f13.net

There's going to be a short D&D TV series on Paramount+, though who knows if D&D will survive it's current XK-class possible extinction level event.

What D&D extinction event?  Did people finally find out other RPG’s exist?

I assume he means this. (https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/108b4sc/ootl_what_is_going_on_with_dungeons_and_dragons/j3r6wfl/)

They're basically getting rid of the OGL (not really, but putting so many restrictions on it that they just might as well not have it).  Which, if you remember D&D before the OGL, is... well, whatever.  They're shooting themselves in the foot IMO because all that OGL content helps drive sales of their core books, but their accumulated brand strength is such that I don't think this one misstep is going to suddenly topple them.

WotC is about to release a new D&D licensing agreement -- OGL 1.1. Among the many horrible things* in it they are trying to invalidate OGL 1.0a, despite that license explicitly saying it is "perpetual". If they succeed they will destroy the 3rd party eco-system that has been built up around D&D 3rd and 5th Editions that were released under OGL 1.0a. 4th Edition had it's own much more restrictive license so very few 3rd party companies released anything for that system.

* One of the horrible things is that in 1.1:


So basically if WotC wants to take your content and resell it they can and they don't have to pay you royalties for it.

Edit: this is the leaked OGL 1.1 text: http://ogl.battlezoo.com

ah yes, this must be some new definition of the word "own" I wasn't previously familiar with

That’s some 2012 Games Workshop level customer alienation they’re aiming for.

It's the definition of own that prioritizes "self-own" in the social media sense.

Yea, it's completely fucked, and removes any iota of interest I had in checking 5.5E or 6E or whatever it was going to be called. If I ever move on from 3.5, it will be to PF1, even if I have to hoist the black flag because WotC sends Paizo a C&D or some bullshit.

"One D&D"

https://www.dndbeyond.com/one-dnd

Well, suddenly "One-Dnd" sounds way more sinister.

But how they can invalidate an already issued license for existing content is beyond my legal understanding.

So One-DND is going to be 5.5 Edition from the sounds of it?

It easy, they have way more money so they can bully little people until they win.

Isn't it equally easy to say "Go fuck yourself, we use Pathfinder 2e for our new stuff" though? Everybody has to crunch their own numbers, but I suspect losing 100% or your old sales hurts less than losing 25% of your new sales.

Not if Pathfinder 2.0 doesn't exist.

I saw a few Youtube videos popping up claiming Critical Role may be asked to pay Hasbro now or something. I didn't watch them but man, if they destroy Critical Role the nerd backlash will probably be intense. I suspect Mathew Mercer would just switch to Monte Cook's system or something and keep going.

So, I read a little more about it and it seems despite not using any of the WoTC content, Paizo still decided to go with the OGL, which will be invalidated.

Well, that really sucks. I hope Paizo will bring out a 3rd edition of Pathfinder so that there exists a high profile alternative to those fucktards.

That’s what the backwards compatibility claim implies.

No, it costs you tens of thousands in lawyer fees every time.

I know the US has a shitty legal system, but even there you can't sue somebody for not using your license in a new product - yet.

I have to imagine that third parties were always aware of this kind of thing as an existential risk, and that some kind of contingency plan exists where they can quickly crank out new editions of their content that has everything problematic stripped.

Like I said, some of us remember the world before the OGL; companies like Mongoose did some kind of tricky thing where they wrote their material to be compatible with AD&D 2E without including anything that might be seen as infringing in the material that they sold themselves (they didn't even refer to the core books by their actual names).  Obviously the OGL made life a lot easier for all concerned (including WotC/Hasbro) by allowing everyone to dispense with that nonsense, but getting rid of it isn't an extinction-level event.

No, that is the problem, you can sue somebody for literally anything and nothing. You can't WIN, but that still costs the other party money.

Exactly.  Hasbro has enough money to drag out legal fights for years, and they're counting on much smaller orgs to run out of money to fight legal battles long before that.

If that's the way you're looking at it, changing the OGL is a complete non-factor, since they could just pester other companies with nuisance lawsuits regardless.

Dungeons and Dragons: Dishonor Among Intellectual Property Oligarchs

Hence the "5.5 or 6" comment. If it's actually backwards compatible, everyone's gonna call it 5.5E. Less so if some things are vaguely sort of backwards compatible.

You have no idea how right you are

https://twitter.com/DnD_Shorts/status/1613576298114449409?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1613576298114449409%7Ctwgr%5Ed96177499f202ce032ee0fc562fdd7364c90fee7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redditmedia.com%2Fmediaembed%2F10a4ycx%3Fresponsive%3Dtrueis_nightmode%3Dfalse

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmSTCXPXkAU8TEp?format=png&name=large)


A classic case of late stage capitalism.

