An Update on the Open Game License (OGL)
dndbeyond.com
dndbeyond.com
And moreover Paizo et al know they have no reason to trust WotC not to try this again as soon as people get complacent. I'm sure they won't back down, and are going to go full steam ahead with their scheme to sidestep WotC, not unlike Valve working around Microsoft's boneheaded Windows decisions with SteamOS and Proton.
Also, hiding behind "we want to prevent discriminatory content" is a pretty shameful attempt to salvage their image by appealing to the zeitgeist. The hobby has become so inclusive the last decade or so, more than I ever would have imagined.
Talk about an absolute landmine of potential for offense.
https://www.thegamer.com/tsr-dave-johnson-star-frontiers-pla...
Good open licenses don't need a morals clause. Once you start licensing people to put your logos on their products, you need to think about it.
This comment is not intended as approval of the OGL 1.1 in any way, but I think the objections to the morals clause on the basis that it's not needed are missing context.
By and large we are all adults here. Some people may play D&D with sexuality or kink or racism or massive slaughter campaigns on a scale that rivals any battle sim.
They're adults. They are allowed to do that, even if you or I personally find it distasteful.
Other people may want to do such things. Hasbro and WoTC shouldn't have the ability to unilaterally rug pull their users because they're worried about getting a stain on the carpet.
This whole thing was botched from the beginning. They should have phrased it as, "This is what we are thinking, please provide any feedback..." to the community. They would have still been eviscerated but people would say, "At least they started with talking it over and with the goal of making sure everyone was happy with the changes first. Could you imagine what it would be like if they just walked in and tried to dominate the community into submission because of some stupid copyright paperwork? God, they could have killed their brand!"
Does this include licenses that say "irreversible" in them?
"Termination of the grant may be effected notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, including an agreement to make a will or to make any future grant."
More info on terminations/transfers generally: https://www.copyright.gov/docs/203.html
It is these transfers of copyright or partial copyright that the author can terminate after ~35 years.
AFAIK, none of the OSS licenses involve transferring copyright, in whole or in part. The original software creator still retains full copyright of their code. They have merely granted a license to others to use that code in certain ways. I just double-checked and GPL v3.0, frex, explicitly says that this license is built on top of copyright and only has effect for the duration of that copyright, and that the author of the code retains their copyright. The fact that the programmer retains their copyrights is why they can license the code under multiple OSS licenses if they want, or both license the code under an OSS and have a separate commercial agreement with someone else for use of the code in a way that the OSS license wouldn’t allow.
And since people licensing their code under the terms of an OSS license never transferred any part of their copyright to someone else as defined by 17 USC 201, there’s nothing for them to terminate under the terms of 17 USC 203. 17 USC 203(b)(5) explicitly says that these termination rules only apply to chapter 2 transfers, not to other sorts of licenses.
It might stop D&D Beyond from bleeding out, but the folks who've built successful small businesses around the SRD and the OGL aren't going to forget what they just learned. There will soon be at least one new SRD and Open License that will be more along the lines of Creative Commons licensing and have nothing to do with WotC.
Regardless of what happens, THIS is ALWAYS a good lesson to keep in mind when businesses are built on the platforms of others.
Every game master, without exception, is a content creator. Most of them want to try new systems just to see what they are like. If they decide to go to other systems, that’s it for D&D. They can make all of the movies and books they want, but that won’t make people DM it.
We’re not in the era where people buy the box set and try out this new hobby; almost all new players will join experienced groups. The people deepest into the guild, the person willing to GM, ultimately decides what everyone plays.
D&D survived the 4E attempt to overhaul the OGL, the backlash, the GSL that resulted from it, the backlash from that, and the backlash from 4E as a whole, and the mass migration at the time from 3.5E to Pathfinder/d20 instead of 4E. The brand's too valuable to die. "Heroin" used to be a brand name and there'll be people who call any and all fantasy TTRPGs "D&D" until the collapse of civilization.
What might die is Hasbro's interest in spending money and effort on the tabletop RPG part of the brand as a first-party content producer, which is frankly also fine by everyone. The market and content available today is broader and more diverse than ever. The 5E library alone could truck on with players and new content for decades without the need of any corporate steward, much less Hasbro.
Even most of the people who comprise D&D's content team right now came up through the barren years pre-3E and/or during-4E. If Hasbro cuts every one of them, they'd all land well, especially Wyatt and Schneider who've now covered just about every base possible in a single RPG writing/editing career.
I was suspicious of the 1D&D crap moving to a subscription model anyway, so I am quite frankly glad about this.
What's weird is I agree with everything else in your comment.
