Was WotC On to Something When They Dumped the 3.x OGL?

[innerdude]

I ask this question because I'm curiously interested as a non-vested observer of what's happening with Pathfinder 2. More and more it feels like that the "lock in" to the 3.x OGL is going to be problematic for Paizo.

But on another level I'm interested in this topic because the 20th anniversary of D&D 3 and the OGL is next year, and I'm interested in looking back and at the effects of the OGL on the industry since its public announcement.

(For the record, I have zero vested interest in the success or failure of either Paizo or WotC. I am not employed by nor do I own stock in either company. I haven't actively played Pathfinder since 2009, and I've purchased exactly ONE d20-based source book in a decade---a D&D 5e Player's Handbook that I loaned to a teenager six months after I bought it and never saw again. My reaction? A resounding shrug.)

Long term, games built on / derived from the D&D 3 OGL are moving into the same niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche market as the OSR. Like 1e and 2e, there will probably always be a minute subset of roleplaying groups that doggedly stick with the 3.x line, but will increasingly represent a non-viable business market.

So in this context, does the OGL still matter relative to the roleplaying game market generally?

In my mind one of the primary purposes of the OGL was enable robust third-party support for the 3.x game---which it accomplished in spades---which in turn would permanently cement D&D's primacy in the market.

But I'm beginning to wonder if the relevance of the OGL has waned, since access to third-party content is easier than it's ever been. In the year 2000, I imagine one of the assumptions of the OGL was that access to quality third-party material would primarily have to be through hard-copy print media. The goal of the OGL at that time was to enable established publishers to commit resources to creating print material for D&D 3. The "lone man" publisher simply didn't have enough long-term capital to consistently put out hardcover print media and be successful doing it.

But the business realities of published content distribution are so radically different from twenty years ago as to be fundamentally a different world.

So to me it seems that the OGL no longer serves some of its original purpose---but what purpose does it serve now?

Take the case of Paizo --- the issue I see happening with Pathfinder is that no matter how great Pathfinder 2 is, they're essentially splitting their own market, while also contending with arguably the most robust version of the actual Dungeons and Dragons IP in the game's history.

The success of Pathfinder 1 was 100% the result of market demand for keeping the 3.x OGL framework actively available and supported. But I've looked through a couple of the Pathfinder 2 playtests (even though there's zero chance I'll ever GM or play it), and there's some significant deviations from the original Pathfinder 1.

So what is the goal now? The success of D&D 5 seems to indicate that the old strictures of 3.x are no longer really the fashion. Pathfinder 2 has to simultaneously 1) differentiate itself as a valuable, fun, playable game in a way that is both NOT Pathfinder 1 and NOT D&D 5, while 2) convincing players to move to the new system, while 3) maintaining the ability to provide the high-quality supplements it has become known for.

Facing that reality, is there still enough demand for 3.x gaming out there to justify long-term maintenance of the Pathfinder 1 line in perpetuity?

And maybe more to the point, what are WotC/Paizo/Fantasy Flight Games/Cubicle 7/Pelgrane Press/Green Ronin/Evil Hat really looking for now when it comes to allowing/disallowing third-party content licensing? I'm beginning to think a broad-scale "OGL" type of framework is really unnecessary.

Hasbro's DM's Guild seems to be the "new normal," where "lone wolf" creators and super-indie publishers can utilize a simpler-yet-restrictive "open" licensing model, while requiring large-scale publishers to engage in more traditional licensing models. Of course I've not read through the current OGL for 5e, so I may be off on that assessment.

In the end, I'm curious about all this because the 3.x OGL was clearly an inflection point in our chosen hobby's future---and feels to me like the fate of Pathfinder 2 is going to be another. Paizo is either the #2 or #3 RPG company in the industry (depending on how you view Fantasy Flight Games' offerings). And I'm wondering if Pathfinder 1's ties to the 3.x OGL is ultimately going to be a handicap, rather than a boon.

 

[Umbran]

Hasbro's DM's Guild seems to be the "new normal," where "lone wolf" creators and super-indie publishers can utilize a simpler-yet-restrictive "open" licensing model, while requiring large-scale publishers to engage in more traditional licensing models. Of course I've not read through the current OGL for 5e, so I may be off on that assessment.

*Basic* 5e was released under the OGL, which to a quick scan doesn't appear particularly different from past OGLs. Rather than changing the control by changing the OGL, they did so by limiting content in the SRD - the basic mechanics are all there, but many of the classes are missing. So, anyone can write to the system, and even do something interesting with large changes (like Mutants and Masterminds did with 3e), but you can't outright clone the system.

Couple that with a place that folks *can* include those other bits - the DM's Guild - and they cover many of the bases, without losing control. Go figure, it took a couple iterations to find what made the most sense.

I don't think "ties to the OGL" is a handicap, ever. Ties *to a particular system* are a handicap, OGL or not. If that system falls out of vogue, you have an issue no matter if it was OGL or in-house.

