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Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

310 points by xaviex 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kubb 4y ago
nice
krisroadruck 4y ago
What a huge and welcomed about-face. Massive kudos to the community of dedicated fans, players, and creators who helped get this done.
imwillofficial 4y ago
And that folks is how you do it. Faith in humanity restored
SeanAnderson 4y ago
The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. They chose to do so anyway and are backtracking out of an interest of self-preservation rather than a customer-first mindset. I find this shameful enough behavior to warrant a legitimate, heartfelt apology. Instead, they present themselves as benevolent caretakers listening to their communities' response. This comes across as tone-deaf because they've already lost the trust of the community and don't seem to have learned how to take ownership of that fact. Still, this is a better result than if they'd stayed their advertised course. So, for that, I am thankful.
- tonfreed 4y ago
  I think they've completely misunderstood their product. The execs in charge of running the show come from video games, and watching what they're trying to do with DnD beyond makes it pretty obvious they're trying to introduce micro transaction hell and loot boxes into the product. Matt Colville whacked the nail on the head when he said D&D isn't really a game, it's a folk tradition and storytelling. Those are two very difficult things to monetize.
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    Yes, that is a critical part. They want to make DnD Beyond the core of the product. The main channel, where "ideally" both, DMs and players, have to buy each little piece of content and an expensive subscription to create their own scenarios instead of books, which are expensive to produce, ship etc. and then are shared in a group (or kept for DM's eyes only) And they "have to" extract as much revenue from third parties like Paizo and get consumers of their platform. If they get rid of story telling etc. they even can look at AI DMs leading a Dungeon Crawl to increase time of their consumers on their platform, even without fixed groups etc. Extract as much value as possible (and destroy the game)
    - secabeen 4y ago
      They either want microtransactions and loot boxes, or 30% of the overall revenue like Apple and Google do in their app stores.
      - wincy 4y ago
        Ah yes, and then if you try to tell even the slightest bit controversial story about say, adventuring in an ancient Egyptian city with slaves, that will be flagged as hateful content and you’ll be banned from D&D forever.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents such from happening.
  - crayboff 4y ago
    I mean, they did a huge thing that can't be backed out of, they released SRD 5.1 under creative commons. Yeah they did some not great stuff, but let's celebrate the successes when we get them!
    - deadbunny 4y ago
      Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.
      - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
        Sure, but the outrage from this change came about revoking the license for past works. By putting SRD 5.1 under CC, the situation for many indie creators of working with the SRD becomes clean and clear. Hasbro can do whatever they want going forward with D&D.
        cma 4y ago
        Game rules/mechanics usually can't be copyrighted other than just the literal text of descriptions of them. Does this give anything you couldn't have by cloning the rules with different wording flair?
        Karrot_Kream 4y ago
- pubby 4y ago
  > how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think. I'm not saying this as a defense or anything, but I find it helpful to think about.
  - tonfreed 4y ago
    The least they could do is sit down once a month with the game designers for a session of dungeon crawling. The main two in charge have both said they don't play
    - hinkley 4y ago
      The only thing worse than obstaining is half-assing it. Do you really want a bunch of detached people paying just enough attention to something you like that they feel like they can 'contribute' by changing it?
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        Meeting once a month would be within the normal range for a group playing for fun. On the low side, I think, but it's not "so little attention that it's worse than nothing".
        hinkley 4y ago
        People who are uni vested let things go as they are. People who are a little invested screw them up.
  - TillE 4y ago
    Given the extremely fast and extremely comprehensive U-turn, it seems like a lot of people near the top did understand the community very well. Somehow, one person or one small faction made a different decision, and the overwhelming feedback proved it was the wrong decision.
