Well that came out of left field! I had to double check the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.
Yeah “on or before Friday” was right I guess
The announcement reads like someone on the actual D&D team (as opposed to the WotC/Hasbro “leadership”) finally prevailed in the argument about what “open” means, yanked the keyboard out of a corporate drone’s hands, and is trying to make things right. Curious to see if it’s too late (and what OGL 1.2 truly says), but the Creative Commons move is a massive step in the right direction (even though it’s probably not necessary).
Yeah the more the situation develops, the more I suspect
shareholders and board of directors, and maaaybe Cocks, were behind this mess. I mean I’ve read multiple people speaking well of Mrs Williams, for instance.
Idk, it’s too bad we will likely never know for sure. It leaves that tiny taint behind of “are the creatives I like bad, secretly?” And I hate that.
I’m not sure you need it. Nobody can stop you from making a chart with 20 levels and descriptions of powers.
No one could stop you before, but people still were much more willing to do so with the OGL than without it.
Woah, I did not see that coming.
Pass the crow, I guess?
Yeah I was vaguely optimistic and I’m still surprised by this. Haven’t dug deep on the OGL text yet, but a quick read looks good to me. Or rather, close enough to iterate on.
Ok. So, based on what’s in the draft, it looks like what they would be releasing under Creative Commons is very literally the core rules. It includes all the rules for adventuring, combat, spellcasting, downtime, etc. in the SRD. What it does not include is any races, any classes, any monsters or NPCs, the rules for magic items (weird…), or any magic items.
This looks like a good-faith gesture, but saying it doesn’t include “quintessentially D&D stuff like owlbears and magic missile” is misleading. It doesn’t include any specific expressions of the rules at all. I genuinely don’t think anything in the portions of the SRD being released under Creative Commons is copyrightable material anyway. In that light, this looks like a really sneaky PR stunt.
Not only that, this would only be the core rules in the SRD 5.1. It doesn’t include the 3e SRD at all, which OGL 1.0a does.
Sorry, WotC, but this isn’t going to cut it.
Huh. Most of the SRD wasn’t actually copyrightable either, so I don’t really get this.
The community went into a frenzy and people were saying they couldn't take the risk of trying to publish D&D related content without OGL1.0a, even though the OGL was always only necessary for copy-pasting sections of text and using owlbears and whatever other small bits of copyrightable information is in the SRD.
Why? Because the OGL gave them explicit right to publish that stuff, so there was no worry about wotc trying to use “law fare” to stop them using thier protected right to us material that can’t be copyrighted.
Which is also what the CC does, except not at all in wotc’s hands.
Like my feedback will be that they need to at least put the basic framework of races, classes, subclasses, magic items, etc, because those are a big part of what people want to make for D&D based games, and doing so doesn’t mean The Ranger is in the CC (even though they absolutely have no rights over any of the classes, only over the very specific expression of those ideas), but barring some whackery in the feedback process I see no reason to not view this as wotc making a good faith effort to make right the wrong they did, and make their work good for the community again.
And it stops whoever thought up OGL 1.1 in the first place from doing it again.
And the OGL 1.2 terms seem close enough to reasonable that I don’t see why we all wouldn’t provide feedback and see where it goes.
Like KP is gonna drop Black Flag regardless. They started building it before the first news dropped. Paizo and everyone else is gonna do an ORC.
If D&D stays reasonably open, Paizo can still put out new classes for PF with no worries, and I can build a whole D&D system with custom classes and races, and the whole industry leans harder toward open gaming, that’s awesome.
If the final OGL 1.2 allows all the same works as before with the caveat that you can’t make D&D but Nazis, I’m good.