I think that speculating over the authenticity of the document is a moot point as it has been sent to a multitude of content creators expecting them to sign to the agreement that
A- the content they make can be used by WOTC at any time for any reason, and sold by.them exactly as the creator made it. Without paying them a penny, then stop that creator from selling by withdrawing that license. Allowing them to put a content creator out of business at will if they rely on OGL.
B. They can do this to.eliminate potential rivals like Pathfinder VTT , foundry etc in preparation for making DNDbeyond the one and only virtual tabletop that can host DnD content.
C. They can monetise the **** out of dndbeyond and include any content stolen in A/ above
D/ they can do this without fear of being sued , because you sign away your right to do so, assuming you had enough money to take them to court
E/ if you want to crowdfund anything better make sure you can it at 750k because it you make over that, you immediately owe 20-25% of each sale to WOTC meaning that you better factor in this extra cost from the outset
F/ WOTC can say screw E anyway by changing it to 80% of revenue over 20k with just 7 days notice
And they were asking to have these contracts signed by the 13th based on distribution on the 4th
I think that speculating over the authenticity of the document is a moot point as it has been sent to a multitude of content creators expecting them to sign to the agreement that
A- the content they make can be used by WOTC at any time for any reason, and sold by.them exactly as the creator made it. Without paying them a penny, then stop that creator from selling by withdrawing that license. Allowing them to put a content creator out of business at will if they rely on OGL.
B. They can do this to.eliminate potential rivals like Pathfinder VTT , foundry etc in preparation for making DNDbeyond the one and only virtual tabletop that can host DnD content.
C. They can monetise the **** out of dndbeyond and include any content stolen in A/ above
D/ they can do this without fear of being sued , because you sign away your right to do so, assuming you had enough money to take them to court
E/ if you want to crowdfund anything better make sure you can it at 750k because it you make over that, you immediately owe 20-25% of each sale to WOTC meaning that you better factor in this extra cost from the outset
F/ WOTC can say screw E anyway by changing it to 80% of revenue over 20k with just 7 days notice
And they were asking to have these contracts signed by the 13th based on distribution on the 4th
Sorry DnD I'm already gone
No one is stopping you from leaving, but saying the leak is the whole truth is just not a rational move. When something official comes along, we can continue this debate. But you can of course form an opinion that even a draft like this is bad enough. I don't agree, but many others think the same.
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
You pretty much lost me at "You should need to give a corporation your data." Like, I don't even know why you thought that was a good point. If they want to understand what settings/content people would like to see, that's what focus groups are for. That's their problem, not the third party creators. They are not Hasbros free testing department.
And to dip into the "lost revenue" argument, that revenue would not exist without the OGL as is. I don't understand why people think this has been "stealing money from WotC." If OGL stuff like Critical Role and third party did not exist, 5e would not have been this popular, that is objective fact. And if it wasn't as popular, that revenue wouldn't have existed either. It's not stolen revenue, it's created revenue they can't have, those are not the same thing as much as they'd like to pretend
I don't know why people keep saying Critical Role is OGL. It is not. It is under the Fan Content policy, which isn't being changed. Stranger Things also. And let's face it, Paizo is absolutely not generating any kind of customer for D&D.
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
What's considered and what's done are two very different things. People and companies consider cutthroat things all the time, but they rarely actually go through with it. At this point all we can do is wait to see what's published, and then wait months or years more to see what actually happened.
If a corporation considers destroying the livelihoods and lives of individual writers, illustrators, and other creatives, but then doesn't, this still means they showed zero regard for those who'd have lost their jobs had they gone through with it.
We're all perfectly capable of making the distinction between what is considered and what is done.
Some of us are just not mired in the sort of brand loyalty it must take to just not care that the company even considered it at all.
Every company has all sorts of considerations all the time, Paizo and the rest of 3rd party creators too. The only thing that matters is the final proposal.
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
What's considered and what's done are two very different things. People and companies consider cutthroat things all the time, but they rarely actually go through with it. At this point all we can do is wait to see what's published, and then wait months or years more to see what actually happened.
If a corporation considers destroying the livelihoods and lives of individual writers, illustrators, and other creatives, but then doesn't, this still means they showed zero regard for those who'd have lost their jobs had they gone through with it.
