{"id":180104,"date":"2023-01-07T21:30:13","date_gmt":"2023-01-07T21:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/dungeons-dragons-community-holds-breath-as-wizards-of-the-coast-prepares-new-ogl\/"},"modified":"2023-01-07T21:30:13","modified_gmt":"2023-01-07T21:30:13","slug":"dungeons-dragons-community-holds-breath-as-wizards-of-the-coast-prepares-new-ogl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/dungeons-dragons-community-holds-breath-as-wizards-of-the-coast-prepares-new-ogl\/","title":{"rendered":"Dungeons & Dragons Community Holds Breath as Wizards of the Coast Prepares New OGL"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A leaked copy of a new and more restrictive Open Gaming License has put a large portion of the thriving ecosystem surrounding Dungeons & Dragons<\/em> into a nervous standstill. Yesterday, io9 published excerpts from a reported draft version of the OGL 1.1, a public copyright license that can be used by developers to make third-party material for Dungeons & Dragons.<\/em> The new version claims to “deauthorize” previous versions of the OGL, which would require publishers to opt-in to a more restrictive license in which publishers and creators have to report their OGL work, share royalties on revenue over $750,000 (regardless as to a project’s profitability), and grants Wizards of the Coast a “nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use content created under the OGL for any purpose. <\/p>\n

The OGL is one of the reasons for Dungeons & Dragons’<\/em> decades-long dominance of the tabletop roleplaying game market. First published in 2000, the OGL encouraged third-party creators and publishers to produce their own work using D&D’s game mechanics as a framework. OGL-produced work provided Dungeons & Dragons<\/em> with two immense benefits \u2013 all of this third-party material was in essence free advertisement for their game and it also gave D&D a larger footprint within TTRPGs without expending additional resources. Instead of learning a new game to play a science-fiction themed story, players could instead use a reskinned D&D that contained laser guns and aliens. The OGL encouraged designers to use D&D as the foundation for their games instead of creating bespoke game systems, which not only created competition within the D&D ecosystem which in turn raised the quality of D&D design, something that ultimately benefitted Wizards of the Coast as well. It also limited the number of viable competitors to D&D by keeping people using the system even when they weren’t playing D&D and kept the game in a dominant market position, even when the brand struggled in the early 2010s. <\/p>\n

One key to the Open Game License is that Wizards of the Coast has previously stated that, while they had the right to change the License (by publishing a new one), creators could still use older versions of the OGL, which has given creators confidence to publish material using the license. In a 2004 FAQ originally posted on Wizards of the Coast’s website, Wizards states that “even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there’s no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.” However, according to io9, the new version of the OGL states that previous versions of the license would become an “unauthorized” document, meaning that publishers would only have the option of using the new OGL. Lawyers have pointed out that the original OGL is not an “irrevocable” document, despite whatever its creators or Wizards of the Coast had intended, a point that will almost certainly play out in court if the new OGL tries to deauthorize past versions.<\/p>\n

Rumors surrounding the OGL have swirled for weeks, putting many creators on edge. And while Wizards of the Coast previously sought to reassure creators who use the OGL to publish their own D&D material for profit that changes to the OGL would be minimal and would only impact a handful of creators, the new leak has caused many publishers to pause their upcoming projects as they wait to read the new OGL and make a final determination about whether to support Dungeons & Dragons. <\/em><\/p>\n