Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro and the new OGL: the end of an age?

During these last few days a storm has broken out in roleplaying specialized ludic environments due to the leak of the text of the Open Gaming License (OGL) 1.1 which Wizards of the Coast (owned by Hasbro) planned to deploy at the beginning of the year.

In today's post I will talk about how all this drama unfolded and I will analyze how it can affect the hobby we all love, so take a seat, grab some popcorn and let's begin...

Leak of the OGL 1.1

Last January 5th Gizmodo published an article by Linda Codega with a detailed breakdown of the OGL 1.1, the new license that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) intended to use in One D&D, the upcoming iteration of Dungeons & Dragons. Among the changes of the license, going from a few pages to 9,000 words (and which you can download from this link) there's a set of topics affecting publishers and creators publishing games, adventures and supplemts taking advantage of the previous license (the OGL 1.0a) being the most importants the following ones:

• Disavow and nullify OGL1.0a used until now by all of them, forcing them to adopt the new license if they want to create derived or compatible contents based in Dungeons & Dragons Source Reference Document (SRD) and modify all their publications as well as their business model very quickly, because it was expected to make this publicly available in January 4th and come into force the 13th (yes, an extremely short time period).
• Content creators will have to sign in with WotC (surely in the D&DBeyond platform) and provide to the publisher copies of all their works.
• Subject to yearly gross income level obtained (beginning with $50,000 and reaching $750,000 or more) said creators will have to pay WotC a percentge in royalties ranging from 20% to 25% (even without having profit).
• If a crowdfunding platform is used to carry out a patronage to collect funds the prefered one by WotC is Kickstarter (with royalties decreased to 20%), if another platform is used the royalties will be 25%.
• Wizards of the Coast reserves the right to use any content, wether commercial or not commercial, created under the OGL 1.1 as their own under a no-royalties, not-exclusive, perpetual, irreversible, worldwide and sub-licensable license for any purpose.

First of all you may wonder if it's possible to unilaterally annulate the OGL 1.0a as WotC / Hsbro pretended with this new license. Ryan DAncey, creator of the original license and nowadays in charge of the Open Gaming Foundation, thinks it is not possible (something that WotC itself recognized in 2004 implying that, if changes were made, anybody not agreeing with them could use a previous version of it).

Besides the previous point, and setting aside all the royalties issues, I also wonder myself how they thought to get through with the pretension of grabbing the contents of others whithout any kind of agreement between creators and WotC / Hasbro, taking into account that in this 22 years, since its coming out in 2000, many publishers and creators have also adopted it in games that nave nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons regarding themes and mechanics (if you wnt to know more about the history of the OGL you may read this series by The Alexandrian: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3).

On the other hand all of this, reminds James Maliszewski, author of the blog Grognardia, of the “war against Internet” that TSR, the publisher which originally created and published Dungeons & Dragons, carried out by mid-nineties against the spreading of contents created by fans at the time it was heading into its ending.

Reactions and memes

Of course many businesses and creators (big and small) that would be affected by the implementation of OGL 1.1 became very nervous or were straight outraged after knowing WotC / Hasbro plans and during these days they began to react in a way that the compny didn't seem to expect (something that, sincerely, seems scarcely believable).

First manifests and petitions trying to save OGL 1.0a were launched, like the one promoted by Ryan Dancey at Change.org (about to have more than 20,000 signatures at the time of writing this post ), the open letter by #OpenDnD (which has already far exceeded 60,000 signatures) and the open letter by Jon Brazer Enterprises.

Besides all these initiatives, there have been movements bound to get rid of the OGL, adopt other existing licenses or even create new licenses with which to work, giving rise to declarations and announcements like the following ones (without any given chronological order):

• Arc Dream ceases to include the OGL in the books of Delta Green.
• Troll Lord Games also ceases to include the OGL (in fct it seems that Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition took many ideas from Siege Engine, the company's proprietary system).
• The patronage of Black Sword Hack - Ultimate Chaos Edition announces that the game will move away from the OGL and will use CC-BY 4.0.
• Evil Hat reminds us that they ceased to use the OGL commercially from mid 2010s and that the SRD of FATE, Thirsty Sword Lesbians and Blades in the Dark use the CC-BY license.
• Basic Fantasy will cease to use the OGL and is rewriting the game contents to remove all trace of the SRD contents and will use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
• From La Marca del Este also announce tht their contents from now on will be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
• D12Monthly will cease to use the OGL starting with issue #20 and will start to work in his own game system.
• The game Continual Light, in which Tenkar’s Tavern takes part will switch to a Creative Commons license.
• Mini Six Bare Knuckle Edition by Antipaladin Games will depart from the OpenD6 OGL and surely will use a CC-BY-SA license.
• Kevin Crawford declares that he has no problem with the creation of contents with compatible mechanics with Stars Without Number and any other games of the *WN series as long as it don't copy verbatim the text of the game (the authors should use their own words writing it) and don't hint it's a product endorsed by Sine Nomine Publishing (for specific intellectual properties by Crawford, like Latter Earth or Terran Mandate, it's necessary to reach an agreement with the author).
• Bat in the Attic Games declares that Blackmarsh and Majestic Fantasy Realms will be available under a CC-BY license.
• DMDave announces the SRD Alpha Version 1.0.4 of Endless Journeys and theCreator Original Open License (COOL), which will be based in OGL 1.0a but it will be 100% irrevocable.
• Studio Agate announces through their blog the offering of Fateforge Tetralogy as “pay-what-you-want” at DriveThruRPG as a protest by the intentions of WotC with OGL 1.1.