 

[Morrus]

The OGL isn't the "3E" OGL or the "5E" OGL. There's just the OGL. And it hasn't been dumped, because it's non-rescindable. Both 3E and 5E have had some (but not all) of their content released under it, as have many other games.

One of the main purposes of the OGL, as Ryan Dancey - its architect - said: it means that D&D is here to stay. Nothing can make it go away, not even the whims of a (hypothetical) capricious publisher. So much of D&D's basic terminology was released under it, you could pretty much replicate the game (sans the name). Indeed, even if WotC had not released a 5E SRD, most pf the 5E terminology (monster names, spell names, etc.) is all Open Content, and you could make a decent stab at replicating much of 5E under the OGL using just the 3E SRD. Plenty of publishers certainly released 5E compatible material under the already existing OGL without waiting for WotC, and many still do.

The other main reason for the OGL was the theory that third party products which filled in the gaps too niche for WotC would result in a more supported game and drive core rulebook sales. *That* reason is largely gone now, with streamers driving core rulebook sales rather than third party publishers.

 

[Celebrim]

I've said this before, but the world needs another gaming system "like I need another hole in my head" (to paraphrase the song).

There is I think at this point excessive interest in writing a rules set or wholesale revising a rules set to the degree that your product is now incompatible with prior rules sets. I think the 5e designers were correct to try to set the expectation that this would be the 'last' version of D&D - D&D Eternal as well as D&D Next.

There are at this point a ton of reasonably well designed rules engines on the market. They each have their advantages and drawbacks. Some subsystems might need to be added or subtracted and some minor revision might need to be made as a result of experience that might constitute a sort of errata. But there is no need to reinvent the wheel because whether its BRP derived, D20 derived, FATE derived, PBtA derived, SAGA derived, or Cortex derived, etc. something ought to be out there that works for your vision. To much of what goes on in production of PnP RPG systems feels to me less like creating a work of art, than it feels like lonely fun that is engaged in without it ever leading to actual games. I feel like these days rule books are produced mainly for the consumption of people who read rulebooks, and rarely do they ever lead to a lot of satisfying games much less art. Rather, the leisure they consume is the act of reading rulebooks themselves, and the author made the rulebook mainly because he is the sort of geek for whom thinking up rules is fun.

I'm OK with that, but I think we ought to be 40 years on aspiring to so much more.

What really shocks me gaming here in 2019 is how little great content is produced for games. There are a lot of arguments that occur over why D&D succeeded where other early games didn't, and I think that the reason is that D&D more than any other game system emphasized the prepared adventure as the core of its system. D&D had a rule book, but the real game was 'the module' and D&D more than any other system offered up examples of the process of play in its modules and provided actually usable templates to the would be GM as to how to turn the rules into a game. I've written a ton of my own content over the years, but the games I've gotten into and played a lot - D&D, Gamma World, Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu - they always hooked me with their accessible adventures and not with their rules.

I was trying to run 'Mouse Guard' for my kids over the Winter break, and I was struck by how poorly the text prepared you to run the game (and how fiddly it was, and how bad the math was, and how hard it made going from rules to story...) compared to how efficiently running D&D for them had gone. As something to consume as a leisure activity, 'Mouse Guard' is a great rulebook and interesting to read. But in terms of getting a game with a story and character out of its examples of play, there is a much higher hurdle to jump despite the book at least superficially spending more time telling you to do those very things.

I was also struck by how barebones the presentation of the example of play really was, compared to either the famous example of play in the 1e AD&D DMG, or most of all compared to published adventures of the same era. There is an expectation in them that most of the story is not recorded, but will be improvised in play. And while that is true, the amount and what you are expected to improvise in the two systems differs. If you were to just read the rulebook, you'd say of Mouse Guard that it gives you the rules and tools to run any possible challenge, while a game like D&D gives you none. But it turns out, that's not so much true, as for example thinking that 4e's skill challenge system gave you the tools to run any possible challenge turns out to be a naïve view of the problem. If anything, Mouse Guard's rules less prepare you to narrate the fortune than D&D does.

As it pertains to the particular post, I guess what I'm saying is that Paizo is getting it wrong (and I said the same thing to WotC before the 4e launch). What made them successful is they focused on what was important about the game - the example of play, the intellectual property, the prepared adventure - and not really on the rules set. Heck, they got famous for really well done 'Adventure Paths' which were some of the best D&D style adventures that had been published since the Golden Age. Now that they've saturated their market with rules extensions, they want to reboot the market by publishing a new rules set, but I really doubt that will work no matter how elegant Pathfinder II turns out to be. I suspect in fact that Starfinder will turn out to be more successful than Pathfinder II, and I'd strongly encourage any publisher out there that wants to launch a new game to focus very much on the fluff over the crunch if they want to be successful. Or in other words, I don't think the rules they are harnessed to is the problem and I don't think it handicaps them. I think with the right imaginative intellectual property and examples of play, you could come out with a D20 OGL game today, and it would be the hottest thing on the market. And I think you could write one of the best game systems ever, and no one would play it. I think people write rules systems though, because its a lot easier to write a rules system than create a property that goes through the culture like a welcome breeze and becomes the thing everyone is talking about (VtM when it first hit in PnP gaming, Skyrim or Minecraft in video gaming, MtG and the notion of the collectible card game, Star Wars in the movies, Game of Thrones or Stranger things in TV, etc.).