I don't think D&D's survival is a virtue, it's just inevitable. It's a generic brand for fantasy tabletop roleplaying whether anyone playing it likes it or not.
Hasbro's shenanigans are irrelevant to tabletop D&D's survival. They only endanger its success as a product line.
... "All"?
Branding is everything in this industry. Artwork and game mechanics are commoditized. The barrier to entry for new RPG systems is, and has been for decades, zero. But people don't buy anything else, because everyone likes playing "D&D".
The fatal mistake here is IMHO exactly the opposite: they torched their brand (the valuable part!) trying to protect their margins from low-uptake third party vendors who were never a threat in the first place.
I hate to say it, but they should've just stuck to their guns on the OGL update just so they only got hit by traffic coming from one direction instead of both.
ChainMail
OD&D
Advanced D&D
BECMI
AD&D 2.0
D&D3
D&D3.5
D&D4
D&D5
That's about nine versions. Yet they fundamentally make money on generational turnover: another bunch of grade and high schoolers reach the RPG demographic and someone buys them "the latest D&D". No one is going to wade through nine previous versions of D&D and figure out which one they want to use, not before a large amount of the "new gen" is on whatever re-splat they've published.
RE-generationalizing actually doesn't dilute the brand anymore, it actually increases and sustains it paradoxically.
I'm glad there will be a legal battle over it, might formalize it more for the neckbeard people that kind of are the foundation for RPG across generations. OGL doesn't really do anything for grassroots people. This is a fight between corporations.
Also, is the OGL/SRD just for 3.0 mechanics and stat blocks? I would think it would be effortless for WOTC to simply re-license at any generational break, which they've already done themselves about 3.5 times (yuk yuk).
I mean, what is needed by the community at this point? Just the rough Gygax notion of dungeon, elf, dwarf, orc, goblin, dragon, undead, cleric, wizard, Vancian magic, thief skills is generally open source? Is that already the case with Tolkien and other fantasy fiction prior art? Do MMORPGs or console RPGs pay any royalty for the use of those concepts (and they use all of them ... A LOT!)?
I’m a bit out of the loop here. What happened with Microsoft that drove Valve to create SteamOS?
Basically they fell in love with the idea of getting 30% of the app/game market for desktop windows, and announced that the Windows Store was the way to go.
Valve (perhaps somewhat ironically) saw this as monopolistic behavior that threatened their biggest cash cow, and thus saw a need to reduce their reliance on Windows as their main market.
1a: Dungeons and Dragons’ new license tightens its grip on competition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264777 - Jan 2023 (203 comments)
1b: Wizards of the Coast Trying to Retroactively Cancel OGL 1.0a: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271687 - Jan 2023 (233 comments)
2: An Open Letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34314448 - Jan 2023 (356 comments)
3: Paizo announces system neutral OpenRPG license: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363991 - Jan 2023 (58 comments)
Death to the Minotaur: How Wizards of the Coast sacrificed its geeky, Gothic, sex-for-all idealism for Pok March 23, 2001 https://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/
Who are they referring to here? Paizo? Green Ronin? These are not major corporations. Video game companies, movies, tv producers, etc., aren't using the SRD mechanics, and they'd have to license the name and lore elements anyway, as they weren't covered under OGL. Who are these mysterious, sinister major corporations they were fighting against?
$750k in revenue is not the cutoff for a major corporation. Their new license targeted like, 5 person shops.
This is probably Hasbro slitting the stomach of the goose trying to get the golden eggs. They had essentially infinite long term revenue of people buying D&D rulebooks (myself and many of my friends included). Now most people in the community know the fundamental integrity of WotC is compromised by suits and feel slighted, tabletop RPGs is just too small of a space to get away with shady business. Personally I'm never buying a WotC product again.
I have at least one theory on that.
- In the middle of all this OGL mess, WotC also cancelled a raft of unannounced video games. Their in-house D&D games this most recent cycle so far were either flops or revivals.
- At almost the same time, Hasbro and Wizard CEOs were hyping to investors the potential for "the kind of recurrent spending you see in digital games" in non-DM D&D players that comprise 80% of the market but a minority of spending.
What's the primary RPG merch for players today? Custom or specialized dice, customized minis, folios — stuff that's hard to manufacture at scale while keeping high profit margins. Wizards wants to move them into higher-margin, video-game-like digital spaces, especially virtual tabletops.
So Hasbro buys D&D Beyond outright in April and announces in August an Unreal-powered 3D VTT, and the D&D One next-edition rules set/marketplace, which OGL 1.1/2.0 was meant to support.
Whatever the hook in D&D One toward monetizing non-DM players is meant to be,* it'd attract competitors in the space beyond the current batch of VTTs and niche publishers.
