Wizards tried to change their license so that all third party material (books, virtual table tops, anything using the srd) was treated the way videogame mods are, and charge 30% of revenue (this was ogl 1.1). Players unsubscribed from the subscription based en mass, and their largest competitor (paizo, who owns pathfinder, and came about because of the last time they tried this) created an equivalent of the Linux foundation for srd licenses, and sold 8 months of product in 2 weeks.

This is oversimplified but hopefully close enough.

A couple of versions ago, Wizards of the Coast released a subset of the D&D rules for free with a pretty open license. That free subset was called the SRD and the license was the OGL 1.0a. It allowed third-parties to publish D&D-compatible adventures and such without royalties. And, crucially, the OGL had a clause that seemed to make it irrevocable in the future.

Essentially, "if you build on our system, we won't come after you for money or with lawyers, forever, we promise."

The result was an explosion in third-party content and overall an explosion in the popularity of D&D as a whole.

Recently, WotC released a draft of a new license that a lot of people interpreted as going back on this promise. The community was up in arms, then WotC released several waffling non-apologies.

This, at least, sounds like they realized they can't put the genie back in the bottle and have given up trying.

Here are a few of the prominent past HN posts:

Dungeons and Dragons’ new license tightens its grip on competition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264777

An Update on the Open Game License (OGL) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370340

Basically WotC wanted to not only change their future content to a more restrictive license, they also wanted to retroactively switch older content to that license. It seemed like an obvious legal land-grab. Fans objected, and (at least to my surprise, others here seem to be more cynical) WotC did a 180 on the license and adopted CC-4.0-BY.

After an earlier history of legal action against 3rd party publishers (TSR essentially bullying competitors to bankruptcy)[0], D&D's core rules were released under a license called the "Open Gaming License", which includes a license update provision reading "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 promise of that license built an ecosystem of people making and publishing their own content compatible with the official D&D rules.

WotC recently declared that they were switching to an updated version of the license, and that they were deauthorizing the previous version.

The new license included rules such as revenue sharing, limitations on how the rules can be implemented in software tools, and giving WotC the ability to revoke your license to the content. People are largely not happy about this change, especially with WotC's plan to retroactively cancel the current license and replace it with this worse one.

This has led to Paizo announcing their own open license with many other publishers on board [1], and a lot of D&D's vocal fanbase talking about moving their games to other systems with more favorable licensing.

Pathfinder 2, Paizo's competing system, apparently sold out what should have been an 8-month supply of their printed books in the last two weeks [2], and that's a system that puts all the official rules content online for free.

This announcement today of the SRD being released under CC-BY-4.0 is means WotC is canceling their plans to only license their system under the proposed OGL revision, since the CC-BY license more definitely can't be revoked once you've licensed content under it.

[0] https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2021/04/bols-prime-the-many-...

[1] https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v

[2] https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2023/01/pathfinder-sells-eig...

WotC licenses some of their content using the Open Gaming License. It ostensibly covers both the rules* of D&D as well as key elements of the setting -- particular monsters, characters, place names, spells, etc.

That license has allowed products and content creators to build on top of a shared platform -- using and reprinting portions of D&D's content to build their own worlds, stories, systems, etc. Note: not everything D&D publishes is covered by the OGL, just a set of core items they call the SRD -- Systems Reference Document.

WotC/Hasbro leaked that they were working on OGL 1.1 which had a bunch of ambiguous (and many argued harmful) language that required creators to do things like license their content back to WotC, pay fees to license content, control what and what was not appropriate to build on top of OGL, etc.

The OGL 1.1 was met with huge community backlash, and wotc has been fumbling for some time to figure out the next steps. It looks like they are taking those steps now.

* Aside, it's not clear that the rules of D&D are even something that can be licensed in this way, as game mechanics are not protected the same way as copyrightable characters are.

D&D 5th Edition (and some earlier editions) was released in a way that allowed third parties to create their own compatible content by referencing a document called the "SRD", licensed under the so-called Open Game License. This document contained the basic rules and content necessary to play D&D. If you wanted to include a zombie in your published adventure you could use the stat block from the SRD. The license also had some rules to make sure you didn't pass off your content as official, that kind of thing. There is a substantial market for third-party D&D content, and there are numerous companies that make it a core part of their business.

The OGL was written before VTTs (virtual tabletops) were really a thing, so it doesn't explicitly authorize them. Instead, VTT developers arrange their own deal with Wizards directly.

Wizards has also been in a conflict recently with a company affiliated with one of the children of Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D. As I understand it, this company is promoting itself as a throwback to the good old days when tabletop gaming wasn't "woke", and are using OGL content in provocative ways as part of this campaign.

Finally, Wizards is preparing a new version of D&D, "D&D One". All of this was the backdrop to a leaked plan to update the OGL. The new license explicitly said it only applied to printed content, not software like VTTs or games. It also had language allowing them to revoke the license if applied to offensive material. It included a royalty schedule for larger companies to pay on sales of licensed content. Most significantly, the plan was to declare the previous versions of the OGL no longer "authorized", retroactively forcing new terms on existing content published under OGL.

This resulted in a massive backlash. Wizards had an initial response where they tried to clarify the VTT issue and promised to get rid of the royalties, but that didn't really help. They announced a "playtest" where existing users could review the new license and provide feedback. As this announcement says, the response was resoundingly negative. So they are pretty much going back on the entire plan. And since the OGL has now lost the trust of the community, they're also licensing that content under a Creative Commons attribution license they don't control.

Worth noting that this post doesn't mention D&D One at all. It seems likely that they are still considering an updated license for the new version of the game, which means there's likely to be more conflict. But I don't think anyone could argue that they don't have the right to release their new game under whatever license they want -- the big deal here was the attempt to retroactively relicense the existing content.

Here is a transcript of piece about the debacle from NPR from a few days ago.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1151474346