I share and empathize with Yurei's concerns and hate that they're feeling unsafe and unprotected. For myself, I'm SHOCKED about this decision and I do think it is overall the best outcome - but I would've been fine with more specific language regarding content that goes against WOTC's community/cultural standards (yeah, I've been reading all the debate).
That said, I'm really wondering if this was a case of Hasbro/WOTC moving too fast, too soon - essentially showing their hand before OneD&D comes out late next year. I'm wondering if they're going to stupidly repeat the 4E debacle again with this next revision/edition. The good news is if they do, then we can not just keep playing 5E, we can safely create content for it the way we've been doing for the last 9 years.
Just sayin it is a bit weird how this all got resolved just as the community was about to have a big spotlight on the board of directors and shareholder Alta Fox's Free the Wizards pitch about putting new qualified people on the board that understand the MTG and DnD communities.
... just sayin
Before the Film release I expect some heads at Hasbro to roll. The board wants to save face, and they can't afford both a loss of consumer revenue and investor backlash. And they need a win with the Movie. So I expect they will fire whoever came up with the change to the OGL as a way to regain community trust and to appease the investors. Sadly I doubt Chris will be the sacrifice. I suspect it will be someone at WotC who they can pin blame on.
Still gonna need an assurance they don't try to pull it away again at a future date. But a step in the right direction.
Best thing about Creative Commons is that WotC/Hasbro don't control it.
The fact that we had to get to this point in the first place has eroded any and all trust I had in WotC. And it will take a while to rebuild. The players in the 3 campaigns I DM have already voted to switch systems a couple of weeks ago. So I'm pivoting away from d&d regardless.
They cannot pull SRD 5.1 out of the Creative Commons now that they've already released it there. That Is a done deal that can NEVER be undone as the do not have any control over that license.
I am feeling much better now.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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 very cautiously optimistic. They're pulling OGL 1.2 and the effort to remake the GL (I can't bring myself to call the changes open). They're leaving 1.0a alone and SRD 5.1 is already CC. VTT challenges are off the table...
For now.
If this sticks for a few weeks, I'll resub. If they drop a but... I'm out again.
Whoever finally made the decision makers see the light has my sincere thanks. However you did it (short of illegal means) made today a good day.
Before the Film release I expect some heads at Hasbro to roll. The board wants to save face, and they can't afford both a loss of consumer revenue and investor backlash. And they need a win with the Movie. So I expect they will fire whoever came up with the change to the OGL as a way to regain community trust and to appease the investors. Sadly I doubt Chris will be the sacrifice. I suspect it will be someone at WotC who they can pin blame on.
And if that head in the chopping block is Cynthia Willians, then she's the only one who will have willing put herself in that position. Investors have witnessed two major public outcries from Wotc execs decisions, and one may not have to look too far to find the issue.
Someone in Wotc is trying to save their own ass, while possibly tossing someone else under the axe by declaration of backing off of OGL1.0a
Unfortunately at this point on this journey leaving 1.0a untouched is no longer a feasible resolution. A 1.0b revision removing all ambiguity, in line with existing customer expectations, needs to be produced.
This just says you either don't know what the OGL was for or you don't know what the creative commons are.
The OGL is mostly irrelevant now. The entire SRD is now under a license managed by a not-for-profit 3rd party, and out of WotC's hands.
This is MORE than we were asking for.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I Cancelled my Master Tier Subscription January 12th 2023 because of "OGL" 1.1 - Resubscribed 28th of Jan, now the SRD is in CC-BY-4.0
Mate WotC is the same company that released a PHB with the concept of race essentialism (the idea that some races are naturally drawn to some moral believes) and released a book with ape people that were civilized by a powerful wizard and made into slaves (Hadozee). They have the worst track record of catching problematic material in the content they release why do you think they would be able to monitor other people's content?