- roenxi 4y ago
  I disagree because the fundamental core of this argument is "everyone in a community should think alike". That isn't realistic, and using that as a principle leads to bad results - we have to be used to having robust communities with questionable leadership. The natural state of leadership is to be a bit shabby and not quite up to the task. We have the internet now, we have great visibility on what leaders actually do and they can't meet impossible standards. Although that is why decentralisation is so powerful - WOTC doesn't run your games night and doesn't send out a goon squad to police that people aren't using house rules. WOTC don't have the same incentives as their community. A company producing a game almost never has the same incentives as their community. As long as their incentives align with folding in the face of solid negative feedback, that is enough. They made a mistake, they appear to have recognised the mistake and course corrected. Asking for more than that is going to get less - it encourages lies and bad, blandness.
- victorvosk 4y ago
  Real people have disagreements and work through them. Lets not be mad for the sake of being mad. It was completely within the rights of WOTC to do whatever they wanted. People complained and they decided not to do and guarantee they will never do it in the future. Be happy.
  - ninth_ant 4y ago
    I understand what you’re saying, but attempting to revoke a widely-used open source license is not just something completely within their rights. Their sudden claim to have ability to “deauthorize” the 20+ year old OGL and destroy the partners and competitors who built businesses on the promises of a perpetual license - this was an egregious move that was almost certainly not within their rights. Legal analysts were quite consistent in that it’s impossible to be certain but this process wouldn’t have withstood a solid legal test. WotC, in trying to pull this, was attempting to leverage their expensive legal team to bully people into giving away their legal rights under the open license. That’s shady and deeply unethical, and shouldn’t be considered to be within their rights. Now for the future content they make, they can release that under a closed license if they want and that is within their rights even if I don’t like that license.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    Corporations are not "real people" and "they were acting in their rights" is not a defense against criticism for shitty behavior. Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  > has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it. Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.
  - jbm 4y ago
    A minor point, but I am grateful for the self checkout lanes — they have greatly speeded up my checkout, and w/ covid spiking I just want to leave asap. I have never seen "no" registers open though.
    - Macha 4y ago
      Not the US, but no manned registers happens often enough across various store chains here in Dublin at least. To the point where you might have to wave down a staff member restocking a shelf because the self-service needs someone to authorise your alchohol purchase or whatever.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      Walmart seems to agree that they like them as well. Renovated stores are entirely designed to streamline the self-checkout experience.
    - michaelcampbell 4y ago
      I don't mind the OPTION of self checkout, but not having the choice is a big fuck-you to the customers purely to make more millions of profit. At our local Wal Mart, they have registers for humans, but no humans are ever there. 100% do it yourself, with someone wanting to check your receipt. I never stop, if they want to see it's done right, hire someone to do it right. Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too. Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.
- freshhawk 4y ago
  It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this. They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest. So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?
  - hellcow 4y ago
    That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work. The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase. DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_. And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      When I was a player the story was way more important than the mechanism. Many times we just reduced to a few D6 tbh
      - kcartlidge 4y ago
        Us too. Though in the end we settled on the Fighting Fantasy RPG rules as they were simple enough to play in the school playground whilst also providing just a little bit of authority to decisions.
      - alisonatwork 4y ago
        This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  If anything, this shows the power of a product that is driven by subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions sent a strong signal to how the player base felt and it was felt high enough that execs pivoted directions.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  agreed. a substantial amount of the playerbase and 3rd party creators are looking for non-DnD games moving forward, and Hasbro finally realized they handed the opportunity to take all those players and creators to their competition. I think people should still switch. Hasbro has shown who they are. Is there a DnD transformers crossover yet, like in MtG?
- cleak 4y ago
  I’d bet they anticipated the backlash, but thought it could be managed - some short term anger followed by long term profits. It so far hasn’t worked out that way, but these are still recent events; they may just wait to roll out changes more quietly.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    They might be right long term, but that's 1) pretty cynical and 2) I think they might have just created the origin story for their competitors. So good news, they're making $1 billion, bad news they are now making $1 billion of a $1.7 billion market instead of $800 million of a $1 billion market.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lincolnq 4y ago
Can someone explain more about what happened here?