An OGL 1.0a-licensed ruleset could facilitate well-backed companies to build their own D&D One-compatible clones using non-Wizards settings. Companies with experience putting out D&D-ruleset multiplayer games. Companies like Beamdog, acquired in April 2022 by a subsidiary of Embracer Group, who's rolling in settings and IPs that would be delightful to play.
Yeah, that door's already open with D&D Beyond/5E/OGL 1.0a, and Embracer doesn't need OGL hooks to enter the market. But from Hasbro's perspective, why on earth would they leave that door open?
* Wizards already has a long-running framework for systematically dispensing durable rewards to players that could easily go lootbox-a-like if moved to digital: the Adventurer's League, their organized play program (which ironically, like the OGL, also has roots in a Ryan Dancey invention). Paizo runs their own long-running organized play system, Pathfinder Society, which drives quite a lot of Paizo business. Scenarios are distributed almost exclusively online, and Society GMs have the popular option to run games entirely online via VTT or even play-by-post. Wouldn't it be neat if the new OGL also gave Wizards a way to legally challenge its existence by claiming that makes Pathfinder Society a digital product that requires a license? If Pathfinder Society isn't a digital product, then what's D&D One?
That's when I realized I never wanted to support them again.
But the point is, Critical Role is a behemoth in the RPG space now, and while their popularity helped massively increase D&D's popularity, they're also making buckets of money. Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro get none of that money, though they certainly gained more revenue from the free advertising of their game. Hasbro got greedy. This entire gambit was about coming for some of that money, not really about other publishers at all. And that gambit backfired massively, and drove tons of creators and fans to other games.
Painful.
Notably, the idea that it was just a draft is simply a lie - the OGL 1.1 was sent to content creators to sign. That's not an internal draft. It just isn't. There is no way to look at that section as anything other than a deliberate falsification on Hasbro's part.
Secondly, the notion that the main driver was to prevent hateful content is also just nonsensical. It's not like you accidentally dropped a typewriter down the stairs and it suddenly required a 30% royalty, and the notion that any business put that in and it wasn't the primary motivation is fanciful, especially when Hasbro's own financial statement explicitly says that they were expecting to drive significant additional monetisation from D&D.
If Hasbro want to start earning trust back here, not including two easily provable lies in the first, massively overdue statement would be a good start.
https://www.geekwire.com/2022/wizards-of-the-coast-files-law...
[0] James Stephanie Sterling, Bastard - https://www.youtube.com/@JimSterling
[1] i.e. brand-specific fonts and colors
Restricting it in legalese to "Table Top Only" is grounds for all sorts of law suits against Roll20 and the likes that employ the OGL rulesets for non-Wizards-like games. Fuck, this is why Pathfinder forked 3.5 rules. Wizards only cares about milking their already aging customer base. They had a really good effort on 4th ed. on bringing new folks in but then they showed how shallow the walled garden is and people left. Shame on you Wizards, shame. OGL should be open. Open Source, Open Ideation, Open Arms, Open Hearts. Wizards should do this, or give up the IP and stick to Magic The Gathering where they have a huge install base with Magic Online.
That means a bunch of dropped dnd beyond subscriptions and us no longer purchasing digital source/adventure books.
DnD has insane brand recognition but the system itself isn't anything overly special. We have stacks of indie table top books thourgh various sales over the years sitting there waiting for us to try out.
As I understand it (and I'm not an expert, hence the question), Pathfinder is based on D&D as released under the OGL, and has been a successful commercial product for years.
How is it legal for WotC to change the terms of the OGL licence and invalidate Pathfinder's ability to use the D&D content retroactively? Surely Pathfinder can point to the original OGL release and say "all our content is based on this release which you released under an open licence".
Secondary question: does this apply to OSS as well? Can (e.g) Postgresql wait until the whole world is relying on their software, and then pull a licence change that makes it non-free/libre and requiring a paid licence fee?
> 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.
Wizards is claiming (I think erroneously, as it contradicts past published statements to the contrary regarding its intent) that this gives them the right to declare previous versions of the OGL as no longer "authorized" and thus invalid.
I suspect this won't hold up in court should it come to that but testing it in court would be the only way to find out.
Most FOSS licenses do not include a clause like this.
I think the concern is around provision 9 of the OGL: "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."
IANAL so I have no idea what all the implications of this actually are, or how a court might understand it. But at face value, the "any authorized version of this License" makes people think WotC would no longer authorize the 1.0 license and only authorize the 1.1 license, so further copying and distribution of material originally distributed under v1.0 would only be possible under the v1.1 license if it becomes the only "authorized" license.
