An Open Letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast
opendnd.games
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Dungeons and Dragons’ new license tightens its grip on competition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264777 - Jan 2023 (203 comments)
Wizards of the Coast Trying to Retroactively Cancel OGL 1.0a - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271687 - Jan 2023 (233 comments)
I understand D&D is to RPGs what Windows is (or used to be) to operating systems. But unlike an operating system, D&D's grasp on roleplaying is more fragile. There are plenty of RPG systems that are (subjectively) better and owe nothing to D&D's imaginary setting or rules. In fact, the largest innovation happens outside the D&D franchise.
There are very innovative "lite" RPGs like Trophy Dark or Risus, but also heavier and "crunchy" systems that owe nothing to D&D. Why risk your business by tying it to a franchise owned by a competing business?
(Again, I understand riding the success of D&D's popularity. But unlike with computers and hardware, the "vendor lock-in" pitfall is easier to avoid with something as intangible as an RPG)
I observe that 1.0 contains the verbiage:
"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."
which at least to my open source license not-a-lawyer read says that they basically can't revoke it.
They can relicense stuff going forward under 1.1, and that may be bad, but I wonder if people are misunderstanding and treating it as apocolyptic when it's just bad. It seems like the worst case scenario is the community undergoes a de facto fork and you can stick to a 1.0 world if you want, not that all the 1.0 stuff goes away.
This smells to me like many similar panics in our community when some project goes to relicense and people don't generally understand that the relicense only applies going forward, because in general you can't retroactively relicense an open license. (There are nuances to that statement which I'm skipping over, but I'd say that's the most correct short summary. The thing that people think is happening is not what is happening.) Of course it is still valid to be upset about the relicensing going forward! It just may not be quite as much a kick in the teeth as people think.
Apparently they are. There is some uncertainty about their right to do so. The few lawyers opinions I have read tend to say they probably don’t but it’s not entirely clear cut. Someone would have to go to court for it to be ascertained but I doubt anyone wants to fight Hasbro for some old content generating no revenue.
Its complicated.
The general law of gratuitous licenses (in the US) is that they are revocable at will; terms of the license do not overcome this. Whether the restrictions in a license like this are limitations on the permissions it grants (leaving it gratuitous) or consideration in exchange for permissions (making it a license contract) is not always an easy question.
Further, even if things for which the license has already been uses might be protected, the license text is an offer, and the offer can be withdrawn. This is important, because the OGL 1.0a isn’t sublicensable; every new user making a new work directly licenses all ancestor works under it, rather than sublicensing through the immediate parent.
But, even to the extent it is recovable, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may limit the effect on parties who have already reasonably relied on the promise of irrevocability.
The OGL does explicitly use the phrase "in consideration for", which you'd hope would make this non-gratuitous. Then again, IANAL.
This is like if the names of the functions in the c++ STL (and their argument/return types) was released under gpl, and they came out and "updated" their license to be basically cc-by-sa-nc but worse and also claimed it retroactively applied to the license. It could technically have repercussions to other languages that mirrored the style.
Now the fun question! how much of what was covered by the OGL was actually copyrightable?
Ideas and facts are not copyrightable, arrangement of ideas and facts can be copyrightable with a higher bar of 'creativity', but the barrer to change before it becomes a new 'arrangement' and not covered is also lower.
I cannot imagine this being a big hurdle to videogames from now on, then. It's not that difficult to use entirely different mechanics in a computer RPG, and they had the details anyway. If the world/setting doesn't matter, I can't see how this can affect videogames not set in D&D worlds.
That is, I don't see video gamers rejecting a CRPG because its rules are not based on D&D. They'll get to kill monsters or whatever in Fantasyland, what does it matter that the inner workings are entirely new?
Frostgrave is D20 based and owes nothing to the OGL or D&D.
I think you're right though. No one with eyes on a big audience is going to want to tie their brand to a Wizards product after this decision. Shame.
So Wizard is the class, but the title inside of D&D depends on the school the Wizard specializes in. Much like how we call a "Doctor" also a "Brain Surgeon", the "Wizard" could be an "Enchanter", if they specialize upon memory-rewriting / charming / brain-bending magic. (Ex: Charm Person, Suggestion, Geass, Dominate Person).
But IIRC, there is no "Magician", as you said. But there are Evokers, Universalists, Conjurers, Diviners, Illusionists, Transmuters, Enchanters, Necromancers, and more. There are also Sorcerers (_totally_ different), Witches, Magi, Alchemists, Clerics, Druids.
Frankly, I'm personally surprised that there's no "Magician" yet. Its like someone stepped into D&D and surprisingly guessed at the one word that wasn't actually in the game yet... (The closest word, "Magi" is a "Magus" IIRC, not a "Magician")
1. Medium
2. Seer
3. Conjurer
4. Theurgist
5. Thaumaturgist
6. Magician
7. Enchanter
8. Warlock
9. Sorcerer
10. Necromancer
11. Wizard
12+ Wizard (nth level)
...
16. Wizard (16th level or Mage)
17. Wizard (17th level)
18. Wizard (18th level or Arch-Mage)
If you make all of your money off of books and models in a world full of wikis, web-apps and amateur typesetters, and especially 3D printing, they may worry that their revenue streams will dry up if they don't lock down the IP (which will be something an IP lawyer told them to think).
And now they'll put the idea into people's heads by trying to avoid that situation.
You don't want Matthew Mercer to have Creative Commons on his radar. Or a bunch of voice mail from other publishers who smell blood in the water. You don't want him thinking about ten years of fan donated artwork. Or that he hopes to retire some day and he and his friends can still play RPGs together, built on this world that is now in danger.
Neither did the version of OGL they published their stuff over.
Imagine that the FSF goes crazy and writes a new version of GPL which gives them ius primae noctis, and also in the same new version they state the previous old version is no longer valid. That is the approximate analogy here.
It'd be crazy.
I dont think people expected wizard's to try and interpretation that as something they can try and revoke. But they are trying and it might go to court.
It is my understanding, however, that Pathfinder Second Edition is pretty much a full rewrite and only includes the OGL as a way for third parties to build content around Pathfinder Second Edition.
There are a great deal of adaptations, under the OGL, of the original 'Moldvay' Dungeons and Dragons BECMI rules (Basic and Expert rules from the 80s) and the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules as well.
As it was originally written, backed up by testimony from 'the guys in the room', the orignal OGL was to be considered 'unrevokeable'.
So there are kind of two bad scenarios if Hasbro/Wizards goes ahead with their current plans. One scenario is, OGL 1.1 applies to 'One D&D' and therefore you'd have to sign and abide the 1.1 OGL if you want to build content (and only 'textual printed/pdf content' if I'm reading it right) for 'One D&D'. The worse scenario is that they attempt to revote the 1.0 OGL which basically means a bunch on in-print content evaporates because their publishers do not want to deal with 1.1 OGL.
An extended wrinkle being that 'One D&D' based on their current plans seems to be more of a Edition 5.5 than a new ruleset entirely.
> It is my understanding, however, that Pathfinder Second Edition is pretty much a full rewrite and only includes the OGL as a way for third parties to build content around Pathfinder Second Edition.
Why did Paizo use a license not designed by them? And if they did a full rewrite, are they under any obligation at all to Wizards of the Coast? If they used the OGL to allow third-parties for Pathfinder, not D&D, what does this have to do with WotC? And cannot they simply switch to another license, if 2nd edition is truly a full rewrite?
There's something I'm definitely missing here.
Why do organizations other than the FSF use the GPL?
Edit because fuck this site's rate limits.
> the GPL doesn't put organizations that choose that license at the mercy of the FSF.
IMO the OGL doesn't either - this is really a radical interpretation WotC is testing and Dancey's statements alone - at the time and today - are going to be enough to get the ridiculousness dismissed. (IANAL TINLA, but I do have some ancient - like 2003-era - OGL-published stuff floating around.)
Conversely the idea that you might need to agree to a newer license to get ongoing access to new things - there's a close parallel with the FSF and the GFDL (where I disagreed) and the Tivo/patent clauses in GPL3 (where I agreed). But that has nothing to do with the license per se and everything to do with still wanting what the license holder-author is offering.
The OGL doesn't look much like the GPL. Wizards of the Coast is a business in direct competition to others using the OGL. It's also crazy that something under the OGL falls in WotC's jurisdiction even if it uses no rules or settings from D&D -- I must have misunderstood this because this is simply too crazy to be true.
GNU can and has changed the rules of one of their licenses. Specifically the GFDL 1.3 was released to allow all the wikis licensed under GFDL 1.1+/GFDL1.2+ to migrate to CC-BY-SA.
This is arguably a case of using the power for good, but fear of them using the power for bad is exactly why e.g. Linux is GPLv2-only rather than GPLv2-or-later
If you publish something under an X+ license, aren't you effectively saying "the conditions of this or a later revision apply"? You are willingly choosing to use this version or a later one. So if a later one changes one of the provisions of the prior version, this isn't a retroactive change but something you explicitly wanted when you used version X+. Version X isn't changed at all, it's just that you explicitly said you accepted version X+1 whenever it became available.
Is this the same situation with the OGL and Paizo? Is Pathfinder licensed under OGL version X+? Seems... unwise. Not like the GPL or whatever, because the GPL is not aimed at restricting your business success and is not designed by your direct business competitor!
Yes.
There are two reasons for this, one is that the first edition of pathfinder had to be, because it used material from D&D 3.5, and then the second edition didn't want to break compatibility with the first edition's ecosystem, and the second is it would violate the copyright of the OGL itself to use a modified version without an "or later version" clause. The same would be true for the GPL, except the GPL expressly provides a mechanism to choose to use the or later clause or not.
In hindsight, it looks like a terrible decision for Pathfinder to have accepted those terms. Had I been then, I would have made an entirely new game "in the spirit" of 3.5 but starting from scratch. I guess they opted for the more appealing route of trying to more directly appeal to disgruntled fans or D&D, and now they are facing the downsides of that. It sucks, agreed.
I guess this is a lesson about the risks of trying to ride another company's success instead of making your own thing. And yes, it happens with software as well.
(I'm still not convinced this will affect companies/games using the OGL for things entirely unrelated to D&D. That'd be surreal!)
The most reasonable opinion I have read on this is that Paizo themselves are not entirely convinced the second edition can be legally seen as an untainted full rewrite and use the OGL out of precaution.
They should be able to relicense but Hasbro might sue them arguing that actually the licensing situation isn’t that clear.
Why would they when there's a well-known and (before recent events) fully trusted license already established within the community?
Even if all the actors in this dramedy are profit-driven businesses, I can't wrap my head around the OGL not being driven by a consortium. How on earth does WotC have final say?
In any case, they are probably regretting it now. I hope this sets a precedent.
Microsoft also publishes software under open-source licenses [0]. The license is short and well-understood, it's not like a large piece of software that might contain backdoors. Also, people trust(-ed) that license.
> If you can do a major rules rewrite [...], surely you have the know-how to design your own license?
Yes, but you'd just end up with a similarly worded license that people don't know. Why spend that money?
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but I can easily see why they decided against that. Also, Paizo is probably sufficiently funded by now that suing them is a bit dangerous for WotC, as they risk a bad precedent.
[0] Which are not necessarily competitors, but might also not be friendly towards MS.
Until not that long ago, Microsoft considered open source licenses a "cancer". While they have changed their stance since then, I'm sure they did some major risk assessment and have safeguards in place of the kind a company like Paizo simply isn't capable of. More importantly, the core MS line of products isn't licensed with a license they don't control.
"Not necessarily competitors" makes all the difference here! This is not a minor detail, but a major one. Look at how Wizards of the Coast is framing the issue, and I quote them [0]:
> “the Open Game License was always intended to allow the community to help grow D&D and expand it creatively. It wasn’t intended to subsidize major competitors, especially now that PDF is by far the most common form of distribution.”
and
> “OGL wasn’t intended to fund major competitors and it wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming. We are updating the OGL in part to make that very clear.”
[0] source: https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-ga...
Not necessarily. In software we have the MIT license. Anyone can freeze any version of the product and use/distribute it freely in perpetuity regardless of whatever relicensing may happen later to other versions.
It sounds like the OGL was written in that spirit. Whether its legal language will back that up in court, maybe we'll find out.