We're all perfectly capable of making the distinction between what is considered and what is done.
Some of us are just not mired in the sort of brand loyalty it must take to just not care that the company even considered it at all.
Every company has all sorts of considerations all the time, Paizo and the rest of 3rd party creators too. The only thing that matters is the final proposal.
The best time to deal with a concerning consideration is BEFORE it becomes a final proposal.
Your entire argument is based on the concept that WotC can revoke the OGL. They can't. It isn't theirs to revoke. The genie has been let out of the bottle and cannot be put back in. The US Copyright Office has already decided this a long time ago. If the Open Game License could be legally revoked, then the language defining that procedure would have been included in the License itself from the very beginning. Ultimately, this would be an issue to be decided in a court of law on a case by case basis - and Hasbro would lose in almost every instance, outside of the issue of IP violation - which is clearly stated *in* the OGL.
Hasbro does not own the concept of rolling dice to create characters, determine ability scores or determine actions within a role-playing game. It is public domain.
What they do own is every trademarked element created *withing* the scope of "Dungeons & Dragons" ie, "Mind Flayers," "Beholders," specific names of characters, creatures, places, events, etc. That's it. Like any other license holder - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, etc. - if they've copyrighted it or trademarked it, then it's theirs and anyone wanting to make money off of those things need to jump through all the hoops to do so, or give up and go off and create their own original IP
And that's the worse thing about this "OGL 1.1" which Hasbro is trying to roll out as an "update" of the OGL (It's an erroneous name, because the original Open Game License is not theirs to alter, as stated above): the fact that Hasbro is trying to claim every and all original Intellectual Property created with the Open Game License as the basis for their game mechanics as THEIR property for all time and regardless of what they want to do with is absolute BS. This is simply a group of marketing people and corporate lawyers trying to cheat uninformed creative people out of their ideas for free.
Every point you try to make for why the "OGL should be changed" is fallacious. Any legitimate concerns Hasbro has of protecting their IP is already covered in the OGL. If they no longer want to use it for any WotC product - fine. The rest of us will go on using it without their consent - which was never needed to begin with.
And "Race" is the accurate term for an imaginary world where multiple intelligent humanoid beings exist which can have mixed offspring. "Species" refers to animals of different genomes which cannot bear genetically viable offspring. In other words, if in the world of D&D Humans are one "species" and Orcs are another "species," then you will not have "Half-Orcs" who are capable of having offspring of their own. Same with "Half-Elves." Instead of being hand-shy over the word "race" and silencing those pointing out the inherent "racism" in the history of D&D, people need to learn to cope. That's the beauty of role-playing games: you can work out your real-world issues in a fantasy environment with just enough similarities to the real world to maybe learn a thing or two about actual, human relationships. Or, you know, just have fun.
As you said in your last sentence: "OGL 1.) does not address the realities of the world we line in..." You are right. And was never written to do . It is a legal document which ONLY addresses the use of the game system - not the morals and ethics of those who play it. You cannot police the hearts and minds of the players. That is borderline fascism and authoritarianism.
PS. Anyone reporting this post as "trolling" is abusing the site's report function to silence dissent. That should tell you something about the people trying to force these autocratic changes down our throats
Years of goodwill ruined just by evening hinting this change. The OGL gave them them the audience to sell to....revoking it can just as easily push the audience away. It isn't our fault their inhouse content folks haven't been very good lately.
I don't know why people keep saying Critical Role is OGL. It is not. It is under the Fan Content policy, which isn't being changed. Stranger Things also. And let's face it, Paizo is absolutely not generating any kind of customer for D&D.
While I'm sure Mercer & Co. have hammered out a private agreement with WOTC, at least parts of CR are most certainly OGL - especially the Tal'Dorei Reborn book they just published, for profit, under their own imprint.
Also, the podcast/YouTube thing is clearly making a profit for them, so I suspect it, too, is no longer considered to be covered by the Fan Content Policy - but I'm not an attorney, so I could be really wrong about that.
It doesn't need an update for any of those reasons, and it also can't be. The OGL permits any version of the OGL to be used, so the only thing that can rationally be changed is more liberties. They don't have the right to eliminate the existing OGL, and any attempt to further limit it will result in ppl not using the next version. They can apply whatever they want to 6th edition, and it will succeed with an OGL, or fail with a GSL, simple as that.
