D&D (2024) [+] Future of The SRD Speculation Thread

[Lupin]

I would be shocked to find out they were working on it at all. Everyone immediately caved when they put the anemic 5E srd in CC and stopped holding their feet to the fire.

Simple as that. They announced the CC-BY change for the 5e SRD and (almost) everybody was thrilled. The web was loaded with posts saying things like "we won!" Sounds more like Wizards "won" a corporate PR battle to me as opposed to truly protecting the game's legacy.

The sentiment from many 5e players re:the older SRDs seems to be general indifference, or at least apathy. "Why would I care about the older ones? I'm not playing that game." Or perhaps for some it's only ignorance: "Wait, they didn't make everything CC-BY after all? The OGL is still needed for something?"

What do I think they’ll do, nothing at all or the bare minimum. They might update the SRD, they might not. They made a lot of promises and most they haven’t followed through on.

What I want them to do is go through the entire history of the game and release an OGL and CC-BY version of the full rules, sans specific IP, of every single version of the game from OD&D to all the Basics to 4E and the upcoming revisions.

On the first point, I expect you're right on the money. As for the bolded, I 100% agree.
Especially after the DnD'24-5 books are out, they really don't have an excuse, unless there are hundreds more job cuts in the interim. And there's literally no reason for the 3.x SRDs to not be CC by now, like Reynard said, it's an afternoon's worth of labor to proof that content.

Fact is, if WotC never releases the older editions into CC-BY, it's a marketplace win for them.

• Keep people nervous about using OGL 1.0a to create vintage-D&D-clones? Check.
• Retain 4th Edition mechanics to themselves reintroduce under new guises in 5e revisions.
• Most importantly, the focus of the public remains squarely on their 5th Edition books and products.

(Yes, I know game mechanics are so far considered uncopyrightable, or so it is until a court decides otherwise, but the potential for legal action is a thing that people worry about. Otherwise, everyone would just rewrite 4e from scratch and publish it.)

Speaking of 4e, while it's true that making a 4e SRD would be time-consuming (as would both a 1e/2e, and BX/RC SRD) it would not be quite as hard as Kyle Brink made it out to be. The existing 84-page 4e SRD from 2009 already makes copious references to which mechanics and powers in the rulebooks were allowed to be referenced by GSL-licensed third parties. All WotC would have to do is populate (by that, I mean copy-paste and lay out) the actual texts from those rulebook sections, and snip out any setting/lore references. Could probably be done by one person in a week or so, then checked for IP mentions by another couple people before sending it out. No, it wouldn't be Essentials nor would it have the corrected Monster Manual 3 encounter math, but it would be a whole lot better than nothing, would rejuvenate interest in 4e (which would result in digital PDF and POD sales for Wizards!) and wouldn't be nearly as time-consuming as crafting an AD&D/2e/RC SRD from the raw rulebooks.

 

[mamba]

The sentiment from many 5e players re:the older SRDs seems to be general indifference, or at least apathy. "Why would I care about the older ones? I'm not playing that game." Or perhaps for some it's only ignorance: "Wait, they didn't make everything CC-BY after all? The OGL is still needed for something?"

mine is: it doesn’t matter, the incentive to revoke the OGL is gone, so whoever needs OGL SRDs can continue using them.

Back then we were told that putting the 3e SRD under CC does not really help anyway because of all the other OGL published material they use in addition, so now I see no problem with the 3e SRD not being under CC as a consequence. Nice to have, sure, but that is it.

Fact is, if WotC never releases the older editions into CC-BY, it's a marketplace win for them.

eh, it makes no difference one way or the other

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'd wager we don't see an updated SRD until the playtests ends and the books are finished.
Safe bet?

Absolutely. It would be wild for them to do it sooner than that.

The difference is that the SRD is the loss leader powering D&D Beyond now: and they will want to onboard new players using the current rules. The SRD is way more important to WotC now than it was in 2014-2016.

Yeah they want the entire D&D ecosystem using the most current rules as quickly as possible.

[Edit: The following was based on what apparently was my misunderstanding of what Parmandur meant by "loss leader", thanks to my unfamiliarity with DDB. The basic point that the SRD isn't particularly important for DDB going forward.]

The current SRD is the free content on D&D Beyond for 5th edition because that was the path of least resistance at the time; the SRD5 was released before D&D Beyond launched, and D&D Beyond was a third party anyway. But now, especially with D&D Beyond now being in-house, WotC can designate whatever subset of D&D 2024 they like as the "free" content for D&D Beyond, without having to decide what to put in the next SRD first.

