Uta-napishti
Adventurer
After among the most bungled attacks on an Open Source community in history, clearly someone at Wizards has pulled themselves together this past week and changed tactics. It just remains to be see if a betrayal with good PR will survive where a betrayal with terrible PR failed.
Make no mistake the goal hasn't changed: Wizards still somehow thinks that the we in the unified third party D&D 5E community are a threat to its plans to make D&D into a billion dollar business. So it has decided to try to scatter that community and break it into little pieces that cannot challenge it. This was the goal when they were bungling it as a mafia-like operation run under NDA a few weeks ago, and is still the goal now when they are trying to finesse us apart with "concessions" designed to give everybody their own little licensing world to play in, while keeping us all from playing together without paying rent to Wizards.
In December, the plan was to break off the larger businesses from the rest of the community by secretly buying off some people with lower royalty rates, forcing others out of business, while keeping a relative lax hold over the cottage industry producers, who should be simply scared of ever going pro. Boy did that fail spectacularly. Right from the start fatally failed to get EN World among other key journalists and influencers under NDA on the OGL 1.1, and as a result they were able to report on it as leaks came out.
Then they made the mistake of writing a license that attacked us all at once so that we could all ally in solidarity. "The tighter your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers". Everything exploded, and it looked like they were going to have many lawsuits, boycotts and a marketing apocalypse. The community was so mad that a few opportunists started making up new outrageous claims about the cackling evil inside Wizards just to capitalize on the outrage.
There was more than a week of silence during while Wizards waited for the news to blow over, but instead the hurricane simply gathered strength.
Clearly now Wizards, still with the same goal, has adopted a much cleverer approach. The tactics have changed, the strategy is the same. It's still on a strange mission to split up the 5E community that it has spent decades building, but the tactics are now about coaxing. Each part of the community should be eased into their own little non-threatening playground, too small or too distant to offer a relevant alternative to Wizard's future plans.
Why can't Wizard live with the status quo? Well, they could, easily, in peace with their community under the OGL 1.0a. The same effect that lifted all boats before would continue to lift theirs. They are moving into new media, and could have counted on their rabid fans to continue to grow their brand and the hobby hand in hand.
But their deepest fears whisper to them that their product is not good enough by itself, and they need to clear the decks of any competition. Remember, these are Microsoft managers. They think an ecosystem that you can't drown in your bathtub or hamstring with unfair license changes is a bad idea.
Thus Wizards is moving manipulate licensing so as to be able to choose its own competition in the Tabletop and Online Play arenas. Any third party publisher should be forced either to make a game different enough from D&D that the average D&D player won't be able to easily find it as compatible third party material ( for this purpose they have offered the barest shadow of a game under Creative Commons ) OR a publisher should be forced to enter into a license that Wizards can terminate for any offence and that limits them to the less profitable print medium that Wizards soon won't care about anyway ( OGL 1.1 / OGL 1.2).
Specifically if they can't force all publishers into one of these two options, Wizards is afraid of the current big strong 5E compatible OGL commons will serve as a counterweight and offshore haven for their plan to lock 6E players up into D&D Beyond and a $10 / month subscription service.
In their nightmare scenario an uncowed, unscattered 5E OGL community would simply offer an refuge that many players would choose over the expensive subscription Wizard's really wants to become the norm for 6E+ D&D. There shouldn't be any place for players to run to if they want to play online or have digital tools to manage their D&D characters. So they need to kill the tools and VTTs that might offer an alternative. Thus the PDF only clauses in the new OGL. VTT Modules need to be official content, or non-compatible.
Wizards keeps telling their shareholders that D&D players are under-monetized at this point and the plan to sell D&D Beyond subscriptions is the grand plan to fix that. Ironically, I sit here "undermonetized" within melee range of the many many hundreds of dollars of WoTC issued D&D books I've bought. From everything I understand, the publishers Wizards are breaking their promises to have been their biggest fans, best promoters, and best sources of new blood and product ideas. Yeah, I'm sure it was totally random that WoTC released Theros not long after those mega kickstarters for ancient Greek settings.
