Paizo Announces New Irrevocable Open RPG License To Replace the OGL

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Paizo, the maker of Pathfinder, has just announced a new open license for use with RPGs. The license will not be owned by Paizo - or by any TTRPG company, and will be stewarded by Azora Law, a company which represents several tabletop gaming companies, until it finds its home with an independent non-profit. This new license is designed to be irrevocable.

We believe, as we always have, that open gaming makes games better, improves profitability for all involved, and enriches the community of gamers who participate in this amazing hobby. And so we invite gamers from around the world to join us as we begin the next great chapter of open gaming with the release of a new open, perpetual, and irrevocable Open RPG Creative License (ORC).

The new Open RPG Creative License will be built system agnostic for independent game publishers under the legal guidance of Azora Law, an intellectual property law firm that represents Paizo and several other game publishers. Paizo will pay for this legal work. We invite game publishers worldwide to join us in support of this system-agnostic license that allows all games to provide their own unique open rules reference documents that open up their individual game systems to the world. To join the effort and provide feedback on the drafts of this license, please sign up by using this form.

In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Green Ronin, Legendary Games, Rogue Genius Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group.

The ORC will not be owned by Paizo, nor will it be owned by any company who makes money publishing RPGs. Azora Law’s ownership of the process and stewardship should provide a safe harbor against any company being bought, sold, or changing management in the future and attempting to rescind rights or nullify sections of the license. Ultimately, we plan to find a nonprofit with a history of open source values to own this license (such as the Linux Foundation).

Read more on Paizo's blog.

 

[Steel_Wind]

I don't think there will be an "ORC version of 5e." No one knows exactly how much "D&D" a publisher needs to strip out of 5e to be reasonably safe from copyright infringement lawfare, but it seems likely that any publisher with a large enough stake to be a significant competitor to Wizards will want to strip out a lot of "D&D" from whatever they publish.

So now we are back arguing that the 5.1 SRD published by WotC under the OGL 1.0a can be de-authorized?

This is still their problem. It hasn't changed.

 

[Greg Benage]

So now we are back arguing that the 5.1 SRD published by WotC under the OGL 1.0a can be de-authorized?

Your position is that, because SRD 5.1 was published under OGL 1.0a, a publisher could throw OGL 1.0a in the trash and instead publish their 5e clone under ORC?

If your position (as with @pemerton) is that publishers should instead continue to exercise their contractual rights under 1.0a, I fully agree with that. But that doesn't appear to be what they're doing, and it isn't what was suggested (to me, at least) by an "ORC version of 5e."

 

[Maxperson]

Say what? I dint understand that.

I think he's saying that WotC is about to eat crow and Paizo is serving it to them.

 

[Remathilis]

See, when Level Up was being written in the first place, Morrus had everyone re-write everything. No copy-pasting from WotC's work, no plagiarizing, nothing. The only things that the OGL covered were names. Like "Green Slime". A specific WotC owned idea. But change the name to "Azure Sludge" and since the words after the name aren't taken from WotC, they have no claim to it at all.

Repeat ad-nauseum through 636 pages of the Adventurer's Guide, 367 pages of Trials and Treasures, and 530 pages of the Monstrous Menagerie.

At least that's the working theory that's got us all doin' stuff. But it's a sound enough theory that the EN Publishing Twitter posted about it publicly and all of us are in the word mines hammering out diamonds.

Best of luck, but I worry a little about this specific thing. Part of the beauty of the SRD was the fact we called things the same names. Magic missile was universally understood as 1d4+1 auto hitting force bolts. But that's a very D&D specific effect. So now anyone wanting to reference it will call it a different name (force bolt, force missile, magic dart, Fitzgerald's Magnificent Missiles) and will probably define the spell parameters differently (damage dice, scaling, auto-hit vs attack roll, range, etc). So if I write an npc for that is a 9th circle occultist who uses flying force dart on his foes, will you immediately understand what that character can do in Level Up or Pathfinder? Or what a Snarglepuff is and is it closer to a bugbear or a gnoll?

I imagine that the biggest draw of the OGL, mixing content from several publishers seamlessly, will be the casualty of this. It's going to be harder to mix CR stuff with KP stuff with Goodman stuff. Everyone will stay with their main system and the companies that support that version of it. The tower of babel of RPGs.

 

[FoolishFrost]

So now we are back arguing that the 5.1 SRD published by WotC under the OGL 1.0a can be de-authorized?

This is still their problem. It hasn't changed.

Honestly? We're just going to have to wait and see. I have no idea how they plan to do this. This is all in the realm of "Legal Trickery".

 

[GMforPowergamers]

. So if I write an npc for that is a 9th circle occultist who uses flying force dart on his foes, will you immediately understand what that character can do in Level Up or Pathfinder? Or what a Snarglepuff is and is it closer to a bugbear or a gnoll?

given time a new shared verbiage could work

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

So does this have any impact for players like me who could not care less about PF, 5e or 1DND? Can Necrotic Gnome still publish OSE under this? Can OSRIC publish under this? Or will they have to do makeovers for all those?

 

[Remathilis]

given time a new shared verbiage could work

Maybe. But that shared verbage will eventually have to be adopted by everyone in their core rules, or else one company's rules will become the new lingua franca. Perhaps several years and at least a few new editions later, the major publisher rulesets will begin speaking with one another. Until then, there will be competing standards and terminology will be all over the map.

 

[TheSword]

Because, simply put, the frog does not want to let the scorpion ride on it's back again.

Listen, a willingness to negotiate is great. On the other hand, the other side has to do so in good faith. I have had dozens of utterly silly contracts tossed at me by people who used boilerplates or didn't understand what the contract said. I advise them, to amend, why, and what's wrong with them. They either change them, or not.

But Wizards is not some noob who just grabbed a contract of the net. They created this thing, agreed to it, and released it for signature. This contract is not a thing to negotiate from, it was an extinction level event that Wizards HAD to know was going to crush companies. It's designed to crush them. It's bad faith.

So no. Negotiation is really not an option. No contract that sounds like "Gimmie 25% and let me punch you in the face any time I like!" is a starting point.

Well with that attitude we’ll never know.

You seem to be under the impression that they companies want to "beat" WotC/D&D. That's not it. They want a safe license so they can continue to do what they do without worrying about some entity shutting them down on a whim, because some jerk got installed as CEO or whatever. Businesses rely on stability and predictability. Uncertainty is the antithesis.

I think that’s problem. They want to continue doing what they do without any change. Better Being open to the idea of doing most of what they want in a symbiotic relationship rather than a demanding it and it getting nothing.

 

[Nylanfs]

This goes back to my original point about divide and conquer. I just can’t see multiple disparate systems only linked by a legal document carrying weight.

This is EXACTLY how the GPL and FOSS concepts work.