Dungeons and Dragons’ new license tightens its grip on competition

Their "this is not specific personalised advice, consult your own lawyer" thoughts were:

1. The license does not specify revocable or irrevocable, but it would be likely a court would find it to be irrevocable because:

- other lanaguage in the license such as the perpetual term and the option to use later versions appears to anticipate it being non-revocable

- the zection on termination only provides for breach of contract and protects sublicenses of the terminated work from being terminated unless the sub licenses were also infringing. The fact that it provides some grounds for terminatioj but "we have a new license" isn't among them hurts their argument.

- There is mutual consideration and this is even spelled out in the contract as being consideration in terms of the derivative content being reciprocally licensed, plus the unspecified benefit to Wizards of having more complements to their product increasing its appeal. The licensee obviously gets the rights to use the covered content.

- The 23 year usage of OGL 1.0a may constitute reliance especially when combined with past clarifying public statements where Wizards official documents and then-active employees indicated it was intended to be non-revocable.

- Clauses in US law for copyright owners to terminate licenses require 35 yeara and do not affect sublicenses, so unlikely a court would assume a stricter unwritten standard of revocability than this

However, they also point out you can waive your rights to use content under 1.0a if you were to agree to 1.1, e.g. to get access to 6e content.

They also touch on the idea of if Wizards could use others OGL 1.0a licensed content under 1.1 which imposes lesser restrictions on wizards than 1.1. They're vaguer on this point, but imply probably not as its too much of a deviation from the previous license and raise the reliance part again

I’m mostly worried about the folks posting settings and adventures on drive through RPG, it seems like they have a ton more exposure. :(

Legal costs do not necessarily scale by size and wealth of the litigant. I'm not a lawyer, but I've dealt with enough license disputes that I'd be lawyering up if I was in the D&D OGL business. This looks to be a pretty simple contract dispute about what paragraph 9 (Updating the License) actually says and if it is actually legal (it probably is). I'd first ask the lawyer if I should suspend selling and distributing, and then ask if it's worth litigating the OGL license change. Suspending the business will also dramatically reduce the cost of litigation because there's going to be minimal damages to argue (which takes a truckload of accountants and extra expensive lawyers to calculate).

Probably because they are trying to figure out damage control. this leak only happened on thursday.

I would expect a response during the week with them backpeddling a bit.

Netrunner has continued as a fairly successful non-profit fan cooperative [0] since, but remains in a very legally shaky position (they've been working on cutting ties with the original IP as much as possible, but if Hasbro wanted to set an example, it might not matter).

[0] https://nullsignal.games/

Maybe it's easier to hire lawyers than to focus on making more D&D products, video games, and licensed media that are actually good.

In any case, it usually isn't a good idea to fight your fans/customers, because they are the lifeblood of your game (and company), as well as its biggest advocates.

By all accounts Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition by Onyx Path (a licensee of Paradox) is quite good, though, as is Vampire the Requiem (a reboot/variant gameline by Onyx Path, now mostly shut down by Paradox, designed around more modern gothic horror/mystery and less of VtM's 90s Blade vibes).

9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License. https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/OGL%20License

From Gizmodo: One of the biggest changes to the document is that it updates the previously available OGL 1.0 to state it is “no longer an authorized license”

Some more background on the terms: https://www.larsenlawoffices.com/can-terminate-perpetual-lic...

The way the US justice system works is if you have more money than all of your opponents, you win.

https://medium.com/@MyLawyerFriend/lets-take-a-minute-to-tal...

Open Game Content (or OGC)

        ...the game mechanic and includes the methods, procedures, processes and routines to the extent such content does not embody the Product Identity and is an enhancement over the prior art and any additional content clearly identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor, and means any work covered by this License, including translations and derivative works under copyright law, but specifically excludes Product Identity....

        ...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...

> If your tabletop roleplaying game has an "orc" species and "rogue" class and "sword" equipment, is WotC going to sue you?

There are plenty of games that already have those. In fact, there's an entire sub-genre of D&D-like game ("OSR") designed around directly emulating older editions of D&D, based on the fact that you can't copyright game mechanics themselves, just the text that expresses them.

Tabletop RPGs are (traditionally) built on elaborate systems of rules for managing character traits and interactions. The rule set will strongly influence the structure of the game narrative and your perception of options. Converting settings and scenarios to another system can be a major change. D&D prevails in the market due to the huge inertia, despite the existence of many attractive alternative systems.

FATE moved from OGL to CC BY when they shed the Fudge origins: https://www.faterpg.com/licensing/

Several games, like Eclipse Phase and GLoG, use CC BY-NC-SA: https://eclipsephase.com/cclicense/

Several OSRs dual-licensed as OGL and CC.

