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The Role Aids line from Mayfair Games had text like this on the cover of its books: "Suitable for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons." "Presented by the editors of Role Aids for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game." TSR ultimately had to buy Role Aids from Mayfair to get...

By another contract agreed to by both parties. A lot of bad analogies are being thrown around. The Open Game License is not a marriage or a rental agreement. It's an open source license, a type of agreement that courts have become increasingly familiar with in the last 33 years. These licenses...

OneBookShelf may not be as willing to knuckle under as people think. OneBookShelf is the top site for selling TTRPGs and wargames as PDFs, owning as much as 80-90% of that market. If Hasbro demands it stop selling legal PDFs that puts the company in a quandary. Rolling over for Hasbro and...

Steve Jackson Games sued the Secret Service and won, a court fight that led to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It isn't going to stop selling legal PDFs because another RPG publisher wants to do a Thanos snap on 23 years of open games.

If that happens, I expect Warehouse 23 will get a lot of new customers for third-party PDFs OneBookShelf refuses to sell.

If Hasbro tried to wipe out the use of the OGL with that tactic, it would be a threat to every open source license and provoke a vigorous legal defense from deep-pocketed entities across the open source world.

The normal OGL restrictions: Include this license, identify your open game content, identify your product identity, add your product to Section 15.

It also means that WOTC/Hasbro can't tell you to stop publishing the work or publishing your own derived works from it because it has nothing to do with their IP.

Before Kickstarter would you have thought that TTRPGs could raise millions of dollars to create a new game? When D&D Beyond launched would you have believed it could become worth $146 million? These are strange times.

D6 is OGL but it isn't derived from the System Reference Document, so nothing Hasbro/WOTC does would affect the validity of the license or the ability to create new derivative works from it. Here's the Section 15 for D6 Fantasy: There are some OGL-licensed games that don't use the SRD. The...

Going back to the 1990s I remember much worse flamewars than this one, which has most commenters on the same side. In 1995 when Sean "Veggie Boy" Reynolds was the face of TSR's effort to introduce a new Internet Policy as a lot of sites containing DND content were driven offline by the company...

Almost nobody using OGL 1.0 releases the entire work as open game content. The norm is for only a small portion to be OGC. For this reason, OGL 1.1's "Hasbro gets to use your whole work nom nom nom" is extremely different than OGL 1.0's "anyone gets to use the portion of your work designated as...

The original question was "what does Hasbro have of value to offer companies like Critical Role and Paizo to get them to give it 25% of revenue?" Now it has become "why would Hasbro offer something that's so valuable?" Not sure how we got here. The second question answers the first.

A lot of websites that offer SRD-derived content do publish the OGL with the site in Section 15. Here's an example: https://thealexandrian.net/open-game-license

I don't understand this logic. Hasbro/WOTC has licensed out the D&D trademark many times, including on roleplaying games such as Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game, which was published in 2002 by Arthaus and Sword & Sorcery Studios under license from WOTC. (That book has the Dungeons & Dragons logo...

I don't have the final edition, but the Playtest edition of PF2 has a Section 15 that starts with the System Reference Document from WOTC, which means it is derived from the SRD and reliant on the OGL for the right to publish. Everything I've ever bought for Pathfinder has the same.

Paizo wouldn't lose all revenue overnight after Hasbro launched an attempt to kill all SRD-derived content. Products already produced would likely continue to be sold. Any attempt by Hasbro to stop sales of Paizo's existing products, which were produced under a license that both sides agree was...

The use of the D&D name and non-SRD D&D IP, the opportunity to create products that launch at the same time as the next edition, cooperative marketing and a lot of other incentives. I don't think the part of D&D that's in the SRD has anything close to the value of the parts that aren't. The 25%...

I don't see how Pathfinder or a Critical Role clone could be stopped. Both companies have the resources and audience to shift to their own new rule systems that scratch the same itch as D&D without reusing the SRD. If all Hasbro/WOTC cares about are the big dogs, they should negotiate D&D...

If third-party products aren't a big thing, then Hasbro/WOTC shouldn't have any reason to try and kill them off.