We All Won – The OGL Three Years Later

[Some Dude]

I don't think this is an accurate assessment of the situation. People playing D&D. Some of them stop playing D&D. Some of those quit the hobby, while others find other TTRPGs that fit their interests better. Assuming whatever portion of D&D players this last group represents stays consistent (and there is no reason to believe otherwise) then the more people who play D&D does in fact mean more people playing other games at some point downstream.

From the lawsuits of the '80s to the OGL, D&D has been actively hostile towards other games for decades. "Trickle-down gameonomics" may or may not be a thing. I'd need to see some numbers, honestly. Even if it did turn out to be true, it'd have to be an awful lot of gamers to offset the bad practices of D&D as a brand.

 

[Reynard]

This thread reminds me that WotC kept making noises about putting previous SRDs under CC, but has never actually made any movement in that direction. I would go so far as to suggest they were always lying and never intended to put the 3.0 or 3.5 SRD into CC.

 

[Pedantic]

Oh the "apology" was very corporate, to be sure. Didn't sit well with me, but then I shrugged and moved on. Personally, I focus more on what the creatives on the design team are doing and saying than what the marketing folks or c-suite folks are doing, saying, and pushing on those actually making the game.


Missing the point? No. Disagreeing with your point? Yes.

I don't have your tolerance for corporate action, especially in my hobbies. It's one thing to put up with casual inhuman behavior in my cell phone provider or a grocery store, it's quite another in my voluntary free time. That they moved from behaving slightly better (perhaps primarily as an accident of history) to the baseline doesn't excuse them, nor am I willing to compartmentalize the company's actions.

They aren't entitled to grace, and "well, they're a massive corporation what do you expect?" shouldn't be a cover that lets them get it for free. Everything came down to "look, we stopped ourselves from continuing the problem!" instead of actual contrition and growth.

 

[bsss]

More specifically, the harmed they caused was the fracturing of what used to be a consistent safe common harbor, so some legal effort to repair that would have been much more ameliorative than chucking the SRD in the CC and wiping their hands.
This is simply missing the point. WotC absolutely did burn down the OGL. The prior environment, where everyone treated access to the SRD and classic D&D rules/elements as a commons, and felt comfortable putting the OGL on their games to add to that commons is gone. The rise of bespoke licenses is a direct result of norms collapsing. It's certainly possible that WotC can't actually repair the damage they did, but they didn't really try.

This is the gist of my problem with the "everything's great!" reading of the OGL aftermath. To the degree to which one valued the copyleft nature of the OGL, I think that post-fiasco it's clear that the spirit of the OGL has weakened, both in terms of the usage of the OGL itself, and terms in its spirit. (And the chuck to CC BY is part of the evidence of that.)

This thread reminds me that WotC kept making noises about putting previous SRDs under CC, but has never actually made any movement in that direction. I would go so far as to suggest they were always lying and never intended to put the 3.0 or 3.5 SRD into CC.

At the tail end of the section, SlyFlourish suggests that there's just no financial reason for them to do anything with the 3.x SRDs, and cynically, that makes sense to me, it was probably just mollifying cover. I think it's fair to hold them to account for that promise, but I doubt they will unless there's a big enough stink, and I might guess that for most people who would actually benefit, the continued existence of the OGL 1.0a is "good enough". All relicensing those SRDs would do at this point would be to give the community an OGL off-ramp, and I think largely WotC just has no reason to care --- they've got what they want with the current state of things. Maybe there's some part of the 3.x SRDs that they don't want in the commons (so they don't want to re-ring a bell that's more open than the OGL 1.0a), but I can't immediately picture what it'd be that'd practically matter.

 

[Artamo]

Question from someone not incredibly knowledgeable about the differences between the various licenses:

When WotC proposed the original version of the OGL that started the uproar three years ago, did it actively threaten the ability of ENWorld Publishing, Draw Steel, Kobold Press, Darrington Press, Arcane Library and the like to publish their games?

Were those publishers satisfied with the changes that came after that uproar?

As far as whether something was “won”, I think those are probably the most relevant questions to me. My limited understanding was that original terms would’ve been highly prohibitive, perhaps threatening some of those companies from continuing operations or their projects. Which, if that’s true, should certainly answer questions of whether bad feelings are deserved or not. I know I’ve held grudges longer than 3 years that didn’t involve people trying to cut off my ability to make money so I can’t imagine how some of those publishers might have felt.