Does contract law allow for such a thing? I don't know.
> Secondary question: does this apply to OSS as well? Can (e.g) Postgresql wait until the whole world is relying on their software, and then pull a licence change that makes it non-free/libre and requiring a paid licence fee?
No, because free software licenses don't tend to have that confusing "Updating the License" or any way to retroactively change the conditions that the OGL has.
OSS projects could always re-license (at least the code that the project has copyright ownership of) going forward, but that wouldn't affect copies you already got under the previous terms.
The key is that the old OGL was perpetual but not irrevocable.
It's happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#...
The short version is that if you hold the copyright, you can relicense new versions as you see fit, but can't change the license on already released versions. If the copyright is held by individual contributors, then you'd need unanimous consent from all of them, because the company is effectively licensing it from them in approximately the same way a user would.
PostgreSQL, specifically, is in the latter category, so it's not really a concern: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Developer_FAQ#Do_I_need_to_...
https://investor.hasbro.com/events/event-details/ubs-firesid...
I feel like following the investor relations can paint a much deeper picture than is otherwise apparent at press release time.
As an example, let's examine, one of the cards they printed an homage to is Volcanic Island--the most-available, lowest-cost real English Magic printing (Revised). Its average price on Oct 1, a few days before the 30th anniversary announcement, was (according to mtgstocks.com) $799. Its average price today is $779 (the $20 difference is within normal seasonal variation). A more-collectible printing, Unlimited, had an average price on Oct 1 of $1342.50. That's its exact average price today. The much-more-collectible Beta printing was $12,500 on Oct 1, and $14,999 today.
No, the uproar from the community had much more to do with the way they marketed and sold the product in which these homage prints existed, the way their messaging about its sales performance seemed sketchy, and most importantly the price of the product.
[1] https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/official-rep...
- $999 for 4 packs of non-playable cards is just a huge turn off to basically everyone, so nobody was excited about this to start
- they "soft violated" the reserve list. I don't really care about speculators in general but in the case of magic the "speculators" are often game stores that sell singles and thus are "forced" to be exposed on the long side to the prices of magic cards. My favorite local game store ended up going out of business because they keep reprinting cards and devaluing the inventory of local game stores
Didn't they sell out instantly? I found the price point dumb as well, but clearly people liked it. Their target was always middle aged members of the middle class, going for rarity made sense.
I doubt the set devalued the restricted list much.
I guess I knew everything about it and don't see it as a debacle.
The way they've handled Arena has been a total joke though, which is pretty funny considering it's basically Hasbro's top product.
EDIT: Oops, accidentally said "in this post", when WoTC's announcement was in the FAQ that got leaked.
> Can I keep using OGL 1.0a to develop fifth edition content?
>
> No. OGL 1.0a only allows creators to use "authorized" versions of the OGL, which allows Wizards to determine which of its prior versions to continue to allow use of when we exercise our right to update the license. As part of rolling out OGL 2.0, we are deauthorizing OGL 1.0a from future use and deleting it from our website. This means OGL 1.0a can no longer be used to develop content for release.
It even explicitly states "Content already released under 1.0a will also remain unaffected."
(though ideally they'd, you know, make that legally binding.)
FWIW, I don't even believe they ever wanted to try to claw back e.g. the 3.5 SRD, so I'm not as concerned as other folk here. (But it's also clear that if they have no such intent, they'd need to make it legally binding for folk to trust them.)
> Can I keep using OGL 1.0a to develop fifth edition content?
>
> No. OGL 1.0a only allows creators to use "authorized" versions of the OGL, which allows Wizards to determine which of its prior versions to continue to allow use of when we exercise our right to update the license. As part of rolling out OGL 2.0, we are deauthorizing OGL 1.0a from future use and deleting it from our website. This means OGL 1.0a can no longer be used to develop content for release.With those two bits, I expect OGL 1.1 to only allow commercial use.
They do explicitly say "Content already released under 1.0a will also remain unaffected" though!
They would lose any serious challenge in court, though i wonder how much hasbro lawyers would drag it out...
I laughed and cringed at this sentence.
[1] There was a published FAQ from WotC (copy available at https://www.rpglibrary.org/articles/faqs/ogl.php) saying:
> 7. Can't Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn't like?
> Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.
where section 9 of OGL 1.0a says:
> 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.
Most folks will continue to use DnD, but the big time online games will have to re-invent themselves.
The OGL does not allow people to use the D&D branding, nor any famous monsters or named spells (i.e. no Tasha's Anything or Beholders) and so if anyone made a D&D NFT they'd already be in conflict.
"Yeah."