These previous actions are a few examples of all that have been happening these days and pale in the face of the announcement of Paizo is creating the Open RPG Creative License (ORC) together with the law firm Azora Law. Paizo wants to give publishers and creators a license which won't be linked to any given system and will be under the control of an independent non-profit foundation (like Linux Foundation) tasked to watch to maintain its open nature and prevent that it could be acquired and/or modified by any company selling roleplaying games (thus preventing what WotC / Hasbro is trying to do with the new OGL).

What success may have the ORC? It's difficult to answer these question right now, because right now it's only an announcement by Paizo and there's no document yet, but judging from the publishers joining the initiative (Chaosium, Atlas Games, Zweïhander, Goodman Games, Kobold Press and his project Black Flag, Mongoose Publishing and the contents program for Traveller with a new SRD based in Traveller Core Rulebook Update 2022, perhaps Necrotic Gnome and his Old-School Essentials... with some 1,500 creators and companies according to the latest news) may be we are witnessing the birth of an initiative that will give a lot to talk about.

If you are interested in knowing more about the ORC you may read the interview with Jim Butler, Paizo presient, by Linda Codega at Gizmodo and follow this thread at RPG.net forum.

Besides all these there have been also a notable number of memes regrding the issue, as can be seen in the presentation below:

What's doing Wizards of the Coast meanwhile?

And while all this things are happening WotC remains silent during a week, surely observing how the situation unfolds and evaluating his options regarding the reaction of the community, which obviously doesn't prevent bad news for the company still appearing:

• EN World forums pick declarations by D&DBeyond ex-employees Andrew Searls (former Product Manager) and Adam Bradford (company cofounder) explaining the bad relationship between the online platform and WotC.
• DnD_shorts males public a leak sent anonimously by a D&DBeyond employee explaining that the company executives see their customers only as source of income (what a surprise, isn't it?) and all the coming decisions regarding the OGL were comunicated to the employees in a 30 minutes' meeting held in January 11th in which The community was also accused of overreacting.

This last leak, wether it's true or not, caused a reaction which resulted in a wave of cancellations at D&DBeyond initiated by the cosplyer and youtuber Ginny Di resulting in a servers crash as Game Rant and Gizmodo informed the same day. Surely it was this act that took to cancel the online announcement about OGL 2.0 (yes, it's no longer 1.1) of the same day without any explanation, as Linda Codega informs at Gizmodo.

Finally Wotc made a public announcement through D&DBeyond in the 13th about the state of the OGL and tried to contain the indignation caused by the whole thing without budging at all (and it seems that the text of the release was redacted afterwards if we pay attention to this post at Geek Native). Either way this try hasn't worked and the community hasn't liked it as can be read in this thread at reddit, this post at Bat in The Attic or this other one at Alphastream.

This first official release was followed by another two: one in the 18th, trying to ammend the situation saying they have been mistaken and want to make changes, and the one in the 19th, presenting the OGL 1.2 draft proposal (oh, they have lowered the number) and the commitment among other things to use a CC BY 4.0 license for basic mechanics and he OGL for specific Dungeons & Dragons SRD contents, something I think is strange and won't go anywhere given the important controversy it's generating, because if it wants to be a free license it isn't going in the way to be one, as shows this post at Medium by Noah Downs and the posts long ago devoted to the topic by Robert E. Bodine at Play What You Want, his blog about legal issues relted to roleplaying games (both are lawyers specialized in intellectual property) as well as all the opinions poured into social networks, like Mastodon (searches with #ogl and #dnd) and Twitter (searches through a Nitter instance with #ogl and #dnd).

To obtain a vision regarding licenses and related matters you also may be interested in reading this post in the series about Personas y Dados, the guide about the creation of roleplaying games written by Jorge Coto Bautista.

Conclusions

Reaching the end of the post it's time of the conclusions about all that was happening these two weeks, and indeed all has a really surprising melodramatic tones.

First I think it wouldn't be strange that the initial leak of the OGL 1.1 has been a feeler launched by WotC / Hasbro to probe how the (relatively) small publishers and creators as well as general fandom reacted (yes, it seems the kind of maneuver that Elon Musk would concoct if he managed WotC as he he is doing with Twitter).

What surely the company wasn't expecting such a great and critical response to get this far even causing the apparition of ORC, with a great number of creators and publishers joining the initiative and Creative Commons licenses beginning to be important in the roleplaying ludic sector.

Besides all this you also should consider how the loss of confidence generated by all the matter and the effect that bad publicity would have in the business model and benefits of WotC / Hasbro (in factit may doing it right now and also it seems that already one in ten roleplayers don't want to play Dungeons & Dragons) and all the polemic with the management of the OGL reaching general press with articles in The Guardian and The Washington Post surely won't help in the year of the premiere of a film of Dungeons & Dragons due to a perceived boycott in the horizon as spotlights The A.V. Club, something that perhaps wouldn't help the spiration of creating a tv series.

Now to finish I would like to remind you that game rules by themselves aren't subject to copyright, that while waiting for the ORC Creative Commons licenses may be interesting and that there's an universe of games beyond Dungeons & Dragons with which imitate the same kind of experiences without having to go through WotC, I'm sure you will find something you will like.

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