feats). And it's not the only case, alternity seems like it did the sake thing with components of mechwarrior.

If you hadn't been involved in the hobby during that period, or if all you played was DnD, I could understand how one might believe it is all coming from WOTC. It is factually wrong, but I understand it. Still the fact that OGL 1.0a has inserted D20 mechanics into so much of the ecosystem, it makes revoking it a problem.

[Zuras]

I’m personally done with WotC where D&D Beyond, VTTs and any dynamic electronic media are concerned. I get too attached to the stuff I create to worry about suddenly losing access to it unless I fork over more money because I didn’t read the fine print in a click through license.

I’m going to keep playing 5e because it’s a fun system, I already own the books, and it’s easy to find a group at my FLGS. If Wizards keeps supporting stores and acting like they remember it’s a partnership, they might win me back, but if they turn their backs on brick and mortar retail in quest of digital lucre, I’ll probably be playing or running whatever the store community goes for as a replacement.

I play D&D mostly to get away from a computer, though, so I’m unlikely to be their target audience. Which seems dumb to me, since I’ve spent tons of money on their products, but that gets back to the core stupidity of the entire project to me.

Why do you need aggressive and dramatic moves to improve the profitability of your second most profitable product line? Why focus on this at all when you could be preparing for an influx of new potential customers showing up to get into D&D at the local game store or online? If D&D is under-monetized why are you breaking legal agreements and enraging the community instead of making an updated D&D cartoon or otherwise leveraging the parts of your IP that don’t require a DM interface?

[da newt]

According to the Kyle Brink Linked-In account he describes himself this way:
Product development executive with demonstrated success in games, digital advertising, media, monetization and e-commerce on mobile, web, PC and console. Effective in startups as well as enterprise-scale organizations, able to move from one mode to the next as required. Straightforward, adaptable, and professional.

With past experience like:
Owner of game development framework for NCSOFT West, giving teams and executives the two-way transparency and accountability they need to work efficiently, build trust, achieve quality, and identify risks early. Responsible for ensuring all teams and executives know what to deliver and what to expect.

He was the director of Studio Operations at WotC Feb 2021 to July 2022 when he got bumped to Executive Producer of D&D.

Can anyone translate that jibberish into something meaningful in plain language?

[Brookshw]

I, for one, look forward to the clownfiesta when White Wolf sees their opportunity to be top dog and sells the rights to a Vampire the Masquerade tv series to Amazon or some **** and suddenly becomes the most popular RPG in the world.

Wasn't that called Underworld

[Lemmy]

Ehhh... even in the depths of 4e's struggles, D&D was the 2nd-most popular TTRPG in the world. That might have seemed like being on life support compared to 3.5, but I can assure you it was not. And it will survive just fine in a post-Stranger Things and even a post-Critical Role world too, especially since OneD&D is not trying to upend the whole apple cart (read: the ruleset) the way 4e did.

And even if they fail to revoke 1.0a and someone "forks" 5e - or they succeed and someone finds a way to do that later on anyway using ORC - I still maintain that OneD&D will be both close enough and high-profile enough that many tables, even most, will pick up the player-facing material to put into their 5.1e games.

Of course the product with world-wide brand recognition and backing from a billion dollar corporation will survive... But that doesn't mean this move won't do precisely the opposite of what it was intended to do: make WotC more money.

TTRPGs are a pretty small niche in entertainment, even if that didn't seem to be the case for a couple years... And that probably isn't gonna change any time soon. And this move isn't gonna bring any more players to their side.

D&D has more value to them as a multi-media brand, but no one needs the OGL or anything else from WotC to make their fantasy video-games, movies and TV shows unless they want to add a "Official D&D product" sticker on it... And seeing the latest D&D video-games, that doesn't have half the appeal Hasbro/WotC thinks it does.

[Sparky McDibben]

I, for one, look forward to the clownfiesta when White Wolf sees their opportunity to be top dog and sells the rights to a Vampire the Masquerade tv series to Amazon or some **** and suddenly becomes the most popular RPG in the world.

Wasn't that called Underworld

Off topic, but I love thinking about the World of Darkness, with its broody goth vampires, weird magic(k), and soccer hooligan werewolves. Underworld is one of my favorite terrible-but-fun movies.

[Psyren]

(Side note, the user reviews seem a little...suspect. I'm not normally one to call out "review bombs", but it's a little weird that half the reviews are either in Russian or complaining about SJWs.)

Oh don't worry, I prefer reviewer scores most of the time for this exact reason - but 66% critical is still... not great if the goal is to try and get non-fans on board.