It would be so easy to take their lumps, say mea culpa, walk back from the brink, leave the OGL 1.0(a) alone, and work on making a better 6E that they can license any way they wish. Some might say players would move to 6E and leave all of us OGL 1.0(a) 5E dinosaurs irrelevant. However, Wizards is afraid this won't happen, and has made the risk much bigger by declaring compatibility 5E -> 6E, so there won't be a clean break.
Why did they declare compatibility? Because they want to keep making money between now and 2024. In order not to undermine future sales of everything they produce until 2024, Wizards has promised that 6.0 will really be 5.5 and be backwards compatible. Please keep buying our new books -- they'll keep their value beyond 2024. This means that the SRD 5.1, that defines how D&D 5E works including classes, spells, example subclasses still will to a large extent define how 6E works and what is compatible with it. So all of our OGL stuff will still be around beckoning folks to ignore the new $10 / month 6E D&D Beyond subscription and stay on Roll20, Foundry, or just plain 'ol Books.
Fundamentally, Wizards has declared that they are unsure they can make the best D&D content, and want to be the only one in the market. They have also clearly broken their legal promises in order to do so. Since their tone change, they have started walking back the things that they had hoped to drive through, and have pared their attack down to the core thrust: breaking their promise to honor the OGL 1.0(a). Illegally withdrawing the 5E content that had been released under this license is the center of their strategy to fragment their community into small, nonthreatening pieces.
Everything that Wizards has offered to replace the OGL 1.0(a) content is actually intentionally worse than what we had before.
What we had before under the Old OGL 1.0a:
CC Core:
Someone can clearly write a D&Dish game with this, but they could have before under fair use. Wizards likely will lean on anyone creating spell slot tables or a subclass system as being too close to the now supposedly revoked 5E SRD. Goal: Allow lots of little incompatible systems far from the D&D brand, and a PR coup to distract people from the recent PR cataclysm.
OGL 1.2 Draft:
6E's SRD (whatever that will end up being) will be under this no-longer open version of the OGL. Perhaps the 5E SRD will be released again under it. Goal: Bring serious publisher competitors under the threat of termination at Wizard's pleasure, force them to repudiate access to the OGL 1.0(a), (all their 5E stuff) and cut them off from the VTTs, software, websites and other media in the world.
Grandfathered Content OGL 1.0a:
Wizards bizarrely claims you can still sell books that were under the OGL 1.0(a) before a given date under that license. Goal: Prevent lawsuits with clear losses being filed against Wizards for the illegal move of withdrawing the OGL 1.0(a). Get establish publishers to wait and see rather than calling their lawyers.
That's all bad, well, what we should do about it?
Still Publish OGL 1.0(a) content based on the SRD if Wizards won't back down: Everyone should make clear, perhaps in an open letter signed by Dancey, that they are going to continue to publish new content under the 1.0(a) that is based on the old content that was released including the 5E and 3.5 SRD, so sue us. You can't revoke an open source license that you delivered right with the product, and has no revocation provisions. If they sue, they prolong all of this, torpedo all of their plans for the next 2 years, and they will ultimately lose. They will fold if enough people go this route together.
You can of course dual license the parts of your own content that you created (i.e. not parts you pulled in under the OGL) under a new, free license (the OGL 1.0(a) AND the ORC or Creative Commons). You can make clear what parts are under which license in a section at the end of the work like you do today with the OGL 1.0(a).
Support Alternate Efforts: Support whatever Levelup, Kobold etc... do to keep a 5E compatible ecosystem alive. We will have to redouble this if Wizards thinks it can go into silent mode, or release the OGL 1.2 without ending its attack on the 1.0(a).
Boycott: We're not buying any Wizards products or signing the OGL 1.2. until you make good your unholy mess.
