Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8894968" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Okay, a few thoughts:1) This is a statement, not the actual new proposal. Obviously we have to be vigilant and, even where we like what we just saw, make sure that the eventual new document actually follows through (hopefully with the community legal experts going over it like never before).2) No one believes any of the 'This is all a misunderstanding/We never intended X/ We always intended to get community input on this' kind of stuff. I'm not giving it a pass, but IMO it's the expected norm. Large corporations generally don't benefit from saying, 'yeah we were trying to get away with something, but ya caught us.' (and even if the corporation might get some community kudos for refreshing honesty, the decision makers who authorized this would rather encode it as 'unexpected consumer hostility' rather than 'the consumers caught us trying to %&@# them.').3) WotC has indicated that they can't be trusted. At this point, it's just a reminder to me that I shouldn't have been doing so in the first place (or any other entity that is beholden to stockholders who do not care about principled stances rather than immediate quarterly revenue).4) No, they are not backpedaling on revoking OGL 1.0. At this point it is irrelevant, because the realization that they believe (unless they were doing one hell of a bluff) that they could revoke it means that OGL 1.0 is effectively dead. We could keep up the pressure campaign until they completely capitulate and scrap both the revocation of 1.0 and/or even the introduction of a new one altogether and it won't stop them from changing their minds at a later point. This alone is prohibitive towards working with 1.0, because what 3PP has the resources to treat every new potential product as the one they'll pay to develop but can't publish because an OGL change happened mid-lifecycle? It can never again be trusted as a safety net, and like the trust issue above, it means I retroactively shouldn't have trusted it for the past two decades.5) Thus, for me, the only way forward (other than #6) is to pressure them to introduce a new OGL that is acceptable*. And for that, I ask everyone: given that (IMO) the broken trust and revoked OGL 1.0 components are effectively irrevocable, what else in the new proposal isn't acceptable? For me, I'm okay with the product veto, even though I don't love a corporation being the arbiter of too sexist/racist (they do have some vested interest in people trusting that they would only veto genuine bad actors). What else is in there that can't be/missing that needs to be, outside of the things that cannot be achieved (trust/preserved 1.0)?*and we'd need to have the legally-minded of the community to go over the new thing and make sure it is foolproof and perpetual in a way that 1.0 apparently never was.6) In the end, though, I don't know if this is resolvable. For me this all is just a reminder that there was a world before the OGL when companies other than TSR-then-WotC made games using engines outside of the d20/class/level system (containing vestiges of a dungeon-crawling playstyle which hadn't been universal since ~1975). Maybe we'd all be better off re-exploring those other options. 5e has ballooned the hobby, and maybe the 3PP developers should take the initiative and develop ORC or their own house system no matter what WotC ends up putting forth.</blockquote>

Verification