According to the Kyle Brink Linked-In account he describes himself this way:
Product development executive with demonstrated success in games, digital advertising, media, monetization and e-commerce on mobile, web, PC and console. Effective in startups as well as enterprise-scale organizations, able to move from one mode to the next as required. Straightforward, adaptable, and professional.

With past experience like:
Owner of game development framework for NCSOFT West, giving teams and executives the two-way transparency and accountability they need to work efficiently, build trust, achieve quality, and identify risks early. Responsible for ensuring all teams and executives know what to deliver and what to expect.

He was the director of Studio Operations at WotC Feb 2021 to July 2022 when he got bumped to Executive Producer of D&D.

Can anyone translate that jibberish into something meaningful in plain language?

He's a VP who worked on multiple projects, at least some of which were software.

I’m going to keep playing 5e because it’s a fun system, I already own the books, and it’s easy to find a group at my FLGS. If Wizards keeps supporting stores and acting like they remember it’s a partnership, they might win me back, but if they turn their backs on brick and mortar retail in quest of digital lucre, I’ll probably be playing or running whatever the store community goes for as a replacement.

I haven't seen anything indicating they'll turn their backs on FLGS. If anything, they're competing with them less now, by putting DDB codes into the new physical books (and thus not forcing their customers to choose one or the other.)

Of course the product with world-wide brand recognition and backing from a billion dollar corporation will survive... But that doesn't mean this move won't do precisely the opposite of what it was intended to do: make WotC more money.

TTRPGs are a pretty small niche in entertainment, even if that didn't seem to be the case for a couple years... And that probably isn't gonna change any time soon. And this move isn't gonna bring any more players to their side.

D&D has more value to them as a multi-media brand, but no one needs the OGL or anything else from WotC to make their fantasy video-games, movies and TV shows unless they want to add a "Official D&D product" sticker on it... And seeing the latest D&D video-games, that doesn't have half the appeal Hasbro/WotC thinks it does.

It (probably) won't make them more money from the TTRPG sphere. But as you yourself mentioned, that is ultimately small potatoes compared to all the other things the OGL might conceivably cover without WotC's explicit permission.

[ToranIronfinder]

Ehhh... even in the depths of 4e's struggles, D&D was the 2nd-most popular TTRPG in the world. That might have seemed like being on life support compared to 3.5, but I can assure you it was not. And it will survive just fine in a post-Stranger Things and even a post-Critical Role world too, especially since OneD&D is not trying to upend the whole apple cart (read: the ruleset) the way 4e did.

And even if they fail to revoke 1.0a and someone "forks" 5e - or they succeed and someone finds a way to do that later on anyway using ORC - I still maintain that OneD&D will be both close enough and high-profile enough that many tables, even most, will pick up the player-facing material to put into their 5.1e games.

True but the hobby has waxed and waned I don't play much, just trying to get back in, but when you are middle-aged with kids underfoot, hobbies take time. I imagine when I end up in a nursing home, I might find a Traveller game or something. DnD and the hobby as a whole has had ups and downs, and we are probably closer to a high than a low all things considered. I suppose if DnD stays up there, popular movie franchise licenses will become the next big fad, draining people from DnD to whatever comes up next. VTT's interest me at the moment because it might be the best way for junkies of old systems to find a game.

5e is interesting for DnD, but I tend to think this new run isn't so much for reasons of required tuneups to the system or the various conspiracy theories I hear, I think they just have run out of customers for the core books, and they would rather do a new edition of the core rules than take risks on splits, which don't always sell as well as core material does.

Mind you, I have never been against fair market value for licensing their system or them making a fair profit, but I'm not sure 6e or 5.1 or whatever it is being called is different enough, or enough of an upgrade to consider buying a new set of rules to be an upgrade, at least not at their rates, and I would never do VTT that only did DnD.

[Lucas Yew]

NCSoft? Those monsters who contaminated modern South Korea's video game market with an abhorrent Pay to Win + Divide and Rule BM?

That makes it even more fishy, mountains more that is...

[Rynjin]

Yeah, seeing "NCSoft" was a big lol from me. He shouldn't so proudly put that on his social media if he wants the general public to trust him.

[Anymage]

Wasn't that called Underworld

You joke, but they did have their own show too. It was rather mediocre. Meanwhile, at around the same time Buffy was being Buffy and there are lots of little hints that the writers were familiar with V:tM even if they wound up making their own lightly inspired mythology.

D&D has more value to them as a multi-media brand, but no one needs the OGL or anything else from WotC to make their fantasy video-games, movies and TV shows unless they want to add a "Official D&D product" sticker on it... And seeing the latest D&D video-games, that doesn't have half the appeal Hasbro/WotC thinks it does.

