Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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It could also be that they didn't foresee a company like Paizo building their entire business around a game using WotC's rules set that would be marketed to D&D 3.5e players as an alternative to 4e, and were bound by the language in the OGL from taking any action.
Don't get me wrong, what we've seen of the new OGL absolutely stinks, but I imagine if they had anticipated something like Pathfinder, they would have written the original OGL differently from the get-go.
I don't spread unconfirmed rumors about someone, whether or not they are my "friend."
The only announcement Wizards made about monetizing D&D was when they said that people making over $0.75 million a year have to pay a small royalty on the revenue over that number. There are less than 20 people/companies who were making that much money off the game, and Wizards of the Coast has every right to take a small share of the money from people getting rich off their products. Not only that, but this wouldn't actually make them nearly as much money as some people say it will, since so few people are directly affected by it.
Even in the Gizmodo article, where they talked about unverified "leaks," I didn't see very many clauses that would actually serve to make them that much money. The biggest (obviously also unconfirmed) clause that people are objecting to is the one that would hurt RPGs (such as Pathfinder) that are using older versions of the license. In all honesty, that clause would probably lose them more money and customers than it would gain them, judging by the reactions of numerous fans in threads such as this.
In other words, if this is seriously the way in which Wizards is trying to "monetize D&D," then they are doing an absolutely terrible job at it.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.1. Pathfinder 2e is still an OGL game.
2. Pathfinder 2e is considerably less newbie friendly than DnD.
Seems like a good time for the content owners for Tolkien and other fantasy setting creators to sue Hasbro. WoTC has ripped off content and ideas from all sorts of sources, including Paizo.
Actually, they did foresee some of that. The originators of the OGL wanted to protect the game from bad decisions by the company. They saw firsthand how poor corporate leadership could destroy the game and the OGL was meant to be a shield against bad (or even just extreme) leadership decisions.
That included things like changing the game into something a lot of the community did not want as well as the company making business decisions that a lot of the the community doesn’t like. Pathfinder was an intended response to something like the radical changes of 4e. (Whether 4e was good, bad, or otherwise is beside the point. What matters is if enough fans want a different D&D experience than WotC was offering, the OGL was absolutely intended to facilitate that.)
The main problem was that everyone who felt that way was either forced out or left WotC between then and now. Current leadership apparently has a completely opposite view of the OGL than those who created it (and are even apparently trying to gaslight us into thinking Oceania always been at war with Eastasia, oops, I mean WotC never intended the OGL to allow any of this.)
Honestly, it's not the OGL that made Pathfinder possible, it's the SRD -- the 3.0 SRD was far too complete as a game, the stuff they left out to prevent treating it as a complete game wasn't at all adequate.
LOL
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
HI - it has been a while. So here's an excellent compromise:
WOTC builds a slick tool and editable driven interface for digital needs - that allows add ons and customization, but also wants to close the door on other party hosting sites - as long as it covers mapping, tools and you get everything you paid for either digitally or in a paper book as accessible and built into the price you already paid, that might be ok.
WOTC allows companies to continue their 3rd party licenses and offers to buy them out legitimately, or better yet HIRE THEM FOR MORE CONTENT, that's excellent. The creativity of these small businesses is what drove 5e for many many players and groups. If WOTC/Hasbro has a hard time making good-great content, why the hell not offer creative positions for the people already doing the work? Win win.
Denying the success and growth of 5e was due to homebrew and 3rd party options is just plain stupid - 3/4 of the material (settings, modules) created internally by WOTC is crap. I have a DM who insists on running it and he is too lazy to flesh in loot and rewards, as was the designers who made it so we are starved for items etc. Lazy, lazy.
Instead of beating them to death, can WotC agree to help the 3rd party creators for a fee or just "if you can't beat them, join them?" - Hire them, buy them out but retain the creative staff and give them leeway in making material. There has got to be a better way.
I do not think I will make the jump to (M)one(y) DnD as I already have a bad taste in my mouth for the woke content, but doing this to companies who thrive on successful creativity - and leaving us with crap source books for a much higher price (oh it is coming less content for more $), will steer me and my people to just stick with 5e and move on from anything new from Hasbro.
Yeah, could be! WotC is absolutely entitled to regret the OGL. They're just not entitled to take it back.
This could be a sneaky way to get new content instead of just hiring new writers.
New book series tend to inspire new content. Hire a writer or two.
New movies and small screen shows(tv and streaming) tend to inspire new content. Hire a writer or two.
Hire writers from other cultures in order to include their myths and legends also.
Do you see a trend here? It starting to look like they want to feed off of the fans instead of creating new content in house.
By the way they could just hire those fans and content creators. Has anyone been offered a good deal yet?
The OGL was published when D&D 3E launched in 2000. It wasn't written for the purpose of enabling another company to create a 3.5E look-alike so D&D fans had an alternative to D&D 4E.