They'll be lucky to survive imagining this abomination.
If you want to look at it through that lens, the whole DND system is a game of quantifiable racism. Anything that is one class of things versus another Players vs Monsters, Elves vs Goblins, Orcs vs Dwarves..... You can make claims that player characters are a study in class privilege..... but that is a whole other deep dive.
It is also strange that we are still stuck in race, species and ancestry terms when WotC has stated that elves, dwarves, goblins, orcs and etc are all people from different cultures and not different humanoids. For example, being an elf does not mean that the PC is a elf by genes, but that they comes from an elf culture.
would not the NFT and bigotry problems be substantially addressed by the fact that OGL 1.0a does not cover product identity?
third parties already cannot use the official D&D logos, characters, storylines, tradedresses or trademarks in their own content, which is why 3pps tend to use their own branding as is; the branding on Kobold Press' Creature Codex for example does not resemble WotC's official books in any way for this reason. you acknowledged earlier that Star Frontiers' product identity is not covered by OGL 1.0a, and anything of a similar nature which is actually made under 1.0a cannot bear WotC-Hasbro's branding outside of the mechanical similarities and a small handful of races/monsters
you could still make NFTs or bigoted content featuring like. tieflings. or something, under 1.0a. but at this point the concept of a tiefling is about as synonymous across fantasy products as elves and dwarves are and aren't treated as a WotC D&D exclusive "thing"
If you want to look at it through that lens, the whole DND system is a game of quantifiable racism. Anything that is one class of things versus another Players vs Monsters, Elves vs Goblins, Orcs vs Dwarves..... You can make claims that player characters are a study in class privilege..... but that is a whole other deep dive.
alright i'm putting on my official bakunin certified socialist hat and saying for clarity that class in the marxian sense has absolutely nothing to do with character classes in DnD terms. i wont launch into a screed or anything, suffice to say that "class privelege" as lefties use it and character classes in DnD isn't just comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to rare earth minerals. these are different categories of ideas altogether with effectively nothing in common
there is a stronger argument to be made that there's a kernel of racial prejudice in the core of DnD however, and that's something which is quite a bit more difficult to meaningfully address, since the whole "distinct races with distinct physical and mental attributes" thing goes as far back as tolkien and the works he based middle earth off of, though yeah, ernest's, hrrrm, choice of words in describing races is especially poor.
In some cases it even has a much older root than Tolkien. For example, discussions about the Harry Potter books recently suggested that the whole concept of gnomes, trolls and goblins in European mythology and fantasy originates from two millennils of anti-Semitism.
would not the NFT and bigotry problems be substantially addressed by the fact that OGL 1.0a does not cover product identity?
While NFTs are a stupid and pointless scam, there's nothing about the OGL that particularly enables them. As for bigotry/etc, there's no question that less than desirable products have been released under the OGL (and, generally, vanished into the mists of history because they were terrible), but that's not exactly new and... so what? It's not like anyone thinks Wizards is to blame for what random people released under the OGL (their current OGL is actually worse for them, because it means they do have control over what gets produced under it, which means they get blame).
Couple of days late here but good post that is trying to deal with objective reality rather than generate more outrage.
I write / manage contracts as part of my day job. A lot of ppl are missing the bigger picture here and freaking about individual details. Think of a contract (license) like the rules for your favourite sport, a contract defines the size of the playing field, who is allowed to play and under what conditions and attempts to anticipate some issues that might arise during the game. Note that the rules don't describe an actual game, they're just fences that define boundaries and any rule is implemented in the context of the ruleset as a whole.
So reading the OGL 1.1 holistically what do we learn?
1. WotC believe they can cancel OGL1.0a. I don't imagine they took this decision lightly and since everything in OGL 1.1 document is built on this foundation then it's likely that they took legal advice on the subject and considered the commercial, partner and customer impacts. I'm not saying that means that this is 100% legally watertight or that it can't be reversed. What I'm saying is that they believe (a) they can change it and (b) that it's in their best interests to do so.
2. Assuming they can update it what else can we learn about the OGL?
Per the OP's list they want to bring the OGL up to date, in particular in respect of new technologies (NFT etc) and new social / media landscape (original OGL predates social media). That part touches on possible future revenue but is really about brand protection. Some of this is current but it's also about future proofing what they imagine 3rd parties could do if left unchecked.
