We All Won – The OGL Three Years Later

[Corinnguard]

I could easily see people playing D&D5e and borrowing parts of A5E...

I think that is the intent. Let the players get interested enough to borrow elements from A5e for their 5e games. While some players will stick with 5e, others will Level Up.

I also don't know if in later books A5E moved away from the OGL, looking at Morrus's comments, I seriously doubt it.

A5e's SRD was published under the Creative Commons, the Open Game License and the Open RPG Creator.

 

[WitchyD]

Even with WotC moving the 5e SRDs to a CC-BY 4.0 license, I don't think that undoes the harm done by WotC. Any time a hobbyist or independent designer who wants to do their own remix on F20 games but doesn't because they are afraid of screwing up the licensing between multiple, maybe incompatible licenses, it's a loss to the scene.

On a personal level, I won't call it a win on the licensing front until WotC releases a D&D4e SRD under the OGL and/or CC-BY 4.0 license. I'm one of the sickos who prefer 4e over other editions, and even today there isn't a game that does it quite like 4e did. I'd love to see more overtly 4e-derived games out there.

 

[CommodoreKong]

On a personal level, I won't call it a win on the licensing front until WotC releases a D&D4e SRD under the OGL and/or CC-BY 4.0 license. I'm one of the sickos who prefer 4e over other editions, and even today there isn't a game that does it quite like 4e did. I'd love to see more overtly 4e-derived games out there.

Have you tried Draw Steel yet? I haven’t personally played 4e but from what I understand it’s a bit of a spiritual successor and I can personally say from the running The Delian Tomb it’s a really well designed RPG.

 

[WitchyD]

Have you tried Draw Steel yet? I haven’t personally played 4e but from what I understand it’s a bit of a spiritual successor and I can personally say from the running The Delian Tomb it’s a really well designed RPG.

Not yet, no. I am aware that Draw Steel does things fairly differently from 4e, such as dropping binary to-hit rolls in favor of a tiers-of-success check.

I'm presently running 13th Age 2e, which also doesn't do it quite like 4e did, but does work better for a shorter two-hour timeslot that I'm stuck with for now, as well as being a bit more newbie-friendly.

I'm still holding out a bit of hope that a 4e SRD will end up licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 and we'll see some hobbyist or indie designers do their PF1e- or TotV-style remix of 4e. I'm aware of the Orcus retroclone, which comes closer to 4e than either of the others mentioned but did ancestries and classes differently enough that I wouldn't call it a strict retroclone. (It's still a very impressive bit of work!)

A CC or OGL licensed 4e SRD would also allow for better community support in the form of VTT modules or character builders that aren't on shaky legal ground or outright piracy.

 

[VHawkwinter]

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

That's true; but with the 5e SRD in Creative Commons, the people making 5e compatible stuff no longer need to use the OGL much, unless they're adapting older OGL content and not rewriting it. And if you're making something wholly new and want a better version of the OGL, now there's ORC License as well.

Personally I'm glad that the companies who have a back-catalogue of OGL content weren't forced to take it all down; but then, I do not at all enjoy the design of 5e (All the 3.X variants I've seen certainly have their problems, but IMO 5e discarded all the content (and compatibility with content) that I liked while replacing the old problems with new ones). When I eventually gave up on 5e, I was up to ~1600 pages in DMs Guild Conversion content and like 85 pages in house rules to core mechanics, and was only including content from a handful of Hasbro 5e books. It didn't look like 2e or 3e, no, but it didn't look like the 5e my few 5e-loving friends wanted either. None of us were getting what we wanted out of it, and though I was gradually getting closer, I concluded I was still farther from what I had wanted than if I had just tried to rework the 3.5 or PF1 Core rules.

Anyway. I don't know that the OGL is "needed" in the same way it used to be, between the 5e-Compatible people having a Creative Commons SRD to work from, and the all-new people having ORC if they want copyleft mechanics but copyright setting. If that makes sense.