I don't think it's possible to predict which spinoff products will do well and which won't, as my above comment hints at. And I do think we should all acknowledge that we're reading a comic written by a guy who's making a living spoofing D&D without any official connections.

I think Hasbro suits are being penny wise and dollar foolish in seeing spinoff media as potential royalties that they're missing out on instead of free advertising. But that's an understandable dumb decision on their part, even if the way they went about it was a less understandable dumb decision.

[Mechalich]

TTRPGs are a pretty small niche in entertainment, even if that didn't seem to be the case for a couple years... And that probably isn't gonna change any time soon. And this move isn't gonna bring any more players to their side.

D&D has more value to them as a multi-media brand, but no one needs the OGL or anything else from WotC to make their fantasy video-games, movies and TV shows unless they want to add a "Official D&D product" sticker on it... And seeing the latest D&D video-games, that doesn't have half the appeal Hasbro/WotC thinks it does.

This is very important. TTRPGs have never been huge money-makers in their own right. However, for various reasons that are able to serve as the foundations for substantially larger enterprises such as video games, novels, and TV/movie adaptations. In many ways the greatest value of TTRPGs is to serve as a laboratory of ideas that can be tested on a small scale among hardcore fans to determine whether or not they might have mass-market validity and then switched across genre for monetization purposes. The Owlcat Games adaptations of PF adventure paths are a very good recent example of how this can work.

WotC seems to believe that the OGL has enabled a vast array of other players to obtain 'laboratory-space' to gestate ideas within nerd culture and that as a consequence they are losing out of the back end. The problem, when it comes to the adaptability and monetization of ideas developed within the TTRPG space, the OGL governs basically nothing but mechanics, and mechanics are the least important part of any given ideas utility when derived from tabletop. If anything, overly strict fidelity to tabletop mores, which is found in the Owlcat PF adaptations, is a negative. The d20 system is the least valuable part of D&D. The settings, characters, and artistic renderings, all of which WotC has always retained, are what matters. Doubly so given that almost every proper noun in the OGL, whether it's a class name, a monster name, or a spell name is in the public domain. This is pretty typical for RPGs. Someone mentioned Underworld above, a franchise that represents a test case in how little of VtMs content could ever be considered exclusive.

Instead of trying to close others out of the TTRPG idea space, WotC should have either pushed into the space themselves in a big way such as by imitating Paizo by spewing out setting content and/or relaunching the moribund novel line, or they should use their purchasing power to trawl the space and co-opt good/monetizable ideas in the same way Hollywood has long done with the literary space.

[Psyren]

NCSoft? Those monsters who contaminated modern South Korea's video game market with an abhorrent Pay to Win + Divide and Rule BM?

That makes it even more fishy, mountains more that is...

Yeah, seeing "NCSoft" was a big lol from me. He shouldn't so proudly put that on his social media if he wants the general public to trust him.

I would. They have the... 5th? 4th? ... most popular MMO on the planet right now (and 2nd most popular localized from an eastern market), i.e. Guild Wars 2, which contrary to most Korean MMOs remains beloved in the west. They've made some high profile missteps too (City of Heroes, lol) - but then, so have Square-Enix and Blizzard, and I'd list those too.

...not Konami though

Mind you, I have never been against fair market value for licensing their system or them making a fair profit, but I'm not sure 6e or 5.1 or whatever it is being called is different enough, or enough of an upgrade to consider buying a new set of rules to be an upgrade, at least not at their rates, and I would never do VTT that only did DnD.

I think there's a lot of potential for a dedicated D&D VTT that is very focused and very easy to use to be successful. I first brought this up over in the rumors thread, but the folks behind the Arkenforge VTT concluded that, at the time of purchase by WotC, DnD Beyond already had about 80% of what it needed to be a functional VTT. It's little wonder that they're choosing graphics and integration to be their differentiators.

If anything, overly strict fidelity to tabletop mores, which is found in the Owlcat PF adaptations, is a negative. The d20 system is the least valuable part of D&D.

I don't know that I agree with this at all. I mean yes, strictly speaking you don't need the OGL, SRD, or anything like it in order to make a CRPG. But the moment your say "digital D&D!" or "digital Pathfinder!" or "like Baldur's Gate/NWN/ToEE!" you get a ton of free publicity aimed directly at your target audience. Because let's face it, everyone is looking for the next Baldur's Gate, D&D or not, and the outlets know it.

