WotC D&D Historian Ben Riggs says the OGL fiasco was Chris Cocks idea.

[MoonSong]

Well, it's not a takeover even that Vrinks said was thw concern: the concern was a big company coming in and taking over the D&D space with the OGL itself as LaNassa wanted to do with no talent or resources

He wasn't using the OGL either.

 

[Parmandur]

He wasn't using the OGL either.

Right, because of incompetence. It is not a huge leap in my mind to imagine someone looking at that mess (and WotC well and truly involved legally) and imagining a scenario where a bad actor with competence and deep pockets comes along.

It is the charitable reading of the situation, and the most probable at any rate.

 

[I'm A Banana]

By "product of his time" I assume you're talking about "that time since humans formed large organizations"?

Whenever we started letting influential failures continue to be influential despite their failures because we didn't have the societal intelligence to course-correct and had this assumption that people in positions of leadership must be there because of some intrinsic value of their ability and not just because they know people who are already influential. So, probably right about then, yeah.

 

[mamba]

The OGL was always kind of weird. In the first place, it was more of a gentleman's agreement and whether it was legally enforceable to begin with was always debatable.

anything is debatable, but it stands a very good chance of being enforceable, the only question is what the remedy is, much like for the CC

It was more of a "follow a few restrictions and nobody has to spend a bunch of money on lawyers" because it's not clear how much of the rules even could be legally protected. Specific names, location details, sure. Roll a D20, add a number and compare to a target? Even if you used the same terminology it's unknown what would happen if it ever went to court.

that is entirely independent from the OGL or CC, both just mean it is not necessary to find out

But it also feels like the OGL stifled competition, companies jumped on the D20 bandwagon instead of developing their own systems. Sadly, without an alternate world simulator we'll never know.

again independent of the license and only a matter of a license being available. The CC is no different in that regard than the OGL

 

[MoonSong]

The OGL was always kind of weird. In the first place, it was more of a gentleman's agreement and whether it was legally enforceable to begin with was always debatable. It was more of a "follow a few restrictions and nobody has to spend a bunch of money on lawyers" because it's not clear how much of the rules even could be legally protected. Specific names, location details, sure. Roll a D20, add a number and compare to a target? Even if you used the same terminology it's unknown what would happen if it ever went to court.

But it also feels like the OGL stifled competition, companies jumped on the D20 bandwagon instead of developing their own systems. Sadly, without an alternate world simulator we'll never know.

It didn't prevent the creation of Fate, or One Roll Engine, nor Savage Worlds. So many publishers focusing on a single system let breathing room for the jewels to shine instead of .

 

[Hussar]

The disparity in revenue between 3PP and WotC is obviously massive, so I don’t blame 3PP from wanting to be part of DDB. If someone told you, you could increase your revenue 100x (I have no idea what the actual revenue diff is) for awhile but have the risk of getting knifed in the back later, most are going to take the money.

I mean that’s the OGL in a nutshell.

Sorry but the debacle proved it wasn’t enforceable. A contract that cannot or will not be enforced was never worth anything.

 

[mamba]

Sorry but the debacle proved it wasn’t enforceable. A contract that cannot or will not be enforced was never worth anything.

we didn't get to the point where it would have gone to court. WotC caved before then

 

[Hussar]

we didn't get to the point where it would have gone to court. WotC caved before then

Still irrelevant. That was the entire point. The first major challenge to the OGL and everyone dropped it like a hot potato.

In any direction, it doesn't really matter. A contract that is abandoned at the first challenge was never an enforceable contract. Doesn't matter who abandoned it. The fact remains that it was unenforceable. I know people want to believe that the OGL was this airtight contract that was carved in marble. But, that's not what happened.

I mean, if the OGL was enforceable, why did no one continue to use it? Why do we have ORC and various other open licenses?

 

[mamba]

Still irrelevant. That was the entire point. The first major challenge to the OGL and everyone dropped it like a hot potato.

not even sure that is true… some moved to CC, no one needed to go to court over it because WotC gave up, which is not the same as dropping it

A contract that is abandoned at the first challenge was never an enforceable contract. Doesn't matter who abandoned it. The fact remains that it was unenforceable.

what was abandoned was the reason to enforce it, by WotC. If they had not, this would have gone to court

I know people want to believe that the OGL was this airtight contract that was carved in marble. But, that's not what happened.

if you look at what happens at court, no contract is airtight. What the OGL has is a very high likelihood of prevailing in court. That it did not even have to go to court is not proof to the contrary

I mean, if the OGL was enforceable, why did no one continue to use it? Why do we have ORC and various other open licenses?

I do not believe that no one is using it any more.

Some moved to CC, others decided to just drop the OGL because they had it more out of tradition than because they actually needed it, and due to WotC’s irrational behavior this inclusion was now becoming more of a headache than it was worth. Yet others might still use it, no idea, I feel like I got some OGL products that came out after all of this

In any case, switching to CC means the CC is a better option for most, not a sign that they would have just abandoned the OGL without it.
Does the CC SRD make the OGL SRD mostly moot, yes, the same way the car made the horse carriage obsolete. This is not about enforceability but about being offered a superior option with no downsides

 

[Iosue]

IMO, the entire situation as it originated and unfolded actually makes perfect sense to my mind as follows:

• Chris Cocks is genuinely terrified of a Musk or Zuckerberg sweeping in with the OGL and doing a weird takeover of the D&D space, as Brinks laid out in his apology tour (the most rational breakdown of the whole affair I think is if he was honestly and openly laying out the fear motivation for WotC business side)
• Cocks & Co. genuinely think that a new OGL deal that brings small publishers closer to WotC worh community standards and access to the Beyond marketplace: the proposed OGL seems insane from the TTRPG hobbyist perspective, but from a U.S. copyright and license perspective it was actually still crazy generous, and I can understand an executive really believing that he was offering a win-win deal for Hasbro and TPP
• Some people on WotC see this will go over like a lead balloon, and spend some time pushing back but yoy can only push back against the CEO of Hasbro so far.
• The community does not see the deal as a win-win, to put it mildly
• When thw potential scale of disaster is clear, the Creative Commons release kills two birds with one stone: the third party community is no longer under any threat of a change to the status quo, but also if a Musk or Zuckerberg swoops in to make a weird counter-D&D...they will use the CC version, and can thus be easily distinguished from WotC in the public eye because they are using a public domain thing rather than a licensed thing (which was the fear in the first place)

Lined up like that, the origin, controversy and resolution flow together as a logical whole...and nobody is really a bad guy (maybe the Metas of the world).

Agreed on all points.

With regard to the third point, even if people in WotC pushed back on it, I think it would have been difficult at the time to make a good case that changing the OGL in the ways they had planned would create a big backlash by end-users. The royalties provisions would not have any effect on fan published or vanity press content. Only a few active companies would have reached the threshold. And if they can get brought on board with sweetheart deals, why would anyone else care? The fact that they announced the royalties scheme in December to crickets (some online grumbling, but certainly no boycotts or DDB cancellations) must have only served to reinforce that idea.

The case for the pushback would have had to have been: it doesn't matter that fan-made content isn't affected, it doesn't matter that already published material isn't affected; people care about the OGL as a thing in and of itself.