- Wistar 4y ago
  Here is a transcript of piece about the debacle from NPR from a few days ago. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1151474346 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1151474346
- eslaught 4y ago
  Here are a few of the prominent past HN posts: Dungeons and Dragons’ new license tightens its grip on competition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264777 An Update on the Open Game License (OGL) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370340 Basically WotC wanted to not only change their future content to a more restrictive license, they also wanted to retroactively switch older content to that license. It seemed like an obvious legal land-grab. Fans objected, and (at least to my surprise, others here seem to be more cynical) WotC did a 180 on the license and adopted CC-4.0-BY.
- genderwhy 4y ago
  WotC licenses some of their content using the Open Gaming License. It ostensibly covers both the rules* of D&D as well as key elements of the setting -- particular monsters, characters, place names, spells, etc. That license has allowed products and content creators to build on top of a shared platform -- using and reprinting portions of D&D's content to build their own worlds, stories, systems, etc. Note: not everything D&D publishes is covered by the OGL, just a set of core items they call the SRD -- Systems Reference Document. WotC/Hasbro leaked that they were working on OGL 1.1 which had a bunch of ambiguous (and many argued harmful) language that required creators to do things like license their content back to WotC, pay fees to license content, control what and what was not appropriate to build on top of OGL, etc. The OGL 1.1 was met with huge community backlash, and wotc has been fumbling for some time to figure out the next steps. It looks like they are taking those steps now. * Aside, it's not clear that the rules of D&D are even something that can be licensed in this way, as game mechanics are not protected the same way as copyrightable characters are.
djur 4y ago
Great news. I notice they don't say anything about the licensing of "D&D One", and I'm guessing there's a good reason for that, but there's a huge difference between using a different license for your new product and trying to change the license of your existing one.
throw0101c 4y ago
So no morality clause either?
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  Morality clauses aren’t compatible with any Creative Commons license as far as I’m aware.
kayodelycaon 4y ago
Well. That was unexpected. Given what's been happening to Twitter, I didn't have any hope that WOTC would do anything sensible. I suspect they'll pull this bullshit again the next time someone looks at a balance sheet.
- roblabla 4y ago
  At least the SRD5 is now irrevocably in the creative commons. So the situation now is somewhat better, they can't simply revoke the license anymore for that document.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > At least the SRD5 is now irrevocably in the creative commons. They changed the underlying law of licenses that makes gratuitous licenses revocable at will independent of the content of the license? How?
    - int_19h 4y ago
      As applied to open source licenses, that is a legal theory, not settled law, and there are many people, including lawyers who professionally deal with F/OSS, who disagree with you. https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/ https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/
    - chrisoverzero 4y ago
      You've asserted something like this a few times on HN, and your responses are undetailed enough (or flavored with fake astonishment, like this one) that you seem to think it's obvious. Isn't the requirement of attribution the consideration in cases like this? Which would make it not gratuitous? Here's open source lawyer and HN user 'DannyBee saying so, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14557737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14557737
    - roblabla 4y ago
      IANAL, but from TFA: > By simply publishing it, we place it under an irrevocable Creative Commons license. I'd be very surprised if they still had their rights to revoke the license after explicitly saying otherwise.
tunesmith 4y ago
Is there actually not a catch here? I'm only somewhat familiar with the debate.
- johnday 4y ago
  Yep - not only is there no catch right now, but they literally can never add one. The SRD is released under CC-BY-4.0. The only point of contention is what happens to their new product, One D&D, which will probably retain some nasty payment structure, and almost certainly not be OGL'd. That's fine though - if they build a walled garden around One D&D, they simply won't be able to compete against the open community of 5e.
  - tonfreed 4y ago
    It'll be funny if all those juicy royalties they think they're going to get never materialise because no one wants to develop for their system.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > not only is there no catch right now, but they literally can never add one. The SRD is released under CC-BY-4.0. They can't change that particular SRD, but material not in the SRD can be changed as can new material. Also, as they leave the old OGL intact, it is a catch in itself: 1) It's generally restricts rights much more than grants them [0], and 2) WotC believes they can revoke it at any time.
