Gonna be tough to run a streaming and publishing company when your partner - Wizards - is pretty clearly just looking for an excuse to siphon off 25% of your income the moment the community lets off AND wants to deprecate your entire existence in favor of some weird online-only version of the game full of microtransactions
I don't know how you could possibly imagine that third parties - streamers or otherwise - would want to continue in that environment, and that whole revelation occurred because of their intended changes to the OGL. And yes - having an OGL-like license is largely how people felt comfortable creating all the things that live in this space and blew it up
Boycotts are not manipulation. People banding together to speak with their wallet is one of the few ways a consumer base can actually pushback against a corporation is not manipulation. There is no weird language, mental gymnastics, or dancing around facts with the mass D&D Beyond Sub cancellation. It is people being frank and simply speaking with their wallets.
So again, boycotts are not manipulation. Your statement is false.
They are on a very tautological level. Why are you boycotting, is it to get the other party to act in a different way, then you are trying to manipulate them into a action they were not planning so it is manipulative. But yes using the term manipulation here gives the wrong impression of what is happening.
I don't know how you could possibly imagine that third parties - streamers or otherwise - would want to continue in that environment, and that whole revelation occurred because of their intended changes to the OGL. And yes - having an OGL-like license is largely how people felt comfortable creating all the things that live in this space and blew it up
Nothing in the 1.0a OGL actually permits you to stream D&D sessions, that's permitted by a combination of fair use and media policies, all of which could have existed without the OGL. What WotC needed and wanted in the early 00s was a fan policy that meant gaming conventions, fan groups, publishers of fan magazines, and so on were safe. What they actually created was a license that directly assisted its competitors. It was a dumb design even back then, and Wizards has spent at least fifteen years regretting what they did.
To be slightly more accurate: the real problem isn't the OGL, it's the SRD. If the SRD had actually functioned as intended (it was never supposed to be possible to play a functional game without a PHB, but the way they tried to enforce that was by removing the rules for experience... which were trivial to replace) I doubt Wizards would have made multiple attempts to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
None of which means they'll actually succeed, or that they way they tried to go about it was a good idea, but I absolutely understand why they want to.
Boycotts are not manipulation. People banding together to speak with their wallet is one of the few ways a consumer base can actually pushback against a corporation is not manipulation. There is no weird language, mental gymnastics, or dancing around facts with the mass D&D Beyond Sub cancellation. It is people being frank and simply speaking with their wallets.
So again, boycotts are not manipulation. Your statement is false.
They are on a very tautological level. Why are you boycotting, is it to get the other party to act in a different way, then you are trying to manipulate them into a action they were not planning so it is manipulative. But yes using the term manipulation here gives the wrong impression of what is happening.
Yeah using manipulation in this case is suggesting unscrupulous behavior...which is a very odd take overall when discussing a billion dollar company vs. its community.
Boycotts are not manipulation. People banding together to speak with their wallet is one of the few ways a consumer base can actually pushback against a corporation is not manipulation. There is no weird language, mental gymnastics, or dancing around facts with the mass D&D Beyond Sub cancellation. It is people being frank and simply speaking with their wallets.
So again, boycotts are not manipulation. Your statement is false.
They are on a very tautological level. Why are you boycotting, is it to get the other party to act in a different way, then you are trying to manipulate them into a action they were not planning so it is manipulative. But yes using the term manipulation here gives the wrong impression of what is happening.
Because there is nothing else that we really can do that would get them to listen. Boycotting is really the only real way for us to have any sort of real say, by speaking with our wallets. It isn't manipulative because we are being frank and open about our intents. Manipulation requires unscrupulous intent, generally by purposely falsifying or withholding information. This boycott lacks unscrupulous intent.
If the term doesn't give the right impression then it is not the correct term to use.
The first is that, regardless of actual reasonableness, taking something away is different from just not giving people something in the first place. If the 1.0a OGL had never existed, 1.2 might look totally fine.
Even in the absence of OGL 1.0a the OGL 1.2 is a bad deal. The only difference would be that there would never have be any professional 3rd party content and D&D would still be where it was prior to OGL 1.0a. Instead of now, where there is professional 3rd party content that will go away under OGL 1.2
OGL 1.2 is a bad deal but acceptable for a casual forum. It is utterly unacceptable as a business deal between professionals. Laws and contracts exist to provide a framework to resolve conflicts when problems arise between two parties, that is why people personally or professionally invested in them read them with the worst case scenario in mind, because they is why the contract exists. If nothing ever went wrong then legal contracts wouldn't be necessary and judges, courts, and lawyers would be utterly pointless.