Even if WotC explicitly intends to keep both the free stuff on DDB and the SRD aligned content-wise, it's incredibly easy for the actual release dates to be decoupled ("Look, sure, we need a careful review before we put anything out under CC-BY, but releasing it as free DDB content doesn't commit us to letting third parties publish based on it. So we'll just put it on DDB on September 17th to support the launch of the PHB, and wait for the reviews from the various departments to be completed before we release the new SRD.")

So the thing folks are forgetting in this part of the discussion is that they aren’t just selling their own products on DDB anymore.

The more 3pp migrate to the new phb, the more players do, and the more third party sourcebooks they can sell on DDB that specifically support the new core books.

I think they want that new SRD out fast. Not because it’s needed for content to be on DDB, but because people don’t want to make big high value products exclusively for DDB. They want to also sell them elsewhere, and wotc learned the hard way recently just how opposed the 3pp community is to having to make deals with wotc in order to do that.

So, if they want the critical role Marquet Setting Guide to end up on DDB and be made using the revised options and rules in the new core books, and see a version of the Gunslinger with weapon mastery, or whatever, they need for CR to be able to make a print book using an open license SRD.

 

[Lupin]

mine is: it doesn’t matter, the incentive to revoke the OGL is gone, so whoever needs OGL SRDs can continue using them.

Back then we were told that putting the 3e SRD under CC does not really help anyway because of all the other OGL published material they use in addition, so now I see no problem with the 3e SRD not being under CC as a consequence. Nice to have, sure, but that is it.


eh, it makes no difference one way or the other

Re: people saying the 3/3.5 SRD in CC doesn't help, while I do remember people saying that, I recall it was because they were arguing for WotC to minimally amend OGL 1.0a and cement it as legally irrevocable (effectively, a good OGL 1.1), so that all those additional materials were forever accessible to publishers. This was all mainly discussed during the January situation, before WotC had even done the full-CC-BY thing, which I think most people didn't consider a strong possibility until late in the affair. (I might just be remembering things differently than you, though.)

I would not agree with the notion that having the 3/3.5/Modern d20 SRDs in CC-BY are meaningless because some major products had used some other 3rd party OGL works in their licenses. With the uptick in CC-BY RPG content, I expect that many rulesets could be revised to include CC-BY or original content if the other SRDs were CC-BY. OSRIC, for instance, only uses the base 3e SRD.

In the end, they didn't amend the existing OGL text to be irrevocable, and from the sound of it, won't. (If they had, it would have been the cleanest and most helpful solution.) Instead, they did something both more and far less generous. Publishers are putting their books at risk for potential future shutdown by publishing new works under the OGL. Yeah, it may not be the pressing concern it was just over a year ago, but the corporate wagons will circle again one day (like it has in the past, with the GSL and 4e) and some security in using the full rules of all the classic D&Ds would be a welcome gesture.

In particular, 4th edition D&D is still essentially off-limits to third-party publishers. Most of what's available in the market is 4e WotC PDFs/PODs. Those are great and all, but it would be much more of a comfort for 4e designers to have that game and its gameplay features into a safer "public access" haven, instead of using a patchwork, OGL-reliant clone.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Bottom line, wotc want their game to be the foundation and lingua Franca of the biggest part of the hobby. They want every D&D -like using the phrase “d20 Test” and playing around with weapon mastery and thinking of Counterspell as a spell that forces a saving throw, and whatever else. They want to make Kobold Press feel like they need to be familiar with the new SRD in order to make “compatible with Tales of The Valiant and with 5e” products.

They also want to prove that it’s just an update, not a new game, and the way to do that is to update the SRD (which means putting out a new one technically) with the new update/revisions.

 

[mamba]

In the end, they didn't amend the existing OGL text to be irrevocable, and from the sound of it, won't.

they don’t have to, it already is… while this was not determined by a court as it never went to trial, I do expect the court to agree.

Apart from that they have no incentive to ever try again, as the SRD that matters is now in CC anyway, so it is not affecting the availability of the 5e SRD. There is nothing in it for WotC any more.

