D&D General Interview with Chris Cocks on D&D AI, the OGL, and more

[Charlaquin]

This is definitely a big conversation in the opensource software world as well. I'm on the side that a CC BY 4.0 license is the more open license because it allows people to publish material and decide what they want to put in the open. The more OGL-style licenses don't and actually benefit the top of the food chain more than the bottom.

If WOTC had released it under a Share Alike license, they could have held back their own stuff from the SRD but force every downstream publisher to release everything under a share-alike license which would mean WOTC could use anything you created under that license but could hold their own stuff back by not putting it in a system reference document. It would have been unlikely they would have brought in stuff from downstream producers but I guarantee many people would have been suspicious of them.

I'm much happier that it's out under a CC BY 4.0 license as I'm happy that Russ put out the A5e SRD under the same license. It is much friendlier to downstream producers.

Yeah, I'm generally a fan of share-alike, but I think in this case CC BY 4.0 was probably the right call.

 

[MerricB]

Yeah, I'm generally a fan of share-alike, but I think in this case CC BY 4.0 was probably the right call.

Given that the actual use of the OGL often mimicked CC BY 4.0. So, so many products that didn't open up their new mechanics...

 

[Charlaquin]

At some point soon I need to start a thread explaining how we use AI for our games. But I will briefly mention the aspect I think has been most useful. We digitally record all our sessions (with player permission), run the audio through a speech to text AI that formats it pretty well with character and NPC names and such, then run a template summary AI page over that text to provide a "Last Session" summary. The last session summary includes a summary of what happened, treasure found, spells and other resources used, goals achieves, goals established but still outstanding, and more. And we use that at the beginning of our next session.

I cannot emphasize how useful this is for our sessions. We used to spend 10 minutes going over what happened before, forgot treasure all the time, that sort of stuff. Now, we have this cool one-sheet that covers it all and we're up to speed much faster.

I have my DM's permission to provide more on this in it's own thread and will do so hopefully soon. It's....pretty rad.

That does sound very useful, and probably pretty ethical as AI goes. If the tools weren't also being used for so much other, less ethical stuff (as well as producing truly atrocious carbon emissions) I'd probably consider doing something like this. Sadly, uses like this don't exist in a vacuum.

For the record, I'm not trying to tell you or your group what to do in your own games. Not my business. Mostly this just sounds cool and I wanted to express disappointment that I can't square such a use of these tools with my own ethical compunctions.

 

[cbwjm]

I've a similar experience as Chris when it comes to AI, I've used it a few times to generate character images for my PCs. Last game, our DM and generated a bunch of images to show us people or places we were visiting. A few other players also used AI for character images. I think it's a smart way to go for WotC to integrate these tools into DnDBeyond for players and DMs to use.

 

[Alzrius]

The more OGL-style licenses don't and actually benefit the top of the food chain more than the bottom.

I disagree with you there, Sly. The OGL benefited the little guys far and away more than it did WotC (who also benefited, but less overall). All mechanics being open while "flavor" material was held back meant that the community had a great deal of innovation to draw upon, which they ultimately did, while WotC was the one who ignored virtually everything the community made.

If the argument against using the SA license is that it makes too much stuff open, the answer to that is not to go to a license where making anything open is entirely optional. The OGL got it right, and the CC-BY-4.0 is a step back from that.

You are confusing 'open' and 'open source' and I am not sure the term 'open source' is the correct term for what you talk about either

I'm not confusing it, Chris Cocks is; I'm using the terminology he laid down in his quote.

That's part of a tool a DM can use to quickly spin up some NPCs, not a replacement for a DM or a replacement for a writer at WOTC.

I mean, I'm sure that's how it's being presented, but I don't think they're going to stop there.

 

[Ibrandul]

Cocks has, what, 3x5=15 people in his immediate groups who use AI.

My math makes it 3x5x?, where ? is a value between 0 and 1 inclusive, because this interview is full of so many lies and half-truths that who knows whether he’s being truthful here.

 

[Reynard]

with the 5e SRD in CC, WotC couldn’t care less about the OGL and what is available under it. It never was about old material in the first place. Any incentive to go after anything has been removed by releasing the 5e SRD under CC.


they are taking their sweet time with that, let’s see what 2025 brings

If they "couldn't care less' they would have some intern spend 4 hours releasing the 3.5 SRD under CC-BY and be done with it.

The line that they are "working on it" is BS on its face. And since WotC does not actually publish anything under that era's ruleset, there is no reason not to release it other than active disdain for companies and people that created their businesses under the OGL and the 3.5 SRD.

I can't do much, but I can refuse to give WotC a single dime until they do the right thing here.

 

[Reynard]

Given that the actual use of the OGL often mimicked CC BY 4.0. So, so many products that didn't open up their new mechanics...

Directly in opposition to the intent of the OGL. It's shameful.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

Chris Cocks: "Yeah, I mean, that was about a year and a half ago. And that was a serious case of foot and mouth disease. From our perspective, we did it wrong. And we apologized.

"And I think we quickly made amends. I think where we were coming from [00:46:00] on that whole thing, and the open game license for people who don't know, it was something that was established about 20ish years ago. That basically opens up the rule set and some of the core content for Dungeons and Dragons to create a lingua franca rule set and set of content for people to be able to play tabletop role playing games."

"So what we were trying to do is we were trying to evolve it because a document that was created in 2002 didn't foresee the rise of video games. It didn't foresee the rise of AI tools. It didn't foresee even things like content streaming. So our goal there was to try to protect an end user's ability to be able to make content and have fun and a creator's ability to create content and be able to make a living off of it while preventing kind of like a quick serve restaurant from using the D&D brand to sell tacos or a big video game company to be able to create a video game using the IP in a way that wasn't fair to us as the kind of quote unquote brand owners, or maybe do something that we didn't necessarily like with the brand or had content that was inappropriate."

"Which happens in, when you have tens of millions of users making content, I think we found a fair and equitable solution to it. You know, if anything, we embraced open source even more."

If this is what Chris Cocks actually believes about the OGL, then it makes sense in context why he wanted to kill it. But if you start with wrong assumptions then your conclusion will inevitably be wrong as well.

Sounds like he still doesn't get it, but at least he's smart enough to give us fans what we demand, even if he doesn't understand why.

 

[Stormonu]

What a stone-cold, bald-faced liar.

Video games were already huge business -- $30 billion worldwide in 1998 (and that's in 1998 dollars), about ten times Hasbro's 1998 worldwide net revenues -- well before the OGL was written. Which is why the WotC/Hasbro-written OGL Software FAQ specifically discussed games, and the d20 System Trademark License specifically excluded "interactive games".

Are they even bigger business now? Yes, sure. But they're hardly some new phenomenon, or even newly-popular phenomenon, that wasn't thoroughly considered back then.

Especially when WotC itself produced D&D books for Diablo II (and Alternity under Starcraft). RPGs and TTRPGs were fully entangled even back in that era.