When you release software under an open source license such as those, you are not using a license designed and solely controlled by your business competitor!
The OGL situation would be like Microsoft releasing Windows under a license designed and solely controlled by Apple.
I see the new management of Wizards of the Coast as now arguing that "the OGL was never meant to fund competitors [to D&D's owners]". It seems they are echoing my sentiments!
Whether what they are attempting is lawful is besides the issue: what matters is that Paizo and whoever wouldn't be at risk had they not chosen a license designed by -- and completely controlled by -- their business competition!
Of course, but that's not what happens when you use someone else's license at all. And no, whoever used OGL with their project is not at any risk at all - unless they used or made derivative works of existing WotC's content licensed under OGL, in which case they had no other choice than to use OGL anyway.
> Of course, but that's not what happens when you use someone else's license at all. And no, whoever used OGL with their project is not at any risk at all - unless they used or made derivative works of existing WotC's content licensed under OGL, in which case they had no other choice than to use OGL anyway.
Other people in this comments section are arguing otherwise! Whose interpretation should I trust? Yours? Theirs? Wizards'?
The issue with Pathfinder is that it was a derivative work of D&D, and although it has been rewritten since it's not clear whether the rewrite still is or not. If it is, then it couldn't be licensed on anything else than OGL and may be affected by OGL 1.1; if it's not, then it's simply unaffected by OGL 1.1 (or at least not in a way that will cause any troubles), since it's not up to WotC to decide how is this work being licensed.
Yes, they are. Use CTRL+F to find out. People here are arguing this can be interpreted to impact even games that are unrelated to D&D mechanics or setting. People are freaking out in a sense that would seem disproportionate if this only affected Paizo.
Also, please read the open letter mentioned in the link.
Of course, feel free to argue with them (either the commenters here or with the authors of the letter) if you want, but please not with me: I'm the one asking questions, not offering explanations.
To guard myself from such situation, I'd have to state that I'm licensing it under OGL 1.0a only, at a cost of potentially making it incompatible with content released on a future version of the license - just like some GPL projects do (most notably Linux, which is GPLv2-only).
> I'm the one asking questions, not offering explanations.
And I'm offering explanations :)
Maybe, but a license is just an agreement between two parties on how they can use a copyrighted work. And in the original text, there was no means for WotC to revoke the license from other companies. It would be like if you released software using GPL2, then the GNU project released GPL3 which was much more restrictive, required you to pay rms for any software you release and tried to claim that anything licensed with GPL2 was now licensed with GPL3. You'd think that crazy, and nobody would be asking you why you released software with a license you didn't design.
Yes, but that's not so hard to imagine, it's basically:
Imagine the GPL is issued by a for-profit company not an ideological nonprofit, and imagine the “X or any later versiom” clause is replaced by or “Any authorized version clause”, and imagine that the for-profit company decides that the use of the older versions are contrary to its existing interests?
Heck, there is a reason that even as it is written, and even with the FSF being a nonprofit with a stable ideology, some people, when licensing their own work, usd GPLvWhatever without the or-any-later version clause.
The FSF doesn't compete with your business and doesn't want a cut of your business.
Moreover, if you are going to use a license designed by a competing business for your main line of products (e.g. Pathfinder) you better make sure your competitor is not the sole arbiter of that license! A consortium of businesses would make more sense.
No? This kind of thing happens all the time with various kinds of contracts, e.g. in finance if one bank comes up with some kind of instrument most of their competitors will try to follow the same thing. It's like asking why would you use a file format designed by a direct business competitor.
The bank analogy also doesn't match. A closer analogy would be if your bank must use their competitor's installations and infrastructure, and risk bankruptcy whenever the competitor thinks they don't want to lend them their installations anymore.
Using your direct competitor's license, fully under their control, is closer to handing them the keys to your company for no obvious benefit, right?
No it isn't? The license is just the contractual agreement. Like, I'm not sure if the second bank to offer overnight repurchase agreements literally copied the first one's contract and just changed their name, but they certainly could've, and that's been normal practice with some newer financial products.
> Using your direct competitor's license, fully under their control, is closer to handing them the keys to your company for no obvious benefit, right?
No, not at all? How is it "under their control"? They can publish a new version of it but that has nothing to do with you unless you want it to.
> No, not at all? How is it "under their control"? They can publish a new version of it but that has nothing to do with you unless you want it to.
It is under their control because they are the only ones that can modify, add or remove provisions to the license. This is like a file format where only one company can determine the standard: it sucks for everyone else! At best you're playing catch-up, at worst the owner can bar you from using the format. A consortium would be less risky.
And apparently the current situation shows it was very risky indeed!
Hold on, we're just talking about the license, aren't we? I thought the question was about why they were using the OGL, which is very much just the legalese/contract.
Some people seem to think the OGL is the "blood" of these third party companies, without which their business model doesn't exist. Surprisingly -- but I have trouble believing this -- some think OGL-licensed games are at risk even if they are unrelated to the D&D franchise and its gameplay mechanics (I hope this is just a misunderstanding!).
But let's say this is just legalese. Does it seem wise to let your core product be sold under contractual terms defined by your direct business competitor, which by their own admission has no interest in "funding the competition"? (they've been quoted saying this).
I think it's probably fine. Like, if WotC is willing to sell their product on these terms, it's probably safe for me to sell my product on the same terms, especially if we're direct competitors. Obviously there's a risk, but there's a risk in not competing too. Compare price matching.
Lawyers cost money.
> And if they did a full rewrite, are they under any obligation at all to Wizards of the Coast?
The theory is that they are not.
> If they used the OGL to allow third-parties for Pathfinder, not D&D, what does this have to do with WotC?
People point out that the PF2 works have OGL licenses.
I'm sure we'll all find out in the coming weeks/months
Does OGL 1.1 mean that /all/ branches are affected?
The software equivalent would be if the FSF found some sneaky legalese, and came out with a hostile GPL 5 and simultaneously invalidated all previous versions of the GPL. Thus rendering everyone pre-v5 unable to publish going forward, with the only recourse to “upgrade” to the new version.
It’s sick, and likely not legal, but in the D&D example Hasbro have a much bigger legal team than the people they are trying to bully. So the threat of a potentially expensive lawsuit to force small fish into a legally dubious license.
I don't know their exact reasoning, but I always add licenses when publishing software I write, and they always are ones I didn't design (because I've never written a license myself). I don't think it's that crazy to use an established license that seems to be working well in a community you'd like to emulate when trying to launch you're own; I doubt Paizo had any more idea than the rest of us that WotC would pull something like this.
> And if they did a full rewrite, are they under any obligation at all to Wizards of the Coast? If they used the OGL to allow third-parties for Pathfinder, not D&D, what does this have to do with WotC? And cannot they simply switch to another license, if 2nd edition is truly a full rewrite?
My (admittedly primitive) understanding of licensing was that once something was released publicly with an indefinite license, it generally wouldn't be possible to retract that later. The copyright holder can change licenses as they see fit, but nobody will be bound by the new license unless they accept it or use a new version of the product that doesn't offer the old license. This leads me to theorize that one of a few things could be going on here:
1. The new version of the OGL (1.1) disallows you to continue using the old version (1.0) once you start using something with it. If this turns out to be the case, then people would be able to continue using the materials as-is at the last point where the OGL 1.0 was offered, but they wouldn't be able to use any future changes without accepting version 1.1 as a replacement for all of the preexisting content as well. WotC might have only intended this, but due to poor communications and/or wording in the license change, people got worried and then the narrative got out of control 2. The license works like I described in option 1 due to WotC knowing that they can't actually retroactively change the license for people already using it, but they intentionally obfuscated this to try to scare people into switching to using the new version even if they shouldn't technically have to * The license does actually a say that it's overriding the previous one, which is not actually something a license is supposed to be able to. WotC either doesn't realize this or is hoping that in a legal battle they either can either prolong it to starve their opponents of resources or manage to convince a judge to rule against the existing consensus and establish a new precedent.
I think that option 2 is the most likely by a slight margin, but I might be biased as someone who played PF1 and now plays PF2. Option 3 would be the scariest to me given that a prolonged legal battle seems like it would be the most insulated from public opinion, which I think is mostly against the new license right now.
I understand this, but you don't use licenses designed by your business competitors whose main product is in direct competition to your own. The analogy here would be Microsoft using a license designed by Apple for Windows and MS Office! Or whatever their major line of products is nowadays.
A software platform is not a license. But also, Apple moved to GCP, problem solved. This doesn't seem to be the same situation as Paizo's, is it?
It also doesn't change the fact that Wizards could argue they have an OGL v1.0a+ license, and use OGL v1.1 to put pathfinder 1e srd on their new vtt without paying paizo for example
If I were Paizo I would sever Pathfinder entirely from the OGL, especially if they rewrote their game from scratch, and ask modules writers to switch to the new licensing. But what do I know?
Let's imagine a scenario:
1. Paizo releases Pathfinder 1E. It's uses material from D&D 3.5 SRD which requires it to use the OGL.
2. A third party releases a campaign for pathfinder 1E. It uses material from pathfinder 1E which requires it to use the OGL
3. Paizo releases Pathfinder 2E. They change to CC BY-SA for their open components.
4. I now want to update that campaign to the 2E rules. But the original campaign publication insists I must use OGL, and Pathfinder 2E insists I use CC BY-SA and now I cannot.
I think a mix of (a) the scenario above, (b) legal CYA in case it was found Pathfinder 2E was too close to 3.5e material and (c) using what they're used to led to the decision to continue to use OGL for Pathfinder 2E.
All the "fun" of software licensing, only for pen and paper games. It's like we are already in hell.
I understand the dedication to 3.5 - it was years, if not decades of experience, commitment, and buy in. It can’t be helped to see the several editions since as desperate effort to get more sales from WoTC
5E and Pathfinder are the local optima. Most players say that if you want a "3.5-ish" system, you should do Pathfinder 1.0 instead. If you want a proper simplification of the system, 5E is far superior to 4E.
I have friends who enjoy 4E by the way. But they are in the gross minority. Almost everyone I know who has played 4E agrees with me that it oversimplified the game. Yes, 3.5 was too complex, but 4E overcorrected. 5E found a better simplicity vs flexibility location for most players.
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3.5 is fun because almost all the bonuses multiply with each other. So you can string together huge, multiplicative bonuses that stacks in convoluted manners. (Ex; Enlarge Person not only is +2 to STR, but also +2 Damage Dice, so your 2d6 greatsword becomes 3d6 damage). This multiplicatively stacks with Keen Weapon, Inspire Courage, Greater Heroism, Bull Strength, +5 Magic Weapon and more.
But it also makes 3.5 very "sharp". If you fail to see the multiplicative bonuses, you feel very underpowered and fall behind the damage curve.
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5th Edition / Pathfinder 2.0 reduce the multiplicative bonuses, but still have hugely unique feeling classes where everyone feels like they have a role to play in the party. It really is a happier medium.
As such, most players today ignore 4.0. If you want simplicity, 5e is "simple enough".
If you just want to perform improv-roleplay out some scenarios, then Dread is probably the best. The only action the players do is:
1. Pull piece out of the Jenga Tower
2. Roleplay the result (success == You succeeded at the current situation. Tower-falls == you die).
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There's better systems out there (aka: Dread) if you really just wanted simplicity. World of Darkness is probably the more mainstream "simple / roleplay heavy" game of importance. (Dread is perhaps overly simple, but that's the point of it. Its basically improv / roleplaying simulator and that alone)
D&D, for all of its faults, is a fully specified battle simulator. It doesn't mean that everything makes sense (what were the grapple rules again?), but most everything has been thought out, and what "should happen" is often written down somewhere.
On the other hand, many people prefer improv / rules-free systems (like Dread, or World of Darkness to a lesser extent).
Anyway, there's plenty of other games. But the niche of D&D is the well specified set of rules of how magic and physical interact with each other. (This magical force field has X HP and 30 Hardness, interacting with your Adamantine sword that ignores hardness 20 and less, etc. etc.)
Still I’m firmly in the camp of those thinking D&D focus a lot of attention to the insanely boring and uninteresting part of role playing - aka how a sword interacts with a magic shield in excruciatingly tedious mathematical details - and very little attention to what’s actually fun which is, well, playing a role.
