OGL v1.2 Survey Feedback: 'Hasn't Hit The Mark'

WotC has shared some of the (still ongoing) survey feedback following the release of the Open Game License v1.2 draft last week.

We want to thank the community for continuing to share their OGL 1.2 feedback with us. Already more than 10,000 of you have responded to the survey, which will close on February 3.

So far, survey responses have made it clear that this draft of OGL 1.2 hasn't hit the mark for our community. Please continue to share your thoughts.

Thanks to direct feedback from you and our virtual tabletop partners it's also clear the draft VTT policy missed the mark. Animations were clearly the wrong focus. We'll do better next round.

We will continue to keep an article updated with any new details posted here or elsewhere on the OGL. You can read it here

The linked FAQ (no, not THAT linked FAQ, the one where they say the original OGL cannot be revoked, I think we're supposed to ignore that one!) indicates that recent rumours about $30 subscriptions and homebrew content are false. They also say that they will be revising the 'harmful content' morality clause in the recent OGL draft, which in practice gives WotC power to shut down competitors at will.

You can still take the survey here until Feb 3rd.

 

[dave2008]

Oh, nope. Not in 1.2a. But I don't really care about 1.2a after 1.1a was released.

They showed their cards, showed they were utterly untrustworthy and willing to rewrite the perpetual agreement to steal whatever they could from whomever they could.

I disagree with this assessment. WotC is not a monolith. You have competing ideas and agendas in most corporations. What is or is not "their cards" can change dramatically. So I personally think this attitude is a bit misguided; however, I don't blame you or anyone else for having it!

After that, the trust is broken. As I said upthread, there's 3 steps to fixing this, and none of them involve releasing 1.2a or 1.4a or 1.8a.

1) Apologize honestly
2) Enshrine the OGL 1.0a, or put the entire SRD 5.1 into Creative Commons
3) Write up a GSL 2.0 that people can sign to produce content for OneD&D

Nothing else is going to actually work.

I disagree. That may be your stance, but I think a lot of people are more flexible.

Personally I would like like #1, but I don't need it. I don't need #2 either, but I would like it. I agree if your are insisting on #3, then #2 is needed. But I would prefer a version of their current approach with multiple editions released for CC and SRD for OGL 1.2 - with the caveat that the final OGL 1.2 is an open license with several corrections made to the current draft.

 

[FoolishFrost]

I said 1.2, just check what you quoted. My main point is that it is not in the current draft.

It is a process, and what is important, IMO, is the final draft. Less so, how we got there.

Your statement:
"Correct me if I am wrong, but those clauses are not in the OGL 1.2? The only public draft that was released."

You mentioned a "public draft". That was 1.1. It was NOT a draft, it was sent to publishers, and expected to be signed. That is not a draft.

Is anyone else starting to notice a level of disinformation going on in all these threads? I'm not targeting Dave here, but in general. The amount of missing information from arguments is getting kinda endemic. Maybe a fact checking article on ENworld we can just point at is a good idea?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

to a degree yes, but then where does that leave us? Do you think you stand a better chance with any other big company when they want to screw you over?

If the assumption is that anyone is out to get you and will use their money and power to squash you, that does not leave a lit of options to enter into a contract with a big corporation.

If this were the default assumption of humans, chances are we could not even form societies, because that does require a lot of good faith assumptions

the only assumption I as a customer (or as a writer, or as a CS agent, or as a book keeper) can make is "the company will always do what is in there own best interest, and I need to do everything I can to align that with my own best interests, or at least my own minimal harm"

 

[Xyxox]

I disagree with this assessment. WotC is not a monolith. You have competing ideas and agendas in most corporations. What is or is not "their cards" can change dramatically. So I personally think this attitude is a bit misguided; however, I don't blame you or anyone else for having it!

I disagree. That may be your stance, but I think a lot of people are more flexible.

