Hmm, so they are claiming "Magic Missile" is quintessentially D&D?
Glances at Pathfinder
Yeah I think they’re gonna have a hard time with that. Owlbear, I can kinda see. D&Ds owlbear is distinctly D&D. I saw people talk about how the Druid turning into an owlbear made the D&D movie trailer feel like a D&D movie, for them, along with the gelatinous cube and displacer beast.
Whats your point though, you had plans to release new material under OGL 1.0a ? Old material is fine.
Not sure why people think they deserve to release new material under an old license.
This is a bad take. The OGL was literally written to be perpetual and irrevocable. That was the unambiguous intent of the license. It is completely reasonable to expect that status to hold…in perpetuity, and it is even more reasonable to be upset at the idea of having to jump through new hoops in order to publish new material related to works you’ve been publishing for years and that are the basis of your entire company.
But under the new license, you can keep doing exactly the same thing you did under 1.0 in the same way, except now you have to put the badge on and don't make a negro race inferior to a white race (ahem, Justin and Dave). For 99.9% of publishers, nothing will change with how we were doing it before, except putting the badge on the work.
I think the badge is even optional.
That appears to be what they're saying.
Legally, I don't think they can actually stop third parties from offering 1.0a licenses, they can just stop offering them themselves. So, if everyone starts using the Mongoose pocket handbooks under 1.0a...
Yeah, probably.
I think that what is critical for them here is that such a product is easily repudiated by them, and it’s less risky for a publishers to just use the new OGL or just the CC mechanics. Such a product is, if wotc is able to get hay they want here,
unlicensed in the context of D&D. It’s off-brand, bootleg, etc, because it isn’t under the currently approved wotc D&D license.
Which isn’t great, and I think they’re foolish to think they
need this, but I also don’t think is an especially bad situation, as long as the new OGL is reasonable.
Okay, people smarter than me: why did they go with CC for the "core mechanics"?
It’s a sign of good faith, that ensures in a truly ironclad way, that they can’t “OGL 1.1” us ever again, at least as far as basic compatibility with D&D 5e goes.
The new OGL allows even more, obviously.
But the CC isn’t under their control. They can’t even vaguely wave a hand toward the idea of being able to revoke it. Ever.
They can’t even go after offensive games or whatever, and anyone who hates wotc now but has content they’ve invested into that used D&D as a base, can make new content that is compatible with that work, as long as that
new work doesn’t feature things that aren’t in the CC, all without even touching the OGL.
If I want to make a spellbook for Level Up, and I hate wotc, all I have to do is just make sure that my spells aren’t D&D spells, and don’t reference things that wotc thinks belong to them. Because the mechanical kernel is compatible, the only rules text I might need to reference is CC, and Level Up itself is covered under the OGL 1.0a. I don’t have to be using the same license as level up, to make something that is a combination of CC content and my own new creative work.
Like the OGL has always been, it’s an open hand inviting everyone (except Nazis) into the big tent. It’s a way of saying, “even if this company becomes an evil fascist wart, it simply cannot ever even try to argue that it could hypothetically mess with your creative works made using this work.
In total, the proposal means you can just copy-paste the exact wording, and huge swaths of games that do so will be built upon a
lingua Franca that means that no one has to learn a new entire system to go from one game to another, preserving and strengthening the concept of the OGL, but with that “offensive content” caveat.
www.dndbeyond.com
