Open RPG Creative (ORC) License Draft Published

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Paizo Publishing and Azora Law have published the initial draft of the Open RPG Creative license (ORC) for public feedback. This license was concieved of during January's Open Gaming License (OGL) controversy and was designed as an independent, irrevocable replacement for that license. Also available is an FAQ, or the 'Answers & Explanations" (AxE) which explains the structure.

Commentary can be left until April 21st, and the intention is to finish the license by the end of April.

So what is ORC? It's an open license which can be used by any creator to 'open' their game up so that other creators can use it. It is independent and irrevocable, and cannot be updated or revised.

paizo.com - Community / Paizo Blog

 

[bedir than]

I love the forced sharing of rules in ORC and OGL... but the having to go through and parse product identity vs. OC and AOC and exactly how much wording you can just reuse for it and...

It makes me really like the idea of a CC-BY repository of individual product SRD files where if you want to know what you can copy you just go there. (I can picture a badge for products that indicates that all the game rules are in the repository for example, so that folks new if what they were buying was in to sharing).

I think there are ways to use table of contents and/or layout within the CC system to indicate credited content, CC-BY and CC-SA clearly.
Unlike what Paizo says, there is no requirement that new content based off of CC-SA be shared eternally forever.

Unfortunately, the share-alike provision requires the downstream community to share their entire work.

If this was true basically every blog entry in the world, every single tweet, every forum post here would be Share-Alike now because they have spun off of CC-SA stuff at some point.

 

[sevenbastard]

So the whole ORC in the library of congress reminds me off an old adventure in Dungeon Magazine where some orcs break into a library.

Each Orc has like two paragraphs of back story. All meaningless as the party is just going to go stab stab and never talk to them.

The above is not some subtle shade on the ORC license just reminiscing on a terrible bloated 1e Dungeon Magazine adventure.

 

[Jer]

Also looking forward to all those Call of Cthulhu ORC clones.

I'd love to see what a CoC retroclone looks like just as an academic exercise. Considering that the current edition feels enough like the edition I started playing CoC with (5th edition) to not really know what the differences are off the top of my head. I'm not even sure how you'd make a clone that wasn't just a rip-off of the current edition given how little the game has changed over the decades.

 

[overgeeked]

I'd love to see what a CoC retroclone looks like just as an academic exercise. Considering that the current edition feels enough like the edition I started playing CoC with (5th edition) to not really know what the differences are off the top of my head. I'm not even sure how you'd make a clone that wasn't just a rip-off of the current edition given how little the game has changed over the decades.

From 5E to 7E they have added or changed: luck, chases, pushed rolls, bonus & penalty dice, percent stats, idea roll as forced narrative, background / backstory info as mechanics, hit point changes, skill changes, removed the resistance table, and a few more minor tweaks.

They recently reprinted 2E Call of Cthulhu. If you’re looking for an old-school Call of Cthulhu experience, you can get the (almost) original version of the game new in a box or as a PDF.

My post was more a comment on Chaosium’s terrible attempt at a license a few years ago where they tried to prevent people from making games using public domain stuff like Cthulhu and King Arthur because they already produce games that use those.

 

[DaveMage]

I think it's a great draft. I love that they've provided expansive product identity and open content definitions right in the license so that publishers don't have to figure out how to word their product identity statements anymore.

 

[glass]

Let's look at Product Identity and ORC Content. These are analogous to the Product Identity and OGC in the OGL. (Note, common point of confusion I see, Product Identity -- PI -- is not the same term as Intellectual Property -- IP).

I kinda wish they had not used the term Product Identity for exactly that reason.

OTOH, it only confuses armchair commentators in threads like this (and even then only some of them - so far I am an armchair commentator, and I always understood the distinction). So maybe it does not matter.

 

[Dreamscape]

So maybe it does not matter.

An important point to remember is that it only matters if someone enforces the licence. WotC never took the initiative to terminate the OGL for products that declared mechanics PI (in violation of the OGL), which is why that became common practice. The ORC and similar licences are primarily there to assure downstream users that they won't be sued, rather than to protect the upstream users against copyright or trademark theft (the law already does that).

 

[SJB]

I'd love to see what a CoC retroclone looks like just as an academic exercise. Considering that the current edition feels enough like the edition I started playing CoC with (5th edition) to not really know what the differences are off the top of my head. I'm not even sure how you'd make a clone that wasn't just a rip-off of the current edition given how little the game has changed over the decades.

1. Cthulhu Eternal already exists.
2. Chaosium have pulled the CoC SAN rules out of BRP (and thus ORC).

 

[Nylanfs]

It was supposed to be released today or tomorrow, and then it got leaked by Chaosium friday afternoon.

 

[glass]

So maybe it does not matter.

An important point to remember is that it only matters if someone enforces the licence.

The "it" I was referring to was the confusion (amongst people in threads on Internet forums, but hopefully not anyone who is actually dealing with it for real) between "Intellectual Property" and "Product Identity", which are vastly different concepts with very similar initialisms.

Hopefully nobody who is publishing under OGL or ORC (let alone getting to the point where enforcement action is required) is going to mix up PI and IP, but you see it threads on the topic here all the time.