Pressure Third Parties to do the right thing:
Make sure that Distributors like One Bookshelf etc.. know what side their bread is buttered on, and vow to protect the sale of OGL 1.0(a) content lest they cave to Wizards and stop accepting new publications under the old license.
Until When?. Until we get the commons back that we built up over the last 20 years, and it is declared safe from attack.
They need to immediately drop illegal attempts to somehow invalidate the OGL 1.0(a) and confirm future content published under it is of course identically protected to past content. Until Wizards announces they they will never revoke 1.0(a). The also need to reissue past OGL 1.0(a) content under a license identical to the 1.0(a) but the world "irrevocable" right after perpetual. Call it 1.0(b) or 1.3. 1.2 should not be issued at all.
Alternately, releasing the 3.5E SRD and the 5.1 SRD as another just-as-open license, like the ORC or Creative Commons would be fine too, but it has to be a just-as-open irrevocable license as what we had in the past.
Hey Wizards want some Love back?
Right now trust is shattered. Everyone has seen that people willing to dishonor their word have the reigns at WoTC now. What can one do when one has betrayed the community, broken its rules that they vowed to uphold? Well, you can try to go overboard to make amends.
For instance?
WoTC owes fans, publishers, VTT developers, game masters and influencers a giant apology at the very least. They should also commit to releasing the 6E and all future SRDs under open licenses. (CC, ORC, OGL 1.0(a-ish))
What about you?
How do you see this? Has Wizards give us enough lip service / walking back of the big bad evil plans, that we should overlook old promises broken? How much farther are you willing to go? What are you hearing? What should we be doing?
Make no mistake the goal hasn't changed: Wizards still somehow thinks that the we in the unified third party D&D 5E community are a threat to its plans to make D&D into a billion dollar business. So it has decided to try to scatter that community and break it into little pieces that cannot challenge it. This was the goal when they were bungling it as a mafia-like operation run under NDA a few weeks ago, and is still the goal now when they are trying to finesse us apart with "concessions" designed to give everybody their own little licensing world to play in, while keeping us all from playing together without paying rent to Wizards.
In December, the plan was to break off the larger businesses from the rest of the community by secretly buying off some people with lower royalty rates, forcing others out of business, while keeping a relative lax hold over the cottage industry producers, who should be simply scared of ever going pro. Boy did that fail spectacularly. Right from the start fatally failed to get EN World among other key journalists and influencers under NDA on the OGL 1.1, and as a result they were able to report on it as leaks came out.
Then they made the mistake of writing a license that attacked us all at once so that we could all ally in solidarity. "The tighter your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers". Everything exploded, and it looked like they were going to have many lawsuits, boycotts and a marketing apocalypse. The community was so mad that a few opportunists started making up new outrageous claims about the cackling evil inside Wizards just to capitalize on the outrage.
There was more than a week of silence during while Wizards waited for the news to blow over, but instead the hurricane simply gathered strength.
Clearly now Wizards, still with the same goal, has adopted a much cleverer approach. The tactics have changed, the strategy is the same. It's still on a strange mission to split up the 5E community that it has spent decades building, but the tactics are now about coaxing. Each part of the community should be eased into their own little non-threatening playground, too small or too distant to offer a relevant alternative to Wizard's future plans.
Why can't Wizard live with the status quo? Well, they could, easily, in peace with their community under the OGL 1.0a. The same effect that lifted all boats before would continue to lift theirs. They are moving into new media, and could have counted on their rabid fans to continue to grow their brand and the hobby hand in hand.
But their deepest fears whisper to them that their product is not good enough by itself, and they need to clear the decks of any competition. Remember, these are Microsoft managers. They think an ecosystem that you can't drown in your bathtub or hamstring with unfair license changes is a bad idea.