Personally I would like like #1, but I don't need it. I don't need #2 either, but I would like it. I agree if your are insisting on #3, then #2 is needed. But I would prefer a version of their current approach with multiple editions released for CC and SRD for OGL 1.2 - with the caveat that the final OGL 1.2 is an open license with several corrections made to the current draft.

Put me into the stance he took group, I agree completely with that red line. There cen be no compromise on OGL 1.0a as the consequences of not holding fast are far larger than TTRPGs and could affect trillions of dollars worth of global commerce.

 

[dave2008]

Your statement:
"Correct me if I am wrong, but those clauses are not in the OGL 1.2? The only public draft that was released."

You mentioned a "public draft". That was 1.1. It was NOT a draft, it was sent to publishers, and expected to be signed. That is not a draft.

I mentioned 1.2., thus I was talking about 1.2.

Also, 1.1 was sent to specific parties under an NDA - that is not a public draft. The NDA makes it very specifically private.

Is anyone else starting to notice a level of disinformation going on in all these threads? I'm not targeting Dave here, but in general. The amount of missing information from arguments is getting kinda endemic. Maybe a fact checking article on ENworld we can just point at is a good idea?

Agreed - you seem to need to do some fact checking yourself!

 

[Steampunkette]

I disagree with this assessment. WotC is not a monolith. You have competing ideas and agendas in most corporations. What is or is not "their cards" can change dramatically. So I personally think this attitude is a bit misguided; however, I don't blame you or anyone else for having it!

You certainly do have competing ideas and agendas in corporations... but eventually one of them wins out against the rest and that's what the company does.

And the one that did was "Let's revoke an agreement we promised was irrevocable for 20 years and replace it with a new one which gives ourselves the authority to steal people's work, take their revenue over $750,000 directly, and makes it almost impossible to run a VTT that can compete against the one we intend to create, but haven't yet." and also "Let's send this as a contract to some of the biggest publishers in the industry with an NDA and a deadline to sign onto it."

And then when that one got shouted down by a leak and the community, they're backing off to "We'll -just- make it possible to unilaterally end any license we like at any time and also make it impossible to create a VTT that can compete with the one we intend to create, but haven't yet... and also break that agreement we promised was unbreakable for 20 years."

Like... It ain't gonna happen.

I disagree. That may be your stance, but I think a lot of people are more flexible.

Players, surely. Some small publishers probably. But the big dogs and a MASSIVE QUANTITY of small publishers are all "Nah, chief, ORC and CC from now on."

Like... the players don't need to sign the 1.2 or 1.3 or 2.27 or whatever they get up to in the end. It's the publishers and producers. And they've said "No".

 

[mamba]

Forever is a long time and the industry has changed dramatically and if folks were still releasing pdfs and paper books. I don’t think it ever would have come up.

I am not so sure about that, to me the biggest difference is how big WotC / D&D got

Also, it does not matter how long forever is, they knew how long it is when they offered the license

Now we have multi-million dollar corporations selling computer games and copying D&D wholesale and selling it on at a mark up.

if that were true (selling D&D at a markup), that would be a really bad business model and fail pretty much immediately...

Wizards is spending hundreds of thousands of $ on R&D for future iterations of D&D while clones can benefit from that R&D at no cost to themselves.

poor old Wizards, making record profits and having to spend some money on R&D

If this was their concern, they could go back to GSL 2.0 and not release anything new under OGL 1.0a. There would be no need to revoke it

Morally I think WotC are ok… from what I’ve seen to date.

then you are morally bankrupt

 

[Umbran]

Probably. This is the red line for lies at the heart of the debate. But even those opposed to WotC seem to be of two minds: (1) fight every inch for preserving the OGL 1.0a versus (2) the OGL 1.0a is no longer worth preserving and it's best to move on because there is too much bad blood in the OGL 1.0a now.

Yeah. I've seen people present that they don't actually care so much about the function of the license any more - if it isn't 1.0a (or 1.0b, clearly irrevocable), they just aren't going to go along.

However, I think WotC and D&D have grown to the point where there are some legitimate business concerns that none of us or them could reasonably have been able to predict 20 years ago, and it should be okay to make some changes for that.

I think it should be okay for WotC to present us with a license that is functionally the same as v1.0a for 3pp commercial print, pdf (or some version of "static electronic files" to allow, say, searchable online rules compendiums), VTT play and actual play streams, with other uses explicitly carved out of it.

WotC should be allowed to explicitly reserve movie, TV, and streaming media rights. They can have traditional videogame rights. Those are all endeavors large enough that we should allow WotC to handle licensing them on a case-by-case basis. I think it would be good for us to let WotC own those things. The 3pp and tabletop community doesn't need those rights in an open license. Any party ambitious enough to want to go into those spaces should have to negotiate for those right separately.

Unfortunately, previous versions of the OGL are still ambiguously open on these points - the definition of "use" is too broad - such that closing those licenses is the only way to carve out these spaces for WotC.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Contrast that with players playing some other game - if you aren't interested in what Wizards is publishing and you find yourself in a group playing Vampire, then you are completely out of their ecosystem. New people you bring into the game are learning Storyteller/Storypath mechanics and buying White Wolf or Onyx Path products instead of Wizards. Switching back to D&D might not happen at all even if Wizards starts publishing something you might be interested in because now you're invested in different mechanics and have different ideas for the games you want to run.

this was my experience in the 90's... New players joined D&D. New players joined our Vampire LARP, or our Mage TT game. There was SOME cross over but in general it was at best 50/50 not 100%. Lots of D&D players didn't want to try any WW games, and a lot of Vamp and Mage players looked down on D&D. Not all, but enough... and even then I saw the "I just don't want to invest time and money in a new system"

Even if you switch to another D&D-like game based on D&D mechanics - like you switch over to Pathfinder or 13th Age - that's still better for Wizards

this however is NOT my experience...

than you leaving the D&D community altogether. If you're playing Pathfinder you might still care about adventures or settings that Wizards produces. Even if you're playing Mutants and Masterminds, the core mechanic of the game means it's easier to switch back to playing D&D if your group decides they're done with supers for now. If you're playing Vampire or Mutant Year Zero neither of those things are probably true.

There are WAY too many people holding on to previous editions for this to be true... and that's before the entire thing going on right now on Tick Tok where a vocal number of PF2 players (Not all, I have very reasonable friends playing that game) saying "This is why D&D died the day pathfinder was born" and even have people who are mad at Wotc/hasbro DEFENDING wotc/D&D because of the crazy attacks.
I also am in OSR groups on FB that back in 2017, 2018 where already pushing 'no 3e+ edition is REAL D&D' and those same groups are super up in arms today...

I have seen people come in to play pathfinder, or castle and crusaders, or (insert OSR or retroclone here) that refuse to make the jump to D&D for the same reason people refuse to jump FROM D&D... "I don't want to learn a new system"

MY own Tic Toks started when a PF2 player asked everyone to explain to him other d20 games... and then later other non d20 TTRPGs. My first posts were saying I currently play 5e, but prefer 4e, but also play V20, M20, Rifts and TORG... and I got hate comments form that guys fans saying that 4e and 5e were 'rip offs' of pathfinder.

The thing that Wizards seems really myopic about is that the entire OGL/SRD enterprise was both about building trust and building and keeping a community of players together in their game. Keeping people in the D&D tent even if they're closer to the flaps or the edge than in the middle of the tent.

Oh D&D is the biggest game, but make no mistake, even on here on these very boards you will find people saying no matter what happened they are never going back to D&D but instead playing (insert 3pp D&D)

 

[GMforPowergamers]

The real issue I see is that morality clause has no recourse and could be easily abused. If they want to punish someone or shut them down, all they have to do is throw that at them and if they can't afford the legal fees. Which will be most content creators they fold and WOTC gets thier way. Looks to me like they can squish anyone they want with the exception of a few bigger players with just that one threat.

in my answer to the poll I noted that there needed to be an appeal process for this.