If the worry is that people think WotC endorses hateful content they don't need to restrict the OGL but just better monitor the platforms that they own where people can release content. It doesn't matter that they have a restrictive OGL if someone can publish problematic material on D&DBeyond or on GM Guild and WotC content moderation team doesn't catch it. It would actually be worst for them with what was set on OGL1.2 because the headlines would be that WotC profited from hateful content until there was a public outcry.
Your hypothetical is also unrealistic, like how often do you see stories blaming DMV for car accidents involving people with drivers licenses? It would only be a problem if WotC sponsored the content and that is not how the OGL works.
Stop pretending you don't know exactly what's going to happen when somebody uses their explicitly granted chance to peddle their hatred using D&D and all y'all buy it like it's a Black Friday Super Deal.
How about you stop pretending there isn't a LONG and storied history of morality clauses and morality laws being weaponized against marginalized and vulnerable people. That there isn't a history of the simple existance of certain people being considered obscene. I don't know how you can watch what is happening to queer people, especially trains people, in the US right now and not understand how hard the reactionary pendulum is swinging, and how, if Wizards is allowed to become the sole arbiter of morality, all it would take is one change in management, or one pearly clutching stock holder to see that morality clause turned into a way to ban "undesirables" like queer people, or sex workers, or people of color, or anyone with an arrest record from working on any OGL project.
I cannot highlight statements like these enough in light of where this thread has gone. It is legitimately wild to me that people would advocate for giving massive corporations such unrestricted power in the name of "protecting against hate speech". Especially in this situation since, the biggest controversy around racism in the TTRPG community recently came from WotC, the very same company these people are advocating to give all this power to. People like this seem to fail to understand that the reason these corporations exist is to make money. Appealing to minority groups or protecting against hate speech on their platforms is something that is done because it is now viewed as profitable to market to them. If the cultural attitudes towards minorities ever shifts to being more negative, those same corporations you want to give all this power to will turn around and use it to oppress those same minorities in order to appeal to the dominate cultural attitude.
Seriously, if this is something you haven't heard about before I would highly recommend looking into the criticisms made of pride month by people in the LGBTQ+ community - frequently dismissively referred to as "Rainbow Capitalism" - because it is a good example of this phenomenon. Or take a look at the history of the DSM and how being gay used to be classified as a mental disorder (the field I work in used to classify me simply existing as mental disorder, seriously!).
You cannot rely upon the goodwill of corporations alone to protect people in this economic system. Because they will choose profits every single time. If WotC wanted to create a license to protect minority groups, they should have done so in a way that did not give themselves a massive amount of power over 3rd party creators, and should not have left it up to them to be able to decide what "hateful" content actually is because that is too vague and could easily be turned against minority groups.
For what it's worth, I think it's a good idea to have formalized rules to protect minorities and oppressed groups. I don't think the implementation of clause 6F was good at all, but I think there should be something as opposed to just "letting the market weed them out" because if there's something worse than letting one corporation decide on the rights of people it's letting corporations as an aggregate do the same thing. "The market" never goes out of it's way to protect the disenfranchised, that's why those protections and regulations need to be imposed upon it.
It is legitimately wild to me that people would advocate for giving massive corporations such unrestricted power in the name of "protecting against hate speech".
I have to hope it's just young people who are at that age where they're still insanely passionate about moral rights and ethics, but maybe not experienced enough to realize or think through what they're advocating for - like, to them it seems like a perfectly good and reasonable thing to ask for, because to them it literally is just as simple as 'rules to prevent hatespeech' - they're not experienced enough in legal matters or the way the world really works to have seen how those kinds of morality clauses can be warped to fit a current purpose or ideology, and to them they can't understand why anyone would be against something that's so plainly good?