    - johnday 4y ago
      Yep, everything not CC is still under the sword of Damocles. The good news is that the vast majority of players and third-party publishers are using 5e, so this announcement protects them forever. It would not be unexpected for them to use this as a way to dwindle support for OGL1.0a, but either way the state of affairs today is far, far better than a few days ago.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      Forgot my footnote: [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gpm 4y ago
CC-BY-4.0 for those wondering which creative commons license. That means attribution required, but no significant other limitations.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  I expected SA "share alike" (aka "viral")
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    SA would be worse for WotC; as they move to OneD&D, they would rather have the 5.1 derived third party products to be separate silos that draw on the 5.1 base rather than cross-pollinating. So third parties not sharing-alike is what they want.
- account42 4y ago
  Thanks, that really should have been mentioned in the post. "A Creative Commons license" doesn't say a lot.
jron 4y ago
WOTC (Hasbro) was trying to revoke a license the authors intended to be irrevocable. Everything else was a red herring. I'm guessing their legal team had more to do with this change of heart than consumer/publisher feedback.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > WOTC (Hasbro) was trying to revoke a license the authors intended to be irrevocable. WotC was the legal author, and gratuitous licenses are revocable at will, anyway.
  - jron 4y ago
    The original author is on record stating that it was intended to be irrevocable. There was also a quote on the official WOTC website stating the license couldn't be revoked. IANAL but I wouldn't take that case to court.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      The original author was an executive at WotC, with access to professional legal advice. If they wanted the license to be irrevocable, they would have put it in the license.
      - Macha 4y ago
        If we look at other contemporary licenses reviewed by professional legal advice, like the GPLv2, Creative Commons v1-3, MIT, Apache v1, they all have the same omission of irrevocable, and it was about another ten years before they released newer iterations with that magic language (or didn't, in the case of MIT). It's also not speculation that that was the intent of the original author, they're on record from both the time of license publication as a wizards employee and recently in light of the controversy and both 20 years ago and today were consistent they meant it to be irrevocable
        4y ago
kderbyma 4y ago
Sweet. That's nice to see
ArtWomb 4y ago
>>> For the fewer than 20 creators worldwide who make more than $750,000 in income in a year, we will add a royalty starting in 2024. So, even for the creators making significant money selling D&D supplements and games, no royalties will be due for 2023 and all revenue below $750,000 in future years will be royalty-free. My "Star Frontiers" fan video game is go! https://www.starfrontiers.com/ https://www.starfrontiers.com/
- codazoda 4y ago
  As an FYI my browser blocks all your JS because it's served over http even though the page is https.
  - nix23 4y ago
    Yeah same here with: -Firefox -Privacy Badger -uBlock origin -LocalCDN
sundarurfriend 4y ago
So from a little bit of digging around for context (as a non-DnD player): * SRD = System Reference Document [1], is a kind of specification of the DnD rules, that people use to create add-on DnD-related content. * OGL = Open Game License [2], which the SRD is licensed under. * There was a(n apparently very unpopular) proposal to move to OGL 1.2 (which I guess is more restrictive). * Now it seems like SRD 5.1 will be dual-licensed under both OGL 1.0a and Creative Commons. (I can feel a rabbit hole awaiting me if I dig further, and I've gotten enough of a gist to satisfy myself, so I didn't look into what a VTT policy is.) [1] https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/System_Reference_Document https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/System_Reference_Doc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License
- djur 4y ago
  VTT is a virtual tabletop. It's useful to be able to load the game's rules into the software so it can keep track of stats, equipment, etc.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Macha 4y ago
