Battlezoo Shares The OGL v1.1

Battlezoo, the YouTube channel which shared the initial leak of the new Open Game License, has shared the PDF of the OGL v1.1 draft which is currently circulating. This draft is, presumably, the same document obtained by Gizmodo last week. It's not currently known if this is the final version of the license.

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[Charlaquin]

I mean, I agree that I liked the OGL as it stood - I think it's a better approach. The only part I don't get is the absolute vitriol against the new one. It's disappointing, for sure. But it strikes me more as "there goes that era of good times" rather than "here come the dark ages".

There is an enormous portion of the RPG industry that relies on the OGL 1.0 to exist. This new license would put an absolutely massive number of small publishers out of business, and have an equally large chilling effect on the industry as a whole. If you enjoy games other than D&D, this change is bad for you. If you enjoy the wealth of 3rd party content currently available for D&D, this change is bad for you. Heck, if you buy into the idea that market competition breeds innovation, this change is bad for you. This change only benefits WotC, at the cost of everyone else who publishes or plays RPGs.

 

[Staffan]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "sharing". Isn't that allowed by the non-commercial bit?

The non-commercial OGL 1.1 is a separate thing from the commercial OGL 1.1. The commercial OGL only allows you to use your own stuff and stuff from the SRD. There's no provision for using stuff from a third party – not even with their explicit permission, because they do not have the ability to sub-license it to others.

And this was one of the main good things about OGL 1.0 and the ecosystem build around that. If I made a monster book, you could use a monster from that book in your adventure. If you designed a cool character class, I could incorporate that into my setting. The OGL 1.1 does not allow that sort of cross-pollination.

That's terrible, I admit it. That kind of stuff usually polices itself doesn't it? (IE if they ever actually do it, they'd have a riot).

They are getting a riot now. We'll see if they care.

And given the outright lies presented in the leaked document ("OGL [...] wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming." – it was specifically called out in the FAQ that you would be able to publish things in a plethora of mediums; and "over time the old OGL incorporated some confusing and even contradictory provisions." – no provisions were added to the OGL over the last 22 years), I do not trust Wizards to not pull off shenanigans with the license. They have shown themselves utterly untrustworthy.

REVENUE? Yeah, that would be where your only profits lie. I'm on board with this one. that would kill most of the bigger publishers, AFAICT. Which sounds like they're purposefully trying to keep their bigger publishers small. (You'd be much better off making $745K than 1M in that case, which seems strange). It seems to me to be a way of keeping publishers from becoming actual competitors.

Note that it's 25% on revenue over $750k, so if you have a revenue of $1M you'd pay $50k and still have $950k, so that's more money. Of course, that assumes that getting those $250k didn't cost you anything, which is probably a bad assumption.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What’s unreasonable is D&D’s owners spending decades benefiting from having everyone and their mother making content for D&D on their own dime, all the while promising they’d be able to keep doing so forever, only to pull the rug out from under them and say “now start paying us or shut down.” Forgive me if I’m more concerned about what’s fair to the small independent publishers than what’s fair to the billion dollar corporation.

A lot of people are also doing it to contribute to the hobby, while just barely making pocket change. So you just have a huge base of fans who have invested their own money to dabble in publishing as a hobby who now have a huge legal headache to navigate. It also just runs counter to the promise and spirit of the OGL. If they had never put the OGL out and entire communities, a whole culture of gaming and industry hadn’t emerged around it, it would be one thing. But from about 2000 until last week, everyone involved had every reason to believe the OGL couldn’t be taken away and planned abs spent around that expectation

 

[Nikosandros]

I completely understand why someone who makes their living as a 3PP would be upset (angry even, if that's how they roll). And those of us who feel like we're "friends" with publishers like Morrus (even if only because we hang out here) can reasonably "defend" our friends.

But what I've seen goes quite a bit beyond all that. People who have never bought a 3PP are OUTRAGED. At least, that's how it appears.

I strongly dislike 1.1 as a license for D&D going forward, but I'm disgusted by it, in its voluntary obfuscation and the fact that it implies that all previous OGL stipulations are no longer valid, despite what WotC har repeatedly stated in the last 20 years. If their theory is upheld (or no one is able to dispute it) this means ruin for Pathfinder, most of the OSR, Level Up, etc. Yes, I find this infuriating.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Don't get me wrong, everyone. I think it's a bad idea to get rid of OGL1. I'm just trying to understand why everyone (other than 3PP publishers) is seemingly flipping out about it.

Perhaps it is best if we overreact now, if it makes a difference to the plan going forward.

 

[Staffan]

Ironically, they only did that in the first place because WotC tried to get rid of the OGL. Had 4e been published under the OGL, Paizo would have been happy to just keep making 3rd party content for it. It was the GSL and its “poison pill” that made Paizo go “well, guess we’ll just keep making 3.5e then.”

They would not have been. The way Paizo people have described it, the process went something like this.