"Ok, tell them we were doing to to stop people making NFTs."
"Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures."
"They are the same picture."
There is no legal difference between "fans playing in your sandbox" and "major corporations using your work for their commercial purposes". Under current copyright law, fans are just really unscrupulous thieves, and writing a legal distinction between the two that won't immediately be run roughshod by Hollywood, book publishers, or the music industry is extremely difficult if not impossible.
If you want a license that turns off major corporations, pick CC-BY-SA.
Yes, I know CC-BY-NC-SA exists. That sounds like it'd do what WotC would want: draw a line cleanly between fans and corporations. However, the notion of commercial use in the law is so broad as to cover basically everything. The only two cases in which I'd say CC-BY-NC-SA[0] confers any rights is either...
- You are an individual sharing the work on a filesharing network
- You can categorically prove to a judge that you had no "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation"
The latter category excludes literally all fan works. Even if you just drew them yourself and posted them online, that still gives you social capital: likes, reshares, and algorithmic attention. That is a commercial advantage for you. Even if you exclude that, the platform you posted the works on is still getting a commercial advantage from you being on there, so they have violated the license that you sublicensed to them. That's why the NonCommercial clause in that license has to say "filesharing is not commercial", because existing case law already says the opposite. If it's a draw, it's commercial.
Copyleft & ShareAlike clauses don't have this problem, because they ride atop established legal definitions rather than murky notions people have of being able to infringe copyright a little. All they say is "if copyright law says you made a derivative, then you have to also license it back to the commons you took from". Quick, simple, and most importantly, court-tested[1]. And no profit-seeking corporation will play ball. The standard practice of negotiating a license in exchange for royalties is so lucrative that it starves other forms of funding creative work. For the same reason, you don't see people making big-budget SCP films[2], because you can't window a release that you are legally allowed to CAM[4].
Of course, Wizards doesn't want that either, because... well, they also can't negotiate a license in exchange for royalties in that scenario. The market for exception selling is actually not that big. Even if it does serve to separate fans from large corporations now... what stops the corporations from just buying or hiring the fans later on once they figure out a viable business model under CC-BY-SA? The circle that Wizards is trying to square is that they want a license that is functionally worthless, so that when the corporations jump in to buy out the fans, they can pull the coin out of the vending machine and steal the surplus that those other corporations wanted.
[0] Or it's even weirder cousin, CC-BY-NC-ND, which is basically just a fancy covenant not to sue BitTorrent users
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internation...
[2] There are plenty of indie films out there, of course, and they do largely play ball with CC-BY-SA, Andrey Duksin[3] notwithstanding.
[3] A Russian SCP creator that trademarked the SCP logo and tried to extract monetary demands from the SCP Wiki's Russian language branch. Their shenaniganery has largely been forgotten due to the ongoing situation of Russia being a genocidal ethnofascist death cult.
[4] Movie piracy scene term for "point a camcorder at a screen and press record". Prohibited by many state laws but I'm pretty sure you couldn't enforce it on a CC-BY-SA work.
Hasbro is down 40% YoY. It's very, very plain that the entire goal of this was to drive players into DnDBeyond and then charge them a subscription fee because DnD's primary customer is DMs and not players. The entire point is to delete their competitors like Roll20, Foundry, or 3rd party sellers in the digital space.
This blog post is a smokescreen under the guise of "feedback". They were asking folks to SIGN the OGL 1.1. There wasn't a feedback period or words about how this was an early early draft that would change based on feedback. SHESH.
Hasbro tried this with 4th edition by making the rules of the game more wargame-like to force regular players to buy minis (there were even rules initially that for official dnd events that you could only use OFFICIAL minis) but they backed down on this even too. Same thing, different go to market.
The fools in Hasbro's executive suite are NOT decades-old players of DnD and they have no idea what they're doing. They have no commitment to players: Hasbro shareholders is where their loyalties lie.
I've played TTRPGs for 25+ years and this behavior is also completely unsurprising from Hasbro/WoTC.
This is nearly every single corporation in America. We are veritably infested with a caste of the "business class" who are completely unqualified to run anything, and indeed don't even care about running these companies. Instead they hop from company to company, ripping out the internals of whatever made that company great in the first place, laying off talented people, randomly closing down "cost centers", and doing everything they can to get an immediate stock price bump now, even if it literally destroys the company down the road. They don't care; by then they will have jumped to a different company. That's the game, and it's played an entire echelon of C-level Harvard Business School grads whose daddies helped them get admitted. The dystopia where corporations are ruthless profit-seeking entities would be better than what we have now, which is that corporations are the playthings of a caste of modern-day corporate raiders. The rest of us look at the decisions made by giant corporations and ask "how can they be so stupid?" They're not being stupid, they're being viruses, and viruses can still be successful even when they sometimes kill their hosts.