[ToranIronfinder]

I think there's a lot of potential for a dedicated D&D VTT that is very focused and very easy to use to be successful. I first brought this up over in the rumors thread, but the folks behind the Arkenforge VTT concluded that, at the time of purchase by WotC, DnD Beyond already had about 80% of what it needed to be a functional VTT. It's little wonder that they're choosing graphics and integration to be their differentiators

Maybe, as I noted we are probably closer to a high point than a low point in the popularity of DnD, Hasbro had 72% of its revenue from WOTC-that is a huge gamble for a company of Hasbros size on such a fickle thing.

If a player can play DnD and only DnD on his VTT, and another one gives him options for several dozen other systems, which one is he going to choose? Of course many of us consider DnD to be one of the lower quality offerings. Of course, Paizo, Green Ronin etc are not going to want their stuff on WOTCs hardware after this, and well things may happen if other VTTs are locked out . . . . As I said, best bet, sell plug ins to all the VTTs out there for 5.1e, instead of taking the system risk. As for DDB, most people seem to think it's tool selection is subpar, I'm not speaking from experience, I'm not on it, and if they revoke OGL 1.0a I won't be on it.

As to Baldur's gate and others, personally when I saw Ad&D I thought that it might be something like Wizardry or Bards tale, being D&D was a negative not a positive in my mind. So that argument may not be as solid as you think. Not being DnD related certainly didn't hurt those properties in the day, nor I'd it hurt dragon's age or a few other non-DnD properties. That is, I really son's think the DnD name does a great deal for marketing a videogame except to those already doing TTRPGS. The real value of those properties is the reverse, the only thing that got me to try the D20 Star Wars was KOTOR, as I consider it inferior to its predecessor. Likely CRPGs benefit less from their connections to TTRPGs than TTRPGs benefit from CRPGs.

[thethird]

If it were truly just "the ttrpg environment" I'd agree with you, this would be akin to blood from a stone. The problem is that 1.0a itself is shockingly vague in terms of how and where it can be used, and is already starting to be used outside of TTRPGs. Maybe only 1/6 of tabletop D&D players actually buy books, but a vastly higher percentage of the CRPG audience paid for those products. And the variety and profitability of D&D-adjacent experiences outside of sitting around a table and rolling dice are only going to grow, and in ways that the original framers couldn't possibly have foreseen 23 years ago.

Which was explicitly intentional. That's not a good point against it.

Also, note that the OGL license doesn't deal with the D&D brand. There was the D20 license (a separate one) that dealt with the D20 brand (but that stopped). The OGL license allows someone to reference things published under the OGL such as the SRD but doesn't allow someone to include excluded information such as D&D. One can skirt it by claiming compatibility with you know what most played tabletop game on their 5th edition, but that's not saying D&D.

The D&D brand is solely in control of wizards of the coast. No change to the OGL is necessary to protect it as the OGL already protects it.

I don't know that I agree with this at all. I mean yes, strictly speaking you don't need the OGL, SRD, or anything like it in order to make a CRPG. But the moment your say "digital D&D!" or "digital Pathfinder!" or "like Baldur's Gate/NWN/ToEE!" you get a ton of free publicity aimed directly at your target audience. Because let's face it, everyone is looking for the next Baldur's Gate, D&D or not, and the outlets know it.

Nothing is keeping you from saying that something is like another thing if it is like another thing. You can make brown frizzly sugary drinks no problem. You can even say they taste like coca cola.

[Lemmy]

It (probably) won't make them more money from the TTRPG sphere. But as you yourself mentioned, that is ultimately small potatoes compared to all the other things the OGL might conceivably cover without WotC's explicit permission.

Those things weren't really influenced by the OGL anyway, so the point is moot. Even the video-games inspired by D&D mechanics are VERY different from D&D. WotC doesn't own attack rolls, class levels, random encounters, 1-20 RNG or anything like that.

I dare say that Baldur's Gate and NWN are better known to most consumers as just Baldur's Gate and NWN than as a part of the D&D brand.

All the new OGL does is scare off people from buying stuff in the one area where the OGL actually matters.

[Anymage]

Also, note that the OGL license doesn't deal with the D&D brand. There was the D20 license (a separate one) that dealt with the D20 brand (but that stopped). The OGL license allows someone to reference things published under the OGL such as the SRD but doesn't allow someone to include excluded information such as D&D. One can skirt it by claiming compatibility with you know what most played tabletop game on their 5th edition, but that's not saying D&D.

The D&D brand is solely in control of wizards of the coast. No change to the OGL is necessary to protect it as the OGL already protects it.

It would be very hard to look at OotS and not think D&D, despite the fact that the comic has overall been really good about sticking to the SRD and other safe areas. You have someone making his livelihood off of D&D inspired fiction, and WotC doesn't see a penny of that.

