So WHY Didn't The OGL Contain The Word 'Irrevocable'?

Whether or not the Open Game License v1.0a is revocable is one of the main things being argued about during this whole OGL-gate crisis, with lawyers firmly stating opinions on both sides of the issue. We all know that Ryan Dancey, the OGL's 'architect' (along with IP lawyer Brian Lewis, who was WotC's in-house counsel at the time) firmly believes that the license is irrevocable--in his words, "If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license."

But why didn't it just say so? On the face of it, including that simple word might have prevented this whole crisis. Dancey commented on Facebook:

because in Y2K that term was not used in state of the art copyleft licenses like the LGPL or the Apache or BSD licenses. There's no "magic word" in US contract law that lets you walk away from your obligations.

The OGL was based on existing software open source licenses; it even predates Creative Commons by a couple of years.

Just on this site there are lawyers on both sides of the 'revocabiity' debate, and on social media and elsewhere there are many more. In this thread no less than SIX lawyers weigh in over an 86-page debate, and they don't all agree. WotC clearly currently believes it to be revocable (but didn't believe so before), and Paizo believes the opposite.

The license does indeed contain the term ‘perpetual’, but many lawyers have argued that the precise legal meaning of that term is not the same as the common English meaning, and that it does not render a license irrevocable. On the other hand, legal minds have pointed out that the license contains no verbiage regarding 'de-authorization', or any mechanism for doing so. That said, if all lawyers agreed, we wouldn't need courts.

Ryan Dancey -- Hasbro Cannot Deauthorize OGL

I reached out to the architect of the original Open Gaming License, former VP of Wizard of the Coast, Ryan Dancey, and asked his opinion about the current plan by WotC to 'deauthorize' the current OGL in favour of a new one. He responded as follows: Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does...

www.enworld.org

It's clear that Dancey's, Lewis', and indeed WotC's intent at the time was to make it impossible to revoke the OGL, and that that was the proposition offered to third party publishers at the time. D&D historian Ben Riggs (author of Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons) comments:

This is a radical change of the original intention of the OGL. The point of the OGL was to get companies to stop making their own games and start making products for D&D. WoTC execs spent a ton of time convincing companies like White Wolf to make OGL products. To act like the existence of Paizo or Kobold is a perversion of the OGL may be gaslighting, it may be ignorance, but it is certainly nonsense.

Everybody believed the OGL was irrevocable at the time. Dancey and Lewis did. WotC did. The entire industry did. Everybody. Whether or not the license can be de-authorized, it is certain that a breach of trust has taken place.

Dancey has posted a blog where he talks more about his current attempts to save the Open Gaming License.

Unfortunately, the leadership team at Wizards of the Coast has decided to unlawfully and in bad faith attempt to deauthorize v1.0a of the OGL. In mid-December 2022 they met with various parties who use the OGL and attempted to strong-arm them into signing onto a new OGL that repudiates the philosophy of Open Gaming that is embodied in v1.0a. The draft license that they attempted to force onto the community included onerous provisions that shifted control of the content created out of the commons shared by all participants equally and into a legal space controlled solely by Wizards of the Coast. Their new license was not, in any sense, an “open gaming license”.

The leverage that the company believed it had was their perception that they had the right to deauthorize and revoke the v1.0a version of the license. They do not. Attempting to do so will result in difficult litigation which ultimately poses a risk to Wizards of the Coast’s fundamental conception of what it can copyright and protect with US intellectual property rights laws.

 

[kjdavies]

My wife saw a rumor going around on Twitter that all this is because someone as Hasbro found out that D&D was their most profitable revenue stream, and wants to squeeze it even more like subscription video games. Apparently the plan included things like charging $1 on their virtual table top for each type monster you want to use.

If true, that's disgusting beyond belief.

MtG is probably more profitable. The claim was that they weren't milking D&D hard enough: only a small fraction of D&D players actually buy books, but if WotC can get them all to pay monthly fees to use the digital platform, that would be some real money.

 

[Clint_L]

My wife saw a rumor going around on Twitter that all this is because someone as Hasbro found out that D&D was their most profitable revenue stream, and wants to squeeze it even more like subscription video games. Apparently the plan included things like charging $1 on their virtual table top for each type monster you want to use.

If true, that's disgusting beyond belief.

I’d pay that, if I was switching to a VTT!

Putting a swarm of 20 zombies on the table probably costs me at least $50, plus the time to paint them (I enjoy painting miniatures, but a lot of folks would see this as an additional cost). Putting 20 zombies on the virtual table for a dollar sounds like a crazy good bargain!

From a miniatures and terrain enthusiast’s perspective, the VTT is likely to be ridiculously cheap. I don’t think it’ll scratch the same itch, though. At least, not for me, but I’m old.

 

[Solauren]

You can sell the miniatures Clint. You can use them offline. You can set up bad-ass looking displays.

You can't sell app purchases (in most cases).

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

I’d pay that, if I was switching to a VTT!

Putting a swarm of 20 zombies on the table probably costs me at least $50, plus the time to paint them (I enjoy painting miniatures, but a lot of folks would see this as an additional cost). Putting 20 zombies on the virtual table for a dollar sounds like a crazy good bargain!

From a miniatures and terrain enthusiast’s perspective, the VTT is likely to be ridiculously cheap. I don’t think it’ll scratch the same itch, though. At least, not for me, but I’m old.

They forgot to say that it's 1 dollar per session

 

[Clint_L]

You can sell the miniatures Clint. You can use them offline. You can set up bad-ass looking displays.

You can't sell app purchases (in most cases).

You are preaching to the choir, brother.

Though I'll die before I sell any of it. A thought which probably depresses my wife and child, who will then have to get rid of half a garage full of my RPG crap.

However, I'm old and have had both decades to support this habit and a lot more money than most new players. If I'm new to the game and wanting to have a snazzy tabletop, and I'm young so virtual things are fine, then I imagine this VTT option would be pretty tempting at a fraction of the price of doing it the old way.

 

[Xyxox]

You can sell the miniatures Clint. You can use them offline. You can set up bad-ass looking displays.

You can't sell app purchases (in most cases).

I have moved on to 3D printing all of my minis because cheap and high quality at the same time is super awesome. While perusing the capabilities of the API for foundry I stumbled upon the capability of doing 3D tabletop depictions there. This could be a new place for the 3D printer file minis to move as in licensing you to use the files for Virtual Tabletops besides using them to print minis. Any 3D file format is easily converted to a proper format for this, so this may be the next step for the 3D Printing community as well.