But boy, that's grade 1A "My fellow kids" language:
"However, it’s clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1."
Yuck.
"Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we."
We all won! Just like in D&D!
There's a time for making the audience feel like you're one of them. You might even be. But read the room first. This clearly was a time for a more somber treatment of the fandom/customers.
Talk about tone deaf
(The first time is what gave us Pathfinder 1e in the first place, for those who don't know - they took D&D 3.5e, under the OGL 1.0, and made modifications and continued its spirit)
Back in the day I even had an email thread with Ryan Dancy about making software tooling based on the OGL, which was pretty non-committal and discouraged me from proceeding with any efforts.
The existence of OGL-implementing tools is more a factor of WotC/Hasbro reserving attempts to enforce that on small fish in a small pond, but could be deployed against anything even marginally successful that wasn't tithing enough.
(One example of a discussion around that is re: Pathfinder Online, another Ryan Dancey project, which avoided the OGL question entirely by implementing a different ruleset. https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5lhu1?One-is-the-Lo...)
> ... you have to give all the recipients the right to extract and use any Open Game Content you've included in your application, and you have to clearly identify what part of the software is Open Game Content.
> One way is to design your application so that all the Open Game Content resides in files that are human-readable (that is, in a format that can be opened and understood by a reasonable person). Another is to have all the data used by the program viewable somehow while the program runs.
> Distributing the source code not an acceptable method of compliance. First off, most programming languages are not easy to understand if the user hasn't studied the language. Second, the source code is a separate entity from the executable file. The user must have access to the actual Open Content used.
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20060913004016/http://www.wizard...
> NOTE: The biggest problem we've found with software and the OGL is that programmers aren't paying attention to Section 8 of the OGL. Section 8 states: "If you distribute Open Game Content You must clearly indicate which portions of the work that you are distributing are Open Content." This doesn't mean you can say "all rules in my program are Open", the users need to be able to see all that Open Content. You can do this by putting Open Content in a format that is easy to understand. Popular solutions have been to place everything in text files that the program pulls info from, having everything in a viewable database within the software, using Java script on a webpage (viewing the source of the webpage will display the code and Java script is relatively easy for a user to interpret). The key is that the user has to see everything that is Open Content that the program uses and be able to understand it without too much effort. The whole point of the OGL is that once information is declared Open everyone has free access to it under the OGL. Compiling that information into a program denies the user that access and violates the spirit of the Open Gaming License.
[0] Subscription-based models are a double-edged sword like that. Anyone can say, "well I won't buy the next edition's books", and even if they mean it, Hasbro can ignore that threat until they're out. But if people can instantly end their subscriptions, well, that's different.
Well, that explains pretty much everything.
system being somewhat narrowly the executive duty to quarterly growth metrics for shareholders, the same shareholders which make up the board who chooses the execs, etc...
while i absolutely believe there are plenty of people with questionable-at-best ethics, these people don't just magically become executives in a vacuum, or by themselves.
I really wish they would sell WotC and that it would go private. Not everything needs to become a billion-dollar idea. Why can't we just have simple consistent million-dollar ideas that sustain our sense of fun and joy.
Between the magic 30th anniversary debacle, the lowering of quality in their products in general, and their clear attempts to milk as much money out of their customers as possible, WOTC has lost the plot.
Also WotC: creates highly racist caricatures of an enslaved race (Hadozee) in an official book
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/23330621/dnd-spelljammer-hadozee-rac...
Is it dark? Yes, and I think it's meant to be.
If anything, I think it's actually great that they're doing this because I believe RPG games are a great and safe mediums to acquaint people with these difficult subjects. I can't be the only person with this opinion?
Are people calling Marvel racists or anti-Semitic because Hydra was inspires by some parts of the Nazi military being obsessed with the supernatural?
I think calling these racists (or xist) is a failure of imagination; kinda weird to see it come from the RPG community, too
Contrast that with the gith, another slave race that broke their bonds. Just as gritty, but not racist.
Also, at the risk of being painted a heretic/racists/whatever. I'm not sure why the focus is so much on just black slavery; is it because it was most recent, or is it because of the current zeitgeist? Is it an American thing? Is it the "monkey" part and because some racist rednecks call black people monkeys? I find it mortifying we're giving those people so much influence over a fantasy world they're probably not even aware of.
Ding! You hit the nail on the head! To be succinct, if you hear monkey and think black people, then you are a racist regardless of any good intentions you may or may not have.