The real meat is in OP's points 3-5. It's asserting that WotC aren't getting value for it's IP from the current OGL and that they're sending a strong signal that going forward they will strongly assert control of their IP and it's value (see more below).
3. How are they going about asserting this ie how strong are the rules, what do they intend by them and how reasonable are they?
The single most glaring thing is the amount of control they want. They demand that any creator over $50k register themselves and demands payment of payment of 25% royalty (20% Kickstarter) on anything over $750k or seeks a custom deal.
As many ppl have observed royalties at that level would kill a small company, which benefits no-one. So the intent is not to cripple them but to provide them with a strong incentive to seek out and strike a custom deal. It also provides a high baseline for WotC to negotiate from so they can dictate terms. Essentially registration and custom deals are a way of getting the sheep to organise themselves into an orderly queue for shearing.
This certainly has a chilling effect but more fundamentally what 3rd parties really need is certainty so they can plan and make decisions for the future with some certainty that the rug won't be pulled out. Except that the OGL allows WotC to rescind / change the OGL at 30 days notice.
I'm not unduly concerned by the 'we can use your IP' thing. The whole hobby is built on reusing character and plot tropes from a host of different media. What they say is that things can look similar because people have the same ideas at the same time (eg did Crit Role or WotC first come up with the idea of a city from a previous era trapped under the ice?). Oddly I believe them. Not because they're trustworthy but because the rest of the OGL already gives them all the control they'll ever need.
4. In conclusion I'd say we're going to get a new OGL whether we want one or no, justified or not. If I were to focus my efforts on a single ask it would be to remove the ability to revoke the new OGL on short notice and commit themselves to at least 5 years.
If I had a second wish I'd want more transparency on the custom deals ie publish a custom deal template. Essentially some reassurance that there's a balance between WotC and the 3rd party creators getting reasonable value for their respective IP.
And yet....they may just drive a lot of content developers and players to a off brand replacements. I came back to D&D about a year ago after about 15 years away, in large part due to things I saw happening with independent content. I suspect I will follow those folks, or go back to CoC for awhile.
Couple of days late here but good post that is trying to deal with objective reality rather than generate more outrage.
I write / manage contracts as part of my day job. A lot of ppl are missing the bigger picture here and freaking about individual details. Think of a contract (license) like the rules for your favourite sport, a contract defines the size of the playing field, who is allowed to play and under what conditions and attempts to anticipate some issues that might arise during the game. Note that the rules don't describe an actual game, they're just fences that define boundaries and any rule is implemented in the context of the ruleset as a whole.
So reading the OGL 1.1 holistically what do we learn?
1. WotC believe they can cancel OGL1.0a. I don't imagine they took this decision lightly and since everything in OGL 1.1 document is built on this foundation then it's likely that they took legal advice on the subject and considered the commercial, partner and customer impacts. I'm not saying that means that this is 100% legally watertight or that it can't be reversed. What I'm saying is that they believe (a) they can change it and (b) that it's in their best interests to do so.
2. Assuming they can update it what else can we learn about the OGL?
Per the OP's list they want to bring the OGL up to date, in particular in respect of new technologies (NFT etc) and new social / media landscape (original OGL predates social media). That part touches on possible future revenue but is really about brand protection. Some of this is current but it's also about future proofing what they imagine 3rd parties could do if left unchecked.
The real meat is in OP's points 3-5. It's asserting that WotC aren't getting value for it's IP from the current OGL and that they're sending a strong signal that going forward they will strongly assert control of their IP and it's value (see more below).
3. How are they going about asserting this ie how strong are the rules, what do they intend by them and how reasonable are they?
The single most glaring thing is the amount of control they want. They demand that any creator over $50k register themselves and demands payment of payment of 25% royalty (20% Kickstarter) on anything over $750k or seeks a custom deal.
As many ppl have observed royalties at that level would kill a small company, which benefits no-one. So the intent is not to cripple them but to provide them with a strong incentive to seek out and strike a custom deal. It also provides a high baseline for WotC to negotiate from so they can dictate terms. Essentially registration and custom deals are a way of getting the sheep to organise themselves into an orderly queue for shearing.