Thus Wizards is moving manipulate licensing so as to be able to choose its own competition in the Tabletop and Online Play arenas. Any third party publisher should be forced either to make a game different enough from D&D that the average D&D player won't be able to easily find it as compatible third party material ( for this purpose they have offered the barest shadow of a game under Creative Commons ) OR a publisher should be forced to enter into a license that Wizards can terminate for any offence and that limits them to the less profitable print medium that Wizards soon won't care about anyway ( OGL 1.1 / OGL 1.2).
Specifically if they can't force all publishers into one of these two options, Wizards is afraid of the current big strong 5E compatible OGL commons will serve as a counterweight and offshore haven for their plan to lock 6E players up into D&D Beyond and a $10 / month subscription service.
In their nightmare scenario an uncowed, unscattered 5E OGL community would simply offer an refuge that many players would choose over the expensive subscription Wizard's really wants to become the norm for 6E+ D&D. There shouldn't be any place for players to run to if they want to play online or have digital tools to manage their D&D characters. So they need to kill the tools and VTTs that might offer an alternative. Thus the PDF only clauses in the new OGL. VTT Modules need to be official content, or non-compatible.
Wizards keeps telling their shareholders that D&D players are under-monetized at this point and the plan to sell D&D Beyond subscriptions is the grand plan to fix that. Ironically, I sit here "undermonetized" within melee range of the many many hundreds of dollars of WoTC issued D&D books I've bought. From everything I understand, the publishers Wizards are breaking their promises to have been their biggest fans, best promoters, and best sources of new blood and product ideas. Yeah, I'm sure it was totally random that WoTC released Theros not long after those mega kickstarters for ancient Greek settings.
It would be so easy to take their lumps, say mea culpa, walk back from the brink, leave the OGL 1.0(a) alone, and work on making a better 6E that they can license any way they wish. Some might say players would move to 6E and leave all of us OGL 1.0(a) 5E dinosaurs irrelevant. However, Wizards is afraid this won't happen, and has made the risk much bigger by declaring compatibility 5E -> 6E, so there won't be a clean break.
Why did they declare compatibility? Because they want to keep making money between now and 2024. In order not to undermine future sales of everything they produce until 2024, Wizards has promised that 6.0 will really be 5.5 and be backwards compatible. Please keep buying our new books -- they'll keep their value beyond 2024. This means that the SRD 5.1, that defines how D&D 5E works including classes, spells, example subclasses still will to a large extent define how 6E works and what is compatible with it. So all of our OGL stuff will still be around beckoning folks to ignore the new $10 / month 6E D&D Beyond subscription and stay on Roll20, Foundry, or just plain 'ol Books.
Fundamentally, Wizards has declared that they are unsure they can make the best D&D content, and want to be the only one in the market. They have also clearly broken their legal promises in order to do so. Since their tone change, they have started walking back the things that they had hoped to drive through, and have pared their attack down to the core thrust: breaking their promise to honor the OGL 1.0(a). Illegally withdrawing the 5E content that had been released under this license is the center of their strategy to fragment their community into small, nonthreatening pieces.
Everything that Wizards has offered to replace the OGL 1.0(a) content is actually intentionally worse than what we had before.
What we had before under the Old OGL 1.0a:
- Access to 75% of D&D 5E, and 75% of D&D 3.5E classes, spells, rules, magic items, the concept of feats, skills, the concept of background, the concept of subclasses.
- A commons where there was a share alike license... what I passed on to you you could pass on further
- No Limits by Medium
- No Reporting
- No Royalties
- Irrevocable According to WoTC's repeated statements
- VTT Support
- Access to a Body of 20 years of Work Compatible with 3.5E or 10 years of 5E. Including using the Base classes extending them with Subclasses, Backgrounds, Spells, abilities.
- Mixing old and new work freely in the same document.