  For more context: Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast (the company that has owned D&D for the last 20 years) released the rules text and some basic creative content like classes, some monsters, etc. for D&D 3.5 under a custom open source inspired license called the OGL. It's sort of a weird blend of GPL-esque virality clauses but the actual restrictions it places are much more akin to a permissive license like Apache. This led to an explosion of third party content. When D&D 4e came around, Wizards felt they didn't want to compete with that so they released D&D 4e under a new license called the GSL which was much more restrictive to allow them to shut down competitors, which caused third parties to shun 4e and continue publishing 3.5e content. Partly because of the continued existence of the 3.5e ecosystem (along with some controversial video game inspired gameplay changes), 4e largely failed and alienated the fanbase. So they released 5e with a number of peace offerings to the community, one of which was that 5e would use the OGL again. Now Wizards are on the cusp of releasing OneD&D (6e). Part of their strategy for 6e is their own virtual tabletop (VTT) product. A virtual tabletop is effectively a software product which gives players a chatroom + shared map and drawing tools so they can effectively play tabletop games which are designed around more props online. Wizards plan for their own VTT includes a very video game inspired monetisation model where they would sell skins, spells, subclasses etc. The problem they have is this: they are a very late comer to the VTT market, since they haven't launched their product yet, while their competitors (especially roll20) have been going for near a decade now. And these competitors were perfectly in their right under the OGL 1.0a license to use enough content to enable their players to play D&D on it. Wizards did not feel having more content and a higher fidelity product was going to be sufficient to drive players to their microtransaction filled product, so they did not want to release 6e under OGL. But they remembered the 3.5e/4e problem. They didn't want to release their new, more locked down 6e and have everyone just keep playing 5e and 5e derived content under the OGL. So they decided they would try exploit some of the wording of OGL 1.0a to de-authorize it and replace it with a new OGL 1.1 which was a very draconian license given Wizards royalty-free unlimited licenses to other 1.1 content, yet imposing royalties, attribution, registration and field of use restrictions on third parties. That way nobody could keep making 5e VTT plugins, 5e addons, etc. and everyone would have to go to 6e and the competitor VTTs would die from not being able to support the most popular game. This leaked when they asked third parties to sign it, to much bad press, so Wizards announced OGL 1.2. It did roll back many of the more egregious restrictions from the 1.1 version, but it still kept veto power with wizards (wrapped up in an anti-hateful content clause, but one that was so broad and required waiving a right to contest to the extent wizards could define competing too closely with them as hateful behaviour), and it still put limits on what VTTs could do and allowed them to change the rights of VTTs at any moment. Players still felt this was not enough and did largely vote with their wallet by cancelling subscriptions to D&D beyond, D&D's online content distribution and character builder service that was to be the baseline of the new planned VTT, to such a level that Wizards have now had to capitulate and roll back their planned changes to existing and older editions at least.
tptacek 4y ago
So this is a clean, complete win, right? Once the license controversy started, there was no reasonable ask beyond this outcome?
- Macha 4y ago
  I'd say this is 99% of a win. The one thing it does still leave is the claim they can de-authorize 1.0a at will later. For active products this is not a problem, as CC BY is a strictly more permissive license and they just move to claiming they're using the CC license. However, for second-order derivatives there is still one problem. 1. Third Party A uses OGL 1.0a content from Wizards, licenses its own work as OGL 1.0a as a result 2. Later Third Party A goes out of business 3. Third Party B reused Third Party A's content under OGL 1.0a. 4. There's no one left to relicense Third Party A's content under CC BY. But "don't make second order derivatives of abandonware content" is a lot easier to work around than "don't make stuff compatible with the large existing ecosystem"
  - rsstack 4y ago
    Note that the license is CC-BY-4.0, not -SA. Doesn't change anything material in what you wrote, just FYI.
    - Macha 4y ago
      Thanks, luckily the edit window is still open so I fixed my post
- wolverine876 4y ago
  It's as if nothing happened, afaict. As I understand from IP attorneys who have discussed the issue publicly, 1) The SRD is all/mostly material that is non-copyrightable anyway; it doesn't matter how it's 'licensed'. 2) Partly as a consequence of that, the old OGL 1.0a - the license that they say they agree to continue to use - takes away rights that people legally have and offers very little in return (e.g., it offers rights to the SRD, which the licensee already has by law). You are better off publishing without it, in most cases. 3) For those who for some reason care about OGL 1.0a: Wizards of the Coast began by saying they were revoking the OGL 1.0a. Publicly commenting IP attorneys said that, because OGL 1.0a doesn't say it's irrevokable, that Wizards could probably do that. Now Wizards is leaving it in place, but presumably they could revoke it at any point. IOW, nothing has changed and the licensing was a scam to start with. The SRD license is worthless and the license for which people were clamoring actually hurts their interests. For a legal analysis that supports the above, from a credible source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...
