We All Won – The OGL Three Years Later

[SlyFlourish]

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.

"you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we."

- An Update on the Open Game License (OGL), D&D Beyond, 13 January 2023.

The RPG hobby is awesome right now, with tons of fantastic RPGs and several open licenses to produce just about anything we want. It's interesting to look at how things got here over the past three years since the 2022 / 2023 OGL catastrophe.

Disclaimers

• I've worked with and been paid by WOTC periodically over the past 15 years.
• I regularly talk to folks at WOTC.
• I get review copies of D&D products from WOTC.

Three year anniversary of the OGL catastrophe.

A quick summary of the history of the Open Gaming License.

• In 2000 Wizards of the Coast created the Open Gaming License and used it to publish the 3rd edition system reference document.
• In 2016 WOTC published the 5.1 system reference document, with all the 5th edition D&D rules under the OGL. For eight years, thousands of products were published under that license.
• In late 2022 and early 2023, Wizards of the Coast attempted to "deauthorize" the OGL – something the creators of the license said was never intended. The outcry from publishers, RPG fans, and massive. WOTC tried several times to explain themselves and change parts of their plan. None of it was received well.
• On January 27th 2023, Wizards of the Coast completely turned around, releasing the 5.1 SRD under the much more widely used Creative Commons Attribution license and saying they would not deauthorize the OGL.
• Since then, WOTC released the 5.1 SRD in five languages under the Creative Commons and, in 2025, released the 5.2 SRD under the CC in five languages – the ruleset upgrade used in D&D 2024.

Today

• The truth is, we all won -- mostly.
• RPGs have, in my opinion, never been in a better spot.

- We have the 5.1 and 5.2 SRDs in the creative Commons in five different languages.
- We have three 5e-based SRDs from three different companies, all under CC licenses.
- We can write all the 5e material we want without a license fee and without permission – forever.

• After the OGL catastrophe, many game companies went their own way. Many companies accelerated plans to publish their own independent RPGs. New games got started. How many of them would have happened anyway? Hard to say.
• Now, three years later, many of them are published and out there being played and they're fantastic.

- Dolmenwood
- Daggerheart
- Draw Steel
- Shadowdark
- Pirate Borg
- Shadow of the Weird Wizard
- 13th Age V2
- Nimble 5e
- Pathfinder 2e revised / Starfinder 2e

• The breadth of these games is super wide. Some hang on to 1978 like Dolmenwood. Some are as "high tech" as you can get like Daggerheart. Lots of them are grabbing a particular style and running hard with it.
• Most of these games have some kind of license as well – some very open, some not quite as open as we'd like, but because we have those core 5e SRDs in the CC, anything that leans on those, even if compatible with other systems, should be fine.
• The only potential bad outcome is that there used to be a central discussion and focus surrounding D&D and now that's split out to many other RPGs – I think this is a strength, not a weakness, but not all agree.

Who Didn't Win?

• I think WOTC's reputation as the steward of D&D is still poor among those who think about WOTC at all (which is likely a minority of D&D players). I think this negative reputation over the past three years is undeserved.
• Most people probably don't care. They're here for D&D and never pay attention to the brand.
• But some in the hobby, myself included, definitely pay attention to WOTC.
• WOTC definitely won the OGL war in another way. One of the big things they wanted out of their attempt to deauthorize the OGL was a piece of big 5e Kickstarters. Now they get that piece based on publishers wanting to publish on D&D Beyond and I bet the fee is higher than it was with the "new" OGL. Publishers are scrambling hard to get on D&D Beyond (at their peril I think) – something unthinkable when the OGL deauthorization was first brought up. Funny how a carrot works way better than a stick.
• What can WOTC do to otherwise improve their reputation?

- Be part of the community. Go to conventions as regular people type people. Run games. Play games. Listen to people. See what other games are up to.
- Run in-store programs. Rumors are that there's some new D&D Encounters style program being tested out.
- Make good products. Focus on making good D&D books.
- Put out PDFs of 5e books. Give us a path to legitimately own digital 5e D&D products.
- Behave like a member of the industry, not the whole industry itself. Take a humble human approach to the hobby.
- What do you want?

A Great Timeline

We're in the best time in RPGs that I can remember. There are way more games and way more worlds than we can ever play, which might be its own problem. We all won. RPGs are great.

 

[Morrus]

I think they achieved their goal. The OGL is barely used now.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I think they achieved their goal. The OGL is barely used now.

I don't think it achieved the goal of wanting to regain control over the whole 5e ruleset and stop things like Solasta from getting made. But I think they're pretty happy getting to select which companies they want to work with to get their taste of the profits.

The OGL is barely being used now but the CC BY is so much stronger as a license.

 

[dragoner]

I think they also wanted to protect themselves against say Disney making "Dungeon of the Dragon Princess" spinning off their IP.

 

[Retreater]

What else happened...

Out of fear of losing access to the SRD, several companies released slightly modified products to continue staying in business: Tales of the Valiant, Castles and Crusades Reforged, Pathfinder 2e Revision. This muddied the waters of the hobby, delayed product releases, and was ultimately unnecessary as the OGL entered Creative Commons.

I still dislike WotC for the OGL scandal. I still haven't spent money on one of their products. (I got the 2024 books through trade - and they still managed to disappoint.)

 

[CommodoreKong]

Letting third parties sell content on DnD Beyond was always a much better way to make money on third party content then trying to end the OGL.

Our group was already planning on trying other games around the time of the OGL and WotC’s actions just accelerated things and we haven’t looked back at DnD. Since then we’ve played Pathfinder 2e, Starfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu and Draw Steel and I have several other games in mind I would like to play in the near future (Mothership, Shadowdark and Pirate Borg). I don’t really keep up with 5e 2024 but from what I’ve seen it’s such a small change from 5e it just doesn’t look all that interesting to me.

 

[Artamo]

Most people probably don't care. They're here for D&D and never pay attention to the brand.

I’m confused by this point. Are people here for D&D specifically (in which case, aware or not, they are there for the brand) or are they calling it D&D in an eponymous way for any TTRPG: the way we called any photocopying to be Xeroxing.

 

[MGibster]

I’m confused by this point. Are people here for D&D specifically (in which case, aware or not, they are there for the brand) or are they calling it D&D in an eponymous way for any TTRPG: the way we called any photocopying to be Xeroxing.

They're here for D&D specifically. Everything else is fighting for 2nd place.

 

[Deset Gled]

• Most people probably don't care. They're here for D&D and never pay attention to the brand.
  
  ...
• What can WOTC do to otherwise improve their reputation?

One big spot where I feel WotC really dropped the ball is with pre-5e SRD products. At one point, they committed to updating the SRDs for earlier editions into Creative Commons as well. They have since quietly gone back on that promise. The last official update was just about 2 years ago:

2024 Core Rulebooks to Expand the SRD

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the expansion of the fifth edition Systems Reference Document (SRD 5.2), which will include updated content from...

www.dndbeyond.com

IMNSHO, seeing that project through would go a long way in removing the bad taste in my mouth from the OGL debacle. But, as you rightly point out, few people are aware of this, and even fewer care. Which is why they can get away with promising it to make good PR after their major screw up, and then never follow up.

 

[Maxperson]

Who Didn't Win?

• I think WOTC's reputation as the steward of D&D is still poor among those who think about WOTC at all (which is likely a minority of D&D players). I think this negative reputation over the past three years is undeserved.

I don't view WotC as negatively as I did in the year or so after the OGL disaster, but it's still not positive. For my part WotC's reputation won't be good until they fulfill the promise they made to put the older editions into CC.