We All Won – The OGL Three Years Later

[Reynard]

That's obviously a rather crude over-simplification of the issue. You may find that compelling, but I think it actually significantly weakens your argument. The entire rhetorical device of "let's over-simplify something to try and make it look good" is kind of DOA since "Wow so it's illegal to make plans with friends now".

I have no idea what you are on about here.

The reality is that TSR was quite hostile towards other games, and doing what it could to mess with them, but there was a limit to what it could do. WotC haven't been as hostile, but have definitely never had a "rising tide lifts all boats" attitude to other RPGs except when D&D itself is looking kinda down.


Pretty sure TSR tried at that least once.


Neither of which is a blank cheque for rubbish behaviour, even though some people inexplicably insist both are.

Companies get to say who plays in their sandbox. hat might suck, but it is true.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Maybe you need to reread my post?

I did, is the "definitely" sarcastic? Otherwise it seems like a single, straightforward sentence. What am I missing.

 

[Deset Gled]

I think that's actually being less realistic and more rhetorical - "We didn't win those things from WotC. We bought them." is absolutely rhetoric!

But I think if we are being realistic we see that OGL 1.1/2.0 debacle was not the sole cause of the success of those products, but certainly part of the picture, and maybe a significant part. It caused a lot of publishers and designers to think more seriously about their relationship with WotC, and a lot of fans to question exactly what they were supporting.

Oh, absolutely, this is full of rhetoric! Of course, so is claiming "We all won".

Do we really have anything but rhetoric at his point?

Read the first line of my post again please.

Let me save you the click "I'm working on a show topic for my Lazy RPG Talk Show tomorrow and thought I'd share the notes here to get people's thoughts."

And you have them? Look, I respect you, and your opinions. But let's not pretend. Your OP doesn't ask if we won or lost the OGL fiasco, it takes a clear side. But really, even framing the whole thing as if there's a winner at all is already seeding for a more confrontational discussion.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I have no idea what you are on about here.

Companies get to say who plays in their sandbox. hat might suck, but it is true.

That doesn't support the argument that they're not hostile. Two kids may well have sandboxes, but when one of those kids is okay with other kids coming in and playing in his as long as they don't knock down his sandcastles, and the other regularly has sand-throwing tantrums at other kids and hits people with his little plastic spade, we are totally justified in calling the latter kid "hostile".

"Legally allowed to do" doesn't mean "not hostile". In fact, having worked at law firms my whole adult like, I would say companies who are obsessed with doing everything they're "legally allowed" to do are often extremely hostile and aggressive. Trying to shut down distribution channels however is outside of what you're "legally allowed to do" in most jurisdictions, and would typically fall into tortious interference or monopolistic practices or that third thing the name of which is escaping me. Likewise patenting/trademarking existing things is often pushing at the boundaries of the law.

So it seems maybe your definition of hostile isn't "hostile" as people would normally mean it, as in unpleasant and aggressive behaviour, it's "beyond the bounds of the law", based on your examples?

 

[Reynard]

I did, is the "definitely" sarcastic? Otherwise it seems like a single, straightforward sentence. What am I missing.

I was saying they weren't curated, just like the E-shop, hence sarcastic "seal of QUANTITY."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I was saying they weren't curated, just like the E-shop, hence sarcastic "seal of QUANTITY."

Oh I assumed that was a typo given there was also a typo in Official, sorry lol. Let's blame @Parmandur's Android phone for making me too prone to assume things are typos, then it's neither of our faults!

 

[Pedantic]

It turns out it was weak enough that the company who published the license thought they could deauthorize it. That's why releasing in the CC was necessary. People think it was weak because, it turns out, it is weak. Now, today, it's probably fine to keep using it because we know it'll be a long time before WOTC tries something like that again but it's not impossible. The CC feels a lot safer.

