Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
White Dwarf Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Nest
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions, OSR, & D&D Variants
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
EN Publishing
Twitter
BlueSky
Facebook
Instagram
EN World
BlueSky
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
Twitch
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions, OSR, & D&D Variants
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
Publishing Business & Licensing
WotC Talks OGL... Again! Draft Coming Jan 20th With Feedback Survey; v1 De-Auth Still On
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="rknop" data-source="post: 8904413" data-attributes="member: 20176"><p>No.</p><p></p><p>Content restrictions (like "no offensive stuff") absolutely do not belong in an open license. You don't see anything like that in Creative Commons. The open license needs to be just about the legal terms for what can be reused. Trying to police tone and offensiveness will undermine it as an open license.</p><p></p><p>What is offensive is both in the eyes of the beholder, and in the eyes of the cultural mores of the time. They evolve. There are two problems. First, who gets to decide what's offensive? If WotC gets to decide what's offensive for all "O"GL content, they have too much power. If each individual publisher gets to specify what's offensive, then chaos reigns, and the ability to reuse things in the way that open license are supposed to enable becomes horribly tangled.</p><p></p><p>It's not too hard to imagine, for instance, a company stating that no derivative work under the "O"GL can use the terms "demon" or "devil" -- after all, we have <em>exactly</em> a historical example of this having been considered too culturally offensive by the publisher of D&D. Do you really want to make supposedly <em>open</em> game content subject to this?</p><p></p><p>If it's left to the cultural mores of the time, then stuff that was licensed under the supposedly-open license will become to be seen as widely not available any more under that license.</p><p></p><p>If you forbid any bigotry in open game content, could somebody write a WWII-based RPG? Because bigotry was a pretty important factor in what was going on there. Who gets to decide when bigotry is offensive vs. a part of the background that the authors aren't endorsing?</p><p></p><p>I REALLY hope that Paizo et al. do not fall into the trap of wanting to put in an anti-bigotry clause into their open game license. I'm not in favor of bigotry, but such concerns are separate concerns from the terms of sharing open content, and should not be conflated.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="rknop, post: 8904413, member: 20176"] No. Content restrictions (like "no offensive stuff") absolutely do not belong in an open license. You don't see anything like that in Creative Commons. The open license needs to be just about the legal terms for what can be reused. Trying to police tone and offensiveness will undermine it as an open license. What is offensive is both in the eyes of the beholder, and in the eyes of the cultural mores of the time. They evolve. There are two problems. First, who gets to decide what's offensive? If WotC gets to decide what's offensive for all "O"GL content, they have too much power. If each individual publisher gets to specify what's offensive, then chaos reigns, and the ability to reuse things in the way that open license are supposed to enable becomes horribly tangled. It's not too hard to imagine, for instance, a company stating that no derivative work under the "O"GL can use the terms "demon" or "devil" -- after all, we have [I]exactly[/I] a historical example of this having been considered too culturally offensive by the publisher of D&D. Do you really want to make supposedly [I]open[/I] game content subject to this? If it's left to the cultural mores of the time, then stuff that was licensed under the supposedly-open license will become to be seen as widely not available any more under that license. If you forbid any bigotry in open game content, could somebody write a WWII-based RPG? Because bigotry was a pretty important factor in what was going on there. Who gets to decide when bigotry is offensive vs. a part of the background that the authors aren't endorsing? I REALLY hope that Paizo et al. do not fall into the trap of wanting to put in an anti-bigotry clause into their open game license. I'm not in favor of bigotry, but such concerns are separate concerns from the terms of sharing open content, and should not be conflated. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
Publishing Business & Licensing
WotC Talks OGL... Again! Draft Coming Jan 20th With Feedback Survey; v1 De-Auth Still On
Top