ivanstojic 4y ago
My TTRPG group has been playing together for several years - on and off. We'd been mostly playing D&D 5e, even though we had members clamoring for other systems. After the WotC fiasco started blowing up, we finally bought a couple of Pathfinder 2e books, ran a few trial characters and one-shots. We are now in process of starting a new campaign entirely based on Pathfinder that we expect could take a couple of months to play out. It really only took us one session to figure out the major mechanical systems in the gameplay, and a few we are still learning about. The major component remains the role playing experience which is the same, no matter which dice you throw to decide outcomes of situations. I think Hasbro will soon realize that while the social impact of the name D&D is deep, the stickiness of the system is much lower than they gambled on. It's unlikely that any of my member group will soon buy anything new from them.
- hellcow 4y ago
  My group is finishing up a multi-year 5e campaign. None of us had ever played a TTRPG before this, so we've never experienced anything outside of 5e. We were all super excited for OneDND... But when the OGL changes hit, we canceled our DNDBeyond subscription and are switching to Starfinder as soon as our campaign is done. This announcement from WotC is too little, too late. The fun is getting together with friends. I don't need WotC or microtransactions for that.
  - ecshafer 4y ago
    I always recommend people try systems outside of DnD. I've been playing RPGs for almost 2 decades now, and I always liken it to being a fan of movies, and always watching the same movie every week on movie night. DnD is the most popular RPG, and that is really it's strongest point. There are tens of thousands of other games out there, and in my opinion most of them are better than DnD, a lot of them are better at being DnD than DnD is at being DnD.
- PaulKeeble 4y ago
  They spent enough time with this license issue a lot of people have had time to jump over to Pathfinder 2E and settle into a campaign. Its not particularly difficult to do so and when the ORC arrives with 150 independent companies releasing content they likely will never leave. Some of the exodus is going to be permanent especially since in many ways Pathfinder solves a lot of the rules issues people have in DnD.
vaylian 4y ago
A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring. * WoTC fails to meet expectations and the stock prices plummet * To do damage control, WoTC/Hasbro annouces a "fireside chat" for their shareholders where they try to explain the situation but basically just say "we did nothing wrong and we are trying to extract a lot of money from Dungeons and Dragons next" * Unlike the MTG community, the DnD community is very good at organizing a unified response and the shitstorm came swiftly and took WoTC by surprise. (Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who know how to call together a group of people) The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  There's only so much water in the well, though, and they might well be close to that limit. It's not an infinitely growable market, it's a niche product. True, the niche has gotten quite large in recent years, but at this point it's at least as likely to shrink as to grow.
  - jachee 4y ago
    > It's not an infinitely growable market This needs to be said more often about more markets.
    - saghm 4y ago
      One would think that it would be true of pretty much _any _ market. I know it's not being meant literally, but even so, there are only so many people in the world, and people only have so much money. Even something that's essential for everyone like food is going to be limited by that; eventually you'd need to wait for there to be more people if you want to be able to sell more.
david2ndaccount 4y ago
Disappointed this is only the 5e srd and not the 3.0/3.5 one.
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VyseofArcadia 4y ago
I hope whoever made the call to needlessly burn all of WotC's goodwill gets the boot. I'm sure Paizo and Kobold Press are going to go ahead with ORC and Black Flag now that WotC has shown them its priorities.
miiiiiike 4y ago
All of the tumult of the past few weeks has been fun, and, just what D&D needed. If Wizards had been savvier (or more malicious) they would have pulled back on the OGL little by little. I’ve been following the OGL since its release back when I was a a broke HS kid obsessed with the idea of Free Software. I even had a (very) short conversation with Richard Stallman about it “it’s good enough for a game.” I didn’t agree. This is great, and, completely expected if you know anything about the people involved. Being able to publish anything you want and still make use of the SRD is a great thing for D&D.. But I still kinda hoped they’d blow it up so we’d get a bloom of new systems. Whatever, at least publishers are more likely to move away from OGL-like licenses and over to CC now.