Copyright law already exists to protect WotC's IP, and anti-SLAPP statues exist to protect all everyone from frivolous lawsuits. If WotC can prove they started working on an idea before a third party creator published their content then under existing copyright law they have done nothing wrong and would win easily any lawsuit brought against them b/c copyright infringement requires both similarity and access. If the 3rd party content wasn't published first then WotC had no access thus any similarity is coincidental. Without any OGL WotC already has protection from accidental similarity if they start work on something prior to the 3rd party publishing it. Because WotC releases UA it is trivial for them to prove this is the case so they have nothing to worry about here.
The OGL 1.2 changes this so that even if designers at WotC start working on something after a 3rd party publishes it, and that designer bought a copy of the 3rd party content & read it prior to starting the project, and that project is almost the same as that 3rd party content, then the creator of that 3rd party content still will lose if they try to sue WotC for copyright infringement. However, if any 3rd party creator makes anything similar to something WotC releases even if that similarity is accidental, then WotC can block them from ever publishing under the OGL ever again and sue them.
WotC doesn't need OGL 1.2 to be successful, they have been just fine for 20 years until OGL 1.0a - in fact their business and game has grown spectacularly. This is simply WotC bullying content creators to give up their rights because WotC think they can get away with it - because I know this is going to come as a shock to you but : Lots of companies don't actually want to make good competitive products for their customers. Making good products is time consuming, expensive, and hard. If a company can just crush their competitors or barring that steal from them .. they absolutely will because Executives are just as lazy as anyone else and it is easier to manipulate the market and their consumers than to actually make a good competitive product.
I'll say. It looks as though there will be two licenses: one for the SRD 5.1 and one for SRD 6, and people will pick and choose which one to use. Hopefully, this means the company is shifting OGL 1.2 to be more carrot than stick. They should have done that to begin with, but hindsight is 20/20.
I don't blame the company for wanting to claw back some control of its IP. The OGL was incredibly liberal for a commercial product. Basing it off an open software license certainly helped build the IP back up again; even if it helped competitors. But that's still comparing something you can buy on book shelves to free software; like a Linux instance. I think the community just got too used to was was too sweet a deal. And now they're arguably getting a better one, with the entire SRD 5.1 now going under CC-BY-4.0.
I look forward to many more years of dnd with srd 5.1 in creative commons it is now public domain. I am glad this debacle is over and we can focus on One DnD again.
I look forward to many more years of dnd with srd 5.1 in creative commons it is now public domain. I am glad this debacle is over and we can focus on One DnD again.
No, CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) is officially public domain. This is filed under CC-BY-4.0; which, "lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation."
"What they actually created was a license that directly assisted its competitors"
Yes, but also no. What the OGL did was allowed the SRD to become the dominant rule set in the hobby, by allowing a thousand and one flavours to suit the tastes of nearly every gaming table. Sure lots of those flavours were provided by 3rd parties that WotC didn't earn a penny from (tbh if WotC had been reasonable in the royalty they asked for, i.e. 2% not 20% they might have gotten some support for asking for some portion of 3rd party profits), but like an ice cream shop if someone loves one of the flavours it's very likely they will try some of the others eventually. The OGL was and is terrible for rival game systems but allows rivals within the D&D system. But beyond this, being the single dominant ruleset which has happened with 5e & OLG 1.0a means that it is far easier for new people who have never played a TTRPG to be exposed to and learn the rules of your game and to find a table playing your game to join. But beyond that the diversity of flavours generated by third parties also means players will stick with your game system by trying out different styles from 3rd party creators, rather than trying out whole new game systems, when they get bored of wgat you are putting out.
Yes, but also no. What the OGL did was allowed the SRD to become the dominant rule set in the hobby, by allowing a thousand and one flavours to suit the tastes of nearly every gaming table.
That was mostly driven by (a) the D&D name, and (b) having an actually functional ruleset to go with it. The products that were enabled by the open gaming license did not meaningfully extend the range of D&D, except for a few things that barely even count as the same game system (like Mutants and Masterminds)
Yes, but also no. What the OGL did was allowed the SRD to become the dominant rule set in the hobby, by allowing a thousand and one flavours to suit the tastes of nearly every gaming table.
