I wonder if it's too little too late. All WotC really has going for it at this point is the D&D name and player goodwill, and they just shot the latter out of a cannon into the sun. DMs and PCs alike have already shown their willingness to migrate over to alternative D&D-like systems.
And moreover Paizo et al know they have no reason to trust WotC not to try this again as soon as people get complacent. I'm sure they won't back down, and are going to go full steam ahead with their scheme to sidestep WotC, not unlike Valve working around Microsoft's boneheaded Windows decisions with SteamOS and Proton.
Also, hiding behind "we want to prevent discriminatory content" is a pretty shameful attempt to salvage their image by appealing to the zeitgeist. The hobby has become so inclusive the last decade or so, more than I ever would have imagined.
This whole discussion has me wondering if we need to work on hardening FOSS licenses against corporate shenanigans. Apparently, in the US authors have a pretty broad power in revoking licenses after 35 years.
In the US, it's part of the Copyright Act and it applies regardless of the license. Per 17 USC 203(a)(5):
"Termination of the grant may be effected notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, including an agreement to make a will or to make any future grant."
That section is part of Chapter 2, which is about /transfer/ of copyright, in whole or in part. The “license” it refers to is a license that provides for /complete transfer/ of a part of the bundle of rights that is normally encompassed in copyright. So, frex, someone could use a “license” to transfer their right to authorize derivative works based on their copyrighted work to, say, their kid. The original author would no longer have any say about authorizing derivative works—only the licensee (their kid) would.
It is these transfers of copyright or partial copyright that the author can terminate after ~35 years.
AFAIK, none of the OSS licenses involve transferring copyright, in whole or in part. The original software creator still retains full copyright of their code. They have merely granted a license to others to use that code in certain ways. I just double-checked and GPL v3.0, frex, explicitly says that this license is built on top of copyright and only has effect for the duration of that copyright, and that the author of the code retains their copyright. The fact that the programmer retains their copyrights is why they can license the code under multiple OSS licenses if they want, or both license the code under an OSS and have a separate commercial agreement with someone else for use of the code in a way that the OSS license wouldn’t allow.
And since people licensing their code under the terms of an OSS license never transferred any part of their copyright to someone else as defined by 17 USC 201, there’s nothing for them to terminate under the terms of 17 USC 203. 17 USC 203(b)(5) explicitly says that these termination rules only apply to chapter 2 transfers, not to other sorts of licenses.
Accusing the community of being racist as the reason they had to put on a 30% royalty fee to control all the content. That will go down well for what IMO is one of the most inclusive communities on the internet.
Based on the stuff Wizards of the Coast considers racist, it’d be really easy to unintentionally be caught up in their nullifying your license too. This includes changing language around a race of evil, gypsy like people that are subservient to a vampire lord (which hews very close to the writings of Bram Stoker’s Dracula), or a species of flying monkey-like creatures being enslaved and later freed as part of a fantasy setting (this was removed and Wizards apologized for being terrible and racist).
Talk about an absolute landmine of potential for offense.
This is more closely related to (for example) the company that's currently trying to reprint Star Frontiers, an 80s game to which WotC holds the rights, except they're adding racism.
Good open licenses don't need a morals clause. Once you start licensing people to put your logos on their products, you need to think about it.
This comment is not intended as approval of the OGL 1.1 in any way, but I think the objections to the morals clause on the basis that it's not needed are missing context.
I like the phrase, "Good open licenses don't need a morals clause".
By and large we are all adults here. Some people may play D&D with sexuality or kink or racism or massive slaughter campaigns on a scale that rivals any battle sim.
They're adults. They are allowed to do that, even if you or I personally find it distasteful.
Other people may want to do such things. Hasbro and WoTC shouldn't have the ability to unilaterally rug pull their users because they're worried about getting a stain on the carpet.
This whole thing was botched from the beginning. They should have phrased it as, "This is what we are thinking, please provide any feedback..." to the community. They would have still been eviscerated but people would say, "At least they started with talking it over and with the goal of making sure everyone was happy with the changes first. Could you imagine what it would be like if they just walked in and tried to dominate the community into submission because of some stupid copyright paperwork? God, they could have killed their brand!"
Especially rich from the company that published Spelljammer last year, a supplement that somehow got out the door despite including formerly enslaved sentient _monkey_ characters that gave people minstrel vibes.
It seemed to give some Americans that vibe. I read up about the Hadozee and black Americans comparison, it's pretty tenuous. I guess if you're looking for racism, you find it.
Yes, it is probably too little and too late. They gave everyone using the OGL a short, sharp shock and this mealy-mouthed bit of gaslighting isn't going to change enough minds to make a difference on that.
It might stop D&D Beyond from bleeding out, but the folks who've built successful small businesses around the SRD and the OGL aren't going to forget what they just learned. There will soon be at least one new SRD and Open License that will be more along the lines of Creative Commons licensing and have nothing to do with WotC.
> All WotC really has going for it at this point is the D&D name and player goodwill
... "All"?
Branding is everything in this industry. Artwork and game mechanics are commoditized. The barrier to entry for new RPG systems is, and has been for decades, zero. But people don't buy anything else, because everyone likes playing "D&D".
The fatal mistake here is IMHO exactly the opposite: they torched their brand (the valuable part!) trying to protect their margins from low-uptake third party vendors who were never a threat in the first place.
At this point their biggest asset is the fact that DnD has become synonymous with RPG among potential customers. The fact that they've cheesed off existing customers doesn't affect that.
