What's Past is Prologue: Understanding the OGL Licensing Controversy in Light of the 3e/4e Transition

[Ruin Explorer]

I stopped reading the Shadowrun 5E core book after reading 4 pages dedicated to how an explosion travels from to room.

I actually ran SR5 for a while, but like, I can't remember exactly why we stopped, but certainly the last session was because we got bogged down in the middle of a combat trying to resolve something and we'd been staring at the book for 30+ minutes trying to puzzle something out (the internet had not helped).

We switched to a PtbA version of Star Wars the next week.

 

[Umbran]

Optional rules could with a toggle, but yeah, "natural language" and automation don't work. This could of course just be a low-function battle mat and not an automated system.

Given that D&D Beyond character sheets already have a significant amount of rules-automation to them, the sensible first release would be a battlemat with grid and tokens.

 

[DMZ2112]

One of the major reasons we stopped playing 3.XE was that the game tried to define every possible situation, and ended up with a "rule for everything", something PF1 doubled down on (looking at you stairs handedness penalties). But doing this didn't make the game better - not even as a "simulation". It just made us need to look things up way more and roll more dice (usually with tons of penalties).

Absolutely -- more rules have never resulted in more agreement. The "holes" people are complaining about in D&D5 might get smaller, but they'll also get deeper, and while the argument could be made that they will be fewer, I won't believe it until someone shows me data. More content means more errors, always.

All making a game encyclopedic does is make sure there's always a rule in a line in a book somewhere that someone at your table can point at and say "I told you so." It sets tables up for confrontation and conflict when the table's preferences and knowledge of the rules contradict the Word of God.

Look at PbtA and FitD -- those systems are tiny, but they thrive because they assume flexibility and communication on the part of the players. Common cause! That's where D&D falls down -- we don't have the same expectation. We assume antagonism as the default, and always have, except for D&D5 at launch.

I have an additional design concern that without redesigning the system from the ground up, these efforts to build heavy scaffolding over a more open and interpretive foundation will be like that castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, burning down, falling over and then sinking into the swamp.

His Sage Advice is just as terrible as Sage Advice in 2E, but even easier to ignore, because we're not teenagers now lol.

Well said.

I'm still fuming a bit over being seen not negating Invisibility.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Given that D&D Beyond character sheets already have a significant amount of rules-automation to them, the sensible first release would be a battlemat with grid and tokens.

It does, but I personally suspect they'll wait until it's further alone than that, given the video demonstrating how they wanted it to work.

I mean, I know, right? Said video is not dissimilar to a senior partner drawing how he wants something to work on a piece of paper and saying "Now make this work!", just a lot more expensive. But equally, both cases do show the actual goal, and I'd be surprised, personally, if the people who authorized that video were willing to authorize a version of the 3D VTT which was, say, only as automated as Roll 20. This is totally "my instinct" not in any way evidence-based, but I don't think someone who put out that video would even let an un-NDA'd beta of something less automated than Roll 20 out there.

 

[Staffan]

Great example yeah lol.

And honestly regardless of how anything else about this works out, the fact is a bunch of people are going to take "how the 3D VTT works" as if it were God's Own Holy Writ re: RAW/RAI, when I guarantee at least of the implementations on the VTT will be just some developer going "Oh this obviously works X way!" and no actual designer would have approved that decision. I mean, there's literally no way they're going to have, say, Crawford and Perkins personally approve the functionality of every or even any significant percentage of mechanics in the 3D VTT.

I would imagine that if there's a rule that's ambiguously written, the developer would send a question up the chain to see what was up. But something like magic missile where the official interpretation (roll d4+1 for damage once, multiply by number of darts) is completely out of the left field, that doesn't seem likely.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I would imagine that if there's a rule that's ambiguously written, the developer would send a question up the chain to see what was up. But something like magic missile where the official interpretation (roll d4+1 for damage once, multiply by number of darts) is completely out of the left field, that doesn't seem likely.

That's what I'm saying.

So instead of one Crawford giving wacky interpretations, we'll have an army of unnamed mini-Crawfords all giving their own takes on how rules work. Many of them will likely not be D&D players or DMs (or not this edition).

You can't count on them to make the most logical approach to a problem. We're rolling the dice. Yeah maybe 98 of 100 5E DMs would interpret Magic Missile the "normal" way (roll 3 times), I know Baldur's Gate 3 does for example, but it won't be DMs implementing the rules, it'll be devs, and some of them will do stuff that's utterly logical to them, but not to others. So it's probably more like 80/100 chance they "get it right".

I agree with more ambiguous stuff it goes up the chain, but if it reaches Crawford then OH NO frankly lol.

 

[MGibster]

That doesn't play nice with microtransactions

I expect as the years ago by WotC will center their game design philosophy around microtransactions and subscriptions fundamentally altering the way the game is played.

 

[Haplo781]

Given that D&D Beyond character sheets already have a significant amount of rules-automation to them, the sensible first release would be a battlemat with grid and tokens.

DDB had one ready to go when WotC bought them out.

 

[Umbran]

DDB had one ready to go when WotC bought them out.

Plausible. If I were in charge of D&DB, I'd have been working on one.

But I'd need more than the bald assertion of someone on the internet to take that as likely.

 

[Charlaquin]

So, funny story: While 3.5 was the first edition of D&D I played, 4e was where I really got into the game. And when Paizo came out with Pathfinder, selling itself as a way to keep playing 3.5, I thought, “how is that even legal?” So, I looked into it a bit. Found out about this whole OGL vs GSL controversy. And though I’m ashamed to admit it, I came away from that with an anti-OGL perspective at the time. Crazy, I know, but as a fan of 4e, Pathfinder just looked like this refuge for stuck-in-their-ways 3e fans who just hated 4e, and the OGL looked like a well-intentioned document that unintentionally enabled the “grognards” to split the D&D player base. It looked to naïve 17-year-old Charlaquin like the OGL was ultimately to blame for the Edition War.

Of course, now I recognize that the RPG industry is bigger than just D&D and Pathfinder, and that the OGL is an incredible resource for third party publishers that the whole industry benefits from, perhaps D&D most of all. It only hurt 4e because 4e didn’t use it. The GSL was actually the thing hurting 4e. But now, I fear all the folks who started playing with 5e may end up thinking the way I used to about the OGL. It may look to them like it did to me, this weird relic of the past with a loophole that enables competition from bitter old players who can’t get with the times, and that they might celebrate the idea of it being revoked.

My hope though is that these newer players who have enjoyed the benefits of the mass of 3rd party support for 5e will recognize that this wealth of support is owed to the OGL. That would be my angle for trying to convince 5e first-timers to care about this issue. “You like Kobold Press stuff? Deck of Many? All the 3rd party supplements and settings that are always getting Kickstarted? None of that would exist without the OGL 1.0).”