That was mostly driven by (a) the D&D name, and (b) having an actually functional ruleset to go with it. The products that were enabled by the open gaming license did not meaningfully extend the range of D&D, except for a few things that barely even count as the same game system (like Mutants and Masterminds)
Mutants and Masterminds doesn't need the OGL, it might have been published under it for convenience to avoid SLAPP suits by WotC, but the raw mechanics were never copyrightable so never needed the OGL to spawn vaguely similar games. Kobold Press, Ghostfire Gaming, Piazo, Critical Role, needed & need the OGL to exist. The D&D name is far far less powerful or valuable than you or WotC seem to think. I came into the hobby barely having heard of D&D before and only in the context of "that thing there was some stupid satanic panic about" and never having heard of WotC.
I don't know how you could possibly imagine that third parties - streamers or otherwise - would want to continue in that environment, and that whole revelation occurred because of their intended changes to the OGL. And yes - having an OGL-like license is largely how people felt comfortable creating all the things that live in this space and blew it up
Nothing in the 1.0a OGL actually permits you to stream D&D sessions, that's permitted by a combination of fair use and media policies, all of which could have existed without the OGL. What WotC needed and wanted in the early 00s was a fan policy that meant gaming conventions, fan groups, publishers of fan magazines, and so on were safe. What they actually created was a license that directly assisted its competitors. It was a dumb design even back then, and Wizards has spent at least fifteen years regretting what they did.
To be slightly more accurate: the real problem isn't the OGL, it's the SRD. If the SRD had actually functioned as intended (it was never supposed to be possible to play a functional game without a PHB, but the way they tried to enforce that was by removing the rules for experience... which were trivial to replace) I doubt Wizards would have made multiple attempts to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
None of which means they'll actually succeed, or that they way they tried to go about it was a good idea, but I absolutely understand why they want to.
I didn't say it allowed them to, I said it made them feel comfortable doing it. I understand the difference and chose specific words
Yes, but also no. What the OGL did was allowed the SRD to become the dominant rule set in the hobby, by allowing a thousand and one flavours to suit the tastes of nearly every gaming table.
That was mostly driven by (a) the D&D name, and (b) having an actually functional ruleset to go with it. The products that were enabled by the open gaming license did not meaningfully extend the range of D&D, except for a few things that barely even count as the same game system (like Mutants and Masterminds)
Mutants and Masterminds doesn't need the OGL, it might have been published under it for convenience to avoid SLAPP suits by WotC, but the raw mechanics were never copyrightable so never needed the OGL to spawn vaguely similar games. Kobold Press, Ghostfire Gaming, Piazo, Critical Role, needed & need the OGL to exist. The D&D name is far far less powerful or valuable than you or WotC seem to think. I came into the hobby barely having heard of D&D before and only in the context of "that thing there was some stupid satanic panic about" and never having heard of WotC.
Oh, for crying out loud.
A SLAPP lawsuit is one that silences criticism. An alleged copyright violation doesn't fall under that umbrella. And, if you want to get technical, whether game mechanics are copyrightable or not may depend on where you are in the world. Stop relying on just U.S. law for your opinions. There is no such thing as an international copyright. Each country has its own laws on the matter.
Copyright also isn't the end-all be-all people seem to think. Game mechanics can be patented; as demonstrated by Middle-Earth: Shadow of War and its Nemesis System. Heck, people seem to think mind flayers and Strahd von Zarovich now fall under Creative Commons because they're mentioned once or twice in the SRD 5.1. And, no, that's not how it works. Names aren't copyrightable, but they can be trademarked. Go ahead and use "Strahd von Zarovich" if you want, but it can't be in any way that approximates something owned by the holders.
You don't actually know who does and doesn't need the OGL. Paizo is even on record saying they don't for Pathfinder 2nd edition. It's been kept around as a cost-saving mechanism, since it lets the occasional "D&D-ism" slip through the cracks without fear of reprisal. They, rather emphatically, do not need it. Heck, championing the ORC as they are should be proof enough of that.
Mutants and Masterminds doesn't need the OGL, it might have been published under it for convenience to avoid SLAPP suits by WotC, but the raw mechanics were never copyrightable so never needed the OGL to spawn vaguely similar games. Kobold Press, Ghostfire Gaming, Piazo, Critical Role, needed & need the OGL to exist. The D&D name is far far less powerful or valuable than you or WotC seem to think. I came into the hobby barely having heard of D&D before and only in the context of "that thing there was some stupid satanic panic about" and never having heard of WotC.