That's my hope anyway. Seeing the rise of 'purity culture' on Tumblr has been very startling and strange, I used to think that 'anti's' were honestly a joke, like, how can anyone genuinely get upset about people shipping fictional characters together? But they're real, and they do... I don't like really GET it, but I know they're serious now and not just troll accounts made to be facetiously over the top.
i am rather happy. i'm waiting for more legal experts to weigh in but it seems they have agreed that the 5th edition srd will not be changing. that was my hard line. if they want to make a different license for one dnd i'm probably fine with that. even if they put all the crap they originally wanted i'll still play 5e and buy 5e material they publish. moght not move to one dnd but we will see. my line was on changing the existing stuff but i'm a lot more understanding on future stuff
For what it's worth, I think it's a good idea to have formalized rules to protect minorities and oppressed groups. I don't think the implementation of clause 6F was good at all, but I think there should be something as opposed to just "letting the market weed them out" because if there's something worse than letting one corporation decide on the rights of people it's letting corporations as an aggregate do the same thing. "The market" never goes out of it's way to protect the disenfranchised, that's why those protections and regulations need to be imposed upon it.
The basic issue for Wizards is that they only really have two choices: either they can take control of what people say using their IP, or they can explicitly disclaim responsibility; there isn't a particularly middle ground between those two. In theory they could bring back something like the d20 STL (which let you use their trademark in exchange for giving them pretty substantial control over what you could produce), but I don't think it would be particularly successful if introduced at the moment.
..."This is a promise not to sue so long as you don't try and damage our good name by association."
Y'know...except now, with the Creative Commons license, people can damage D&D's good name as much as they please and Wizards has no redress or recourse. Nor does the community. Because people wanted an irrevocable license out of everyone's control. So now 5e is perpetually and irrevocably vulnerable to hate, discrimination, and exclusionism and there's actually factually legally ****-all bupkis nada anybody at all can do about any of it.
That's gonna be just so great.
Well, that's what the laws and the judicial system are for. In addition, there is also the public judgment, the commercial scope that this material may have, etc.
I honestly don't think we need a private company to decide what is hateful content and what is not. And really WoTC has already shown that it doesn't have a very fine judgment about it either. I don't think it's the best defense we have against content of this type, really.
And on top of all that, that "protection" came with other very unethical additions. It seems to me that if OGL 1.2 was our protection against hateful content, it was worse the cure than the disease. In fact, if all they had done was include an "anti-hateful content clause" in the OGL, this whole mess wouldn't have started. The usual ones would have complained, of course. But the community would not have been radically against it. Because honestly, the hateful content thing was the OGL 1.2 anecdote. The excuse at best.
..."This is a promise not to sue so long as you don't try and damage our good name by association."
Y'know...except now, with the Creative Commons license, people can damage D&D's good name as much as they please and Wizards has no redress or recourse. Nor does the community. Because people wanted an irrevocable license out of everyone's control. So now 5e is perpetually and irrevocably vulnerable to hate, discrimination, and exclusionism and there's actually factually legally ****-all bupkis nada anybody at all can do about any of it.
That's gonna be just so great.
Well, that's what the laws and the judicial system are for. In addition, there is also the public judgment, the commercial scope that this material may have, etc.
I honestly don't think we need a private company to decide what is hateful content and what is not. And really WoTC has already shown that it doesn't have a very fine judgment about it either. I don't think it's the best defense we have against content of this type, really.
And on top of all that, that "protection" came with other very unethical additions. It seems to me that if OGL 1.2 was our protection against hateful content, it was worse the cure than the disease. In fact, if all they had done was include an "anti-hateful content clause" in the OGL, this whole mess wouldn't have started. The usual ones would have complained, of course. But the community would not have been radically against it. Because honestly, the hateful content thing was the OGL 1.2 anecdote. The excuse at best.
1.2 never got even tried. All this 'Well they would have!' is just speculation on how aggressively they would have used it.
It's probably because my English is not native, but when I talk to you I get the feeling that you don't understand what I'm saying.
What are you talking about exactly? A draft of OGL 1.2 came out, and it included a bunch of unfair terms. So much so that 90% of the community told them no. What was to be tried?
It's probably because my English is not native, but when I talk to you I get the feeling that you don't understand what I'm saying.