Hasbro has been actively destroying the goodwill built up over many years by Wizards of the Coast in the Magic: The Gathering community for increased (short term) profits the last few years. It's unsurprising to those who follow the MtG scene that they've now turned their attention to D&D and are trying to do the same there.

it's a disaster

Tbf it's all been downhill since 1st ed  :why_so_serious:

I've read a couple of histories now of Gygax, TSR, etc., so let's just say that it began as a kind of glorious but weird mess and then at some point tipped into being an amiable disaster a bit like John Romero working on Daikatana and then tipped into being a parable of culture clash between corporations and then became kind of a success story about how good management can fix bad decisions and now it's come around to being another parable of late-stage capitalist failure. It's kind of the American Dream: all the bad, all the good.

There was that Slaying the Dragon book that came out last year that was fairly decent.

Yeah, that's one of the best, a bit gossipy maybe but that's ok.

I read somewhere that a lot of the early D&D artists' original work for TSR was lost in one of the later reorganizations--likely destroyed. That's heart-breaking.

WotC has begun the walk back process after the backlash, scraping 1.1 and working on a 2.0 that excludes some of the most egregious parts of the 1.1 draft including royalties and effectively taking joint ownership of all your work, but unless WotC makes 2.0 explicitly irrevocable I doubt they’ll be able bring back everybody who is now thinking of alternatives since Hasbro has made it perfectly clear they are willing to alert their deals if it suits their purposes and you should be praying they don’t alter them again.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl

Edit: not a draft, I forgot people were being asked to sign the 1.1 version

...and if they weren't before, they sure as hell are now.   :why_so_serious:

From the way they walked that back it really seems they didn't think that would become such a shitshow. Are the people at Hasbro really really dumb?

Yes.

Edit: it's literally this meme personified:

(https://i.imgur.com/DbC9OtB.jpg)

I don't know, I am thinking they just proposed something ridiculous so they can make a show of walking it back and then people will be more willing to accept their "compromise" which will still suck, but maybe slightly less egregiously.

Then they should fire their PR department to the last person. They sell something replaceable by people with smart ideas and a color printer. Their brand recognition and the goodwill of the people buying their stuff are the only advantages they have.

Sort of reminds me of how Disney came up with the theory that they didn't owe any of the royalties that LucasArts contractually owed to people who'd written Star Wars novels and other SW work even though they actually did own all that old property and could still make money from it. So, notably, Disney said "Yeah, we can republish Splinter of the Mind's Eye but we don't owe Alan Dean Foster anything, because when we bought Star Wars all those old contracts became automagically void". When Foster said "Wait, what? That's not how that works", Disney said: yes, that's how it works unless you have the money to hire more lawyers than we do. It turned out of course that Disney was routinely stiffing people in exactly this way, and usually over peanuts. They've settled with Foster (and he apparently signed an NDA about the terms) but that probably leaves most of those other cheated people still out in the cold.

The astonishing thing is that this is not only about really small sums of money in the end from the perspective of big companies (and not small to creators on the other end) but that this often strangles off the kind of widespread adoption and affection that makes the core property more valuable and more widely relied upon. D&D is doing great at the moment precisely because it's a cultural touchstone, even if there are better tabletop gaming systems, but that's precisely because the company allowed for other people to get in on the action. It's just such stupidity on every level--it shows once again that the worst threat to cultural capitalism emanates from the vast incompetent middle of its executive ranks, the people desperate to prove they're doing something the company needs done but who have no vision at all of value or creativity or sustainability.

"Hand's back on the menu, boys." (https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/01/13/ogle)

Interestingly the Opening Arguments podcast did an episode on this where Andrew Torres (the lawyer bit of the podcast) was defending WotC for being pretty reasonable in the new OGL. The royalties aspect of this only kicks in after $750,000 in revenue and that only if you're actively selling a product using their ruleset i.e. if you're producing a podcast available for free and taking donations they won't touch it (so I think Critical Role is fine for most of their stuff, the Netflix series might be a different beast).

The only element that he was critical of was the fact that Wizards declared that they have full rights to using your creations in DnD and you aren't owed anything. So the new OGL could mean Hasbro could start producing their own books using Critical Role's content and characters, which would be massively shitty. But basically there are about 20 people/companies in the world who will actually be affected by the revenue changes. However it has been an absolute shitshow PR wise.

Because nobody believes them--as nobody should--in their post-shitshow representations of what they really intended, e.g., Oh we were just trying to make sure we had a way to shut down racist content. That's the new bullshit coming out of culture companies to explain money grabs or dumb IP aggression, the "oh we were just trying to be so very woke". No, no, come on.

Also, that is an argument only a lawyer can make.

"That robber baron is pretty reasonable. Sure, you used to be able to walk down that road for free, but its his road and he could take more than 25% of your money."

Ignoring that many people only walked down this road because it was free.

Because the owner invited them to walk down the road and set up roadside businesses on the road for other walkers and promised it would always be free.

Also, their modern definition of racism is pretty broad, so will they try to shut your content down if you still use drow as Evil?

WotC walks everything(?) that people were upset about in 1.1:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1428-a-working-conversation-about-the-open-game-license

I would say read the fine print. They're completely reserving the right to alter the deal later when it comes to 5e content--it's one reason I think they're desperately trying NOT to brand the new material as 6th edition, because they want to say 'maybe we leave old 5e content alone, but not anything from this point on'. There's a lot of really careful parsing going on here that leaves the company a lot of room to not only do licensing different from here on but change how they extract revenues from existing derivative work.