- Mixing work from many publishers at the same table with little friction
- Huge numbers of fans able to get quickly into work from huge numbers of designers
- Lots of news, lots of kickstarters, lots of games
- Giant player numbers and sales for 5E
- Rising valuations for Wizards, Hasbro
CC Core:
Someone can clearly write a D&Dish game with this, but they could have before under fair use. Wizards likely will lean on anyone creating spell slot tables or a subclass system as being too close to the now supposedly revoked 5E SRD. Goal: Allow lots of little incompatible systems far from the D&D brand, and a PR coup to distract people from the recent PR cataclysm.
OGL 1.2 Draft:
6E's SRD (whatever that will end up being) will be under this no-longer open version of the OGL. Perhaps the 5E SRD will be released again under it. Goal: Bring serious publisher competitors under the threat of termination at Wizard's pleasure, force them to repudiate access to the OGL 1.0(a), (all their 5E stuff) and cut them off from the VTTs, software, websites and other media in the world.
Grandfathered Content OGL 1.0a:
Wizards bizarrely claims you can still sell books that were under the OGL 1.0(a) before a given date under that license. Goal: Prevent lawsuits with clear losses being filed against Wizards for the illegal move of withdrawing the OGL 1.0(a). Get establish publishers to wait and see rather than calling their lawyers.
That's all bad, well, what we should do about it?
Still Publish OGL 1.0(a) content based on the SRD if Wizards won't back down: Everyone should make clear, perhaps in an open letter signed by Dancey, that they are going to continue to publish new content under the 1.0(a) that is based on the old content that was released including the 5E and 3.5 SRD, so sue us. You can't revoke an open source license that you delivered right with the product, and has no revocation provisions. If they sue, they prolong all of this, torpedo all of their plans for the next 2 years, and they will ultimately lose. They will fold if enough people go this route together.
You can of course dual license the parts of your own content that you created (i.e. not parts you pulled in under the OGL) under a new, free license (the OGL 1.0(a) AND the ORC or Creative Commons). You can make clear what parts are under which license in a section at the end of the work like you do today with the OGL 1.0(a).
Support Alternate Efforts: Support whatever Levelup, Kobold etc... do to keep a 5E compatible ecosystem alive. We will have to redouble this if Wizards thinks it can go into silent mode, or release the OGL 1.2 without ending its attack on the 1.0(a).
Boycott: We're not buying any Wizards products or signing the OGL 1.2. until you make good your unholy mess.
Pressure Third Parties to do the right thing:
Make sure that Distributors like One Bookshelf etc.. know what side their bread is buttered on, and vow to protect the sale of OGL 1.0(a) content lest they cave to Wizards and stop accepting new publications under the old license.
Until When?. Until we get the commons back that we built up over the last 20 years, and it is declared safe from attack.
They need to immediately drop illegal attempts to somehow invalidate the OGL 1.0(a) and confirm future content published under it is of course identically protected to past content. Until Wizards announces they they will never revoke 1.0(a). The also need to reissue past OGL 1.0(a) content under a license identical to the 1.0(a) but the world "irrevocable" right after perpetual. Call it 1.0(b) or 1.3. 1.2 should not be issued at all.
Alternately, releasing the 3.5E SRD and the 5.1 SRD as another just-as-open license, like the ORC or Creative Commons would be fine too, but it has to be a just-as-open irrevocable license as what we had in the past.
Hey Wizards want some Love back?
Right now trust is shattered. Everyone has seen that people willing to dishonor their word have the reigns at WoTC now. What can one do when one has betrayed the community, broken its rules that they vowed to uphold? Well, you can try to go overboard to make amends.
For instance?
WoTC owes fans, publishers, VTT developers, game masters and influencers a giant apology at the very least. They should also commit to releasing the 6E and all future SRDs under open licenses. (CC, ORC, OGL 1.0(a-ish))
What about you?
How do you see this? Has Wizards give us enough lip service / walking back of the big bad evil plans, that we should overlook old promises broken? How much farther are you willing to go? What are you hearing? What should we be doing?
Last edited:
