D&D 5E So, 5e OGL

[aramis erak]

Why is avoiding stuff like the BoEF and giving WotC creative control over 3rd party products considered a good thing?

Certain elements have a lot more potential damage to the brand than benefit. Most of these involve stuff that will get the religious right wingers up in arms. While society is a lot more permissive now than in the late 70's, WotC really doesn't need to give anyone reason to recreate/reinvigorate BADD.

No one I know who games wants to get the religious right up in arms again. Still, several preachers in Anchorage rail against RPGs at least once a year.

 

[Halivar]

Certain elements have a lot more potential damage to the brand than benefit. Most of these involve stuff that will get the religious right wingers up in arms. While society is a lot more permissive now than in the late 70's, WotC really doesn't need to give anyone reason to recreate/reinvigorate BADD.

Umm, yeaah, I don't think you have to be a "religious right-winger" to figure out that the BoEF is not something you want the public associating with your brand. And not in an eye-rolling, "oh lord here come the rubes" sort of way.

 

[I'm A Banana]

There's a trade off to be made.

If you retain tight control, you will not avoid embarrassments, you will just avoid certain kinds of embarrassments, and accept the responsibility for those that you do stumble into. You will be able to shape the product catalog. But it's a lot of work. And it involves paying people to do that work. And it's not fool-proof. And it lets certain elements of the gaming community that you can't afford to service languish. Moralizers gonna moralize, and you can't appease them by changing "devils" to "baatezu."

If you surrender tight control (perhaps in favor of a community system....like ENWorld's Reviews....), there will be products you don't want associated with your game, at least tangentially. But you have plausible deniability and you can let those products you wouldn't normally bother to create serve their more limited audiences and bring them into the fold of the main game (Dancey's network externalities at work!). It's a lot LESS work, though it might involve some framing, and if you do it right, you just need to kind of keep an eye out maybe. But you'll have a broad appeal.

Overall, for a game like D&D, I'd push for the second option. D&D has always been a game that people do their own thing with, for good or for ill. We were all 13 year olds rolling on the random harlot table and killing Thor or whatever at one point or another. The people who made the BoEF thought there was a market for it (since they haven't made anything since, I don't think that bet panned out for them). D&D benefits more from a riotous explosion of whatever people can throw at it than it does from being a curated and deliberate experience. You don't show up to a game of D&D to play WotC's game, you show up to a game of D&D to play a game with your friends that lets you do whatever you want to do with it. There's a lot of benefit to be had there.

And the Decency Police didn't notice the BoEF, and they won't notice a 5e BoEF, either. Things like that don't make a ripple (or else FATAL would be more widely known). They're gonna dislike the game because there's wizards and demons in it, and mostly because weird kids have fun with other weird kids playing it, and we're not about to get rid of THOSE. You can't appease people who simply want to destroy you. You've got no choice but to be the best you can be at what you do. For D&D, that means ennabling all sorts of weirdness.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I'll be shocked if today's wotc decides to go the curation route. They struggle to manage the exclusive licensees they have now, with their flagship APs--I can't imagine them taking on the challenge of slogging through all the chaff of a general license.

 

[aramis erak]

I'll be shocked if today's wotc decides to go the curation route. They struggle to manage the exclusive licensees they have now, with their flagship APs--I can't imagine them taking on the challenge of slogging through all the chaff of a general license.

I would expect the trademark license to include a content type clause. One that can require withdrawl of a contentious or excessively graphic product.

 

[seebs]

There's at least one case (I think it involved Prodigy) where a court ruled that if you had the ability to edit/censor/control stuff, failure to do so created liability, but that if you didn't have the ability, you had no obligation to acquire it. So basically, if you were in the habit of editing or controlling what people post on your service, and someone posts something defamatory and you don't edit it, you can be in trouble; if you don't have tools for editing stuff and don't monitor what people post, you're not on the hook because you haven't implied that you are curating.

I would think that, tactically, "sorry, we can't really control what people do as long as they follow the license" is a better place to be.

 

[aramis erak]

There's at least one case (I think it involved Prodigy) where a court ruled that if you had the ability to edit/censor/control stuff, failure to do so created liability, but that if you didn't have the ability, you had no obligation to acquire it. So basically, if you were in the habit of editing or controlling what people post on your service, and someone posts something defamatory and you don't edit it, you can be in trouble; if you don't have tools for editing stuff and don't monitor what people post, you're not on the hook because you haven't implied that you are curating.

I would think that, tactically, "sorry, we can't really control what people do as long as they follow the license" is a better place to be.

The wording will likely be along the lines of "anything which, in the opinion of Wizards of the Coast, damages the D&D brand will be cause for revocation of the individual's right to use the D&D compatibility logo license"... Similar weasel wording exists in several other logo licenses and open supplement licenses.

 

[seebs]

I really hope they don't do that. It creates a broad chilling effect, and I seem to recall that there's been examples of things like that being used to attack currently-unpopular groups of people by banning anything which includes them. And I don't like the idea that people working on stuff will be afraid to include stuff that they think someone somewhere might be offended by, but that's what the clause means: If anyone complains, we might shut you down. Or might not. You can't tell in advance, you can't ask us and get confirmation, you just have to hope we don't decide to shut something down and leave you out of a job.

Basically, when people do stuff like that, I assume it means that they are planning to use them in harmful ways, and that they are afraid of the world, and it's never, ever, been a good sign. I can't point to a single example ever of such a clause being used in a way that I thought made something better.

 

[Roger]

I'm cautiously-optimistic based on the Goodman Games products, among others.

As far as I can tell, WotC is not unleashing the Kraken upon unlicensed 5E products. That in itself is probably good enough news for everyone involved.

Furthermore, it leads me to hope that they may be crafting a license based on the principle that people will want to use it, rather than merely be forced to grudgingly comply with it. That would be consistent with the 5E experience so far, in my opinion.

This may just be foolish optimism on my part, but hope springs eternal.



Cheers,
Roger

 

[Nylanfs]

So, still nothing on the license right? My assumption is because any RPG board I frequent hasn't blown up about it.