Yes that's the big thing not mentioned yet -- whether or not the new license will be explicitly irrevocable of if they are free to do a bait and switch. They also haven't said yet if OGL 1.0a can continue to be used for new 3E/5E stuff.

They are obviously trying to say enough to get people to stop cancelling D&D Beyond subscriptions and drag things out so the outrage moves to something else not D&D related but giving up royalties and the license-back requirements are already big concessions.

They are very clearly laying the ground work to remove access to the 1.0a agreement and any new content will need to sign up on the new one.

I currently don't mind that- there's going to be a LOT of other ones you can agree with instead. You don't need the sign on the front cover to say it's going ton be compatible with the D&D brand now.


This could be the first step to the death of D&D,  perhaps being bought out later and resurged like Battletech has been after FASA died.

The thing is that there's such a wealth of good systems out there now that I think a lot of players AND content makers will be glad to just shove off to something else, maybe just because of the novelty of it, and anybody making a digital tabletop playing system would likely also be just as happy to not deal with some of the specific headaches of D&D's rules/mechanics.

I'm not even sure what the purpose of the OGL even is...?  As far as I know, you can't copyright game mechanics (or systems in general).  You can trademark specific terms, and you can copyright specific characters and artwork, but that stuff is all excluded from the OGL anyways, and it doesn't touch on patents, so I'm not sure what the point is.

Like, if I made a million dollars selling my knockoff space opera RPG supplement, and WotC comes up to me with their hand out asking for 25%, what are they going to do if I say "no"?  There's no copyrighted material in the book, I'm not using their art or their characters, what are they going to claim?  Or, if they claim to own my work because they want to print up a bunch of merchandise based on my supplement, and I hit them with a copyright lawsuit, how can they claim that I signed over all my copyright to them if I didn't explicitly agree to the OGL?  You can't just unilaterally decide that a bunch of shit that belongs to other people is yours now.

I assume that lawyers looked at this, but it makes no sense to me.

WotC is claiming copyrights on their Systems Reference Documents. The OGL is the license that lets you create derivative works based on those assumed copyrighted documents. The SRDs are very long and have a lot of stuff in them beyond the game "rules" and basic mechanics. AFAIK nobody has tried to challenge the copyrights on those documents since the OGL 1.0a, at least, is very generous in it's licensing terms so there's no point to try and challenge them.

If OGL 2.0 turns out to be similar to 1.1, it's possible somebody might try and challenge the copyright on the SRD for One D&D but they better have a lot of money to burn since Hasbro will defend it.

You'd be surprised. If you spend much time at gaming shops or on gaming forums there seems to be a decent sized subset of players who have only ever played DnD and are very reluctant to play anything else.

I don't know what all the fuss is about, I've been using the same D&D books since the 70s.

This is why you have things like Warhammer no longer using the words "Orc", "Elf", or "Dwarf" to describe their fantasy races.

don't buy wotc products

that's it, that's the secret sauce

There's some level on which I'm just plain offended when folks have something valuable and they destroy it, even if I don't care about the thing itself all that much. It's worse when I do care, of course.

Boy are you living in the wrong century.   :why_so_serious:

OGL 1.2 "playtest" / "discussion" version released yesterday.

Announcement:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1432-starting-the-ogl-playtest

License link:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/attachments/39j2li89/OGL1.2_DraftForDiscussionPurpose.pdf

Some high/low lights:

• They are still trying to get rid of 1.0a for new content
• They are willing to die on their "morality" hill
• Their excuse for no more 1.0a new content is its lack of a morality clause
• No class action lawsuits
• They messed up their "irrevocable" clause as it does not include the termination exception(s) so they'll need to fix that

"No class action lawsuits"  is legalese for "next time we misbehave you can't band together to balance our overwhelming financial advantage and force us to behave"

WotC just released SRD 5.1 under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0). So they gave up on trying to police that content, at least. No word yet on what license the One D&D SRD will have.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1439-ogl-1-0a-creative-commons

I think Hasbro's recent warning of weak earnings plus a 15% layoff adds some clarity to what's going on behind the scenes. They're dumping their in-house entertainment division (I think its last release will be the upcoming D&D movie) and the only product line they have that is performing really strongly over the last few years is, guess what, Wizards of the Coast's stuff, especially D&D. So that's likely what led the middle management to tell the C-suite to squeeze the golden goose as hard as possible.

"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star gaming systems will slip through your fingers."

sometimes reason prevails over short-sighted greed?

According to this (old but newer than the latest above) Ars article https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-retreats-from-attempts-to-update-longstanding-open-license/ (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-retreats-from-attempts-to-update-longstanding-open-license/) it looks like total capitulation by WotC.

At least until they think no one's paying attention any more.

We still haven't heard what D&D Next (releasing 2024, supposedly) will be licensed with.

I think they've already blown it just by alerting the D&D licensees to how vulnerable their positions are.

Sort of feels like mutually assured destruction at this point.