This certainly has a chilling effect but more fundamentally what 3rd parties really need is certainty so they can plan and make decisions for the future with some certainty that the rug won't be pulled out. Except that the OGL allows WotC to rescind / change the OGL at 30 days notice.
I'm not unduly concerned by the 'we can use your IP' thing. The whole hobby is built on reusing character and plot tropes from a host of different media. What they say is that things can look similar because people have the same ideas at the same time (eg did Crit Role or WotC first come up with the idea of a city from a previous era trapped under the ice?). Oddly I believe them. Not because they're trustworthy but because the rest of the OGL already gives them all the control they'll ever need.
4. In conclusion I'd say we're going to get a new OGL whether we want one or no, justified or not. If I were to focus my efforts on a single ask it would be to remove the ability to revoke the new OGL on short notice and commit themselves to at least 5 years.
If I had a second wish I'd want more transparency on the custom deals ie publish a custom deal template. Essentially some reassurance that there's a balance between WotC and the 3rd party creators getting reasonable value for their respective IP.
100% agree with your holistic analysis of the contract. The only part I think you missed is the role that online play has in the new OGL, given the seismic shifts in the way people play the last few years combined with the opportunity to use a subscription based system for online play to overcome the economic challenges presented by the three rulebooks and done purchase problem D&D has faced over the entire 50 year history.
Hasbro sees the opportunity to turn D&D into a cash cow using online play, and this is a driving factor in the new OGL.
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I think that speculating over the authenticity of the document is a moot point as it has been sent to a multitude of content creators expecting them to sign to the agreement that
A- the content they make can be used by WOTC at any time for any reason, and sold by.them exactly as the creator made it. Without paying them a penny, then stop that creator from selling by withdrawing that license. Allowing them to put a content creator out of business at will if they rely on OGL.
B. They can do this to.eliminate potential rivals like Pathfinder VTT , foundry etc in preparation for making DNDbeyond the one and only virtual tabletop that can host DnD content.
C. They can monetise the **** out of dndbeyond and include any content stolen in A/ above
D/ they can do this without fear of being sued , because you sign away your right to do so, assuming you had enough money to take them to court
E/ if you want to crowdfund anything better make sure you can it at 750k because it you make over that, you immediately owe 20-25% of each sale to WOTC meaning that you better factor in this extra cost from the outset
F/ WOTC can say screw E anyway by changing it to 80% of revenue over 20k with just 7 days notice
And they were asking to have these contracts signed by the 13th based on distribution on the 4th
Sorry DnD I'm already gone
No one is stopping you from leaving, but saying the leak is the whole truth is just not a rational move. When something official comes along, we can continue this debate. But you can of course form an opinion that even a draft like this is bad enough. I don't agree, but many others think the same.
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
What we have is deafening silence from WotC on the matter when they needed to be front and center with this.
This combined with the investor call that revealed a desire to "monetize" the product more doesn't exactly instill confidence.
You pretty much lost me at "You should need to give a corporation your data." Like, I don't even know why you thought that was a good point. If they want to understand what settings/content people would like to see, that's what focus groups are for. That's their problem, not the third party creators. They are not Hasbros free testing department.
And to dip into the "lost revenue" argument, that revenue would not exist without the OGL as is. I don't understand why people think this has been "stealing money from WotC." If OGL stuff like Critical Role and third party did not exist, 5e would not have been this popular, that is objective fact. And if it wasn't as popular, that revenue wouldn't have existed either. It's not stolen revenue, it's created revenue they can't have, those are not the same thing as much as they'd like to pretend
I don't know why people keep saying Critical Role is OGL. It is not. It is under the Fan Content policy, which isn't being changed. Stranger Things also. And let's face it, Paizo is absolutely not generating any kind of customer for D&D.
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
Every company has all sorts of considerations all the time, Paizo and the rest of 3rd party creators too. The only thing that matters is the final proposal.
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
WToC is playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun and they are going first. They need to pull the trigger very very very carefully.
The best time to deal with a concerning consideration is BEFORE it becomes a final proposal.