What are you talking about exactly? A draft of OGL 1.2 came out, and it included a bunch of unfair terms. So much so that 90% of the community told them no. What was to be tried?
The community told them no based on assumptions as to how the community believed it would be used. Since it never came into effect, there is no evidence that the community were right as to how it would be used.
I am flabbergasted that anyone would believe the community acceptance of a legal document--one giving specific and very clearly detrimental powers and privileges to one side of the aisle--would NOT result in at least a portion of those specific powers actually being exercised.
I would say that the apparent denial coming from such a belief is breathtaking... but over the past two weeks I've already witnessed people literally expect that the same company that was just exposed as trying to legally nuke a license of theirs could actually be strong-armed into, not just not nuking the license, but hand-crafting a version of it more restrictive for them, and with extra bells and whistles on top, including a "hateful content" clause that was somehow, magically exactly what was wanted by everyone in the fandom. I don't think I have any more breath to be taken.
..."This is a promise not to sue so long as you don't try and damage our good name by association."
Y'know...except now, with the Creative Commons license, people can damage D&D's good name as much as they please and Wizards has no redress or recourse. Nor does the community. Because people wanted an irrevocable license out of everyone's control. So now 5e is perpetually and irrevocably vulnerable to hate, discrimination, and exclusionism and there's actually factually legally ****-all bupkis nada anybody at all can do about any of it.
That's gonna be just so great.
Well, that's what the laws and the judicial system are for. In addition, there is also the public judgment, the commercial scope that this material may have, etc.
I honestly don't think we need a private company to decide what is hateful content and what is not. And really WoTC has already shown that it doesn't have a very fine judgment about it either. I don't think it's the best defense we have against content of this type, really.
And on top of all that, that "protection" came with other very unethical additions. It seems to me that if OGL 1.2 was our protection against hateful content, it was worse the cure than the disease. In fact, if all they had done was include an "anti-hateful content clause" in the OGL, this whole mess wouldn't have started. The usual ones would have complained, of course. But the community would not have been radically against it. Because honestly, the hateful content thing was the OGL 1.2 anecdote. The excuse at best.
To be fair, if the "update" had included a deauthorize on the old one, people probably would still have flipped either way. Without deauth, you can just choose the less restrictive one.
The main problem people had with 1.2 was that it made it clear that their license was suddenly tissue paper and could be changed on a whim.
It's probably because my English is not native, but when I talk to you I get the feeling that you don't understand what I'm saying.
What are you talking about exactly? A draft of OGL 1.2 came out, and it included a bunch of unfair terms. So much so that 90% of the community told them no. What was to be tried?
The community told them no based on assumptions as to how the community believed it would be used. Since it never came into effect, there is no evidence that the community were right as to how it would be used.
No, the community told them no because telling them yes was idiotic. If wizards were a privately held company and the CEO was a literal saint, they still would have said "No, we want a real contract that can't just be voided arbitrarily or replaced with something entirely different on a whim." Whether or not wizards would ever do such a thing (unimaginable, truly) is utterly beside the point. Using it means *agreeing* to it. My lawyer would beat me with a stick first.
To be fair, if the "update" had included a deauthorize on the old one, people probably would still have flipped either way. Without it, you can just choose the less restrictive one. Unless wizard offered something more valuable than the SRD nobody would have accepted a morality clause, even a toothless one. The problem people had with 1.2 was that it made it clear that their license was suddenly tissue paper.
Exactly! Whether they knew it or not, the fans of D&D negotiated in light of their BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). Since nothing being offered was actually better than walking away, fans were overwhlemingly unwilling to accept OGL 1.2.
WotC has now set itself a high bar, but I think a better one. That is, they now have to make the new release of D&D to be so attractive that people want to move over to it (and operate under whatever license OneD&D is going to be released under) rather than stick with the system (5e) that is now irrevocably able to be used by anyone. It's a challenge, but better for the game as a whole.
A number of users here keep mentioning the need for morality clauses and one user actually suggested enumerated morality rules were required.