I think its rules, its prevalence and the fact it’s mostly played in somewhat bland heroic fantasy settings have been a major turndown for a lot of people who would actually enjoy roleplaying so in a way I guess I should celebrate anything making it less popular.
Roleplayers are here for the improv / acting.
Rollplayers are here for the combat. D&D absolutely is combat focused.
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Lets take an example: When a Wizard casts Disintegrate, and a friendly Druid casts "Wall of Stone" to block it, what should happen? Are you interested in debating / improvising the result? Do you want it to be defined?
Improv players want this to be ill-defined. They want to make something up, depending on the current situation / feel of the game. If its a big boss fight and the Wizard is the evil big bad guy, maybe the Disintegrate goes through and hits the players. If its just some mook, maybe its a "weaker disintegrate" and gets blocked by the stone wall.
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This is terrible for combat / tacticians. A tactician wants to know that Disintegrate _always_ makes exactly a "one 10-foot cube" hole in the stone structure (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/disintegrate.htm), and always counters-and-dispels Force effects. Because the tactics + interactions have been agreed upon ahead of time, it means that the tactics of the game are focused. Its a battle closer to chess, or perhaps war-simulators / war-gaming, where you need to know what interacts with what, and how, to proceed.
You can't just make stuff up in a war-simulator. They need to have pre-defined actions. Knowing that this level 5 spell (Wall of Stone) can effectively counter a level 6 Disintegrate is an oddity in the hierarchy of magic (usually, you need an equal, or higher-level spell to counter other magic). But taking advantage of resource-management (they spend level 6 spell, you spend level 5 spell, so you have more resources left over afterwards) is just part of the game.
Alas, that's not how games work. Someone casts "Insanity", can it be removed with Dispel Magic? What about Antimagic Field? What happens if you kill the person, then resurrect them, do they come back with the insanity effect?
The story must go on. You either decide that you want it ill specified (ie: whoever improvs the best gets the decision), or you have a rulebook that carefully lays out the interactions.
You don't have to know the interactions. Simply knowledge that millions of other players have come across this game, and have likely already come across this situation and have analyzed the rules + made a decision is enough.
No person wants to memorize rulebooks. But we dungeon masters do so to ensure fairness in our decisions. If someone doesn't like the ruling, i can always point out the rulebook (or if not the rules, then an online discussion of a similar situation) that will settle the debate.
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Because if you know a thing about players, they will try everything to "Just for flavor, have that +5 Magic Sword on their Gorilla because its awesome" (when they really just want to roll more damage than everyone else in the party).
If I let the Druid effectively have twice the magic items of everyone and letting his pet-gorilla play a Fighter, then everyone else loses (because there's no way they can keep up with the damage output of a Gorilla using weapons locked to martial class). Martial weapons are locked to martial classes for a reason: those classes lose spellcasting but gain more damage to gain another role (the damage-dealing role) to play in this game.
In effect: the 1d8 fists of a Gorilla are there and balanced against the needs of everyone else. The Druid + Pet-Gorilla already play with two turns per... turn. They're already considered quite strong in the game, I as the dungeon master, need to know where "too much damage" starts to seep in and where "Improv rulebreaking" can start making the Druid stupidly overpowered.
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I've played with lots of "Improv" people. Even with their best interests at heart, the game innately becomes a "Lemme bullshit my own powers to be better than everyone else's, so that I'm the star of this show".
Maybe you don't do it, but *someone* in the group always tries to do this. You need to cut them down and restrict them so that their power level remains roughly on the same level as everyone else in the party. Knowing the limitations of spells, as well as the limitations of weapons, is a good starting point to ensuring fairness at the table.
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Going back to the top. Insanity is 7th level and is explicitly stated that only 7th level spells and above (like Limited Wish) can remove it. Trying to bullshit a 3rd level spell (Dispel Magic) into removing Insanity means that the Wizards / Sorcerers become overpowered, relative to the abilities of everyone else. You have to make them spend a 7th level slot to heal this particular curse.
Plenty of games work this way thankfully.
What you describe after is hell. That’s exactly what I hate about RPG. You don’t have to care about balancing power level and people “bullshiting“ their powers if your game simply doesn’t have these mechanics. I don’t want to have to play through a detailed combats ever especially in a heroic fantasy setting. That’s as far removed from fun a situation as I can imagine.
It’s interesting because our discussion makes it obvious that there are entirely orthogonal way of enjoying RPG with next to no overlap.
D&D is not only tedious to me, it's also a "mechanicist" (for lack of a better word) approach to fantasy. It's rules-based rather than fun-based. It doesn't tell a story, it tells how spell X interacts with weapon Y and how to read charts and stats. A fight in movies doesn't happen like that, the flow and thrill is entirely different.
I'm ok rolling dice, it's fun! But give me a result fast and make it narratively meaningful, nothing breaks immersion like arguing whether a level 35 Pastamancer can cast Fireball against a level 5 shield of enchanted wood.
If we look at real life games, such as Fencing... and less "combat" like games, like Football or Baseball, we end up with huge rule systems to fairly resolve conflicts.
One can say "I just want to throw a ball and have fun". But there is no _GAME_ here. If you want to play "Basketball", and get good at "Basketball", it becomes very important to define a foul.
Same thing in the D&D world. You may not necessarily have to define what is or isn't a foul in your games, but should combat grow intense and adversarial, then it becomes a necessity.
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But as I said before: if you want to just roleplay, Dread is there for that. There's a reason why other games systems exist.
But I bust out D&D when I want to (and when my players want to) have a complex system of magical spells interact with each other, in a well defined manner. That's still flexible enough for story to be pulled out of it.
I disagree about your sports analogy. D&D is the worst possible engine to simulate the fast paced flow of a sports game.
Or a fight. It's a mechanistic simulation, way too emphasis on interactions between low level rules. It's like attempting to design a good soccer game by writing lots of rules about the physics of the ball, how each bristle of the grass interacts with the ball, how the materials of the shoe affect the kick -- and all of this must be consulted in several charts every time there is a kick!
A wargame designer I know once put it like this: if your rules take an hour of play to simulate something that in real life only takes a few minutes, you are doing something wrong.
> The story must go on. You either decide that you want it ill specified (ie: whoever improvs the best gets the decision), or you have a rulebook that carefully lays out the interactions.
> You don't have to know the interactions. Simply knowledge that millions of other players have come across this game, and have likely already come across this situation and have analyzed the rules + made a decision is enough.
You need a way to resolve conflicts. But that doesn't need to be some kind of zillion-layer spell simulation game (and in fact I'd argue that that just lends itself to its own kind of bullshitting, where people find ways to do things like the peasant railgun or locate city nuke).
> Going back to the top. Insanity is 7th level and is explicitly stated that only 7th level spells and above (like Limited Wish) can remove it. Trying to bullshit a 3rd level spell (Dispel Magic) into removing Insanity means that the Wizards / Sorcerers become overpowered, relative to the abilities of everyone else. You have to make them spend a 7th level slot to heal this particular curse.
OK so why bother having specific named spells with specific mechanics? Just say that guy's a level 7 wizard so his spell has strength 7+d6, my guy's a level 3 wizard so my spell has strength 3+d6, we make our rolls and the explanation of what happens (he bewitches my mate to make him insane and I try to dispel it) is purely flavour? That's no less objective, no less easy to be fair about (in fact it gives me far fewer avenues to try and bullshit you), but it doesn't require us to go memorize a textbook's worth of spell names and interactions.
Think about how you as a DM resolve non-combat conflicts in D&D - I want to persude the King's council to do this, another party member wants to blackmail the chancellor to vote against me - something that's a far more interesting part of most RPG games than "the party kills all the orcs". Why isn't that worth simulating in all this mechanical detail? Or is it that simulating it in such detail wouldn't actually enhance the experience? Then why not treat combat the same way?
Which doesn't exist in the game. When the last peasant lets go of the object, it falls to the grown on the same square as the peasant.
It only becomes "bullshit", when the improv player comes in and argues that because the object traveled 500-squares in less than 5-seconds, it must be going at X speed or Y momentum and carries forward.
But that's just bullshit. There's nothing in 3.5 that discusses "momentum", or "acceleration". It is "It is a move action to hand an object to another player". That's the rule.
People who mess with shenanigans are the problem, including peasant railgunners.
This is very much not an improv-player attitude IME; improv-players mostly want in-genre things to happen. When you simulate the nuts and bolts, you're more likely to attract the kind of player who sees that as an abstract puzzle to optimize and does so.
(And I note you skipped the Locate City nuke, I guess because that does work in-game? Fundamentally rule-based magic systems tend to be exploitable, because if you want the kind of things that fictional magic does in-genre to be possible, you have to make your magic be able to do impossible things, but the rules that allow that will tend to allow other impossible things which are more min-maxable).
> People who mess with shenanigans are the problem, including peasant railgunners.
Sure. My point is that adding more detailed mechanics does nothing to deter that; quite the opposite.
Hardly. Everyone likes to pretend "they're just in it for the story", but in my experience, they just want to give themselves advantages in my experience.
> And I note you skipped the Locate City nuke
3.5 is known to be pretty busted. I'm not aware of this sequence of events being possible in Pathfinder, which is my preferred crunch.
There are certainly busted things in Pathfinder (see Summoner). But upon recognition, I talk with the player and we work something out. (see Summoner Unchained).
If something is busted and truly too much for the system to handle, I stomp down as dungeon master. That's my duty above all, to ensure fairness in the game.
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EDIT: Looking at the Locate City Nuke, it seems like the problem is solved if I just ban the Snowcasting metamagic feat from Frostburn.
In general, my rule is: Do the players want me (the Dungeon Master), using the trick? If so, I use it on them. If not, then its banned. Generally speaking, I, as the dungeon master, can take advantage of these things far more than they can. So its in their best interests to keep the shenanigans in check.
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Honestly, the "Locate City Nuke" sounds like a fun adventure setting, now that I read up on it. Its a complicated set of 7 metamagics applied to one level 1 spell
The players, unlikely would be using this tactic, because its an evil action (indiscriminate killing).
If this were "crunchier", and closer to level 5 or 4 spell, yeah, that's a problem. But with this much metamagic needed to make Locate City into an actual problem (plus the need for a very specific Sorcerer / class build to serve as "The Ritual focus"), "Locate City Nuke" follows the pattern of Magical McGuffin (Wizard tries to steal a Princess/Sorceror named Elsa, who has innate connection to Ice Magic) who then stacks 7x kinds of Metamagic to build a particular spell into devestating power.
Alternatively, I patch "Locate City" so that it has no "Area" but only a "Range". Dungeon Masters are allowed to patch spells after all.
Meh, at some point the only solution is "get better players". I've had if anything the opposite problem, with players who enjoy doing a dramatic death scene so much that they'd rush to these moments of sacrifice and loss even when they weren't really necessary. Improv-oriented players as I know them enjoy telling a story and are there for that; the problem you get is every player trying to hog the narrative spotlight (often with their moments of tragic suffering) rather than every player trying to be more powerful than the others.
If your players are anything like my players, they'll cast Dominate Person on the King's Council. I'll have to note with them that the King's Council are elite and therefore expected to have Mind Blank, offering them immunity to their attempts.
They can work with persuasion, but if they are under the effect of Glibness, the King's Wizard would be able to see Glibness as an aura. The King's Paladin may use Zone of Truth to counteract the effects of Glibness, or maybe point out Glibness as "cheating" in the King's Court.
(Mind Blank doesn't help vs Glibness. Glibness simply makes the party's Bard's lies more believable. Its not an actual enchantment upon the King's Court, but instead a "buff" given to the Bard. So additional levels of security for the King's Guard are needed.)
As such, the battle of spells, trust, and other such interactions becomes a game. How well have the players prepared for the social encounter? Are they trying to use spells to "cheat"? How are the king's guards, Wizards, and Clerics trying to prevent the cheating?
Should I let the players get away with cheating? Well, I don't decide. I let the dice decide. As well as the rules that the game are around.
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Maybe the party is able to successfully hide the Glibness through some means. If they thought through their attempts to +40 Bluff check to convince the King's court of their intentions, I will grant them the +40 bluff check.
