We All Won – The OGL Three Years Later

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

They were exactly the people I was thinking about. There was a lot of effort put into Project Black Flag. I know that I backed the initial Kickstarter. Now in 2026 I wonder, why bother? No shade on the Kobold Press people because they are some of the nicest and coolest people around but maintaining a core set of books and expansions for something that's almost entirely 5E is an expense. If it's working, hey, good on them.

I know when the OGL was happening, I was looking for a way forward because I have a crew that plays 5E as their game of choice. We usually play a campaign of 5E and then try something else, so it's been 5E to Daggerheart to 5E to Feng Shui and back to 5E. No one in the group likes 5.5E, and so we already have our 5E, it's just 5.0. It seems like we'd be the perfect candidates for Tales of the Valiant, but no one has expressed any interest, despite just about all of us backing the initial Kickstarter. To them, it's too similar. I'd sure play it, but my secret is I'd play anything just to have a chance to crack jokes and spend time with friends.

That's a long-winded way of saying adopting an almost D&D when we have 5E (and Roll20, so all the books) is just not happening. And that's why I'd expect publishers with a "not 5E" will take their rules changes, put them in a supplement, along with their monsters and new classes, and just sell it on Beyond.

I'm in no position to tell anyone what to do, but as far as an alternative that's almost D&D for folks to jump to, I think that ship has sailed. Of course, just my opinion, and no offense intended to the good folks at any of the companies who made these alternate books.

I hear you, but your group (and mine) aren't everyone. As Marc said, the books are selling. And while it seems unlikely for the foreseeable future, WotC could go nuts again and alienate fans even worse than last time, to the extent that some of their current customers don't want to play their stuff again. (There's a big void on my shelf where my Dungeon Crawl Classics stuff used to be, for instance.) At that point, Tales of the Valiant might make more sense to groups like yours or mine.

And if not, that's OK too. Lots of products out there are produced that might not be what someone wants -- I'm never going to play Exalted, for instance -- and they still find an audience that loves them to bits.

 

[aramis erak]

I am in a similar boat, they never regained my ‘trust’, but I bought a few products since as I think they course-corrected fast enough. 2024 was a disappointment though and might have marked the end of my D&D journey.

I already had trust issues with WotC. The OGL debacle was just confirmation of their corporatist agenda.
I have to laugh when I read/watch the news about MTG players and shareholders suing WotC/HasBro over devaluing MTG.

I certainly am more picky about what I will buy from them in the future and have moved on from 5e. I prefer ToV and SotWW over WotC’s offering and am generally more interested in branching out farther than in staying with a D&D that keeps disappointing me

I saw the writing on the walls with Tasha's, and the revised Mordenkainen's. I was done then with keeping current. (And Mordenkainen's was a gift from a player.)

So I for one am glad that the OGL crisis got us / accelerated a lot of new TTRPGs

So am I, but the OGL, CC, and ORC all overcome the one thing that kept numbers of contenders down: The selection bias of distribution and publishing. Cheaper printing also helped there, as did the rise of PDF as a standard.

IMO, anyone who trust WoTC at this point in time, is setting themselves up to be screwed.

Still better than trusting AI.

If the reports are to be believed, Trusting in WotC is indeed trusting in the users of AI.

As someone who thinks D&D being the de facto face of the hobby is a bad thing, I was really hoping the OGL would disappear. And take D&D's dominance with it.

The architects of the OGL have admitted that it was designed to curtail interest in non-D&D rulesets. And it's led to everyone trying to cram every possible concept into a D&D-shaped box, no matter how ill-fitting it is.

See also Traveller 5E….

It's also given us the repetitive creative bankruptcy of large swaths of the OSR.

Not so much creative bankruptcy, but "my tweaks are better than X, Y, and Z's tweaks"....

Well, aside from Starships & Spacemen 2e... moving from not-D&D elegant but simple system to a Kludged D&D knockoff... yes, I am the bitterman, not the biggerman, on that score.

 

[Corinnguard]

The biggest loser then it turns out were the companies that made D&D 5E clones.

I beg to differ when it comes to Level Up. Bardic Inspiration all around.

 

[Pedantic]

For the debacle to have never happened.

But seeing as that's not possible, claiming that anyone won after a completely unnecessary, damaging and hurtful actions were taken is ... kind of sad. Sure, lessons may have been learned and people might be better now than they were before, but damage has happened. Claiming victory is completely belittling the damage was done.

It's like a celebrity making an ugly racists or sexists comment to someone in public and then a third party claiming 2 years later that we are all better now because we have learned not to be racist or sexists and the celebrity has sort of apologized.

A better outcome? How about as others said, WotC actually carry through with the promised to release to CC all the other SRDs? What about a true sincere apology? What about true transparency on what the actual decision process and decision makers were? And what their honest intentions were?

But yea, what we got was about the least worst outcome we could reasonable expect, but not hope for.

Yeah, it's wild to celebrate the CC as a better solution...when it was only a better solution because WotC endangered the initial commons to begin with. I don't really think they deserve a lot of credit for making it harder for them themselves to do that again, when they could simply not have done it in the first place.