PbtA's license isn't really one, for better or worse: http://apocalypse-world.com/pbta/policy

A larger list of open-licensed games: https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems

More specifically, d20 lacks a useful skill system. You can do 95+% of game mechanics from a skill system. I don't mean a handful of stuff you roll your d20 against, but something much more comprehensive. Some skills are harder to learn. Some require other skills. Some have a weakest link (eg, a surgeon skill depends on both having skilled hands and good doctoring skills). A good framework for this means your system has fewer balance issues.

Along those same lines is the effect system. In d20, a fireball spell and a grenade are very different things. They have to be independently balanced and adjusted until they "feel right".

In an effects system, you would understand that both are explosions with a specific radius, damage (with falloff), lingering fire damage, etc while some other parts are different like what limits the number of shots (magical energy vs how many grenades you can carry). The effects system would allow you to calculate the exact value of both of these things with some slightly different modifiers and different descriptions of what they look like in the game. The result in-game feels different, but is now mechanically balanced and (ideally) cost balanced too.

Next, Vancian magic is by far the least interesting magic and worst for basically any story. Players must make a blind choice and then get either a cake walk or extreme punishment based on that choice. It causes a kind of "when you are a hammer" issue as well. It also doesn't jive with what most people expect of magic.

Better systems are more flexible. They allow the user to decide which spells to use on the fly with some kind of resource limiter instead (eg, the classic mana or how long it takes to cast or how hard a spell is to cast vs how many cast dice, threshold magic where spells get riskier to the caster as you use more of them, etc).

A final aspect is tactics vs resource management. RAW (rules as written) modern d20 is a resource management game. Your team slugs it out with the other team until someone's HP runs low. You expend a resource to raise the HP and keep slogging. Rinse and repeat until there's no more way to raise the HP at which point things conclude (never mind the whole suspension of disbelief that you continue to hack the same thing over and over and over). Yes, there are better and worse choices here, but they are not of particular consequence (and tend to become obvious rather quickly). That is why DMs do battle statistics calculations instead of caring so much about stuff like positioning.

Tactical games are much more interesting. In those games (like in real life), positioning and strategy is all-important. Once someone is in your gun sights, they are almost certainly very wounded or dead. When a GM for these games is planning, they aren't worried about statistics so much as where the enemy is, why they are there, what their strategy will be, etc. This immediately shifts the focus of the game mechanics away from statistics and back to role playing. Combat will be a lot of working together on a plan and then the actual combat won't be super long because life and death results happen pretty quickly.

If you were to go with an actually different system, OpenD6 would be the place to start in my opinion (Star Wars D6 wrote a large part of the current canon and used an early version of this system). It provides a very useful skill framework that is easily extended. Because the dice mechanic is extensible in MANY different and interesting ways, it is far easier to match your particular mechanical choices to your specific universe. The default magic system is quite flexible and uses an effects system to build spells. Instead of sticking with the list of pre-approved spells, you can have your players cook up their own and be pretty sure that the new spell isn't going to break the game. And of course, the system isn't quite as lethal as some others, but it is still MUCH more lethal than d20 by default.

Legal, is more complicated and likely needs to be decided in court. There is a non-small chance that original OGL license is in no way terminated and people can continue to distribute copyright content under it. Through trademarks can be another issue. And being in right doesn't mean you are not sued or otherwise terrorized by an abuse of the legal system. E.g. see non-Lego brick products which are legal but frequently e.g. stuck in customs due to Lego abusing the legal system. Not even speaking about the 3D trademark nonsense which makes selling compatible figures close to impossible even through the law is very very clearly not meant to be apply that way.

One bit of context here to keep in mind is that there have been tabletop releases that have been incredibly clearly on the far side of that line, wherever you might define it - think "literal Nazi propaganda packaged as an at least nominally playable game". I haven't personally seen any use the OGL 1.0a specifically, but there are probably some out there.

Of course, since the OGL 1.0a doesn't imply any particular business relationship with WotC or allow any special association with the D&D brand, any "need" to actually police the OGL 1.1 like this is basically just self-inflicted from how they're conflating what were previously two separate agreements (one for mechanics, one for branding).

I have an edition of Shadowrun where there is an explicit take on the subject. In the Shadowrun world, the appearance of elves, dwarves, trolls, etc... made racism based on skin tone and other human attributes obsolete, and specie (called metatype) became the new differentiator. So no more white supremacists, but there are now human supremacists taking on elves.