It reminds me of the ok hand emoji kerfuffle; where it was briefly racist/taboo to use it.
I think it's total madness to let people I disagree with influence my fantasy world games. Why give them that power? Maybe I don't get it because I'm not American and this is a cultural issue specific to the US (and the majority of people here, I assume, are American).
I think people just don't want to deal with slavery and race bullshit in their fantasy setting, which I understand.
So it's just annoying and tone deaf and doesn't add anything, plus the fact they are simian and transported on tall ships and auctioned off as slaves.
If you can't see why someone would would say "wow, a slave monkey race transported on ships. That sucks." Then you aren't arguing in good faith. It is not that much of a stretch to see it as a little demeaning.
Depictions od people of color as animalistic is undeniably a thing people used to do to be demeaning to them.
So I would argue you are having a failing of imagination.
I honestly doubt someone wrote this because they want to degraded black people using a far fetched analogy. It feels to me like a small group of people really wants this to be perceived as racist for some reason.
Like, don't get me wrong. I'm familiar with racist rednecks calling black people "monkeys," but I see no reason we need to give so much power to some small part of American culture and let it transfer into a fantasy world. What's infuriating is that those racist reprobates are probably not even aware of this situation, and we gave them so much influence.
Anyway, I wanted to write a more extensive reply initially, but then I felt like you've probably already painted me as a witch/heretic/racist in your head, and don't care about what I have to say. So, let's just agree to disagree and move on with our lives.
If you had read the article provided, you'd have also seen that Wizards agrees with the opinion and has modified their backstory: https://www.polygon.com/23339180/dnd-spelljammer-racist-hado...
So, no, you just have stuff to say about who is making the opinion and that it's "not a productive use of your time" to argue about it.
For something not being a productive use of your time, you sure are dedicating an awful lot of time being contrarian to it.
Either you don’t care, in which case you wouldn’t bother to continuing to reply, or you do actually care but just don’t want to express what you know is an unpopular opinion, and are just side-stepping it with this whole “I’m better than this argument” attitude.
if you were willing to rephrase whatever opinions you assimilated from plural Polygon articles into your own words and ask what I think about them, then I might have been slightly more likely to engage with them (your opinions). but merely repeatedly linking to something someone else wrote and saying "so what do you think about that, huh?" is not exactly interesting discourse. there is no "intellectual curiosity" (HN rules) happening here, just weak attempts at baiting the same old tired Internet arguments from the past decade, which many people, myself included, are long since exhausted with.
what do you expect to gain from this continued exchange?
(note that I'm posing a question to you, inviting you to reply to me, if you so choose, and, if you do, I won't mock or belittle you for replying, because this is a discussion website, and that would be silly.)
It's very hard to pretend to not care when you write multiple impassioned paragraphs about what you consider interesting discourse and what is beneath you. Your continued insistence of this "I'm better than you and this argument" does nothing but show that you do, indeed continue to care.
So maybe put all of this time that is so beneath you to read the article, and then you can proceed to insult it rather than just insulting the lowly people beneath you and our petty arguments.
Yet, here you are, continuing to reply. Maybe you should stop stooping to the clearly awfully low bar and falling for my schtick. It obviously isn't intellectually stimulating enough or worthy enough of your precious time.
You think that telling people their opinion doesn’t matter because they chose to have an article state it for them is helpful?
You think that constantly implying and downright saying the people you are interacting with are below you, your intelligence and your time, are providing benefit to the discourse on the site?
You’re just as bad if not worse and you certainly don’t come from a place where you can even remotely tell others when they “blatantly disregard the rules of this website” when your first comment throws them out the window and the rest are acting as if they’re in a different dimension.
In other words, get off that high horse.
Next time, engage by actually listening to another person, whether it’s their words or an article they provide, and comment on that. Not whatever bullshit game you think you’re playing by pretending to be above it all.
yes. imagine if everyone here posted blogpost URLs in place of comments, as if that constituted a valid discussion—this site would be a wreck. encouraging the minimal amount of critical thinking necessary to show that you have internalized something you have read to the point where you can restate it in your own words is a generally good idea for a good-faith discussion-based website. the best discussions on this website involve people putting effort into conveying their thoughts and rhetoric, instead of linking to the thoughts and rhetoric of others and instructing them to read it in its entirety before replying, such that they have to put effort into formulating and then conveying their own counter-opinion, while you had to do no such thing. that doesn't really sound like a good-faith discussion, does it? this is all I was trying to convey.
