I may choose to buy Daggerheart based on its SRD.
The licensing stuff is a little ... I'm gonna wait and let the dust settle and see if I can sift out the facts from the clickbait later.
Anyone planning on going into publishing shouldn't rely on the EN World community for legal counsel and shouldn't "wait for the dust to settle"; they should consult an intellectual property lawyer.
What I will say is the SRD is very complete and gave me enough confidence to actually buy the box set. So the value included is impressive.
The SRD may convince me that the Daggerheart system is well thought out and that the boxed set is worth the MSRP in a vacuum.
However, this is not happening in a vacuum.
I don't think Critical Role rose to success "because of the OGL" or "owes its existence to" the OGL. I'm not even certain that live-streaming your D&D game could fall under the OGL; it seems to me that it is a sufficiently transformative use of SRD content to become its own independent creative work under copyright law... that's an argument for the lawyers.
However, the inciting incident for Critical Role announcing Daggerheart and Darrington Press was almost certainly the OGL 1.1 kerfluffle, just as Draw Steel, Tales of the Valiant, and other TTRPG lines came out of that (due to a combination of legal uncertainty about continuing to try to support D&D and also I'm sure trying to capitalize on leveraging the backlash directed at WotC into siphoning off some of their customer base to build their own customer bases).
For Darrington Press to launch a license that makes it possible for them to issue the same fundamental threat toward third parties ("I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it further") that they themselves experienced - especially considering that threat is more or less their raison d'etre - casts a bitter taste in my mouth, and excitement I had toward Daggerheart curdled into a desire to see them fail when I read that in the license... at least until they make their license MUCH more palatable. To be clear, this isn't directed at Critical Role specifically - I want
anyone attempting to use this license to fail miserably until it's so clear that this sort of stuff is absolutely unacceptable that nobody else even entertains the possibility of using this kind of license again for an instant.
Generally, I think the Critical Role folks are cool, and won't hold this against them if they change course, and if they try to blame their lawyers I'll forgive them but think of it as a bit of a cop-out. Again, this isn't about specific people as much as it's about my position that trapped "Open Gaming" licenses are worse than no license at all.
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