Your entire argument is based on the concept that WotC can revoke the OGL. They can't. It isn't theirs to revoke. The genie has been let out of the bottle and cannot be put back in. The US Copyright Office has already decided this a long time ago. If the Open Game License could be legally revoked, then the language defining that procedure would have been included in the License itself from the very beginning. Ultimately, this would be an issue to be decided in a court of law on a case by case basis - and Hasbro would lose in almost every instance, outside of the issue of IP violation - which is clearly stated *in* the OGL.
Hasbro does not own the concept of rolling dice to create characters, determine ability scores or determine actions within a role-playing game. It is public domain.
What they do own is every trademarked element created *withing* the scope of "Dungeons & Dragons" ie, "Mind Flayers," "Beholders," specific names of characters, creatures, places, events, etc. That's it. Like any other license holder - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, etc. - if they've copyrighted it or trademarked it, then it's theirs and anyone wanting to make money off of those things need to jump through all the hoops to do so, or give up and go off and create their own original IP
And that's the worse thing about this "OGL 1.1" which Hasbro is trying to roll out as an "update" of the OGL (It's an erroneous name, because the original Open Game License is not theirs to alter, as stated above): the fact that Hasbro is trying to claim every and all original Intellectual Property created with the Open Game License as the basis for their game mechanics as THEIR property for all time and regardless of what they want to do with is absolute BS. This is simply a group of marketing people and corporate lawyers trying to cheat uninformed creative people out of their ideas for free.
Every point you try to make for why the "OGL should be changed" is fallacious. Any legitimate concerns Hasbro has of protecting their IP is already covered in the OGL. If they no longer want to use it for any WotC product - fine. The rest of us will go on using it without their consent - which was never needed to begin with.
And "Race" is the accurate term for an imaginary world where multiple intelligent humanoid beings exist which can have mixed offspring. "Species" refers to animals of different genomes which cannot bear genetically viable offspring. In other words, if in the world of D&D Humans are one "species" and Orcs are another "species," then you will not have "Half-Orcs" who are capable of having offspring of their own. Same with "Half-Elves." Instead of being hand-shy over the word "race" and silencing those pointing out the inherent "racism" in the history of D&D, people need to learn to cope. That's the beauty of role-playing games: you can work out your real-world issues in a fantasy environment with just enough similarities to the real world to maybe learn a thing or two about actual, human relationships. Or, you know, just have fun.
As you said in your last sentence: "OGL 1.) does not address the realities of the world we line in..." You are right. And was never written to do . It is a legal document which ONLY addresses the use of the game system - not the morals and ethics of those who play it. You cannot police the hearts and minds of the players. That is borderline fascism and authoritarianism.
PS. Anyone reporting this post as "trolling" is abusing the site's report function to silence dissent. That should tell you something about the people trying to force these autocratic changes down our throats
Whether they can revoke the OGL is... not actually settled. Court might plausibly rule either way, but also pretty expensive to fight it out.
Years of goodwill ruined just by evening hinting this change. The OGL gave them them the audience to sell to....revoking it can just as easily push the audience away. It isn't our fault their inhouse content folks haven't been very good lately.
While I'm sure Mercer & Co. have hammered out a private agreement with WOTC, at least parts of CR are most certainly OGL - especially the Tal'Dorei Reborn book they just published, for profit, under their own imprint.
Also, the podcast/YouTube thing is clearly making a profit for them, so I suspect it, too, is no longer considered to be covered by the Fan Content Policy - but I'm not an attorney, so I could be really wrong about that.
It doesn't need an update for any of those reasons, and it also can't be. The OGL permits any version of the OGL to be used, so the only thing that can rationally be changed is more liberties. They don't have the right to eliminate the existing OGL, and any attempt to further limit it will result in ppl not using the next version. They can apply whatever they want to 6th edition, and it will succeed with an OGL, or fail with a GSL, simple as that.
They'll be lucky to survive imagining this abomination.
It is also strange that we are still stuck in
race, species and ancestry terms when WotC has stated that elves, dwarves, goblins, orcs and etc are all people from different cultures and not different humanoids. For example, being an elf does not mean that the PC is a elf by genes, but that they comes from an elf culture.In some cases it even has a much older root than Tolkien. For example, discussions about the Harry Potter books recently suggested that the whole concept of gnomes, trolls and goblins in European mythology and fantasy originates from two millennils of anti-Semitism.