SRD 1.1 did have the feel of a dumb money grab that's too busy looking at such things as lost revenue streams that it misses how they're free advertising. But it's very possible to make a fiction that looks a lot like D&D based just on the SRD. And to the degree that WotC wants to make D&D a broader brand it does make sense to want to get out ahead of any SRD-based cheap knockoffs.

[Psyren]

Which was explicitly intentional.

On the contrary; the license is very far from explicit about what it was intended to cover. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be in this morass to begin with.

The D&D brand is solely in control of wizards of the coast. No change to the OGL is necessary to protect it as the OGL already protects it.

The "brand" is not necessarily all they own/control in this situation, nor all that they might benefit from trying to protect.

Nothing is keeping you from saying that something is like another thing if it is like another thing. You can make brown frizzly sugary drinks no problem. You can even say they taste like coca cola.

Did Coca-Cola make an Open Formula License I'm unaware of?

Those things weren't really influenced by the OGL anyway, so the point is moot. Even the video-games inspired by D&D mechanics are VERY different from D&D. WotC doesn't own attack rolls, class levels, random encounters, 1-20 RNG or anything like that.

I dare say that Baldur's Gate and NWN are better known to most consumers as just Baldur's Gate and NWN than as a part of the D&D brand.

All the new OGL does is scare off people from buying stuff in the one area where the OGL actually matters.

Not different enough; The Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous CRPGs were explicitly released under the OGL, or at the very least stated to be. Whether Deep Silver and Owlcat ultimately needed to use it in order to safely lift/translate the PF1/3.5 tabletop mechanics to their CRPG is a legal question we can't answer here - but what we can say for a fact, is that they clearly felt the OGL to be enough of a shield to try, without needing to approach WotC for a special license of their own first. And they made considerable bank doing so - which, if nothing else, would have encouraged additional AAA publishers and developers to try their hand at OGL-fueled CRPGs.

TL;DR - I think it's eminently reasonable for WotC to say "hey, this license we created was supposed to help out the next Green Ronin or Kobold Press, not the next Deep Silver or Electronic Arts. Let's change it to make that clear."

[thethird]

It would be very hard to look at OotS and not think D&D, despite the fact that the comic has overall been really good about sticking to the SRD and other safe areas. You have someone making his livelihood off of D&D inspired fiction, and WotC doesn't see a penny of that.

SRD 1.1 did have the feel of a dumb money grab that's too busy looking at such things as lost revenue streams that it misses how they're free advertising. But it's very possible to make a fiction that looks a lot like D&D based just on the SRD. And to the degree that WotC wants to make D&D a broader brand it does make sense to want to get out ahead of any SRD-based cheap knockoffs.

Why is that a bug and not a feature? I am sure many people found the OotS funny and were like, wait you are telling me there is a game that's like the OotS? Or some people were like, damn I want to play D&D but my friends are scared of it, maybe if I share with them these comic strips... That makes new players to D&D and that pennies to WotC as more people play. The more people that play the better the game is. The boards are full of people playing D&D. Are we paying them to play on the pbp games? No. Do we pay them to get the books and we end getting the books through playing? Most likely.

On the contrary; the license is very far from explicit about what it was intended to cover. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be in this morass to begin with.

I meant it's intentionally not specified because they couldn't anticipate things 20 something years down the line and wanted to explicitly left it open. There was a FAQ about using the OGL in software and was clearly stated that it was okay and intentional, so this isn't like they did it before computer software was a thing. For that matter the OGL is based on open software licenses. They expected people to use it and evolve it's use.

For example did they expect people streaming their games? No. Certainly not. Not that it matters much because no one streaming is showing the OGL.

[Psyren]

I meant it's intentionally not specified because they couldn't anticipate things 20 something years down the line and wanted to explicitly left it open. There was a FAQ about using the OGL in software and was clearly stated that it was okay and intentional, so this isn't like they did it before computer software was a thing. For that matter the OGL is based on open software licenses. They expected people to use it and evolve it's use.

For example did they expect people streaming their games? No. Certainly not. Not that it matters much because no one streaming is showing the OGL.

1) I don't understand how "they couldn't anticipate things 20 something years down the line" is somehow an acceptable justification for the original drafters of the OGL to want to leave it alone, but not for the current stewards to want to make changes.

2) "FAQ" is about as useful to the license as it is to a pure RAW discussion, which is to say not much. And while I won't attempt to do so here, try comparing OGL 1.0a to any open software license worth its salt like the GNU GPL 3.0 and then tell me those are on remotely similar footing.

3) Streaming D&D is Fan Content Policy, an entirely separate kettle of fish from the OGL (and explicitly reaffirmed to be such by Kyle's statement today.)