D&D 5E Upcoming OGL-Related Announcement!

[Olfan]

I'm eager to hear what is announced, as I would love to publish adventures under 5th edition rules. As for my opinion of what they should decide, I have none. The way I see it, it's all theirs; the license, the brand, the rules, and they are entitled to do whatever they want with it. Whether that means an online store, content curation, or blocking everybody out. I'm just happy they're not leaving us completely hanging, with assurances they've heard our hopes, and will address them. That's enough for me.

 

[Hussar]

That's the impression I got, too. He may have name-dropped "OGL", but I don't think he's referencing it in the same way that the audience is thinking of it.

I'm also hopeful they'll also reintroduce "Dungeon" and "Dragon" magazine. (I know a print-version is unlikely, but we can hope, right?)

I think it's pretty much a given that Dungeon and Dragon will relaunch with 5e. If they were going to close the magazines down completely, they'd have likely said something by now, rather than just letting it go dark.

It likely won't be a print version. That ship has sailed. Unless people are willing to start paying about twenty bucks an issue, there just isn't any way it's going to happen.

However, that being said, I wonder if you could go the Paizo route? Combine the magazines as one giant, monthly publication and then sell them through book trade. From what [MENTION=42043]Eric[/MENTION] Mona has commented more than a few times, the magazine distributorship is a cesspit and a huge barrier to a newly launched magazine. But, Paizo has proven that a monthly book subscription, which goes through different mailing channels, is quite possible.

That would be cool.

 

[Mistwell]

That doesn't seem likely to me. If there was going to be an SRD (99% of the rules online), then Basic D&D (15% of the rules online) wouldn't be a thing.

Basic D&D is intended as a GAME. It describes how to play the game, how to create campaigns, and the basic races and classes for your characters to interact in that campaign the DM creates. It's a product intended for DMs and Players.

The SRD is intended as a legal document to instruct developers what content is open, and what content is closed, and how to access the open content in developing their content. It's a list of rules, without telling you how to use those rules, and without the flavor of those rules, and the expository text necessary for a new player to learn how to really play the game. It's like an API. Or, in some ways, it's like the code behind software, without a graphic user interface to actually use the code. The SRD is a product intended for content developers.

I understand for years Players have used the SRD as a means to access the rules and play the game - but this is ultimately sort of a kloogey method of doing it, and it's mostly done because they already understand how to play the game, how to create campaigns, how rules interact, and the flavor of those rules. It was never the purpose of the SRD to be used by players to play the game - that was always more of a side effect of it. The primary purpose was for content developers.

So there is absolutely a difference between an SRD, and a Basic game (or even the Advanced game). They serve different purposes and different audiences, though in a kloogey way the different audiences can use either for either purpose if they really want to. But that doesn't take away from the differing purposes of each.

 

[DMZ2112]

To start with, we want to ensure that the quality of anything D&D fans create is as high as possible.

...I'm not even sure why anyone is still entertaining the idea of an OGL after this statement. This statement says, "We're not going to have an OGL." There may be degrees of "openness," Basic D&D may itself be open source, but at the very least Wizards is planning to be the gatekeeper for retail Standard-through-Advanced-D&D5-compatible material to a greater or lesser degree.

If you want to publish D&D5-compatible stuff, you are going to be dealing with Wizards. Whether that will entail a set of hard rules upfront in the license or a department responsible for issuing Wizards Seals of Approval remains to be seen, but my money is on the former -- the latter sounds a lot like work.

For what it's worth I continue to expect that Wizards will be doing a lot of direct, closed licensing to a small number of third-party publishers, particularly for their setting-specific material, and they will invite amateurs to publish supporting material through Wizards as they always have. The form that publishing takes may expand somewhat but I will gasp in shock if they roll out a D&D "app store." They don't want that kind of headache.

Not a bad goal, but to be fair, it's not up to WotC what is high quality and what isn't.

Why isn't it? It's their playground that they're letting everyone else play in. It's not like they can't set the bar wherever they want as far as quality goes.

There's a few reasons.
The biggest one is probably that "quality" is immensely subjective. There is no one authority on what is "quality" and what isn't.

I'm with Hussar, here. Quality -- at least quality of content -- is immensely subjective, which is precisely why Wizards wants to be the subject. And that's their prerogative as the owner of the IP. They can be the one authority on quality if they desire. The end result will still be more open than if they insisted on publishing everything themselves, or introduced a license so restrictive that the end result was the same.

I think what you are arguing, KM, is that Wizards should not do this, which is an entirely different animal and subject to discussion. But it absolutely can be up to Wizards what is high quality and what isn't. All they have to do is say that it is. Poof.

That's what an open market is for. And in any open market, some of the stuff is not going to be of equally high quality to other stuff.

(snip)

That kills the innovation that can spring from an open market, reducing the value of the goods to whatever value others place in this person's (or team's) designation of what "quality" is, which erodes much of the point in having a supported marketplace to begin with.

The "innovation" that can spring from an open market itself does a pretty good job of eroding the value others place in the goods available on that market. Counterpoint: an open market exists to part fools and their money. Everyone benefits from regulation and oversight.

Absolutely nothing will be able to stop some fan from bypassing a license, charging for her material, and being entirely within the law.

History has shown that this is not true. In its day TSR crushed a number of pretenders to the throne with overwhelming legal and fiscal force. They were very rarely actually successful in court, and they still stopped the production of infringing (if not actually competing) products in many cases.

But the key is that they don't get the idea that this is the only way that fans are "allowed" to make and sell D&D-compatible material.

Your sense of entitlement is both vast and baffling.