My point wasn't that some companies need the OGL (though Critical Role does not need it), my point was that the game would be fine without those companies.
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Gonna be tough to run a streaming and publishing company when your partner - Wizards - is pretty clearly just looking for an excuse to siphon off 25% of your income the moment the community lets off AND wants to deprecate your entire existence in favor of some weird online-only version of the game full of microtransactions
I don't know how you could possibly imagine that third parties - streamers or otherwise - would want to continue in that environment, and that whole revelation occurred because of their intended changes to the OGL. And yes - having an OGL-like license is largely how people felt comfortable creating all the things that live in this space and blew it up
#OpenDnD
They are on a very tautological level. Why are you boycotting, is it to get the other party to act in a different way, then you are trying to manipulate them into a action they were not planning so it is manipulative. But yes using the term manipulation here gives the wrong impression of what is happening.
Nothing in the 1.0a OGL actually permits you to stream D&D sessions, that's permitted by a combination of fair use and media policies, all of which could have existed without the OGL. What WotC needed and wanted in the early 00s was a fan policy that meant gaming conventions, fan groups, publishers of fan magazines, and so on were safe. What they actually created was a license that directly assisted its competitors. It was a dumb design even back then, and Wizards has spent at least fifteen years regretting what they did.
To be slightly more accurate: the real problem isn't the OGL, it's the SRD. If the SRD had actually functioned as intended (it was never supposed to be possible to play a functional game without a PHB, but the way they tried to enforce that was by removing the rules for experience... which were trivial to replace) I doubt Wizards would have made multiple attempts to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
None of which means they'll actually succeed, or that they way they tried to go about it was a good idea, but I absolutely understand why they want to.
Yeah using manipulation in this case is suggesting unscrupulous behavior...which is a very odd take overall when discussing a billion dollar company vs. its community.
Because there is nothing else that we really can do that would get them to listen. Boycotting is really the only real way for us to have any sort of real say, by speaking with our wallets. It isn't manipulative because we are being frank and open about our intents. Manipulation requires unscrupulous intent, generally by purposely falsifying or withholding information. This boycott lacks unscrupulous intent.
If the term doesn't give the right impression then it is not the correct term to use.
Even in the absence of OGL 1.0a the OGL 1.2 is a bad deal. The only difference would be that there would never have be any professional 3rd party content and D&D would still be where it was prior to OGL 1.0a. Instead of now, where there is professional 3rd party content that will go away under OGL 1.2
OGL 1.2 is a bad deal but acceptable for a casual forum. It is utterly unacceptable as a business deal between professionals. Laws and contracts exist to provide a framework to resolve conflicts when problems arise between two parties, that is why people personally or professionally invested in them read them with the worst case scenario in mind, because they is why the contract exists. If nothing ever went wrong then legal contracts wouldn't be necessary and judges, courts, and lawyers would be utterly pointless.
Copyright law already exists to protect WotC's IP, and anti-SLAPP statues exist to protect all everyone from frivolous lawsuits. If WotC can prove they started working on an idea before a third party creator published their content then under existing copyright law they have done nothing wrong and would win easily any lawsuit brought against them b/c copyright infringement requires both similarity and access. If the 3rd party content wasn't published first then WotC had no access thus any similarity is coincidental. Without any OGL WotC already has protection from accidental similarity if they start work on something prior to the 3rd party publishing it. Because WotC releases UA it is trivial for them to prove this is the case so they have nothing to worry about here.
The OGL 1.2 changes this so that even if designers at WotC start working on something after a 3rd party publishes it, and that designer bought a copy of the 3rd party content & read it prior to starting the project, and that project is almost the same as that 3rd party content, then the creator of that 3rd party content still will lose if they try to sue WotC for copyright infringement. However, if any 3rd party creator makes anything similar to something WotC releases even if that similarity is accidental, then WotC can block them from ever publishing under the OGL ever again and sue them.
WotC doesn't need OGL 1.2 to be successful, they have been just fine for 20 years until OGL 1.0a - in fact their business and game has grown spectacularly. This is simply WotC bullying content creators to give up their rights because WotC think they can get away with it - because I know this is going to come as a shock to you but : Lots of companies don't actually want to make good competitive products for their customers. Making good products is time consuming, expensive, and hard. If a company can just crush their competitors or barring that steal from them .. they absolutely will because Executives are just as lazy as anyone else and it is easier to manipulate the market and their consumers than to actually make a good competitive product.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1439-ogl-1-0a-creative-commons?utm_campaign=DDB&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_content=8757369729
Pretty big update!