But if their Glibness / attempts at cheating are discovered, I'll grant a heavy penalty (-15) to their interactions for the rest of court.
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Players _WILL_ attempt to cheat (aka: use a spell to "solve") social encounters. This is just part of the game, and part of the fun. Are you, the dungeon master, ready to offer them a proper game of wits and preparation?
> OK so why bother having specific named spells with specific mechanics? Just say that guy's a level 7 wizard so his spell has strength 7+d6, my guy's a level 3 wizard so my spell has strength 3+d6, we make our rolls and the explanation of what happens (he bewitches my mate to make him insane and I try to dispel it) is purely flavour? That's no less objective, no less easy to be fair about (in fact it gives me far fewer avenues to try and bullshit you), but it doesn't require us to go memorize a textbook's worth of spell names and interactions.
Notice the above interactions. Glibness, despite level 3, avoids the Mind Blank preparation. Mind Blank does protect vs the more direct forms of enchantment (ex: Suggestion, Dominate Person, Geass), but it isn't a complete defense for the King's guard.
Of course, maybe the King's Dragon simply casts Anti-magic field and negates all magical preparations for the encountrer.
Note that Artifacts (aka: items from god) are immune vs mortal magic, and are one able to avoid the effects of Anti-magic field. This is where the DM has an opportunity to override the rules of the system and provide a story. (You can, at any time, "win the bullshit" fest by declaring an item a special artifact).
But you want to ensure that if you ever do declare a god-level artifact in play, that the players "saw it coming" to an extent (foreshadowing), or otherwise works in your story.
This is far more tactical, and even story-driven, than rolling a d6 and saying "my dice was higher than yours therefore I win".
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A skilled DM will also do this when its story-appropriate. I would _NEVER_ have an Orc-King's court pull these shenanigans (outside of maybe one Half-Orc Cleric who the players would be familiar with). But the opposite problem may happen, the Orc-King, upon losing an argument to skill alone, may claim the adventurers were cheating at the argument/debate through magic and it'd be up to the players to prove (to a non-magical being) that they were in fact, not using magic.
Etc. etc.
With skill, you can setup good stories more easily through these interactions.
> Players _WILL_ attempt to cheat (aka: use a spell to "solve") social encounters. This is just part of the game, and part of the fun. Are you, the dungeon master, ready to offer them a proper game of wits and preparation?
> This is far more tactical, and even story-driven, than rolling a d6 and saying "my dice was higher than yours therefore I win".
Yes and no. You can offer the players a tactical game of spells, but to the extent that you folow the standard rules this is inherently an abstract puzzle, not really any more attached to the story than rolling a die. Some players enjoy puzzling out a magic system, but many do not. And to the extent that you make it depend on story-relevant artifacts, the rules framework isn't really helping you set things up.
How do the players "win" or "solve" the puzzle? Either they make the sensible, competent, mainstream move - which is fine, but not really narratively relevant and not worth spending a lot of time on - or they find a loophole in your magic system (or in the border between your magic system and common sense), which will almost certainly be against narrative and genre, and you'll have to either allow it or disallow it and either one is pretty unsatisfying - or they notice specifics of the story you've been foreshadowing - something you can do just as well without a standard mechanical magic system. (Yes, if you're very skilled then maybe you can work with the logic-puzzle approach and create an artifact which interacts in a novel way with some standard spell, and the player spots a way to use that that you intended. But more likely they spot a different, more powerful interaction than the one you meant for them to, and then we're back to finding a loophole in the magic system).
> With skill, you can setup good stories more easily through these interactions.
Maybe. In my experience even in genre fiction the best stories aren't, and shouldn't, really be about the magic or the tactics - they're about the deep human themes, trust, betrayal, arrogance and all that Shakespearean stuff. Gandalf fighting the Balrog isn't about him realising that Moria stone was carved by the dwarves and would be vulnerable to magic, it's about him realising that this enemy is undefeatable and sacrificing himself for the sake of his fellows.
The best and most satisfying way for a player to "win" or "solve" a scenario, IME, is a) for them to notice setting or character details that they can exploit (maybe the younger prince is jealous of the elder? Maybe the chancellor is obeying the tenets of a less-popular faith that a party member has ties to?) or b) them to come up with something creative that I hadn't thought of but that is still genre-appropriate and sufficiently "realistic". And I don't think a detailed mechanics system helps a lot with either of those, because at the end of the day either the detailed mechanics system gives you an answer that lines up with common sense or it gives you one that doesn't, and either way it's not helping much.
Through fun, ultimately. Maybe its fun if they don't win.
So they try something, they fail. Its just a social encounter, now the King's guard is distrustful of them and the story continues. No biggie, I can handle that as a dungeon master.
Win or lose, the story continues. The importance is that the players have agency in the process, as well as knowing the limits of their own powers and capabilities.
> The best and most satisfying way for a player to "win" or "solve" a scenario, IME, is a) for them to notice setting or character details that they can exploit (maybe the younger prince is jealous of the elder? Maybe the chancellor is obeying the tenets of a less-popular faith that a party member has ties to?) or b) them to come up with something creative that I hadn't thought of but that is still genre-appropriate and sufficiently "realistic". And I don't think a detailed mechanics system helps a lot with either of those, because at the end of the day either the detailed mechanics system gives you an answer that lines up with common sense or it gives you one that doesn't, and either way it's not helping much.
Or they could just... ya know... beat me (the Dungeon Master / chief antagonist) in the game. Or defeat the foes that I've laid out before them.
Generally speaking, social encounters shouldn't be high risk. The high-risk actions in my experience should be combat. If the players die, they know trouble will happen as the bad guys move forward and wreck the kingdom or whatever.
> Maybe. In my experience even in genre fiction the best stories aren't, and shouldn't, really be about the magic or the tactics - they're about the deep human themes, trust, betrayal, arrogance and all that Shakespearean stuff. Gandalf fighting the Balrog isn't about him realising that Moria stone was carved by the dwarves and would be vulnerable to magic, it's about him realising that this enemy is undefeatable and sacrificing himself for the sake of his fellows.
I don't need a story to play Axis and Allies, Chess, Go, or a myriad of other games though. When playing an adversarial game with my friends, its not about story. Its about combat and adversaries.
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I'm not here to offer Puzzles to my players btw. As the Dungeon Master, I also explain the rules before major decisions are made.
Especially to a new Wizard (who must select spells before the adventuring day begins), the "game" is about which spells the Wizard should select. We all know the Wizard could, theoretically, handle everything. But the issue is that the Wizard must "foresee" the use of all of these spells.
I know Wizards can solve Insanity with Limited Wish. I make sure the players know that. I also point out other curses (Flesh to Stone, Bestow Curse), and their counter-effects. Etc. etc.
Its not about tricking the players or puzzling them. Its about having them have to think about the decisions that they make (ie: which spells to pick).
> The importance is that the players have agency in the process, as well as knowing the limits of their own powers and capabilities.
Sure; my point was: what is it that makes the difference between the players winning or losing? If it's about whether they spotted (narratively relevant) connections, understood things, had good ideas, that's interesting. If it's about whether they had a clever leap of genre-appropriate logic, that's interesting. If it's about whether they solved an abstract logic puzzle, that's less interesting; if it's about whether they out-argue you or browbeat you that's deeply uninteresting. But distinguishing between "came up with a clever way to use the detailed abstract magic system" and "came up with some bullshit" is, if anything, harder than distinguishing between "came up with a clever piece of imaginative improv" and "came up with some bullshit"; better for a powergamer to come up with something stylish and genre-appropriate that benefits them than for them to find some bizarre spell interaction that does something absurd that benefits them.
(If it's about whether they rolled higher or lower that's not really interesting, but it's quick and avoids interrupting the flow, so that's fine for a low-stakes moment. Certainly making one roll for a narratively unimportant encounter is better than making dozens).
> Generally speaking, social encounters shouldn't be high risk. The high-risk actions in my experience should be combat.
Why? D&D pushes you towards doing it that way, but it's not narratively satisfying. Making a lot of dice rolls can give a certain kind of player the illusion that they had agency in winning or losing (particularly important if you want them to accept the death of their character), but in reality it all averages out and who wins a given combat is largely a question of what everyone's stats look like going into it. (Or you allow the players to come up with tactics that you consider clever enough to give them advantages - but then we're back to you having to judge whether they've come up with something good or some bullshit).
> I don't need a story to play Axis and Allies, Chess, Go, or a myriad of other games though. When playing an adversarial game with my friends, its not about story. Its about combat and adversaries.
Right - but roleplaying and adversarial games go poorly together. If a game is adversarial then players have to do mechanically optimal things (and, as you say, will look for every excuse to give their characters a mechanical advantage) rather than the narratively interesting things. Why should a player to try to act in-character when it can only disadvantage them?
Because D&D is a combat board game.
If you want to play roleplaying, try Dread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_(role-playing_game)
> Making a lot of dice rolls can give a certain kind of player the illusion that they had agency in winning or losing (particularly important if you want them to accept the death of their character), but in reality it all averages out and who wins a given combat is largely a question of what everyone's stats look like going into it. (Or you allow the players to come up with tactics that you consider clever enough to give them advantages - but then we're back to you having to judge whether they've come up with something good or some bullshit).
That's like saying Chess or Backgammon isn't satisfying because you're just moving pieces around or rolling dice.
People can love the game itself. Positioning, selection of spells, cooperation with allies. Etc. etc. D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder is a good game at its core.
The same cannot be said of all systems of combat. (IE: World of Darkness). World of Darkness's dice seem more like a randomization element. But then again, this is a roleplaying game, rather than a rollplaying game.
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All the "roleplayer" wants is a random element. Someone to have randomly decided to have been the winner / loser, and then to roleplay the new situation. From this perspective, D&D is counterproductive.
So don't play D&D. Play the myriad of other, roleplay heavy games (like Dread, World of Darkness, Changeling, Vampire, etc. etc.). They're perfectly good games.
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> but it's not narratively satisfying
Don't turn D&D into something it isn't. If you're not satisfied by the combat of D&D, then do not play it. There are plenty of other games that have far better focus on the roleplaying aspect of this genre.
EDIT: Moods shift. Sometimes I feel like combat. I use D&D / Pathfinder / etc. etc. for that. Maybe Ikusa or Axis and Allies as well.
Sometimes I feel like roleplaying. I pull out World of Darkness instead
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Like, if the 400-pages of spell-interactions and obscure flanking rules is counterproductive to your enjoyment of the game... maybe don't choose that system? But I've derived plenty of enjoyment from these systems (3.5, Pathfinder, etc. etc.) so I can say its worthwhile... if you're into it. But don't force yourself to like it if you're not into it...
I enjoy playing Mordenheim-style small squad miniatures combat games (and that's what D&D is at its heart) on occasion. But I've never found a game that can succeed at being both a competitive game and a roleplaying game at the same time (not just RPG-style games, I had this problem with Android the board game too). One can't be a servant of two masters.
> So don't play D&D. Play the myriad of other, roleplay heavy games (like Dread, World of Darkness, Changeling, Vampire, etc. etc.). They're perfectly good games.
Right. You seemed to originally be claiming that having a less mechanically detailed, more roleplay-oriented system inherently made games less balanced and more unfair. "Lemme bullshit my own powers to be better than everyone else's, so that I'm the star of this show" is a problem in fully freeform systems, but you don't need a detailed combat system to resolve it; light systems where conflict is a simple roll (even WoD is a bit heavy for my tastes personally) handle fair conflict resolution just fine. (And I'd argue that they end up being fairer than mechanically heavy systems where the powergamers with min-maxed builds have an advantage over players who just picked a build that felt fun).
I've zero interest in LARP'ing or "acting" my role, but also zero interest in crunchy stats-heavy combat. I prefer light adventures with fast paced combat where not every fart is regulated by a chart. A Frostgrave level of complexity is about right for me; or Risus.
I do find narrative experimental games such as Trophy Dark appealing, but they may require too much from players.
Indeed: there are spells (Phantasmal Killer, Baleful Polymorph, Dominate Person, Power Word Kill, Banishment), that ends combat in a singular turn.
You're right in that 4e combat was much slower and purposeful. I'm... neutral to this. I can say that 3.5 / Pathfinder 1.0 combat is unusually brutal... to a non-intuitive degree. 3.5 / Pathfinder 1.0 heavily relies upon resurrection magic in practice due to its unusual brutality.