I'll take WotC being unable to do what they did again, but I what I want is for them to have never allowed it to be considered at all, and now I'd like some actual proof they've learned and built an institutional norm that will prevent anyone from trying to do anything similar.

All that aside though, more damage has been done by the effective orphaning of the OGL and all the D20 era stuff that was produced under it. 5e's SRD and whole take on the subject was already backsliding from the norms of that period.

 

[mamba]

Yeah, it's wild to celebrate the CC as a better solution...when it was only a better solution because WotC endangered the initial commons to begin with. I don't really think they deserve a lot of credit for making it harder for them themselves to do that again, when they could simply not have done it in the first place.

well, they did, so at that point the best they could do is release an SRD under CC, because no one would trust them with the OGL again

I'll take WotC being unable to do what they did again, but I what I want is for them to have never allowed it to be considered at all, and now I'd like some actual proof they've learned and built an institutional norm that will prevent anyone from trying to do anything similar.

wanting them to never have done it is fine, but that is not really something they can undo. As to proof that they have learned, what would that proof look like? The OGL was seen as proof that they would keep to their word / contract, but they didn't. I don't think they can offer much that would feel more trustworthy than the OGL was and yet here we are... in a way the CC is basically the only thing they can offer up as proof that they learned from it and won't do it again, I certainly take that over anything WotC could come up with on their own

 

[Argyle King]

My perception is that WotC/Hasbro enjoy the benefit of a leniency from the community that would not be extended to other companies for doing even one of thing things people have claimed be upset about online.

Some of that comes from brand identity. At a certain point, people become accustomed to buying a particular label. So, there's some amount of moral inertia.

Realistically, there are also things that WotC can sell (like their mini line) that a smaller company likely can't offer. So, there is a risk/reward tradeoff for taking a moral stand that I imagine people weigh. For many people, it's easier to boycott a company when it's one that they already weren't buying from. People find doing that more difficult when there is a personal interest in the product of a company.

I don't think anyone "won" the OGL fight.

I believe that it is a good thing that WotC has been restructured to (supposedly) allow the brand to be managed better. As per past discussions here on ENWorld -which included people part of the old structure- there was little communication and essentially no collaboration between the various departments under the old structure. So, maybe the company has managed to fail forward.

If there is a "win" for the community that comes out of OGL, I haven't yet seen it. I don't really think a whole lot has changed. As I said earlier, I mostly just don't understand how so much positive momentum for the brand was allowed to wither away without much of anything being done with it.

 

[dbolack]

That was the whole point of the OGL, too. As Ryan Dancey famously said in 2010, "I also had the goal that the release of the SRD would ensure that D&D in a format that I felt was true to its legacy could never be removed from the market by capricious decisions by its owners."

That's .. kinda weird when my memories of the early emails was it was about offloading the production of loss-producing products onto third parties so WotC only had to produce the evergreens...

 

[Pedantic]

wanting them to never have done it is fine, but that is not really something they can undo. As to proof that they have learned, what would that proof look like? The OGL was seen as proof that they would keep to their word / contract, but they didn't. I don't think they can offer much that would feel more trustworthy than the OGL was and yet here we are... in a way the CC is basically the only thing they can offer up as proof that they learned from it and won't do it again, I certainly take that over anything WotC could come up with on their own

Oh no, they could do way better, they just won't. There's obviously the classic SRDs in the CC, but I'd love a public retrospective on how/why they made the decision, maybe some internal reorganization. They could simply issue a new version of the OGL specifically preventing them from what they tried to do.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I hear you, but your group (and mine) aren't everyone. As Marc said, the books are selling. And while it seems unlikely for the foreseeable future, WotC could go nuts again and alienate fans even worse than last time, to the extent that some of their current customers don't want to play their stuff again. (There's a big void on my shelf where my Dungeon Crawl Classics stuff used to be, for instance.) At that point, Tales of the Valiant might make more sense to groups like yours or mine.

And if not, that's OK too. Lots of products out there are produced that might not be what someone wants -- I'm never going to play Exalted, for instance -- and they still find an audience that loves them to bits.

I mean, WotC doesn't even have to go crazy, they can just design a new edition that doesn't jive with what Kobold is making. But yeah, pre-baking your own branch of 5E is simply good from a future stability point, as it means you don't have to completely depend on what Wizards will do when it comes to making things.

 

[mamba]

Oh no, they could do way better, they just won't. There's obviously the classic SRDs in the CC, but I'd love a public retrospective on how/why they made the decision, maybe some internal reorganization.

they are not going to throw their then and current leaders under the bus over this and it is hard to reorganize your CEO out of the company..,

They could simply issue a new version of the OGL specifically preventing them from what they tried to do.

no, the current version already does not allow it and they tried some lame lawyery excuse for why what they were doing was not what the license explicitly prohibits already.

Changing the wording in an updated version offers exactly zero additional protection compared to what you already had in the current version, WotC would just find another lame excuse for why whatever stunt they try to pull the next time was not covered by the license yet again.

They needed to switch to a license they do not control and that others would come to defend if they tried to lie and cheat their way out of it like they did with the OGL. I still believe they would have lost in court if anyone had dragged them there, but the 800lb gorilla has some leeway in pushing others around. With the CC they are not the gorilla any more and cannot get away with trying to bully everyone into submission