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Comment by lasermatts | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if there is an alternative to the OGL? Like, is there any other Open Sourced ruleset that publishers/homebrewers could get behind that _isn't_ run by WotC/Hasbro?

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Much of the tabletop gaming world has embraced Creative Commons in the last decade or so. Off the top of my head, reasonably popular systems that are CC licensed include Pelgrane's GUMSHOE, Evil Hat's FATE and Forged in the Dark systems, Posthuman's Eclipse Phase (although that's a non-commercial license), Trophy, Dungeon World, Quest, and I'm sure I'm missing some significant ones. None of these games are even remotely as popular as D&D, but yeah, there are plenty of options.

Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying uses their own rewrite of the OGL, which has a less trap-doored section on license updates: https://www.chaosium.com/brp-system-reference-document/

It also has some really restrictive terms around using otherwise available material. You can't use it for anything derived from "all works related to the Cthulhu Mythos, including those that are otherwise public domain; and all works related to Le Morte d’Arthur." This is of course to protect their own games, but walling off anything related to the primary source for Arthurian legend is awfully broad. Are all knights related to that?

Also doesn't use "irrecoverable" so it's got the same potential problem as the OGL does, right now. Hopefully they'll change it.

Interestingly Delta Green (a Call of Cthulhu variant) just decided to drop the OGL from their books, which means they're just flat out using a system which is 90% identical to the Call of Cthulhu BRP variant without any license at all. I'm curious how that will go.

"irrevocable" isn't the 1.0a problem, "authorized" is. BRP OGL specifically rewrites that section (section 10 there) to explicitly make products published from older versions retain the older license - you can sell a product published with an older BRP OGL. The authorization question with Hasbro's OGL is whether 1.0a products lose their license because Hasbro allegedly deauthorizes it in 1.1.

Also their license FAQ spells out the Arthurian limits (you can, just not commercially with their system in a BRP OGL product).

There doesn't need to be a games-specific license. Creative Commons is enough for text reuse.

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

You're a better person than I am for providing the links.

Worth noting that for people who aren't comfortable with the PbtA "license," Dungeon World was released under a Creative Commons license and should be enough of a base for anyone who wants to write a PbtA game using a formal license. See https://github.com/Sagelt/Dungeon-World, which is the GitHub of one of the authors.

interesting, I’d think the mechanics and balancing systems for a TTRPG wouldn’t really be CC — they’re closer to how software would be licensed to me but I guess that’s my background showing :)

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