We'll do what we did with the GSL and take our money and our passion and our fandom and go support great works that aren't in their gates, pay somebody else's rent for a while, somebody who maybe doesn't imagine that they get to define what "elf" or what "quality" means for everybody.

If this were true we would not be here slavering at the gate for every scrap of information about D&D5 that slips from Wizards' fingers, and the preorder for a $20 single-use boxed set of D&D5 rules wouldn't be kicking the everloving crap out of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook on Amazon right now.

Like it or not, the Wizards Seal of Approval is still a license to print money in this industry.

 

[Mistwell]

Not a bad goal, but to be fair, it's not up to WotC what is high quality and what isn't. That's what an open market is for. And in any open market, some of the stuff is not going to be of equally high quality to other stuff.

He's saying you cannot make the highest quality content, until you at least have the highest quality ingredients they're going to offer you. Without the DMG, people are likely to create content right away from the PHB which ends up being duplicative, but developed with less playtesting and less feedback, than what's in the DMG when it does come out. This leads to people feeling burned by those early products, like so many did for the early days of 3.0e. Forcing a waiting period on people, so they have time to absorb all the rules before writing their content, does increase the odds their content will be of a higher quality,

And by high quality, are we talking about dodging the janky rules bits of stuff like some Mongoose Publishing stuff

Yes I am pretty sure he means that.

 

[Mistwell]

I don't think so. The key is this:
[cut totally serious reply]

While I appreciate the serious treatment of the issue and I largely agree with you, you may have missed that the actual post you were replying to was a joke and did not appear to be intended to say anything beyond the joke. It was a play-on-words with the word ogle.

 

[Umbran]

I'm also hopeful they'll also reintroduce "Dungeon" and "Dragon" magazine. (I know a print-version is unlikely, but we can hope, right?)

Honestly, I am more likely to go for electronic versions than print at this point. I prefer print for my rulebooks, but for short form adventures and articles, I think electronic distribution is the way to go. Let me print my own hardcopy of just the bits I'm going to reference frequently, and I'd be happy.

 

[Dausuul]

Mike basically says:
* We have a plan
* We've thought about the plan
* We will be announcing it in a few months
* It will go live in early 2015

Anything more would be announcing the plan!

The important bit here is we now have a timeline.

But since we have no idea what the timeline is for, it's not very helpful.

I'm... not excited about this at all. The fact that Mearls talks a lot about "fans" but says not a peep about "third-party publishers" strongly implies their goal is "Nobody but us gets to make money doing D&D stuff." I hope I'm wrong, but that's how it reads to me.

Which, okay, fine, you want to do it that way, it's your IP. But anybody contemplating putting serious work into an RPG-related project (the sort of work you need to do in order to go from "my personal thing" to "publicly available thing") is going to have to think long and hard about whether to tie it to 5E. Do you really want to put in all that work while forgoing any possibility of getting paid for it? When you could build it for Pathfinder instead, and all Paizo will do is cheer you on?

 

[Cybit]

But since we have no idea what the timeline is for, it's not very helpful.

I'm... not excited about this at all. The fact that Mearls talks a lot about "fans" but says not a peep about "third-party publishers" strongly implies their goal is "Nobody but us gets to make money doing D&D stuff." I hope I'm wrong, but that's how it reads to me.

Which, okay, fine, you want to do it that way, it's your IP. But anybody contemplating putting serious work into an RPG-related project (the sort of work you need to do in order to go from "my personal thing" to "publicly available thing") is going to have to think long and hard about whether to tie it to 5E. Do you really want to put in all that work while forgoing any possibility of getting paid for it? When you could build it for Pathfinder instead, and all Paizo will do is cheer you on?

I would be more worried about this if their first major adventure wasn't being done by a really good third party (Kobold Press). I would not be surprised to see Wizards mostly bow of the adventure generation game, and have almost all of their adventures done outside of HQ.

I'm guessing a three pronged announcement
1) Free stuff can use the license willy-nilly
2) App Store / Open Wizards storefront for paid materials where Wizards gets a cut
3) Bigger outfits (Paizo, Kobold Press, ENWorld Publishing) have easy to negotiate contracts to do "official" D&D adventures.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think what you are arguing, KM, is that Wizards should not do this, which is an entirely different animal and subject to discussion. But it absolutely can be up to Wizards what is high quality and what isn't. All they have to do is say that it is. Poof.

They can certainly TRY that. If they do try that, I don't believe it'll be effective -- it won't function as intended. It won't keep poor-quality product from being produced that is affiliated with D&D. It's a bad way to meet their goal of high-quality D&D material.

History has shown that this is not true. In its day TSR crushed a number of pretenders to the throne with overwhelming legal and fiscal force. They were very rarely actually successful in court, and they still stopped the production of infringing (if not actually competing) products in many cases.

It's not worth WotC's time to hunt down every fan PDF and sue its creator. It probably wasn't REALLY worth TSR's time. If for some reason I'm severely mistaken about how much Joe Blow's Compatible Adventure Path (as posted on Reddit) is worth for WotC's lawyers to go after, it's still a poor way to meet their goal, and an expensive one at that.

Your sense of entitlement is both vast and baffling.

Aren't they the ones asking for our money? Aren't we entitled to withhold it unless they meet our needs?

If this were true we would not be here slavering at the gate for every scrap of information about D&D5 that slips from Wizards' fingers, and the preorder for a $20 single-use boxed set of D&D5 rules wouldn't be kicking the everloving crap out of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook on Amazon right now.

Like it or not, the Wizards Seal of Approval is still a license to print money in this industry.

Which is why a curated shop would work well, and probably out-compete any independent folks who would care to try. But if they try forbidding things outside of that walled garden in any real concrete sense, it won't help them meet their goal.