I never said anyone was below me or my intellect or anything like that, I said that I don't care to read what Polygon has to say comparing fantasy races to real-world ones, nor argue about anything like that. you seem to have taken this personally, and for that I apologize—I did not mean to impugn you as a person at all (until you began the "aha I baited you into replying" schtick, which is always frustrating and an easy indicator that the person doing such things never actually wanted to have a good-faith discussion to begin with). you mistook a couple of remarks I made as personal attacks, or something (even though you didn't post any opinions of your own, so I'm not sure how I was supposed to do that…), and that was not my intent whatsoever.
I really don’t follow this, on a similar absurd reasoning one could claim elves in lotr are racist because the have light skin.
It’s just a story set in a fantasy world. If you mean to it’s always possible to twist anything into being offensive.
I mean I don't care that much but it was a little tone deaf.
The real problem was there was a rules bug that let them move insanely fast
Didn't stop generations of racists from making offensive comparisons. Doesn't stop them from continuing to do so.
Racism's value system doesn't care about rationality or truth.
> On a similar absurd reasoning one could claim elves in lotr are racist because the have light skin.
Amusingly enough, Tolkien did in fact hold racist beliefs, despite his fervent opposition to the Nazis during WWII. Both of those things can be and are true. His elves are very explicitly Old Norse expys (read his letters if you don't believe me) and his constant fawning over them (as pale, beautiful, skilled, and wise) in contrast to orcs (as dark-skinned, ugly, brutish, and enslaved) was criticized then and is still criticized now.
> If you mean to it's always possible to twist anything into being offensive.
It is justified to take offense at something that is, in fact, offensive.
However, I think the elves were straight up alfar with their leaders (Gandalf, Elrond, Celbrimbor, Galadriel, the wood elf king - I never remember his name) drawn from the vanir.
I think the Rohirrim were Anglo-Saxon expys though, and I think the Hobbits were English expys. I also think Tolkien put more than a little of himself in both Theoden and Bilbo. Theoden says 'A lesser son of great sires am I'. Also, the relationship between Bilbo (who stays home, too old to fight the war against Mordor) and Frodo (the young effectively son who goes to fight the evil in foreign dark lands) a parallel to him and Christopher Tolkien.
Place names, language, all of that is evocative of Anglo-Saxons (the early vikings, later they came from Sweden and Denmark), except horses.
Wikipedia says "Tolkien grounded Rohan in elements inspired by Anglo-Saxon tradition, poetry, and linguistics, specifically in its Mercian dialect, in everything but its use of horses. Tolkien used Old English for the kingdom's language and names, pretending that this was in translation of Rohirric. Meduseld, the hall of King Théoden, is modelled on Heorot, the great hall in Beowulf." (available under CC-AS)
Wait, that says nothing of vikings...
But, "The name "Anglo Saxon" refers to the Germanic people who invaded and occupied West England from c. 500-1066 AD. These people arrived first from Saxony (NW Germany) and later (800-1066) from Sweden and Denmark. We refer to these last groups as "Vikings", and this is where Beowulf originates and takes place." - from 'Intro to Beowulf' (https://webpages.uidaho.edu/engl257/Anglo%20Saxon/intro_to_b...)
To be fair, some authors lump Anglo-Saxons in with Vikings, some keep them distinct.
AskMiddleEarth is a great site, and has a nice map of Rohan in an article: https://askmiddlearth.tumblr.com/post/104445771679/settlemen...
I believe the wood elf you’re thinking of is Thranduil.
With one notable exception: if it's merely the starting point of a campaign to enact major change (perhaps also if used as a vehicle to display how bad the system really is).
That said, I"m fairly sure you'd have to change a number of things to make "goblins/orcs" match up with real world Germans (such as the cannibalism) But it's been some years since I read LOTR.
I think what people find racist about this situation is that the scenario is obviously mirroring black slavery (fine, it still needs to be discussed), and that the race the authors chose to stand in for blacks are a racial caricature of blacks (monkeys, real world racist dehumanization as used by real world white supremacists and real world history, generally considered sub-human). End result is you get to discuss slavery and racism of sub-humans, which probably isn't what the creators intended, but the sort of thing we got wrong in the 90s. And probably should be fixed in updates like this if you want to keep your IP and franchise alive and not join the masses of media that 'hasn't aged well'.
It seems like a lot of people were misunderstanding the terms of the license due to people not being familiar with them. It could have been better when asking for feedback if they had annotated it with more clear reasoning as the intended audience are not lawyers.
I’m not sure if you are satirical here. But just to be clear that part of the leaked agreament was crystal clear. They would have had the right to throw your book in a photocopier and start selling the copies. They would have even had the right to sell the same right to a third party.
Were they intending to do that literally? Probably not. Would they have picked this and that from the most succesfull publications? Why not? They have the right for it. You signed it away for them.