It felt like it was designed by people who thought the kids are playing World of Warcraft instead of D&D, and tried to design a game that would appeal to them with similar party roles and a layout of cards in front of you that perhaps would remind you of a WoW inventory with all its timers. The problem with that while the same people might want to play both a table-top RPGs session and raid night, they don't like them for the same reasons.
5e's approach was much smarter: simplify a few annoying things (like level 1 damage), tweak the design and add a bunch of cool stuff, but otherwise just let D&D be D&D and lean on marketing the aesthetic/nostalgia and the ability to play without needing to find someone local to teach it to you and your friends.
1. 13th Age
2. Castles & Crusades
3. Fudge
4. Pathfinder
Note that some of these (e.g. Pathfinder) make use of the D&D base rules and setting (System Reference Document, SRD) covered by the OGL. However, not all the games released under the OGL are tied to elements of the SRD.
The issue with the revocation of the OGL 1.0a license is that it affects all of those games.
Then there are all the publishers (Critical Role, MCDM, etc.) creating settings and campaigns for D&D and related systems under the OGL.
The OGL 1.1 license affects video (like Critical Role's Legends of Vox Machina) and other content. It affects people using Patreon for revenue, and possibly (through mentioning pantomime) things like cosplay on TikTok and Patreon.
The full implications are not fully known, and a lot of this would likely need challenging in court. It also depends on how much WotC/Hasbro are willing to challenge/go after.
How so, if they're not using WotC IP?
Honest question, it seems absurd to me that the can cancel a license and have it affect people who licensed their own IP under those conditions.
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.
The 1.1 license is clear that any content using SRD (System Reference Document) content will be in violation unless they update to the 1.1 license (and thus comply with either OGL 1.1 Commercial, OGL 1.1 Non-Commercial, or the Fan Content license).
The situation around non-SRD OGL content is murkier.
Because if there is a requirement that at anytime an authorized version were to be used, wouldn't the language needed be "you MUST replace it with a newer, authorized version" ?
The concern is that changing that making OGL 1.0a unauthorized (has this already happened to 1.0?) has the effect banning further use of it with new works derived from works originally licensed under it or OGL 1.0 under the terms of ant OGL version (this relies on the any authorized version clause being seen as restrictive, not permissive.)
Its theoretically fixable for non-WotC dependent content, if everyone upstream relicenses under different terms starting from the root, but that's not going to help where creators are out of touch or license compatibility led to WotC content cross pollinating.
I would like to see them try biting into that apple. :) While we know that the origins of the show is in DnD there is nothing in it they could claim copyright over. It is the same as if a shower manufacturer would like to claim an idea I had while showering.
And while the CR team is quite small next to Hasbro, they have Amazon Studios as a producer who could probably lend them firepower.
The hunter also keeps thinking that her pet is useful, which apparently is a thing in PF, but is definitely not in 5e.
As for:
> I would like to see them try biting into that apple. :)
They are already getting a bite of that apple. It's called free advertising, which they've been getting for almost 10 years now and all of the attendant profits from people trying to start their own Critical Role and buying models and books to go along with it.
And in the case of CR, they're also the publishers for some books based on CR, which means they're getting royalties from that as well.
I said this is double-dipping, but it's triple-dipping. It's just greed. Of the same sort we often have to deal with here, where something is done to build a community and then the bean counters try to figure out how to maximize profits. This isn't just bad for WotC or RPGs, things like this continue to set precedents that every company is lying to you and any outreach project is just about getting free labor.
I really don't see how they can "revoke" the OGL on non-WoTC games.
Maybe Wizbro is mad that they're not getting any of the money that youtube and roll20 are taking in, but pulling a Nintendo seems completely counterproductive, since youtube and streamers are basically advertising D&D and helping newcomers learn how to play the game, and roll20 expands the group of players who can play (and also enabled groups to continue - or start - during the pandemic!)
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.
Pathfinder does not use Forgotten Realms or any other WotC setting, afaik.
And Pathfinder 2nd edition is no longer based on the D&D rules.
I assume these games will just slightly tweak the formula: use D30s instead of D20, change some class names, and so on. It's exceptionally hard to robustly copyright and enforce mathematics, but WotC's lawyers probably pose a significant enough threat to scare away developers.
1. for example: https://www.gog.com/en/game/pathfinder_kingmaker_explorer_ed...
It's the specifics of D&D's implementation where you need a license. You'd certainly need to develop your own feats, spells (and not just change the names!). You'd need new classes, or at least major changes (no re-using the level progressions or traits).
You'd need to play test the new variants because changes would be large enough to require new balncing.
All in all not a trivial modification.
My understanding is that this is where things get tricky: realistically WotC probably can't go after anyone that creates an ability that is mechanically identical to DnD ability. Things like spell names, might be, but "fireball" is far too general to be copyrighted. But what about a spell called "fireball" that also has the same mechanics? That's where things can get complicated.
So what if they just doubled all HP values and damage values, and changed any names that are not unambiguously generic ("invisibility", "fireball", etc.) ? Damage values no longer overlap, and spell names are different. On what basis does WotC have to claim infringement?
I think you can. I don't think copyright covers gameplay mechanisms, it just covers the actual text of the rules. As long as you don't copy the actual text describing D&D's arcane missile, you can have it in your game. But IANAL.
The problem is making a whole spellbook with a one-to-one correspondence to WoTC's spellbook, even if each of those entries has been modified. The spellbook is more than just a bunch of separate spells - it's a collection carefully designed for balanced gameplay and has protection in itself. See [1] for one way that "compilations" can be treated as having more rights.
The EU also allows copyright of databases [2], and I think the spell list meets the criteria.
And don't forget you'd also be doing the same thing with races, classes, equipment, monsters, conditions, deities, feats, blah blah blah. Put together I think it's pretty likely to be infringing somewhere! Certainly enough that a lawsuit isn't getting dismissed.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf [2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...
Spells and classes names cannot be used if they are trademarked, right? But if WotC didn't trademark "fireball", "paladin" or "hobgoblin", you can totally use them.
That's what the person you're replying to wrote.
The CEO accidentally CC'ed me (he meant to CC Sean, not Shawn) on a letter from Valve's lawyer threatening us with legal action for copying Beastmaster's mechanics. They had a side-by-side of ours (https://hon.fandom.com/wiki/Tundra) vs theirs (https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/Beastmaster), and pointed out that the mechanics were identical.
It was very surprising. So the answer is "Maybe not, but that won't stop companies from threatening to sue you." Or "Maybe it is, and companies will threaten to sue you." No one really knows, since it hasn't been tested in court.
Nor very important in my experience. I get that it's the most popular system globally, but the popularity seems uneven. Where I grew up people played Warhammer, Legends of 5 rings, vampire masquerade, and some others. I can't remember anyone playing DnD specifically. So... there are larger communities that don't really care about that one.
The brand is so dominant that in any group most of the players will play D&D or they will not play. If you don't have the brand on your 3rd party product then the average number of units you will sell is around zero.
It's not really Windows, D&D is Windows+Apple+Linux and everything else is one of the BSDs.
I cannot wrap my brain around this. For boardgames, which is a growing market and has been for years now, people are buying and learning new games every day, especially geeks who are only too eager to teach them to their gaming groups.
How come for RPGs it's too difficult for one geek to evangelize a new RPG to their group, especially if they are newbies not too invested in an ongoing RPG campaign?
D&D is a very complex system, there are far simpler, newbie-friendly rules out there. How come you cannot convince your newbie friends to try one? One other commenter was mentioning how complex D&D is, how every spell and level and weapon is interconnected in very restricting ways in order to prevent overpowered characters -- that cannot be easy to teach! I played plenty of D&D based video games, like Icewind Dale, and for the life of me I'm thankful the computer hides all the complexity; I wouldn't have played them otherwise!
It's also a longstanding, odd thing that even experienced players will spend a huge amount of time homebrewing hacks to D&D to make it work as a different kind of game instead of learning a new system that works well for the kind of game they want to play. Ttrpg systems seem to have a lot more momentum/brand loyalty than you would guess.
A lot of D&D players play a fairly "adversarial DM" style and, rightly, don't want to play the more narrative focused or rules-light systems that are easy to learn, because giving players freedom will lead to them abusing it. The dynamic is players wanting a power fantasy and relying on the DM to stop them from ruining the game with their rule bending.
I'm one of those people who likes learning new ttrpg systems and trying out different systems, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this. It seems like it's a lot of compounding factors, including a lot of growth being driven by streamers and new players who want to play D&D, not some nerd stuff they've never heard of.
As for the OGL license, you have to understand that ttrpg companies are usually very small (some people, sometimes only one) so they can't really spend a lot on exploring what is the best license or publicize a new one. So they take the license that is the most used in their domain which is the OGL
The thing is, it's much harder to implement "vendor lock-in" for RPGs than it is for hardware or software which has business uses. The cost of switching to another RPG system is very low: all it takes for a group of friends to start a new RPG is for the geekiest of them to buy a rulebook and evangelize it, there's almost zero cost (but the rulebook(s), of course).
I find videogames are a red herring as an argument for D&D, since most people playing CRPGs based on D&D don't even need to understand the rules; the computer does everything for them. And people will buy a flashy CRPG regardless of the underlying engine, all that matters is that the game is fun, hyped, has nice graphics, and friends are playing.
IMHO WotC is pursuing a double strategy. On one side they try to pull a marvel, meaning becoming big in the media industry with movies, series and videogame (I expect to see many D& D games in the future if the movie is successful). On the other side they will try to create a subscription based walled garden in the RPG world.
you're right that for the moment switching to a new system isn't really expensive, it may change if wotc manage to create this walled garden
But there's a quote attributed to Bill Gates that feels relevant here: "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it."
DnD is a platform now. That's really cool for them, and long term will benefit them a ton, even if they aren't able to "optimize" their revenue right now.
I’d imagine they’re wanting to get a cut of whatever money Paizo, and Kobold Gaming Press, or the D&D miniatures and books kickstarters that regularly raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As a secondary target, getting a cut of Paizo's revenue is something I imagine Wizards like the idea of, but was not the primary goal.
Critical Role will probably just get a plain royalty free license for use in their main show as a side deal for the amount it promotes the game.
Assuming they don't tank their platform, which it very much looks like right now.
Totally unrelated to this of course, but very cool to see all the same. The OGL has been a cornerstone of innovation in this space and without it a lot of us would be dead in the water.
That said you gotta be _asleep_ to not see the tightening of the reins coming from these mega-companies sitting on fertile creative IP. Marvel Cinematic Universe only made — what? — $28B worldwide while making Rocket-fucking-Raccoon a household name. Games Workshop put the screws to content creators leading to the launch of Warhammer+ and r/grimdank is still hitting the front page of Reddit. Not to mention Uber-nerd Henry Cavill is hooking up with Amazon to bring 40K to streaming.
The strategy works and I suspect it's driven entirely by folks — all grown up and with deep pockets — thirsty to see their marginalized childhood hobbies hit the mainstream. I'm conflicted. As much as I want to say, "Fuck WotC. Fuck Games Workshop" there's visceral appeal in hoping for good Drizzt Do'Urden movie or the Drop Site Massacre becoming as much a cultural touchstone as the The Red Wedding.
I kid. Every 40K fan wants this, but it almost feels like hubris to hope it actually happens. I have to wonder if the Amazon deal[1] is Games Workshop's attempt to get out of the streaming business. Nothing coming out of Warhammer+ is breaking out of the core fanbase; I couldn't fathom suggesting to anyone not familiar with the universe, "Yo, you got to checkout this show The Exodite."
My guess is GW is falling back to its comfort zone of licensing IP: "Amazon Studios today announced that it has secured global rights to Warhammer 40,000...The agreement encompasses rights to the universe across series, film, and more..."[2] When you have two producers from Vertigo Entertainment, one of which happens to be dating Henry Cavill, brokering an escape hatch I'm sure they were, "Yes, please."
My guess is we're going to see Eisenhorn first[3] which feels like a far more approachable introduction to the setting anyways.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/henry-cavill-wa... [2] https://www.warhammer-community.com/press_releases/amazon-st... [3] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/warhammer-tv-se...