I would like to see a list. All the users advocating for this, please enumerate for us what is and is not morally acceptable. Don't tell us is common sense because while we all mighta agree on some things (no derogatory language about a person based on their identity) we almost assuredly disagree on others (can ask entire species be evil). Being vague doesn't help, define it for us, since you seem to know (alone) what is best for the world.
What is the definitive list of acceptable or unacceptable morality in D&D?
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"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing) You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
For what it's worth, I think it's a good idea to have formalized rules to protect minorities and oppressed groups. I don't think the implementation of clause 6F was good at all, but I think there should be something as opposed to just "letting the market weed them out" because if there's something worse than letting one corporation decide on the rights of people it's letting corporations as an aggregate do the same thing. "The market" never goes out of it's way to protect the disenfranchised, that's why those protections and regulations need to be imposed upon it.
6f would have allowed them to arbitrarily censor LGBTQ+ content while prohibiting any legal response* just as easily as "fantasy hitler was right" content because of the no contest clause. The fact that people think a muffled process for allowing the company to squash whatever they want will only be used to stop bad actors is honestly funny as hell.
WotC doesn't need a license to publicly oppose problematic content. Tying it into the license with a clause that nobody can contest legally is ripe for abuse.
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I share and empathize with Yurei's concerns and hate that they're feeling unsafe and unprotected. For myself, I'm SHOCKED about this decision and I do think it is overall the best outcome - but I would've been fine with more specific language regarding content that goes against WOTC's community/cultural standards (yeah, I've been reading all the debate).
That said, I'm really wondering if this was a case of Hasbro/WOTC moving too fast, too soon - essentially showing their hand before OneD&D comes out late next year. I'm wondering if they're going to stupidly repeat the 4E debacle again with this next revision/edition. The good news is if they do, then we can not just keep playing 5E, we can safely create content for it the way we've been doing for the last 9 years.
Before the Film release I expect some heads at Hasbro to roll. The board wants to save face, and they can't afford both a loss of consumer revenue and investor backlash. And they need a win with the Movie. So I expect they will fire whoever came up with the change to the OGL as a way to regain community trust and to appease the investors. Sadly I doubt Chris will be the sacrifice. I suspect it will be someone at WotC who they can pin blame on.
They cannot pull SRD 5.1 out of the Creative Commons now that they've already released it there. That Is a done deal that can NEVER be undone as the do not have any control over that license.
I am feeling much better now.
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 very cautiously optimistic. They're pulling OGL 1.2 and the effort to remake the GL (I can't bring myself to call the changes open). They're leaving 1.0a alone and SRD 5.1 is already CC. VTT challenges are off the table...
For now.
If this sticks for a few weeks, I'll resub. If they drop a but... I'm out again.
Whoever finally made the decision makers see the light has my sincere thanks. However you did it (short of illegal means) made today a good day.
And if that head in the chopping block is Cynthia Willians, then she's the only one who will have willing put herself in that position. Investors have witnessed two major public outcries from Wotc execs decisions, and one may not have to look too far to find the issue.
Someone in Wotc is trying to save their own ass, while possibly tossing someone else under the axe by declaration of backing off of OGL1.0a
This just says you either don't know what the OGL was for or you don't know what the creative commons are.
The OGL is mostly irrelevant now. The entire SRD is now under a license managed by a not-for-profit 3rd party, and out of WotC's hands.
This is MORE than we were asking for.
I Cancelled my Master Tier Subscription January 12th 2023 because of "OGL" 1.1 - Resubscribed 28th of Jan, now the SRD is in CC-BY-4.0
Mate WotC is the same company that released a PHB with the concept of race essentialism (the idea that some races are naturally drawn to some moral believes) and released a book with ape people that were civilized by a powerful wizard and made into slaves (Hadozee). They have the worst track record of catching problematic material in the content they release why do you think they would be able to monitor other people's content?