So yes, it would be nice to eventually get the 3e SRD under CC, but I am not expecting a lot of material that is under the OGL now to bother switching over

Instead, they did something both more and far less generous.

they did the only thing that made sense, why would you trust WotC to not try again eventually, just because they added a word to the OGL. For 20+ years everyone already agreed it was irrevocable and that did not stop them from trying, so why would adding the word stop some other lame excuse future attempt… when there is no trust, promises do not matter

In particular, 4th edition D&D is still essentially off-limits to third-party publishers.

and that won’t change, they won’t release a CC SRD for it. There never was a proper SRD (yes, there is a list with a ton of names and no explanation in it…) and they won’t spend the effort to create one now

 

[Micah Sweet]

[Edit: I see I got ninja-ed on this.]

The first question is, will there be any updates to the SRD at all?

After all, it's been a year since they announced their intention to move the 3.5E SRD into Creative Commons, and if there's been any movement on that front, I haven't heard of it. Now, to be fair, there was some due diligence to be done -- the 5E SRD contained a few references like "Strahd von Zarovich" and "mind flayer," and since Creative Commons has no concept of product identity, putting the SRD into CC meant those names were released for anyone to use. WotC would quite reasonably want to make sure they didn't repeat that. But given that the SRD itself spells out what constitutes product identity, it should not take a year to search the collection of 3.5E open content for relevant terms and remove them.

It may be that they are in fact moving forward on this, but it's a low priority and keeps getting shoved behind other things -- a new edition is coming up, after all. But as anyone familiar with large bureaucracies knows, a thing which gets delayed over and over runs an increasing risk of being dropped altogether. And if the 3.5E SRD is caught in a cycle of delays, it's more than likely that the new edition SRD will face similar hurdles.

It may be time to start putting pressure on WotC to follow through with their commitments* on the 3.5E SRD. If they realize we take this seriously, they'll be more likely to hold to their word on 2024E.

*Technically speaking, they did not commit to putting 3.5 in CC. But they said they wanted to do it and that they were reviewing the 3.5 open materials for release; they clearly wanted 3E fans to think it was coming. IMO, that puts an obligation on them to either follow through or announce clearly that it's not happening and why.

Whether or not they come back to this (either to actually do it or to publicly say they aren't going to) will IMO be a good indicator of whether or not they have any real regard for the older and/or non-casual part of their fanbase. If they ignore the issue, it seems pretty clear to me they feel they can ignore the people who care about it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'll be honest, I didn't think they were serious about that, even at the time.

Yeah, seemed like a dodge to get people off their back.

 

[Lupin]

What I agree with mamba on is that WotC will not put older editions in CC, including 3e/3.5e.

Kyle Brink said "Yeah, I don't see why not" when Ted (Nerd Immersion) asked him about creating SRDs for other older editions (including 4th), while noting that it would take a good bit of time and energy to make them. But then, Kyle also said he expected the 3.5 SRD to be CC by the end of '23...which it very easily could have been, and wasn't. I think someone in the chain of command is deliberately stalling any such releases because there is no compelling reason for them to. So it just ends up being a lot of PR smoke—whether it set out to be or not—that no one takes them to task for.

My argument is only that there is value for 3PP to have the older editions being placed in CC, and that Wizards of the Coast should be honoring their commitments. Having watched their actions over this past year, they clearly will not. When they pull stuff like this, it sure doesn't compel me to reward them by buying their new books, digitally or physically.

Edit: Also, they are absolutely using weasel words in their Community Updates to get out of doing much of anything to update the SRD for 2024 rules. Ensuring the 2024 rules are "compatible" with the SRD is a whole lot different from "updating the SRD to include the new core rules in CC." Didn't they say at the Creator's Summit that they would be putting all the new rules in the SRD?

Edit 2: Apparently Chris Perkins said at the Summit, "Any mechanical changes will be brought into the SRD so you won't have to buy the new books for the mechanic changes." I wonder what they imagine when they say mechanical changes as opposed to alternatives. (For example, they might include new rules for exhaustion, but revised classes are omitted as they are simply "alternatives" to the 2014 classes.)

 

[mamba]

My argument is only that there is value for 3PP to have the older editions being placed in CC, and that Wizards of the Coast should be honoring their commitments.

no disagreement here

Also, they are absolutely using weasel words in their Community Updates to get out of doing much of anything to update the SRD for 2024 rules. Ensuring the 2024 rules are "compatible" with the SRD is a whole lot different from "updating the SRD to include the new core rules in CC."

agreed, I am curious whether we get a two page errata document or a whole new SRD where everything is updated (monster stats, spell descriptions, …)

I am hoping for the latter, but I have my doubts.