Hasbro CEO, also the former WoTC CEO, has ramped up monetization of the Magic the Gathering brand significantly in recent years, partly at the expense of cashing in on the secondary market.
WoTC choking the OGL is consistent with them looking to pump up their profits.
My son got interested recently through some friends and I started looking about getting him into it around the time WotC released the $1000 old-school proxy packs. Needless to say, it turned me off.
And I'm less clear on this point, but are they even able to change the license terms under which third-parties have used WotC content that was already published under the old license? Couldn't these third parties continue using the existing content so long as they forgo new additions which are published under the more restrictive license? Or can they really revoke that licensing on previously published content?
In general, I agree. I think we're seeing a "hobby" community freak out when the owners of the brand turn away from the "ideals" of the hobby in question. This mainly effects people who are making money using the DnD brand. Something that Hasbro owns. Whether they also own the past of that brand, and can alter its licensing, seems like the real ambiguity that Hasbro are hiding behind the curtain.
It depends entirely on your definition of "can".
If you mean, is this action supported by law, then no. If you mean, is this action supported by WotC's own historic interpretation of their own license, then no. If you mean, can they force the hand of smaller creators by threat of litigation, then certainly they can.
IANAL, but isn't this a situation where smaller companies could band together and sue WoTC for Declaratory Relief [0], even if WoTC hasn't yet sued any of them for continuing to operate under the old license it's trying to revoke under questionable circumstances?
The wording giving them 10 days to respond to the questions seems to sound like it's heading towards something like what you suggested?
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UgfQ8rydZ7D5LQXRJ6XDKa-_MRM...
I don't think D&D has to be the default tabletop RPG anymore, nor should it be. Partly due to the OGL and its knock-on effects, lots more people entered the community. Maybe they want different things than just a miniatures combat-oriented pastiche of Tolkien, Howard, and Vance. You can publish books more easily, distribute them more easily, market them more easily. I think the tabletop industry could sustain a community without D&D if it had to, and maybe it has to. I wonder if maybe that's a good thing.
WoTC's decision was selfish, tone-deaf, destructive; all that stuff. It will hurt people with existing businesses built around OGL content. That sucks. But, I don't think it will (as this open letter states) dismantle the tabletop industry. On the contrary, I hope it frees it from its dependence on a capricious IP owner with a brittle license. For the players, maybe it frees them from a mediocre system and the most generic, uninteresting fantasy setting ever. There's a lot more out there, maybe this is a good opportunity to explore some of it.
And if Hasbro are so desperate to prevent that from happening that they'll call in the shit-flinging lawyers - the kind who don't even try to have a solid argument, they just try to make engaging with them maximally unpleasant to everyone involved - then I will be most pissed with Hasbro.
You too, will have to live in fear of attracting their attention. The whole point of this sort of litigation is that they're signaling, they're not going to be reasonable. Are you SURE you're not infringing in the shit-flinging lawyers' eyes?
That doesn't sound like a good opportunity to explore to me.
D&D 5th edition obviously has problems but, like other comments say, it is the current "lingua franca" of the space and it's difficult to conceive of any realistic open replacement that isn't essentially just "D&D 5e with some relatively minor tweaks".
I think the issue is for better or worse D&D is more or less synonymous with Tabletop roleplaying games, especially when you are talking to people outside of the space.
So many of the concepts from D&D from the attribute system (Strength, dexterity Constitution etc.) To the classes (Fighter, Ranger, Paladin and so on) show up all over the place in things like video games etc. At this point I think it's very hard to come up with a fantasy setting and not have it look like somewhat of a D&D clone.
Outside the D&D D20 system I really like the World of Darkness system which is D10 based. I don't think it especially popular though.
D&D is having a similar moment where companies that were built on D&D are becoming bigger than them, and WotC wants to compete more directly now that digital is becoming a priority for TTRPGs. Once you decide to do that, you no longer want to be a platform for your competitor. In a way, this is similar Apple banning apps that directly compete with built-in iOS features. While also an unpopular move, you can hardly blame them.
So in case some genius comes with another successful custom map (or whatever), the company has new ideas to work on, for free.
For me, this is more reason to continue with the D&D 3.5 and pathfinder ecosystems for my RPGs.
Maybe it just means old players like us are no longer the target and it's to the long-term benefit of the game to tell us to pound sand as they have for years.
I'd say the game is healthy if people keep playing, the community grows, the meta isn't stale, and there's still interest in the game. By that metric, the game feels unhealthy to me.
I would _guess_ that WotC is most concerned with overall revenue (and potential for future revenue). I would bet that any reduced player counts have been offset by sales of higher-margin product (so numbers probably look decent right now). But, long term, I think these actions have hurt the brand, so the next product will have to have a higher price to make up for fewer sales.
Of course, I'm just theorizing here. I have no inside info and most of my feelings (especially as a no-longer-player) are driven by what I hear from friends and read online (the latter of which, of course, skews negative).
Just because it seems like everyone is leaving WotC properties doesn't mean they actually are.
Anecdotally, many friends and I played religiously from middle school through college. Nearly all of them have stopped, most have sold their cards. Of course, we got older/more busy during that time, but we also have more disposable income (and chose not to spend it on cards). So, it certainly feels like my sphere has left, personally.
During the pandemic I started playing Arena, and was astonished to discover I could play entirely for free. I haven’t paid them a dime since the last tournament I went to in the 2010s.
As far as I can tell there is a HUGE amount of play on Arena. Presumably someone is paying for that, but it’s not me.
So from my perspective WotC has done the opposite of the money grab they’re accused of.
It's amazing to me that they have kept Magic that relevant and commercial that long. People always complain about "greedy" corporations but guess what? Greedy corporations make the books, movies, video games, board games that you play. If they were failing no one would complain. In these spaces complaints about your motives come with success.
> People always complain about "greedy" corporations but guess what? Greedy corporations make the books, movies, video games, board games that you play.
I will push back here a bit - I play a lot of videogames from small-medium size indie studios (I play relatively few AAA videogames anymore) specifically for their perceived lack of greed. Sure, anyone selling a game wants it to be profitable and fund future games, but indies aren't doing so by selling "Gold Editions" of their $70 game that exist purely to squeeze money out of players. Indie devs make a game and hope to be lucky enough that it gets enough press (and good reviews) to bring in revenue.
This might actually do good for tabletop gaming in general, if Hasbro's cancerous behavior causes people to flee their IP and show interest in other things.
I really don't think this is going to work out the way these braindead business executives seem to think it will. People will move their content to a different platform because DnD has never been anything more than a storytelling/content framework.
Hasbro mad cuz community content better than their own. Go back to ruining ponies.
Why do we not crowdfund some excellent game designers to make a truly open set of RPGs?
Some that would be amenable to making into Computer RPGs.
Some that maybe that would be nearly impossible to automate. (That's fine, too.)
Under some licenses like CC BY / CC BY-SA / CC BY-NC?
I _like_ buying RPG books. I would continue to do so, even if the license was CC BY. I also like getting searchable PDFs, and turning dungeons into a Wiki for the DM to make it easy to find content.
I mean... Come on...
I don't know if there are others or not.
Similarly, I was coming in to post Sufficiently Advances, which is (I think) Creative Commons.
As always, the issue isn't so much content, is selling people on it so they use it, get excited, get involved. Like everything open, when you don't have a budget to make that happen, it gets a lot harder.
Why are you waiting for someone else to do this? Do it yourself!
Something that bothers me more than most things is when people demand others act to solve a growing problem. Sure, you're not the most qualified person to do it, but actual execution trumps qualifications every time.
Get out there! Get in touch with some excellent game designers, ask them what it would take to get their help. Come up with a plan based on their feedback and execute it!
Or at least if you're not going to do it, recognize that your reasons for not doing it are probably exceedingly similar to everyone else's reasons for not doing it, and stop asking the question.
I would agree with this, however most people can't organise and maintain the most mundane aspects of their lives, let alone gather a large group of people together to combat some big goal like this.
I agreed up until this part. Even if you aren't going to do it, stoking the fire with otherwise idle conversation might get more motivated individuals interested.
I've approached two of my favorites, back possibly too long ago before Kickstarter was more of a known quantity, and they both said "hard pass" at the time.
Also, have you ever been approached by an "idea guy"? It's obnoxious as hell. "Hi, I'm creating a video game. All I need is a game designer, 2 programmers, 2 artists, and a sound guy. Pay is on commission." It's like, What? What do you bring to the table?
I bring very little to this table, other than the assertion that I would spend money on this product, if it existed.
But it's entirely possible a game designer will see this, and decide to run their own Kickstarter, based off of the comment I made and the comments I got back.
Or, someone more knowledgeable than me could have explained to me why my idea was unworkable. Or someone could have shared ten links to existing products or ongoing Kickstarters.
I'm not afraid to speak up in a public place about my hopes. Why should I be?
I mean, maybe you meant to be encouraging, but please accept my feedback that your comment seems to me to be an attempt to discourage discussion.
Do it yourself, or at least examine why you won't, and then recognize that the people involved are also humans, and many of those reasons you and others here have listed apply to these "special" people too.
Discussion is nearly worthless; so many people can generate so much of it for so little cost, it must be worth basically nothing. There's far too much of it, and far too little action.
This site is literally the social media arm of a startup accelerator, go start something up!
"Can anyone shoot holes through this idea of mine? Has anyone else already done this? Is anyone else interested in helping me do this?"
Or would that still warrant discouragement from you? Because, honestly, that's the tone I intended. And if you can't read that tone, maybe that's on you?
> In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group.
This would be roughly akin to Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Rackspace announcing they would work together to fight some awful cloud computing initiative from Amazon. But thanks for angrily telling one dude on HN that he should be the one to lead the charge. Really great advice, thanks.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announc...
The big problem is that there's not a single one that everybody agrees to use as the new standard. D&D is the standard. Like Windows. Everybody knows it sucks, but nobody can agree on a single alternative, and the market stays with what people know.
https://www.fudgerpg.com/about/about-fudge/fudge-ogl-require...
PF 2.0 also uses OGL:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/104wjuo/why_d...
I don't understand why there needs to be "a standard". in the 80's, 90's people played Runequest, Warhammer, GURPS, AD&D, Dark Eye... there was no need for a "standard". No, people are lazy and just want to play what is popular, this isn't a standard. Games rules are half the table top RPG, the stories are as important if not more...
Furthermore, back in the days, people were interested in innovative rules or universes, D&D is none of that, it's the most bland and boring game system...
There’s a huge network effect at work here. It’s easier to find D&D players than players of any other game — not that you can’t find them, but D&D is easier. WotC runs organized play programs such that I can walk into almost any brick and mortar tabletop gaming store in the country and immediately find a regular game.
Look at https://startplaying.games/search and count the number of D&D games compared to anything else.
And this has happened before. D&D 4e got rid of the OGL, which made people have these same conversations. This did create Pathfinder, but even cloning the earlier version of D&D didn’t prevent WotC from dominating except during the year or two between 4e and the current edition. Plus 4e played really differently, which won’t be the case for this new edition.
People still are. There's been tons of innovation over the past 20 years, and some of it even seeped into D&D and Warhammer.
But despite everything, D&D is still the big name everybody recognises. Maybe there doesn't need to be a standard, but there is, and it's D&D. Just like with Windows.
TTRPG rules are not tabletop game rules: they don't say what happens, GM does. TTRPG rules are a language that abstracts away trivia in a somewhat objective manner.
This is similar to having many programming languages: ideally you would want to have a single language for everything, but they all suck in different small ways.
Just because you bottled lightning once, doesn’t mean you can do it ever again.
And I think the nature of open content is still relatively new, so that's the best explanation I have for why it hasn't been done yet.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Fantasy_RPG
[1]: https://www.basicfantasy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4596...
No need to even do that, there is plenty of alternative RPG and game systems out there already. It's not about money. It's about principles. But people wants to play "D&D", Hasbro's IP, Hasbro rules and business practices...
But also let's not forget how some conferences managed to shut down and shun the competition by forbidding them to attend the conferences to promote their alternative creations, insuring Hasbro/WotC prominent market shares... There is a lot to say about that "community", a lot of corrupt individuals...