If the worry is that people think WotC endorses hateful content they don't need to restrict the OGL but just better monitor the platforms that they own where people can release content. It doesn't matter that they have a restrictive OGL if someone can publish problematic material on D&DBeyond or on GM Guild and WotC content moderation team doesn't catch it. It would actually be worst for them with what was set on OGL1.2 because the headlines would be that WotC profited from hateful content until there was a public outcry.
Your hypothetical is also unrealistic, like how often do you see stories blaming DMV for car accidents involving people with drivers licenses? It would only be a problem if WotC sponsored the content and that is not how the OGL works.
I cannot highlight statements like these enough in light of where this thread has gone. It is legitimately wild to me that people would advocate for giving massive corporations such unrestricted power in the name of "protecting against hate speech". Especially in this situation since, the biggest controversy around racism in the TTRPG community recently came from WotC, the very same company these people are advocating to give all this power to. People like this seem to fail to understand that the reason these corporations exist is to make money. Appealing to minority groups or protecting against hate speech on their platforms is something that is done because it is now viewed as profitable to market to them. If the cultural attitudes towards minorities ever shifts to being more negative, those same corporations you want to give all this power to will turn around and use it to oppress those same minorities in order to appeal to the dominate cultural attitude.
Seriously, if this is something you haven't heard about before I would highly recommend looking into the criticisms made of pride month by people in the LGBTQ+ community - frequently dismissively referred to as "Rainbow Capitalism" - because it is a good example of this phenomenon. Or take a look at the history of the DSM and how being gay used to be classified as a mental disorder (the field I work in used to classify me simply existing as mental disorder, seriously!).
You cannot rely upon the goodwill of corporations alone to protect people in this economic system. Because they will choose profits every single time. If WotC wanted to create a license to protect minority groups, they should have done so in a way that did not give themselves a massive amount of power over 3rd party creators, and should not have left it up to them to be able to decide what "hateful" content actually is because that is too vague and could easily be turned against minority groups.
For what it's worth, I think it's a good idea to have formalized rules to protect minorities and oppressed groups. I don't think the implementation of clause 6F was good at all, but I think there should be something as opposed to just "letting the market weed them out" because if there's something worse than letting one corporation decide on the rights of people it's letting corporations as an aggregate do the same thing. "The market" never goes out of it's way to protect the disenfranchised, that's why those protections and regulations need to be imposed upon it.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I have to hope it's just young people who are at that age where they're still insanely passionate about moral rights and ethics, but maybe not experienced enough to realize or think through what they're advocating for - like, to them it seems like a perfectly good and reasonable thing to ask for, because to them it literally is just as simple as 'rules to prevent hatespeech' - they're not experienced enough in legal matters or the way the world really works to have seen how those kinds of morality clauses can be warped to fit a current purpose or ideology, and to them they can't understand why anyone would be against something that's so plainly good?
That's my hope anyway. Seeing the rise of 'purity culture' on Tumblr has been very startling and strange, I used to think that 'anti's' were honestly a joke, like, how can anyone genuinely get upset about people shipping fictional characters together? But they're real, and they do... I don't like really GET it, but I know they're serious now and not just troll accounts made to be facetiously over the top.
i am rather happy. i'm waiting for more legal experts to weigh in but it seems they have agreed that the 5th edition srd will not be changing. that was my hard line. if they want to make a different license for one dnd i'm probably fine with that. even if they put all the crap they originally wanted i'll still play 5e and buy 5e material they publish. moght not move to one dnd but we will see. my line was on changing the existing stuff but i'm a lot more understanding on future stuff
The basic issue for Wizards is that they only really have two choices: either they can take control of what people say using their IP, or they can explicitly disclaim responsibility; there isn't a particularly middle ground between those two. In theory they could bring back something like the d20 STL (which let you use their trademark in exchange for giving them pretty substantial control over what you could produce), but I don't think it would be particularly successful if introduced at the moment.
Well, that's what the laws and the judicial system are for. In addition, there is also the public judgment, the commercial scope that this material may have, etc.