My impression is that nearly nobody begins playing with a group of people composed solely of people who haven't played before. New players are almost always introduced by an experienced player, who does have strong opinions about what companies to support.
Reposting a bit I wrote last night in the last thread:
Every game master, without exception, is a content creator. Most of them want to try new systems just to see what they are like. If they decide to go to other systems, that’s it for D&D. They can make all of the movies and books they want, but that won’t make people DM it.
We’re not in the era where people buy the box set and try out this new hobby; almost all new players will join experienced groups. The people deepest into the guild, the person willing to GM, ultimately decides what everyone plays.
> All WotC really has going for it at this point is the D&D name and player goodwill, and they just shot the latter out of a cannon into the sun. DMs and PCs alike have already shown their willingness to migrate over to alternative D&D-like systems.
D&D survived the 4E attempt to overhaul the OGL, the backlash, the GSL that resulted from it, the backlash from that, and the backlash from 4E as a whole, and the mass migration at the time from 3.5E to Pathfinder/d20 instead of 4E. The brand's too valuable to die. "Heroin" used to be a brand name and there'll be people who call any and all fantasy TTRPGs "D&D" until the collapse of civilization.
What might die is Hasbro's interest in spending money and effort on the tabletop RPG part of the brand as a first-party content producer, which is frankly also fine by everyone. The market and content available today is broader and more diverse than ever. The 5E library alone could truck on with players and new content for decades without the need of any corporate steward, much less Hasbro.
Even most of the people who comprise D&D's content team right now came up through the barren years pre-3E and/or during-4E. If Hasbro cuts every one of them, they'd all land well, especially Wyatt and Schneider who've now covered just about every base possible in a single RPG writing/editing career.
I disagree, I think that with 5e DND got super lucky, because they hit upon an unexpected gold mine, with the pandemic, stranger things, and Critical Roll all happening at the same time. Instead of recognizing this as a valuable opportunity to move forward TTRPG and usher in a new renissance on that front, they instead got high on all the money they made for reasons largely beyond their control and assumed it would continue forever, because the corporate suits considered their players "undermonitized" their quote not mine.
I was suspicious of the 1D&D crap moving to a subscription model anyway, so I am quite frankly glad about this.
What's weird is I agree with everything else in your comment.
I don't think D&D's survival is a virtue, it's just inevitable. It's a generic brand for fantasy tabletop roleplaying whether anyone playing it likes it or not.
Hasbro's shenanigans are irrelevant to tabletop D&D's survival. They only endanger its success as a product line.
One of the things WotC has in its favor is that it owns D&D the label, and that there are now .... let's count:
ChainMail
OD&D
Advanced D&D
BECMI
AD&D 2.0
D&D3
D&D3.5
D&D4
D&D5
That's about nine versions. Yet they fundamentally make money on generational turnover: another bunch of grade and high schoolers reach the RPG demographic and someone buys them "the latest D&D". No one is going to wade through nine previous versions of D&D and figure out which one they want to use, not before a large amount of the "new gen" is on whatever re-splat they've published.
RE-generationalizing actually doesn't dilute the brand anymore, it actually increases and sustains it paradoxically.
I'm glad there will be a legal battle over it, might formalize it more for the neckbeard people that kind of are the foundation for RPG across generations. OGL doesn't really do anything for grassroots people. This is a fight between corporations.
Also, is the OGL/SRD just for 3.0 mechanics and stat blocks? I would think it would be effortless for WOTC to simply re-license at any generational break, which they've already done themselves about 3.5 times (yuk yuk).
I mean, what is needed by the community at this point? Just the rough Gygax notion of dungeon, elf, dwarf, orc, goblin, dragon, undead, cleric, wizard, Vancian magic, thief skills is generally open source? Is that already the case with Tolkien and other fantasy fiction prior art? Do MMORPGs or console RPGs pay any royalty for the use of those concepts (and they use all of them ... A LOT!)?
People already started making moves to protect their livelihood in case the OGL was revoked. This response by WotC is not enough to make them reverse course.
I hate to say it, but they should've just stuck to their guns on the OGL update just so they only got hit by traffic coming from one direction instead of both.
WotC also has MTG, but they've done a poor job of making it usable. It seems that for a while now, Hasbro (Hasbeen?) has been milking the WotC stuff and would have been BK long ago if they had not acquired it.
Not even too little. This missive is just as tone-deaf and misrepresentational as their December missive (pre-leak) and the “level up!” language in the leaked OGL. Wizards has demonstrated a shocking lack of introspection or damage control. They are not going to get the opportunity to re-earn trust with many third parties and customers at this point, given how far down this path they’ve come. That’s not how trust works.
And lo Microsoft saw the App Store, and knew that it was good…
Basically they fell in love with the idea of getting 30% of the app/game market for desktop windows, and announced that the Windows Store was the way to go.
Valve (perhaps somewhat ironically) saw this as monopolistic behavior that threatened their biggest cash cow, and thus saw a need to reduce their reliance on Windows as their main market.
How on Faerûn would Paizo repay the private equity without doing the same things WotC is doing? Hasbro has an inflated idea of what it’s worth already.
And moreover Paizo et al know they have no reason to trust WotC not to try this again as soon as people get complacent. I'm sure they won't back down, and are going to go full steam ahead with their scheme to sidestep WotC, not unlike Valve working around Microsoft's boneheaded Windows decisions with SteamOS and Proton.
Also, hiding behind "we want to prevent discriminatory content" is a pretty shameful attempt to salvage their image by appealing to the zeitgeist. The hobby has become so inclusive the last decade or so, more than I ever would have imagined.