GUMSHOE, FATE, Forged in the Dark, Dungeon World, Quest, and Trophy are all available under CC BY licenses. Many of those are fairly popular (if you don’t compare them to D&D) — six figure Kickstarter revenue, for example. Creative Commons has been a reasonably common choice for game designers who want open content for a decade or so.
> GUMSHOE - Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported License
> FATE - Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) / OGL
> Forged in the Dark (Blades in the Dark) - Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.
> Dungeon World - Creative Commons Attribution
> Quest - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
> Trophy - custom, permissive-looking license
Yours was by far the most helpful response I got.
There's also this list:
https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems
Which I found from another thread you were in:
> In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announc...
Think of the implications it would have if anyone could revoke a license they granted and immediately sue someone for violating the replacement license.
They can act as if they can and sue those that try to ignore it. Then focus on drawing out the legal battle it would take to actually settle the question of if they can. Leveraging the threat of expensive litigation to try to avoid any legally binding outcome enforcing that they can't actually do that.
Others have indicated there may be a detrimental reliance (US) or promissory estoppel (EU) case against Wizards to change the license at this point given they have made public statements on the record about the non-revocability of the OGL v1.0a and have allowed the current OGL ecosystem to exist under that assumption for 23 years.
The third situation is that neither of the above matter, which is a problem for the software industry as plenty of open source licenses (GPLv2, BSD, MIT, Apache 1.1) have the exact same omission of "irrevocable".
Provided that WotC does follow through with trying to revoke the previous version, the major thing that will have to play out is to figure out which third-party company is going to end up trying to battle Hasbro in court over whether their maneuver is legal. If anyone, it will probably be Paizo, as one of the largest players building off the OGL. But until that legal question is settled, boycotting the new version (while still building off OGL 1.0) is a dangerous option.
Hasbro is surely using plenty of open source software under licenses like MIT, BSD, GPL v2 which do not have the magic word "irrevocable". I say some software devs should just declare that if Hasbro retroactively revokes licenses then the licenses for their IT infrastructure also gets revoked.
If this goes to court and Hasbro wins, this creates an monstrously dangerous precedent for the software industry. So maybe someone should take their infrastructure hostage before it get to court.
I don't see that being remotely enforceable or even a strong argument were something brought to court, but I think WOTC (really Hasbro ) is using the threat of litigation to limit the ability for creators to continue to make new things that identify themselves explicitly as DnD. WOTC is basically betting that the rpg market is really a DnD market, captive to the brand, which will probably backfire on them.
Dungeon Masters make or break the game. They do it by storytelling, by presenting challenges and helping players overcome them, by creating a sense of ownership and reward. DnD is not good at teaching people to do those things.
I've played some other systems, and immediately they were easier to play and more fun for the group. You don't need 20 rule books, you need a simple set of rules and a desire to participate in a shared storytelling experience, and that's really it.
Apart from the core design, D&D is also pretty middling as a product. Being a DM for D&D is hard—a fair bit harder than running many other tabletop games—and the book are at best a so-so resource: there's a lot of extra prep and careful balance that rests on the DM's shoulders, and doing it right means either falling back part-and-parcel on adventure modules or doing a lot of careful tuning and reading forums and Reddit threads. In an ideal world, the core books would include everything you need to know, but in practice the best DM advice is outside the core books (and sometimes even contradicts the books themselves!) Many other games don't have this problem.
To be clear, I don't think D&D is a bad game, but plenty of other games out there have clearer core designs, better presentations, easier-to-grasp rules, and overall more polish.
If you're interesting in something very D&D-like, there's obviously Pathfinder 2E[1], which builds on the same D&D skeleton but has a much sharper and cleaner approach to grid-based tactical combat. However, I'd also suggest looking at some of the games in the OSR ("Old School Renaissance") space. Games like The Black Hack[2] or Maze Rats[3] provide a much smaller set of rules which are easy to adapt to other adventures: the goal is that you can take adventure modules for effectively any existing D&D-like game—including both present and past versions of D&D—and run them with little overhead.
Something pretty different mechanically but which is quite compelling in that space is Torchbearer[4], which is based on the underlying Burning Wheel[5] system but made significantly simpler (and shares a lot of those simplifications with Mouse Guard[6] except it's, well, not about sword-wielding mice.) Torchbearer is a great dungeon-crawl-focused system that can really capture grit and difficulty in a way that's a lot of fun, but it's also the kind of game where you can get a total party kill not just by a dragon but also by running out of food and torches, so expect a grimy tough game out of it!
If you're looking for something even further afield, I'd suggest taking a peek at Dungeon World[7], which borrows the core mechanics from indie darling Apocalypse World[8] but applies them to a traditional D&D milieu: that said, I'd actually start with Homebrew World[9], which streamlines and clarifies a lot of the rules, but it might require Dungeon World itself to get a handle on how to run the game. Games inspired by Apocalypse World—sometimes called Powered by the Apocalypse games—definitely play a bit differently—they tend to be a bit more "zoomed-out", e.g. combat being resolved in a fewer high-level rolls rather than playing out a full sequence of six-second slices like D&D—and they aren't to everyone's liking, but I think they're worth trying.
I'm also going to plug my personal favorite tabletop game, Blades in the Dark[10], which is not a traditional fantasy game (although people have adapted the the rules to more traditional fantasy, c.f. Raiders in the Dark[11]) but which I think is super compelling. It's about criminals in a haunted Victorian-ish setting doing odd jobs, and builds a system that's top-of-its-class for doing that, including mechanical support for heist-movie-style flashbacks and a lot of systems designed to let you do risky moves and narrowly avoid failure from them. Some of my absolute favorite TTRPG moments have been in Blades games.
Any of that sound interesting? Want other examples or directions?
[1]: https://paizo.com/pathfinder [2]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/255088/The-Black-Hack-S... with the open content collected at https://the-black-hack.jehaisleprintemps.net/ [3]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/197158/Maze-Rats [4]: https://www.burningwheel.com/torchbearer-2e-core-set/ [5]: https://www.burningwheel.com/burning-wheel/ [6]: https://www.mouseguard.net/book/role-playing-game/ [7]: https://dungeon-world.com/ [8]: http://apocalypse-world.com/ [9]: https://spoutinglore.blogspot.com/2019/05/homebrew-world-v15... [10]: https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel [11]: https://smallcoolgames.itch.io/raiders-in-the-dark
I like the idea of the OSR systems with small rulesets. So I'll check The Black Hack first. Do you know about any systems like this one that have been published under the Creative Commons license?
D&D isn't anymore polished than Runequest or Warhammer in the commercial space, or a ton of Creative Common RPG. D&D is just more popular. This isn't polish, this is "corporate".
Admittedly, the settings, characters, books and similar content were never part of the deal. It was more meant to be a common standard that everybody could build on.
But a common world that everybody could expand upon, would very quickly become a gigantic mess.
Do you need to apply for a license?
When OGL1.1 comes out does 1.0 die?
If somebody infringes on your license, do you get a free OGL lawyer or something to help your case?
In conclusion, it almost sounds like OGL is fucking useless in the first place if they can just upgrade it to be paid at scale but clearly I’m missing something
The issue is that part of the 1.0 license says users "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" (emphasis added).
And part of 1.1 says that 1.0 "is no longer an authorized license agreement".
So, in other words, 1.0 had an embedded kill switch which 1.1 activates. At least that's the legal theory which WotC is operating on.
How does this work? Why are they forced to do so?
For the 1.1 leak mentioned there https://rollforcombat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Open-Ga...
Please note the length of the document corroborates the length of about 9000 words as mentioned by tech journalists.
I also know from people in the legal business that Hasbro is notoriously litigious. They will happily drag out a suit and make it as expensive as possible even when they don't really have a case.
[1] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=05891d4f-1658...
GURPS is a well-designed favorite made by Steven Jackson Games:
It’s crunchy as hell and a major commitment.
Pathfinder 2 is likely going to be the biggest winner in this but hopefully other systems benefit as well.
Dungeon world strikes me as another easy analogue and there’s plenty of different stuff like Spire/Heart or Lancer that’s made waves.
Not to say that gurps is bad. I hope they see a bump too. Just feel like the kind of person who likes gurps probably isn’t playing 5e or already knows it exists
This kind of comment is also why it's funny to suggest "just use X" to D&D players. RPG nerds are effectively poor software engieners. Ask 10 of them for an opinion on TT RPG rulesets and you'll get 300 opinions.
> Just feel like the kind of person who likes gurps probably isn’t playing 5e or already knows it exists
Absolutely correct.
It's like saying Monopoly and Agricola are both board games. They are but they're also very different.
If English had revised OGL-like terms of use, would it see the same usage?
Seriously, the revised OGL is onerous and greedy. As a long time fan of tabletop role playing I can't see the changes being accepted by the community.
>> If someone wants an alternative to D&D there are a thousand alternatives.
What are some of your favorite D&D alternatives?
https://www.rpglibrary.org/articles/faqs/fl108.pdf
The US Copyright Office says it can apply to text or description, but not to the rules.
WoTC did have a patent issues for MtG, but I dont think that's going to work for D20 rules. Perhaps they will attempt to patent the OneD&D release?
Either way, it's quite clear that corporations will attempt to colonize and control our culture, and lie and scheme their way to expand their profit extraction.
There is a Wizard Spell that does 1d4 damage at spell slot 1. It is called Magic Missile. There is a block of text that describes the Magic Missile. If you want D&D you can't just clone the mechanic of spells, you also have to write a massive amount of copywritten content.
I'm honestly confused by the entire situation. I remain confused as to why any Hasbro suit regarding this would not just get thrown out by a court. It seems very obvious to me that the D20 system isn't controllable, and that referencing D&D books for more details is clearly fair use.
So it sounds like their approach here is dependent on the interpretation of "any authorized version" to mean "authorized _by us_", which would allow them to declare past versions "unauthorized"? I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds.. unlikely to stick.
This is Wizards trying to walk a fine line. They want a cut of the profits from the big-name D&D-based content creators, but they don't want to kill the entire creative community. I'm not sure they're going to succeed. Pissing off the biggest names putting your product in the spotlight in return for a couple bucks seems a really dumb idea to me.
Or is it computer games? With computers handling the rules, you can just make your own RPG rules, right? Or is it the setting? Do people really only play videogames that are set in Faerun or Icewind Dale or whatever? Can't you just make your own stuff up and call it Arda-- er, Middle-- er, Ancient Magical Land of Elves?
I mean, I would totally watch a battle between Disney's and Wizards of the Coast's legal departments. I suspect the Goliath in this case is Disney, and there are no Davids.
> OGL 1.1 makes clear it only covers material created for use in or as TTRPGs, and those materials are only ever permitted as printed media or static electronic files (like epubs and PDFs). Other types of content, like videos and video games, are only possible through the Wizards of the Coast Fan Content Policy or a custom agreement with us.
The Fan Content Policy is:
https://company.wizards.com/en/legal/fancontentpolicy
Which says that:
> You can’t require payments, surveys, downloads, subscriptions, or email registration to access your Fan Content;
> You can’t sell or license your Fan Content to any third parties for any type of compensation; and
> Your Fan Content must be free for others (including Wizards) to view, access, share, and use without paying you anything, obtaining your approval, or giving you credit.
> You can, however, subsidize your Fan Content by taking advantage of sponsorships, ad revenue, and donations—so long as it doesn’t interfere with the Community’s access to your Fan Content.
All of this exists (IMO) because game mechanics aren't subject to copyright, so you can, if you'd like, read these two sets of rules as Hasbro saying, "This is what we're willing to let you do without having to get a lawyer to defend yourself in court, even if it's legally allowed."
Note, though, that in GP's post, "places and characters from one of the world say Ansalon" very much are covered by WotC's copyrights (and probably some trademarks too).
1) you are required to report your income if it is above $50k.
2) Once you sign they can arbitrarily adjust that $750k with nothing but a notice that the license has been updated.
You would have to be crazy to agree to that. Hasbro can literally tell you you have 30 days to pack then sell your product as their own.
On one hand, I have no interest in defending corporate copyright rules. But on the other hand, I disagree that this would stifle creativity. If there are hundreds of companies out there that only exist to pump out content for the D&D ruleset, surely making them pay for the privilege would encourage some of them to build new rulesets?