I honestly don't think we need a private company to decide what is hateful content and what is not. And really WoTC has already shown that it doesn't have a very fine judgment about it either. I don't think it's the best defense we have against content of this type, really.
And on top of all that, that "protection" came with other very unethical additions. It seems to me that if OGL 1.2 was our protection against hateful content, it was worse the cure than the disease. In fact, if all they had done was include an "anti-hateful content clause" in the OGL, this whole mess wouldn't have started. The usual ones would have complained, of course. But the community would not have been radically against it. Because honestly, the hateful content thing was the OGL 1.2 anecdote. The excuse at best.
It's probably because my English is not native, but when I talk to you I get the feeling that you don't understand what I'm saying.
What are you talking about exactly? A draft of OGL 1.2 came out, and it included a bunch of unfair terms. So much so that 90% of the community told them no. What was to be tried?
I am flabbergasted that anyone would believe the community acceptance of a legal document--one giving specific and very clearly detrimental powers and privileges to one side of the aisle--would NOT result in at least a portion of those specific powers actually being exercised.
I would say that the apparent denial coming from such a belief is breathtaking... but over the past two weeks I've already witnessed people literally expect that the same company that was just exposed as trying to legally nuke a license of theirs could actually be strong-armed into, not just not nuking the license, but hand-crafting a version of it more restrictive for them, and with extra bells and whistles on top, including a "hateful content" clause that was somehow, magically exactly what was wanted by everyone in the fandom. I don't think I have any more breath to be taken.
Sterling - V. Human Bard 3 (College of Art) - [Pic] - [Traits] - in Bards: Dragon Heist (w/ Mansion) - Jasper's [Pic] - Sterling's [Sigil]
Tooltips Post (2024 PHB updates) - incl. General Rules
>> New FOW threat & treasure tables: fow-advanced-threat-tables.pdf fow-advanced-treasure-table.pdf
To be fair, if the "update" had included a deauthorize on the old one, people probably would still have flipped either way. Without deauth, you can just choose the less restrictive one.
The main problem people had with 1.2 was that it made it clear that their license was suddenly tissue paper and could be changed on a whim.
No, the community told them no because telling them yes was idiotic. If wizards were a privately held company and the CEO was a literal saint, they still would have said "No, we want a real contract that can't just be voided arbitrarily or replaced with something entirely different on a whim." Whether or not wizards would ever do such a thing (unimaginable, truly) is utterly beside the point. Using it means *agreeing* to it. My lawyer would beat me with a stick first.
Exactly! Whether they knew it or not, the fans of D&D negotiated in light of their BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). Since nothing being offered was actually better than walking away, fans were overwhlemingly unwilling to accept OGL 1.2.
WotC has now set itself a high bar, but I think a better one. That is, they now have to make the new release of D&D to be so attractive that people want to move over to it (and operate under whatever license OneD&D is going to be released under) rather than stick with the system (5e) that is now irrevocably able to be used by anyone. It's a challenge, but better for the game as a whole.
A number of users here keep mentioning the need for morality clauses and one user actually suggested enumerated morality rules were required.
I would like to see a list. All the users advocating for this, please enumerate for us what is and is not morally acceptable. Don't tell us is common sense because while we all mighta agree on some things (no derogatory language about a person based on their identity) we almost assuredly disagree on others (can ask entire species be evil). Being vague doesn't help, define it for us, since you seem to know (alone) what is best for the world.
What is the definitive list of acceptable or unacceptable morality in D&D?
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing)
You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
6f would have allowed them to arbitrarily censor LGBTQ+ content while prohibiting any legal response* just as easily as "fantasy hitler was right" content because of the no contest clause. The fact that people think a muffled process for allowing the company to squash whatever they want will only be used to stop bad actors is honestly funny as hell.
WotC doesn't need a license to publicly oppose problematic content. Tying it into the license with a clause that nobody can contest legally is ripe for abuse.