The OGL 1.1 is not an Open License

[Reynard]

and as I said I'm not sure if that IS a bad thing. having none or less 3pp will change things I am unsure if it will for better or worse.

So long as WotC refuses to produce support items that some portion of its audience wants, some form of 3PP is a necessity.

 

[Art Waring]

That's not how expiration dates work.
They actually have dates.

An expiration date isn't "something similar happened once and has the possibility of happening again"

And before the claim that this is being pedantic, realize that the entirety of the positioning against the OGL 1.1 is on pedantic readings of non-legal texts before the actual texts exist.

Thanks for taking a comment out of context and posting the literal explanation of how expiration dates work. I guess I have to now reword my explanation to avoid the term expiration to get my point across?

Yes, its not literally an expiration date. However, every trademark provided by wotc in the past, either under the d20 STL or the GSL, has been revoked. You can no longer publish using the 4e GSL or the d20 STL, they are closed, they were once open, their trademark has ended, as in expired (there I said it), finished, concluded, finito...

They have publicly stated that using the 1.1 OGL requires the use of a creators badge, its on record. Creator badges are going to be provided by wotc as a trademarked image to use to put on your products. Later on, they will inevitably pull the license, then the creators badge is revoked, then you can't publish your game anymore.

 

[Greg Benage]

So long as WotC refuses to produce support items that some portion of its audience wants, some form of 3PP is a necessity.

You don't need an OGL for DMs Guild, and it seems to have been pretty successful.

 

[Reynard]

You don't need an OGL for DMs Guild, and it seems to have been pretty successful.

And all you have to do is give WotC the copyright to your work.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

So long as WotC refuses to produce support items that some portion of its audience wants, some form of 3PP is a necessity.

I mean that just isn't true. You can WANT 3pps to make money, but fan work homebrew and things like this very board will fill that hole.

 

[Voadam]

I am not saying it will kill D&D or anything, but if you look at what happened to 3PP with the GST, the license never got widely adopted and 3PPs disappeared from the D&D / 4e ecosystem, that is the pretty bad I meant

There is a difference here. When 4e came out with no OGL 4e SRD only a very few put out 4e stuff under the OGL (Goodman Games early stuff). Paizo was continuing with 3.5 stuff and a number of people were buying and continuing to play. WotC later came out with the GSL it took a while for those few who ended up doing 4e to go with it and there were few of them, most stuck with 3.5 and then Pathfinder.

For 1.1 there is the 5e OGL SRD and OGL stuff that has been going on for years. People who want to do stuff safely under the 1.0 OGL for 5e can continue to do that. If OneD&D is fairly compatible with 5e then it is fairly easy to just continue to crank out stuff based on the 5e SRD. I expect to be able to run 5e modules in One D&D. I expect to be able to use 5e monsters in One D&D. I expect most aspects of 5e settings to play without problems in OneD&D.

I don't expect those publishing 5e stuff under the OGL to feel not safe in continuing to do so for stuff to be used with the new OneD&D variation.

This seems a different situation than when 4e made a very different game from 3e. If 4e had been pathfinder with no OGL instead of the very different mechanics of 4e, I think a lot of publishers would probably have found a way to make compatible OGL stuff for it under the OGL.

 

[bedir than]

They have publicly stated that using the 1.1 OGL requires the use of a creators badge, its on record. Creator badges are going to be provided by wotc as a trademarked image to use to put on your products. Later on, they will inevitably pull the license, then the creators badge is revoked, then you can't publish your game anymore.

Except that is only true for some, not even the majority of creators.

 

[Greg Benage]

And all you have to do is give WotC the copyright to your work.

That isn't true, but you do grant Wizards and other DMsGuild authors a license to your IP. I'm not a 3PP, but a lot of them seem to be satisfied with the arrangement judging by the avalanche of product available there.

 

[Malmuria]

Have third-party publishers "done wonders" for 5e? Which products? I've purchased very little despite playing 5e weekly since 2014. The only thing I can think of is CR. Once that exploded, Wizards would have very much wanted material for it to be published, I think. I haven't purchased anything for it, either, but I can recognize its wonders despite that. Other than CR, though, I can't think of any 3PP that Wizards couldn't easily live without. What am I missing?

If wotc wants to be a $1B brand I can't see why they would even pay that much attention to even $1M 3pp. It's more about protecting whatever they consider their IP (including, apparently, the phrase "the world's greatest roleplaying game") and using their leverage to funnel people into their digital space.

 

[Reynard]

That isn't true, but you do grant Wizards and other DMsGuild authors a license to your IP. I'm not a 3PP, but a lot of them seem to be satisfied with the arrangement judging by the avalanche of product available there.

You cannot republish your DMsGuild material anywhere else and anyone can copy and modify it. That's untenable for a lot of creators.