This makes me believe less that this is an organic push within WotC and more a push by a special interest group. Given that we know WotC didn’t write OGL 1.1, it would make sense that a special interest group funded it with the stipulation that they added the trans bit in.
I have seen no evidence of this so far? Any source?
That's like if Apple had decided overnight to start charging apps their infamous 30% fee
Well Hasbro wants to make money of third party D&D content, nothing more. Why were people still using D&D when non corporate alternatives exist?
The people at the head of these companies could be selling vacuum cleaners it wouldn't make a difference, at the end of the day it's all about maximizing short term profit.
This is a problem for Wizards of the Coast as they view DnD as "heavily under-monetised" and so would like to change that with DnD 6E (aka OneD&D) to a model more similar to microtransaction laden video games. In particular, as part of OneD&D, they are building a whole new VTT on top of D&D Beyond which they acquired last year. This new VTT will have 3d models and animations which they want to sell to players, and D&D Beyond already allows selling pieces of rules for players to use in their character sheet seperately (see here: https://www.dndbeyond.com/marketplace/sourcebooks/tashas-cau...).
This compares to the current model of D&D where maybe the GM buys a couple of books and shares them to their table or people just look up the SRD for the rules and use a third party character builder or VTT. The problem is if you're comparing "1 person spends $60 and 4-5 people pay $0" to "6 people pay recurring microtransaction revenue at the level of popular video games", then the 3d models and fancy effects are highly unlikely to avoid people choosing one of the cheaper options using the open licensed material.
So #1 they'd like to kill the ability for third parties to interfere with their new monetisation models. As for benefit #2, if they get to kill Pathfinder which is the closest game to D&D in licensing shenanigans, then that also removes the easiest option for players to move to if they accomplish point #1 alone. Failing that, they'll settle for #2b, which is capturing the revenue of Paizo (the publisher of Pathfinder) for themselves so that even if players flee D&D to alternatives, Wizards aren't losing any money.
As a tertiary benefit, maybe they manage to bully some smaller content creators into agreeing to 1.1 with the terms that they get to sell it on OneD&D to pad out their content library and make OneD&D more appealing to end users.
After french revolution: tyranny and paranoia
Shortly after: "universal" democracy (modulo something)
Do we really need to repeat the exercise. It'll only lead to tears.
First, you build something that everyone loves and build up a huge stockpile of consumer trust. You use that consumer trust to gain market share, and eventually a lot of market power (though you never use those words or imply that you know you have market power).
Then once you're dominant, you exploit that consumer trust to make more money.
It worked pretty well for companies like Amazon and Google. WotC are just doing it a bit blatantly, or perhaps people saw through the ploy more easily than they had anticipated.
It loses the thread and descends into incoherence pretty quickly.
Also, because if it can do that, it was at some point trained on material licensed under the OGL, or WotC directly.
RPGs is a particularly bizarre case. You really don't need anything but a group of friends, your imagination and some rules to play roleplaying games. Ok, so you want merchandise -- player screens and mats and minis -- all of that's optional, there's no RPG police that can prevent you making your own or buying from third parties. So you have adventure modules... I made my own adventures back when I was a teenager, but I can sort of see not everyone has the imagination to make their own, plus being able to "share" a world with other gaming groups so you can say you defeated the Temple of Elemental Evil or whatnot is sort of cool; not my thing, but I can see it.
But now apparently Wizards of the Coast is not content with all the stuff they already sell, so they are starting to build a virtual world (+ app, of course) where you can customize your character, buy DLC, etc. Of course, all tidily locked-in, because what better way to keep a tight reign than owning the app?
I can't wrap my head around this. An app? DLC? Custom items? For a game that happens inside your head, and that most people choose to play to do something other than staring at a screen? Has the world gone crazy?
You only needed some friends, dice and an imagination...
> You only needed some friends, dice and an imagination
Obviously you need rulebooks, campaign modules, etc. This is the stuff that is under license from WotC.
> Obviously you need rulebooks
Yes.
> campaign modules
Unlike the rulebook, these are nice but not mandatory. And if you're crafty, you can derive inspiration from other fantasy worlds, books, novels and movies. I do understand not everybody is creative enough or wants to spend time doing this though; I also understand some people value a "shared world" they can discuss with other players beyond their group.
> Or do you mean they should just stop playing DnD when WotC pulls this crap?
At some point, yes. I mean, there are plenty of other awesome RPGs to play, right? You are not locked-in to D&D in the same sense many people are locked-in to Windows.
I'm absolutely fine without D&D, but Hasbro is going against makers of Pathfinder, my preferred dungeon crawler RPG.
With the pandemic virtual tabletops blew up and Hasbro (let’s call them what they really are, one of the largest game companies in the world) wants a piece of this action, or maybe all the pieces for that matter.
I play online using a virtual tabletop and while we often just use our imaginations, the VTT keeps track of our character sheets, our current equipment, our gold amounts, a log of all our dice rolls and what skill we were rolling. I used a 3D modeling program to make screenshots that I use as tokens for my character. Our DM runs multiple games and the virtual tabletop is also a note taking app that allows his notes to correspond to objects in the game, attached to certain places, or the entire campaign. Like a specialized Evernote. He couldn’t keep track of all the games he runs without it (or he could but it’d be harder).
It makes things a lot easier than just logging onto a zoom call and playing pretend. All this convenience would be a lot more expensive if it was just through the one official source.
I understand what they’re doing but it’s going to stifle the innovation that’s been happening in this space and finally get D&D to be a “video game” like they tried with 4th edition.
Most experienced roleplayers who know that there's a world outside D&D won't put up with it, but to lots of new players flocking to the big name, having something computer/app based may actually help make it more familiar. They've never heard of Pathfinder, let alone Call of Cthulhu, Fate or Shadowrun, and they have no idea how to play it. That's what they're coming to D&D for: to learn how to play it.
And if WotC/Hasbro is now going to tell them they need to pay to make their character in an online virtual world, they may never find what they were looking for.
I do think it's a bit easier to escape this trap, because an inventive game master can convince their group of friends to play something else, and this is easier than getting someone to switch from Windows. It's simply teaching them a new game!
And I get that! Learning the DnD rules to a point where you can roll up a character and take full advantage of the available actions and skills without a turn taking forever takes time. And once folks have done it once, they don't really care to do it again and again; that starts to feel like work, and this is supposed to be a game. For some, the tradeoffs aren't worth it.
It is a little disappointing, though, seeing all this change on the horizon and knowing that I would lose more than half of my players if I tried to get us into a different rule system.
Does that mean they also won't switch to a new edition of D&D?
My biggest concern, though, is for new players. The ones who aren't even invested in the D&D ruleset yet. They don't know the rules, they don't know what roleplaying even is, but they've heard of D&D, and that's what they want to play, unaware that there are better options out there.
I think the really big fix here is not so much undoing OGL 1.1, but undoing the dominant position of the D&D trademark itself; prospective players need to have heard of Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and all the others. But that's hard to do, with D&D's long and rich history, and a single name is much more memorable than a long list of alternatives.
Fully agreed! If there are such things as Mac or Linux evangelists, why can't there be Call of Cthulhu ones? Evangelizing games is far easier than doing so for computers. People are willing to learn new games. It's all some people ever seem to do, learning and collecting new games!
It's the only RPG I have played more than a handful of times. RPGs are a labor of love, friendship, and fun: no more, no less.
I do understand that kind of involvement in the hobby is not for everyone. I'm not obtuse, I understand the appeal of ready-made fantasy worlds and adventures. But still...
It's not useful _enough_ to make me want to keep using it in this new climate, but still - don't undermine your (very correct!) argument by under-valuing the non-DLC aspects of RPG apps.
I think the thing that happened is that D&D transitioned from being a game to a lifestyle brand. It's not actually about playing a game anymore, it's about collecting books and buying swag and watching Youtube shows.
The OGL[0] says Wizards can authorize new versions of the license, but it doesn't define "authorized" and it doesn't say anywhere they can deauthorize old ones. It also says that the terms of the license are perpetual.
If I saw WOTC was going to make a change like this, obviously I'd retain counsel, but why wouldn't I take a position something like:
1) We don't believe that Wizards can arbitrarily bind us to the terms of any new license just because they have "authorized" it.
2) We will only release content that uses OGL 1.0a licensed works and never anything using 1.1 or any other version.
3) If Wizards doesn't like it, they can sue us and try to enforce their license. It'll be on them to prove the license binds us, and they'll look like assholes in front of their community of players.
When my option is "give up all my corporate secrets and also lose 25% of my money" or this, why shouldn't I do this?
[0] https://opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html
Edit: Another source I found that seems to suggest this might be an option, to an extent - or that there might be other ways to challenge this decision: https://medium.com/@MyLawyerFriend/lets-take-a-minute-to-tal...
Basically the license is perpetual in that there's no default expiry; but it is NOT irrevocable. Consequences of license being revoked would then depend on details, jurisdiction, law,precedent,court, potentially past vs future work, and whether you're feeling lucky, punk :-/
Gosh, why does it have to be this way? It's even harder for non-native speakers to read legal documents "correctly", i.e. the way courts would interpret them. I understand that contracts and laws need precise language, but, in contrast to, say, mathematics, reading legal documents is such an important activity that we cannot ignore the needs of laypeople – they have to follow contracts and laws, too, after all. And I don't think it's plausible that clashes between general use of words and legalese are unavoidable, especially as contracts don't seem to be optimized for brevity.
And in general, us laypeople should vehemently demand contracts and laws to be optimized for easy reading. Imagine what good a precedent could do, where a complete EULAs was judged void, because they were to hard to read/understand/interpret.
That is to say, at some point in the past, some court case probably turned on proving that "irrevocable" was supposed to mean something different than "perpetual," and so now the standard is to assume that's what it means, unless the contract explicitly says something different. What if I want a contract that I can't choose to take back, but which doesn't last forever?
It's a problem of trying to force precision on a language that is inherently imprecise, topped off with concepts that are actually hard to understand.
The one thing we as lay people can do to protect ourselves though is to be humble, I.e. Not assume that we are experts and know what the rules are, or that words mean more than they do. It's a little like programming and requires literal frame of mind that doesn't run away. "Perpetual" is a time dimension and doesn't have a "no take backsies" dimension but our mind puts it there :). I see it all the time where people undertake actions or share advice or give instructions based solely on their intuitive sense on how law "should work" or "what makes sense" (while being blissfully unaware of this bias and assumption).
As a personal example I went through a difficult divorce a decade ago. I read up on family law and talked to a lawyer. The divorce was made that much more difficult by my senior family members incessantly and continuously insisting upon things that were catastrophically wrong, but made perfect intuitive common sense to them (e.g. My dad spent 6 months telling me that my wife did not have any rights on the apartment that was in my name and I paid for. But it was marital home and in our jurisdiction she 100% totally absolutely had legal claim upon it. And million things like that).
(Giving up 25% of your revenue is obviously an enormous blow, but seems possible to be in a position where you think you can just about squeeze by long enough to pivot if you suck it up and take their terms as you try to move away from doing any new 1.1-related works.)
To be fair, Hasbro seems to pull this every other major D&D version since introducing the OGL with 3rd edition, so we should expect Two D&D to be a return to more open licensing after the inevitable debacle of One D&D.
Sucks to be one of the companies that exists solely around the ecosystem of the 5e wave of “Hasbro is trying to encourage third party support rather than squeezing producers”, or one of the ones that survived the 4e squeeze because Hasbro didn’t try to squeeze pure legacy use.
I suspect it depends of course on the exact terms of license and what users of version 1.0 agreed to in terms of future binding.
Might be an interesting case with more than a little relevance for (US) software licenses
As gm it is a shame that someone uses that licence all those years. Paizo made a rewrite and I think was the only company that saw that coming decades ago. But many mainstream groups used the content and the rights that the licence gave to push their projects and made a fortune (and wizards used that to push again the game), and now they are saying: no more. Well, bad luck for you.
Use a real open licence, even a CC-BY-SA-NC if you wants, not a licence with a backdoor from the owner!
My god, the community is fighting a battle for less than 20 companies affected because they wanted to use a stupid licence.
OGL 1.1 is bad as 1.0 was, it is the same shit, now with a royalty and just because of that, they are all like crazies. Was always as bad as now.