• Hmm, Wizards sure are dragging their feet on revealing both the licensing agreement for the new edition and allowing that look into the rules they promised 3PPs. We should probably look into backup plans.
• Hey, they're having an open playtest of 4e at the D&D Experience in February. Let's send Jason Bulmahn over to check it out.
• Bulmahn, upon return: "Nope nope nope." That's not what we want to write for. We need to do something else, and right time to start working on it would be six months ago.
• Hey Jason, didn't you have a variant 3.5e rules set you were working on? Can we take that and expand to a full game?

Now, it's possible that if the GSL hadn't been so toxic, and if Pathfinder hadn't been such a success, the folks at Paizo might have changed their minds eventually. But the original decision to create the Pathfinder RPG (as opposed to the Pathfinder Adventure Paths) was not based on the GSL, but on the distaste Paizo folks had for 4e.

 

[Tazawa]

There's a few interesting things that jumped out at me after my first read of the document. Forgive me if someone else has pointed out these issues--it's hard to keep up.

If the intention of the document is to force creators to use the OGL 1.1 license to support OneD&D, they've left a few holes.

- The OGL 1.1 only applies to "Dungeons & Dragons content that is included in the SRD v. 5.1". As near as I can tell, there is no mention of Dungeons & Dragons in the SRD v. 5.1 beyond the identification of the term as Product Identity in the preamble.​

- Only OGL 1.0(a) "is no longer an authorized license agreement."​

The implications of this are interesting.

- It does not cover the use of the 3.0, 3.5, or D20 Modern SRDs, or even SRD v. 5.0 which was released shortly before version 5.1. All were released under OGL 1.0a.​

- It does not say that OGL 1.0 (Open Game License v0.1 Simplified) "is no longer an authorized license agreement."​

Both OGL 1.0 and 1.0a have the provision that open game content distributed under one version of the license can be copied, modified and distributed under an authorized version of the license. I am not aware that anyone has attempted to de-authorize OGL 1.0.

Does this mean that people can support OneD&D with with open game content derived from previous SRD content under the OGL 1.0 license? It certainly looks like it.

However, I expect that if this oversight is obvious to me, other people will have thought of it too. WotC may have additional documents prepared to attempt to de-authorize OGL 1.0 and withdraw the release of earlier SRDs under OGL 1.0a.

The other thing is that OGL 1.1 does not address non-WotC (3rd-party) open game content distributed under OGL 1.0a. There is a lot of it out there--far more than WotC every released in their SRDs. A lot of that content is very similar to the content in SRD v. 5.1. The creators of that content retain their copyrights to that content with the only condition that it can be distributed under an authorized version of the OGL.

- Can a creator include 3rd-party OGL open game content in their content ("Your Content" in the parlance of OGL 1.1)? It's clearly not "Licensed Content", because WotC does not own the copyright.​

- If such 3rd-party content is included, what does it's status become? The creator has the right to distribute it under an authorized version of the OGL (1.1 in this case), but does not have the ability to give WotC any additional rights to that content.​

Of course if a creator can not include any 3rd-party open game content released under OGL 1.0 or 1.0a, this ends any virility of open game content. You can no longer build off of improvement made by others.

It also puts creators in a very difficult spot. As I mentioned before, there is a very large amount of open game content out there--how can you know that "Your Content" does not infringe someone else's copyrighted open game content? You no longer have a safe harbour related to the very complex issue of "how copyrightable is game content". And Wizards doesn't have your back--the indemnification clauses put all the burden on you.

Overall, the license is a bit of a mess and opens up more questions than it answers. Thoughts?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

There is an enormous portion of the RPG industry that relies on the OGL 1.0 to exist. This new license would put an absolutely massive number of small publishers out of business, and have an equally large chilling effect on the industry as a whole. If you enjoy games other than D&D, this change is bad for you. If you enjoy the wealth of 3rd party content currently available for D&D, this change is bad for you. Heck, if you buy into the idea that market competition breeds innovation, this change is bad for you. This change only benefits WotC, at the cost of everyone else who publishes or plays RPGs.

That's an interesting take. I have heard it argued many times in the past that the OGL caused a lot of RPG publishers to create "safe" D&D material when they otherwise could have innovated the Next Big RPG. (Whether that's true or not). Your take implies the opposite. I'm not sure which I agree with. Probably both have happened. (I can see where a publisher can cut their designer teeth creating D&D 3PP to finance their personal projects that may one day result in better/different games on the market).

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Ironically, they only did that in the first place because WotC tried to get rid of the OGL. Had 4e been published under the OGL, Paizo would have been happy to just keep making 3rd party content for it. It was the GSL and its “poison pill” that made Paizo go “well, guess we’ll just keep making 3.5e then.”

If Hasbro pushes ahead with this, I wonder if we will get a repeat of Pathfinder? Another company coming along making 'Totally not DnD' but with anything WotC can claim scrubbed out (and not using the OGL).

Preferably designed to snatch up 5e players which Pathfinder 2e still struggles with somewhat.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I'll note that it's another day beyond the 4th whe it was supposed to be released and yet it still isn't and radio silence continues.