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

This makes my head swim. It can't possibly have been that long!

As for Paizo, I don't think the OGL is part of the problem. The problem (and I say this having played my share of Pathfinder) is that it’s designed on being that thing you liked, just more of it. Except, now you’ve got Pathfinder 2e, which isn’t quite that anymore.

The OGL continues to certainly have relevance in the form of any number of OSR retroclones, as you mentioned. And some of the prominent gaming companies of today (Green Ronin and Goodman Games, for example) really came to prominence as third-party publishers during 3e’s era.
I think the OGL also needs to be viewed in context. The purchase of D&D by Wizards and the death of TSR were still fresh events. In an alternate timeline, it’s entirely plausible that the deal never happened, that D&D went out of print. The OGL was insurance against that very possibility. Sure, in today’s boom, it seems absurd, but back then it was a close thing.

But on another level I'm interested in this topic because the 20th anniversary of D&D 3 and the OGL is next year, and I'm interested in looking back and at the effects of the OGL on the industry since its public announcement.

 

[Voadam]

I have a couple WotC 5e books, a ton of DM's Guild PDFs, and a ton of OGL 5e PDFs.

The OGL is doing for me with 5e what it was doing for me during 3e, providing more compatible stuff for me to use in my D&D games.

DM's Guild is great but it does not give me anything from the third party worlds. Frog God, Kobold, etc. have provided a bunch of stuff I like.

 

[dragoner]

The OGL has also had influence past D&D, as it was the inspiration for Mongoose's SRD for Traveller, which has made Cepheus Engine possible, which has ~250 titles on DTRPG - https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?page=2&test_epoch=0&filters=45550_0_0_0_0

and it was part of the inspiration for the RuneQuest license, that created Mythras, and thus M-Space, which is what I am running now in a near future hard SF setting I made: http://www.frostbytebooks.com/m-space

 

[Henry]

If you want an example of a world without an open gaming license, look back historically to TSR (owner of D&D prior to Wizards of the Coast) and their positions on D&D compatible content in the early and mid-1990s -- it was an environment where they insisted that anything that included even terminology now common in the genre (such as phrases like "hit points" or "armor class") became property of TSR as a derivative work. If you made a game that included these terms (admittedly coined by Original Dungeons and Dragons, but whose use was coined by many other sources long before trademark was insisted upon) then at the time they insisted that such works could be owned by them and frequently sued in order to maintain such.

An example of their language from the period may be found archived at various locations, such as:
http://d7.pipemaze.com/tsr-vs-the-internet/hahn1.html
http://d7.pipemaze.com/tsr-vs-the-internet/tm1.html

The open gaming license was first to prevent against the concept of the tabletop game D&D being lost in future legal disputes, but also to prevent future assertions that the very terms that became the Lingua Franca of gaming in general were not lost in countless minor legal disputes. Sure, trademarks expire, but companies and copyright trolls alike can bog down their use, to the point of the destruction of the platform itself. If someone tried to sue on the basis of trademarks or copyright for a new RPG that was released properly under the OGL, the defenses' legal fees would be almost nonexistent thanks to the very existence of the OGL. Without a license, you are in much trickier waters, whether you're in the right or not, and for very small companies, it provides a safe harbor to work within.

My biggest disappointment for the OGL has been its lack of use by companies to truly mix ideas from multiple sources and make a better game - too often people try to reinvent the wheel instead of improve what already exists and reintroduce the improved version to the community, a la open source software. The three action system for Pathfinder 2? Spycraft was doing something similar in 2002.

 

[Immortal Sun]

I basically agree with what has been said. The OGL provides a framework for people to make "D&D, but with lasers" that fundamentally doesn't change anything, and doesn't make it so they have to re-invent the d20. BUT, I think some publishers (I'm looking at you Paizo) took the leniency granted by the OGL too far, into making "It's D&D, but painted blue."

4E was horribly, horribly the wrong approach to abandon it entirely, since one of the strongest elements of support for D&D has always come from 3rd-party content creators who love the system, and want to create additional material for it, but typically small additional material, a single class, a couple monsters, a few races, stuff like that.

I think 5E has indeed found a sweet spot between "Giving away the game" and "nothing at all" while simultaneously circling the wagons by drawing in content creators to the DM's Guild, creating a clearly open space for creators while that space sill also clearly being under WOTC's watchful eye.

 

[Shasarak]

So in this context, does the OGL still matter relative to the roleplaying game market generally?

All I need to say is that if it were not for the OGL then we would all be stuck with whatever the couple of guys at WotC can come up with.

Which knowing Hasbros history could be the RPG equivalent of forever reprinting different coloured Monoploy games.