I'll say. It looks as though there will be two licenses: one for the SRD 5.1 and one for SRD 6, and people will pick and choose which one to use. Hopefully, this means the company is shifting OGL 1.2 to be more carrot than stick. They should have done that to begin with, but hindsight is 20/20.
I don't blame the company for wanting to claw back some control of its IP. The OGL was incredibly liberal for a commercial product. Basing it off an open software license certainly helped build the IP back up again; even if it helped competitors. But that's still comparing something you can buy on book shelves to free software; like a Linux instance. I think the community just got too used to was was too sweet a deal. And now they're arguably getting a better one, with the entire SRD 5.1 now going under CC-BY-4.0.
Mice. Cookies. Milk.
I look forward to many more years of dnd with srd 5.1 in creative commons it is now public domain. I am glad this debacle is over and we can focus on One DnD again.
No, CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) is officially public domain. This is filed under CC-BY-4.0; which, "lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation."
"What they actually created was a license that directly assisted its competitors"
Yes, but also no. What the OGL did was allowed the SRD to become the dominant rule set in the hobby, by allowing a thousand and one flavours to suit the tastes of nearly every gaming table. Sure lots of those flavours were provided by 3rd parties that WotC didn't earn a penny from (tbh if WotC had been reasonable in the royalty they asked for, i.e. 2% not 20% they might have gotten some support for asking for some portion of 3rd party profits), but like an ice cream shop if someone loves one of the flavours it's very likely they will try some of the others eventually. The OGL was and is terrible for rival game systems but allows rivals within the D&D system. But beyond this, being the single dominant ruleset which has happened with 5e & OLG 1.0a means that it is far easier for new people who have never played a TTRPG to be exposed to and learn the rules of your game and to find a table playing your game to join. But beyond that the diversity of flavours generated by third parties also means players will stick with your game system by trying out different styles from 3rd party creators, rather than trying out whole new game systems, when they get bored of wgat you are putting out.
That was mostly driven by (a) the D&D name, and (b) having an actually functional ruleset to go with it. The products that were enabled by the open gaming license did not meaningfully extend the range of D&D, except for a few things that barely even count as the same game system (like Mutants and Masterminds)
Mutants and Masterminds doesn't need the OGL, it might have been published under it for convenience to avoid SLAPP suits by WotC, but the raw mechanics were never copyrightable so never needed the OGL to spawn vaguely similar games. Kobold Press, Ghostfire Gaming, Piazo, Critical Role, needed & need the OGL to exist. The D&D name is far far less powerful or valuable than you or WotC seem to think. I came into the hobby barely having heard of D&D before and only in the context of "that thing there was some stupid satanic panic about" and never having heard of WotC.
I didn't say it allowed them to, I said it made them feel comfortable doing it. I understand the difference and chose specific words
#OpenDnD
Oh, for crying out loud.
A SLAPP lawsuit is one that silences criticism. An alleged copyright violation doesn't fall under that umbrella. And, if you want to get technical, whether game mechanics are copyrightable or not may depend on where you are in the world. Stop relying on just U.S. law for your opinions. There is no such thing as an international copyright. Each country has its own laws on the matter.
Copyright also isn't the end-all be-all people seem to think. Game mechanics can be patented; as demonstrated by Middle-Earth: Shadow of War and its Nemesis System. Heck, people seem to think mind flayers and Strahd von Zarovich now fall under Creative Commons because they're mentioned once or twice in the SRD 5.1. And, no, that's not how it works. Names aren't copyrightable, but they can be trademarked. Go ahead and use "Strahd von Zarovich" if you want, but it can't be in any way that approximates something owned by the holders.
You don't actually know who does and doesn't need the OGL. Paizo is even on record saying they don't for Pathfinder 2nd edition. It's been kept around as a cost-saving mechanism, since it lets the occasional "D&D-ism" slip through the cracks without fear of reprisal. They, rather emphatically, do not need it. Heck, championing the ORC as they are should be proof enough of that.
My point wasn't that some companies need the OGL (though Critical Role does not need it), my point was that the game would be fine without those companies.