This is exactly what I don't like about this response. It doesn't "turn out" anything, and there was nothing weak about the status quo until WotC broke it. They destroyed a totally functional edifice that would have continued without their intervention. Just putting it back up doesn't resolve their responsibility, and frankly I don't buy the argument they put it back as good as it was before.

They did lots of things. Tons of videos, tons of interviews, releasing ten different SRDs in five languages for two systems in the CC. Supporting other competing VTTs with their flagship RPG. Of course, all of these moves help them too, but those are definitely things that tried to repair the damage.

They never apologized for the actual harm, they never made an attempt at reparation for the damage they caused, and all of those CC releases are just reflections of how the status quo was and should have continued to be had they done nothing.

The world isn't better, it's just at best not worse and I don't really buy that we're in that best world. I think it is worse than a world with an unchallenged OGL would be.

 

[bsss]

To my knowledge, and someone can go get me a quote if I'm wrong, they only promised the 3.5 SRD in the CC which they haven't done. I think they should do so. They promised to do so. But I don't think it's that important really because almost anything you would want to do with the 3.5 SRD you can do with the 5.1 SRD. Shadowdark wouldn't care. OSE doesn't care. Only, I suppose, if you were going to simply republish the entiire 3.5 SRD in a new product would it matter but I think you can do a lot of reverse engineering to make a 3rd style game with the 5.1 SRD. I think the same is true with a 4e clone if you wanted to.

To describe my "off-ramp" idea a bit, since it's related to what you were and are saying:

I think the most (universally) valuable ramification of releasing the 3.5 SRD as CC BY (or, IMO, ideally CC BY-SA) would be that it'd make possible a domino effect of letting 3.5 SRD-derived products relicense under CC BY(-SA) in order to move to what I think is inarguably a stronger/more understood license in the CC licenses. If I hop over to the OGL v1.0a page in 13th Age 2E, because it has a long line of copyright notices, they cite copyrights for WotC (2000 SRD), Paizo (2009 Pathfinder RPG), Troll Lord (2004 Castles & Crusades), a ton of Fire Opal Media and Pelgrane Press (most everything 13th Age), and a couple smaller publishers beyond that. IANAL either but I believe it'd be possible for Paizo to go "great, Pathfinder is stronger under the same CC terms, let's offer that", and ditto with Troll Lord, and Fire Opal Media, and so on until everyone has essentially ported to what should be more solid license terms, without reverse engineering.

That, I think, would be a good thing, regardless of whether or not the OGL is actually poisoned or just perceived to be, and whether they picked CC BY or CC BY-SA, my preferences aside. Unfortunately, that has no value to WotC, who would have to kick it off, and if nothing else it probably weakens their future options for no tangible community goodwill (unless a huge stink suddenly materializes).

EDIT: and I just realized that 2000 was the 3.0 SRD, not 3.5 SRD, so maybe my off-ramp is dead in construction. But you get the idea. That'd be the only value for anyone in relicensing it now, I think.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Does it? I was under the impression products on there weren't curated meaningfully, they just had to meet certain requirements, by which logic the Steam or Nintendo stores would be "curated", but neither is.

Most of DMs Guild is basically a big slush pile of content, a lot of it clearly by first-time creators with no idea of how to do layout or anything.

There was a Guild Adepts program that was curated, but it was never clear how one became an adept. While a lot of it is very good, there's a cloud of "are these folks just friends with the decision makers?" around it. And the program is effectively defunct anyway.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The world isn't better, it's just at best not worse and I don't really buy that we're in that best world. I think it is worse than a world with an unchallenged OGL would be.

I disagree. The CC license is much more sweeping and permissive than the OGL was and there's even less question about it being revocable -- and challenging that would bring legal responses from a lot more parties, which makes WotC even less likely to screw with it.

I don't disagree that it would be nice to see WotC publicly concede that they screwed up, but there were clearly internal battles going on and what we got was almost certainly hard-fought and the result of political compromises in-house. Powerful folks within Hasbro coming out and saying "we were wrong; we're sorry" was incredibly unlikely to happen and, three years on, even less so.