D&D 5E So, 5e OGL

[Nellisir]

There is strong logic in making the Basic PDF the only OGL document and letting the 3PP go wild, flooding the barely there marketplace while WotC focuses on "official expansions" and thus, only their adventures have WotC defined races and classes outside the Basic PDF.
AKA, a 3PP may put out a Ranger class, but it would be that 3PP's variant and not the "actual" "canon" one from the PHB.

That's EXACTLY the starting scenario that you say just "destroyed" the "D&D brand". A limited core document released under the OGL. So, no.

 

[Lalato]

My guess. And yes, I'm pulling this out of my rear end. There will be no 5e OGL.

There will be individual licenses (see Kobold Press). There will be an allowance for fan creations. But OGL? Nope. There simply is no need for it in a world with individual licenses.

 

[sunshadow21]

The OGL destroyed the D&D brand and there is no way to put that genie back in the bottle.

The OGL is the only reason we're still seriously talking about the brand after WotC's last flagship product flopped. Without the OGL, WotC would be looking an awful lot like White Wolf after the nWoD debacle. With it, they still have a reasonably large group of people who still follow the overall brand and a lot of former partners that still have reason to consider working with WotC again under the right circumstances, making their challenges far less than they would be if everyone had moved on to completely different games made by completely different companies that had no reason to care about working with WotC. It probably didn't help 4E, but there was a lot of decisions made by WotC that didn't help 4E, and pinning all the blame on just one is a bit unfair.

It has definitely changed how WotC must approach the brand, but since their stated goal the entire time of their ownership has been to move beyond just the role playing game anyway, that shift in approach was going to have to happen regardless of the OGL or not in order for them to meet that goal. In the end, if they play their cards right, it will actually have very little, in any, long term impact on the brand while strengthening the gaming community in the process. A simple shift from focusing entirely on the rules is all that WotC needs to successfully pull off in order to make the OGL's weaknesses not matter anymore. WotC still has full control of all the worlds, all the characters, all but one of the official rulesets, and are still the only ones that can use the actual brand name. Pathfinder is no danger of destroying the D&D brand, as Paizo made their own brand, and have no desire for it to be seen as "the other D&D brand", and no one else is even close to having the overall impact that Pathfinder has. In the end, if WotC does it right, the troubles with 4E and the OGL will be just a small bump in the far bigger success story of the brand.

 

[bhandelman]

They have had discussions with some companies about individual licenses.

Weren't there also some individual licenses during 3e? I seem to remember Kenzer Co having a license to do Kingdoms of Kalamar as an officially licensed setting. You also had things like Dragonlance and Ravonloft licensed out to third parties to develop.

 

[darjr]

I didn't think Wolfgang and Steven used a license. They, and Kobold Press, were essentially a free lancer producing a product that WotC is selling. It's a WotC product. Not at Kobold Press one. Kobold Press didn't get a license for these two adventures, as far as I know.

 

[Nellisir]

Right now I think it's equally likely that WotC won't do a public license at all. They won't even make it an issue. I don't think there will be a rush to make a clone 5e on a large scale (ie Pathfinder), and the little retroclone stuff won't even register. Honestly, an OGL 5e clone is going to appear in a year or two at most anyway (more likely 6 months). And they can always chose to do a license in the future (might be a good way to drum up interest in a few years, once the system has proven stable).

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20140529

I do think this is a good sign. Not a great sign, but a good sign.

 

[Uchawi]

I believe they need to implement a license that allows a third party to protect their own ideas as it applies to 5E or a fantasy setting. So if a third party pulls out, or decides to expand to other RPGs, then their ideas are not the property of WOTC. It also needs to reduce any barriers for a third party to contribute to the game. If 5E takes a protectionist approach, then they will have the same problem as 4E where a third party finds it very difficult to add content because the mechanisms WOTC uses to add content is for their use only. The result is the third party is competing against WOTC, versus working together. The concept applies to hardcopy and electronic media and/or tools (game aids).

 

[Sadras]

I believe they need to implement a license that allows a third party to protect their own ideas as it applies to 5E or a fantasy setting. So if a third party pulls out, or decides to expand to other RPGs, then their ideas are not the property of WOTC. It also needs to reduce any barriers for a third party to contribute to the game. If 5E takes a protectionist approach, then they will have the same problem as 4E where a third party finds it very difficult to add content because the mechanisms WOTC uses to add content is for their use only. The result is the third party is competing against WOTC, versus working together. The concept applies to hardcopy and electronic media and/or tools (game aids).

Ok, but in what way will the licence be beneficial for WoTC? Marketing sure. But what restrictions will there be in place to protect WoTC? I'm playing devil's advocate here. I understand most of us would love an OGL, but how does the OGL protect the future commercial interests of WoTC? They are a company, they need to survive - so what protection do they get if I design an adventure to sell using their system? Are we looking at royalties? (Apologies if I come off as naïve - I don't actually know how it worked in the past under 3.5e.)

 

[delericho]

Weren't there also some individual licenses during 3e? I seem to remember Kenzer Co having a license to do Kingdoms of Kalamar as an officially licensed setting. You also had things like Dragonlance and Ravonloft licensed out to third parties to develop.

The "Kingdoms of Kalamar" license was actually a bit different from the other two, for legal reasons.

It all goes back to the "Dragon Archive" CDs, which included "Knights of the Dinner Table" strips for which Kenzer held the copyright. WotC had done the archive on the assumption that these were 'reprints', and so should be fine; Kenzer thought otherwise, and filed suit.

Ultimately, they agreed to a settlement, whereby Kenzer gained a license to publish KoK as an 'official' setting (including the use of the D&D logo), and also the rights to do... something with the old materials/adventures for the Hackmaster game.

(IIRC, a similar case did eventually go to judgement, and it was ruled that treating an archive as reprints was, indeed, fine. But, of course, the settlement was agreed by then, so that's a largely-irrelevant detail.)

So that's why the KoK books had the "Dungeons & Dragons" logo on the front cover, where Dragonlance and Ravenloft did not. It's also why there has never been a "Dungeon Archive" or a "Dragon Archive II".

 

[delericho]

Ok, but in what way will the licence be beneficial for WoTC? Marketing sure. But what restrictions will there be in place to protect WoTC? I'm playing devil's advocate here. I understand most of us would love an OGL, but how does the OGL protect the future commercial interests of WoTC?

The theory, as laid out by Ryan Dancey all those years ago, was that the Core Rulebook of the system (the PHB in the case of D&D) is by far the biggest selling item in the line. To the extent that everything else is worth doing only insofar as it leads to more sales of the PHB.

What this meant for the OGL (and especially the d20 license) was that by enabling people to publish adventures/supplements for 3e, it would encourage many more people to play D&D, and thus help to drive PHB sales.

(Where this theory starts to fall apart is when people started putting out their own standalone games that didn't require the PHB for use. Or, in the most extreme case, Mongoose's "Pocket Player's Handbook", which was a digest-sized book that effectively just reprinted the PHB rules and thus cut out WotC entirely, at a minimum development cost to them.)

Of course, lots of things have changed in 15 years. That logic may now be altered, or may not hold at all.