 

[TheSword]

NM. I’m not gonna argue the OGL War again though. It was 3 years ago. Time to move on.

 

[bsss]

When WotC proposed the original version of the OGL that started the uproar three years ago, did it actively threaten the ability of ENWorld Publishing, Draw Steel, Kobold Press, Darrington Press, Arcane Library and the like to publish their games?

For works that were benefiting from the OGL 1.0a, or were going to, the answer at the time was "nobody knows" and that was because of how WotC positioned their claim in terms of being able to no longer authorize that license. I think it was often but not universally believed that WotC probably couldn't revoke an existing 1.0a license without getting the other party to agree to 1.1, so companies were faced with the choice of ending their relationship with WotC or bringing everything up to 1.1 terms, and 1.1 terms were clearly tilted in WotC's favor. There were similar "maybe fine, but at some point it's academic until a court decides" questions about what obligations a further second derivative would have to change their license, if any.

 

[Artamo]

For works that were benefiting from the OGL 1.0a, or were going to, the answer at the time was "nobody knows" and that was because of how WotC positioned their claim in terms of being able to no longer authorize that license. I think it was often but not universally believed that WotC probably couldn't revoke an existing 1.0a license without getting the other party to agree to 1.1, so companies were faced with the choice of ending their relationship with WotC or bringing everything up to 1.1 terms, and 1.1 terms were clearly tilted in WotC's favor. There were similar "maybe fine, but at some point it's academic until a court decides" questions about what obligations a further second derivative would have to change their license, if any.

I would say that is an active threat particularly if you have to potentially sue, at which point you’re in jeopardy of simply being out-lawyered money wise.

 

[mamba]

This feels like a lot of whataboutism to me.

Wotc burned down the OGL. But what about Daggerheart? What about Draw Steel?

I am not sure what you see as whataboutism here. No one said ‘yeah WotC bungled that OGL thing, but look at how badly X handled their license’

 

[Ruin Explorer]

When WotC proposed the original version of the OGL that started the uproar three years ago, did it actively threaten the ability of ENWorld Publishing, Draw Steel, Kobold Press, Darrington Press, Arcane Library and the like to publish their games?

I can't speak for the publishers, and would be interested to hear specific perspectives, but as a general principle, yes it did threaten publishers.

There were several different vectors of harm.

First off, WotC was trying to push the idea that they could deauthorize the existing OGL, I think 1.0a. Now, legally, the consensus from people who weighed in (including actual lawyers) was that WotC probably couldn't do that, because the OGL was explicitly designed to prevent that, but that they could cause significant legal problems for publishers that might dissuade them from using it. WotC was particularly keen on this seemingly legally nonsensical idea that no new products could use the OGL 1.0a, and existing products couldn't be updated.

So that by itself was basically an existential threat.

Second off, even if you agreed to OGL 1.1/2.0, there were a lot of extremely threatening and problematic provisions being suggested by WotC. Two of them were:

1) WotC will take a cut of your revenue (not profits, revenue, so could easily turn profit into loss) if your revenue was above a certain amount. Most smaller/solo publishers would have been safe, but a significant number of publishers (including many of the ones you name) would have been caught by this, and as well as just the money going, it complicated running a company quite significantly, and opened you up to potential legal disputes with WotC as to whether they were getting what they were owed. And they wanted this for basically nothing in return. The only "consideration" offered in this contract was "We let you keep using our licence", which yeah not really mate.

2) WotC can cut you off at any second for any reason. They were very clear on this, offering a paranoid vision that some Nazis might make a D&D product and it would be terrible for them (guess what, WotC, that already happened, nobody cared - and there are tons of weird and bigot-y D&D 3PP guys out there, and just they sell what they sell to who they sell, and the papers aren't like "D&D is for Nazis now!!!"), so they had to have the ability to instantly de-authorize you and stop you making/selling any new OGL products, oh and importantly, you had to send all your stuff to WotC to REVIEW BEFORE PUBLISHING, which like hell no. Even if they weren't going to rip it off, that's a huge extra delay and anyone whose task is to find fault, is going to find fault. Presumably if they did find fault, you'd have to go back and forth with them until they were happy. This is not something existing publishers were typically equipped to handle (certainly not those who didn't work with licenced products), and it means that like, if say, anti-trans views in the US hardened, WotC might decide your trans-friendly D&D product was not acceptable and cut you off (that's just an example, of course, not something I regard as likely).

There was a lot more bad stuff too but even just that was all existential.