Found this interesting bit of history:
Web Archive: Open Game Definitions
Food for thought, given current developing issues with the OGL's
While NFTs are a stupid and pointless scam, there's nothing about the OGL that particularly enables them. As for bigotry/etc, there's no question that less than desirable products have been released under the OGL (and, generally, vanished into the mists of history because they were terrible), but that's not exactly new and... so what? It's not like anyone thinks Wizards is to blame for what random people released under the OGL (their current OGL is actually worse for them, because it means they do have control over what gets produced under it, which means they get blame).
Couple of days late here but good post that is trying to deal with objective reality rather than generate more outrage.
I write / manage contracts as part of my day job. A lot of ppl are missing the bigger picture here and freaking about individual details. Think of a contract (license) like the rules for your favourite sport, a contract defines the size of the playing field, who is allowed to play and under what conditions and attempts to anticipate some issues that might arise during the game. Note that the rules don't describe an actual game, they're just fences that define boundaries and any rule is implemented in the context of the ruleset as a whole.
So reading the OGL 1.1 holistically what do we learn?
1. WotC believe they can cancel OGL1.0a. I don't imagine they took this decision lightly and since everything in OGL 1.1 document is built on this foundation then it's likely that they took legal advice on the subject and considered the commercial, partner and customer impacts. I'm not saying that means that this is 100% legally watertight or that it can't be reversed. What I'm saying is that they believe (a) they can change it and (b) that it's in their best interests to do so.
2. Assuming they can update it what else can we learn about the OGL?
Per the OP's list they want to bring the OGL up to date, in particular in respect of new technologies (NFT etc) and new social / media landscape (original OGL predates social media). That part touches on possible future revenue but is really about brand protection. Some of this is current but it's also about future proofing what they imagine 3rd parties could do if left unchecked.
The real meat is in OP's points 3-5. It's asserting that WotC aren't getting value for it's IP from the current OGL and that they're sending a strong signal that going forward they will strongly assert control of their IP and it's value (see more below).
3. How are they going about asserting this ie how strong are the rules, what do they intend by them and how reasonable are they?
The single most glaring thing is the amount of control they want. They demand that any creator over $50k register themselves and demands payment of payment of 25% royalty (20% Kickstarter) on anything over $750k or seeks a custom deal.
As many ppl have observed royalties at that level would kill a small company, which benefits no-one. So the intent is not to cripple them but to provide them with a strong incentive to seek out and strike a custom deal. It also provides a high baseline for WotC to negotiate from so they can dictate terms. Essentially registration and custom deals are a way of getting the sheep to organise themselves into an orderly queue for shearing.
This certainly has a chilling effect but more fundamentally what 3rd parties really need is certainty so they can plan and make decisions for the future with some certainty that the rug won't be pulled out. Except that the OGL allows WotC to rescind / change the OGL at 30 days notice.
I'm not unduly concerned by the 'we can use your IP' thing. The whole hobby is built on reusing character and plot tropes from a host of different media. What they say is that things can look similar because people have the same ideas at the same time (eg did Crit Role or WotC first come up with the idea of a city from a previous era trapped under the ice?). Oddly I believe them. Not because they're trustworthy but because the rest of the OGL already gives them all the control they'll ever need.
4. In conclusion I'd say we're going to get a new OGL whether we want one or no, justified or not. If I were to focus my efforts on a single ask it would be to remove the ability to revoke the new OGL on short notice and commit themselves to at least 5 years.
If I had a second wish I'd want more transparency on the custom deals ie publish a custom deal template. Essentially some reassurance that there's a balance between WotC and the 3rd party creators getting reasonable value for their respective IP.
And yet....they may just drive a lot of content developers and players to a off brand replacements. I came back to D&D about a year ago after about 15 years away, in large part due to things I saw happening with independent content. I suspect I will follow those folks, or go back to CoC for awhile.
100% agree with your holistic analysis of the contract. The only part I think you missed is the role that online play has in the new OGL, given the seismic shifts in the way people play the last few years combined with the opportunity to use a subscription based system for online play to overcome the economic challenges presented by the three rulebooks and done purchase problem D&D has faced over the entire 50 year history.
Hasbro sees the opportunity to turn D&D into a cash cow using online play, and this is a driving factor in the new OGL.