Yep, I'm not a programmer, but I've used Excel for character sheets/management long before D&D Beyond existed.
Wizards has had over thirteen years to object to this. The OGL does not state in any way that such a thing wasn't permitted.
I know. As I mentioned before, WotC probably wrote themselves into a corner with the original OGL vis-a-vis Pathfinder. If they had predicted that the OGL would allow a company to create a direct market competitor - based on WotC's own rules set - when they changed editions, they would probably have written something into the original OGL to address that.
As for why they haven't done anything until now, I don't know. Maybe they had assumed that when they released 5E, they'd get players who had left for Pathfinder back. Maybe they've been stewing all this time trying to figure out some legal way to change the OGL.
FWIW, I'm not in any way in favor of the new OGL.
I was there, I read their reasoning. I didn’t say it was specifically about 4e but it was specifically to guard against future WotC decisions.
I think they did, in many cases. My gaming group switched to Pathfinder rather than play D&D4e, but then we decided to switch back to 5e when it came out. But we've been discussing about whether to adopt 6e when it comes out. He hadn't made any decision, but I believe that this was the final nail in that particular coffin. One of our players is working on getting a D&D streaming channel going, and is starting to see a bit of success... and this is a shot across his bow.
I'm pretty sure the new OGL doesn't affect streaming. That is part of the as-yet-unchanged Fan Content rules, if I'm not mistaken. The OGL is purely for static documents, like PDF files.
I'll be honest, whilst I dislike the terms I'm hearing of "WotC will own everything you have ever made", I am hesitant to think of it as the end of D&D. I agree that the 3rd party publishers are making the game more popular, but having spent a lot of time in the DMs Only section of this forum, I am pretty sure that over 90% of people who enjoy D&D do it for their own enjoyment, not to profit from it, and whenever you see a thread asking for help or feedback, it's never "I'm thinking of using monster X from kobold press book Y", it's always "I've made up a monster and I want to get feedback". I never see people say "I'm running this unoffical adventure and this happened, what do I do?", it's always "I'm running this official adventure" or "Im running my own homebrew campaign".
The OGL only affects people who are selling their D&D creativity online. 90% of D&D creativity is unpublished and lives in a folder in someones DMing bag, and is thrown away after they die. 99% of the worlds D&D has been played in has never, and will never, be published.
The creativity of the game will live on - people will just have to do it for themselves, which is what most people do anyway.
Tbh I’ve bought a couple things from third party publishers and with one exception (an adventure called Odyssey of the Dragonlords) I thought the official stuff was way better.
I really like D&D, especially Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms. My pronouns are she/they.
I like reading and writing, but I’m not much of an artist.
Given what happened at the time the OGL was created and all of the discussions with third parties, I think they knew that another company could make another game using the SRD content completely in order to compete with D&D. They just didn't care that could happen and opened up the content any way.
They LITERALLY handed over the content of the SRD to third parties who would have been considered competitors and kept them up to date with every iteration of the OGL while it was in development until they were ready for release. They WANTED these competitors to hit the ground running the day D&D 3.0 was released and they wanted them to be prepared with content to be released THE SAME DAY!
And their gamble paid off. Nobody wanted to create a new game immediately because they all knew the RPG world was set to adopt 3.0. Later, new games were released but mostly for other genres, not truly direct competitors. It wasn't until the suits decided to back off the OGL and go with the odious GSL that a DIRECT competitor had to be created as nobody wanted to abide by that pile of stinking garbage called the GSL.
So no, they knew dang good and well that anybody had the power to take the SRD, rework it and release it as their own game. They also knew that NOBODY could call that game D&D and that trademark is what is the true value of doing things under an OGL. It was from their own greed that the Pathfinder trademark was able to become the number 2 and a direct competitor. They brought all of that down on themselves. Had they continued down the OGL path, there would have never been a Pathfinder.
The age of OGL is over. The Time of the ORC has come!
The moment that WotC declares OGL 1.0a "de-authorized", "revoked" or any such nonsense is the moment I release as much content as possible under OGL 1.0a and say, "Sue me WotC". OGL1.0a cannot be revoked. If thousands of us do it, the countersuit will be a class action suit.
I am bit worried about that particular phrase "under-monetized" too. I already paid three times for the same books (physical books, here in DNDBeyond & in Fantasy Grounds) as a service to my players, so how many more times should I pay so that Hasbro wouldn't feel "under-monetized".
In this digital age it should be different, pay once (subscription or whatever) and use in several places. But that would require functional APIs & stuff, and it would turbo-enhance the whole industry with new services springing up left & right. Instead I think we're expected to pay even more, but I think I'm good now for foreseeable future with the books I've got.
Edit: Reply / quote -buttons, is there really need for both buttons, made my first post look a bit silly without a proper quote to someone's post.