PostOnce 4y ago
WotC does not own the concept of elves, dwarves, or dragons. Nor the concept of dice. D&D is a strong franchise, but the merchandise and rulesets are hardly necessary to play the game. To play RPGs, even practically-D&D-in-all-but-name, all you need is dice and paper. Nerds are wont to roll their own. I may not be a regular guest feature in the HBR, but it seems like common sense even to me that this is a strategically, financially dangerous path to take given their customer base.
wolverine876 4y ago
A reminder that the old OGL (the one they say they will now continue with) is still nonsense: According to at least some IP attorneys, it restricts your existing legal rights for little benefit, and in most cases you're better off without it. Here's the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h... Also, they claimed they could revoke the old OGL at any time; I assume that hasn't changed.
- miiiiiike 4y ago
  The OGL is not nonsense. Before today if you wanted to use the SRD, a work protected by copyright, you needed to do so under the terms of the OGL. The 5.1 SRD is now under CC, which is a much better (i.e. less restrictive) license and addresses all of the concerns raised in the linked article.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > Before today if you wanted to use the SRD, a work protected by copyright, you needed to do so under the terms of the OGL. According to the IP attorneys I read, the SRD entirely/mostly contains uncopyrightable content. Wizards said you needed the OGL to use it, but that is not true. You could use it without a license. For example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...
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lofaszvanitt 4y ago
But Baldur's Gate III will bring in a lot of money. Maybe wait for that.
trynewideas 4y ago
WotC's PDFs are untagged and convert poorly, so if you want a Markdown version, try https://srd.wiki https://srd.wiki. If you absolutely must convert it yourself, use pdfminer, which does a good job with the columns and doesn't need a ton of editing to smooth out.
ulizzle 4y ago
The silver lining in this shitstorm is that a lot of D&D-like games are going to be getting lots of attention. There's better systems out there. IMO, D&D proper died out at 4e, when it tried to copy WoW. If you like horror, check out Kult: Divinity Lost. And for a tight game-system, check out Blades in the Dark, which is like...steampunk Peaky Blinders.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
They gotta eat some humble pie and take a page from chesscom's playbook. Let people on Arena have all the cards but sell memberships
jeh993 4y ago
It takes a lot of chutzpah to think you're going to get a 3 or 4 page license past a customer base that enjoys reading hundreds of pages of rules (and exploiting said rules) as a hobby.
trollied 4y ago
There's 2 great episodes of the Opening Arguments podcast that cover the begginings of this extensively: https://openargs.com/oa675-gizmodos-critical-hit-piece-on-wizards-of-the-coast/ https://openargs.com/oa675-gizmodos-critical-hit-piece-on-wi... https://openargs.com/oa677-our-critical-hit-piece-on-the-gizmodos-critical-hit-piece-on-wizards-of-the-coast/ https://openargs.com/oa677-our-critical-hit-piece-on-the-giz... The Legal Eagle youtube video on this subject is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQJQYqhAgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQJQYqhAgY

310 points by xaviex 4y ago

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kubb 4y ago

nice

krisroadruck 4y ago

What a huge and welcomed about-face. Massive kudos to the community of dedicated fans, players, and creators who helped get this done.

imwillofficial 4y ago

And that folks is how you do it. Faith in humanity restored

SeanAnderson 4y ago

The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. They chose to do so anyway and are backtracking out of an interest of self-preservation rather than a customer-first mindset. I find this shameful enough behavior to warrant a legitimate, heartfelt apology. Instead, they present themselves as benevolent caretakers listening to their communities' response. This comes across as tone-deaf because they've already lost the trust of the community and don't seem to have learned how to take ownership of that fact. Still, this is a better result than if they'd stayed their advertised course. So, for that, I am thankful.

tonfreed 4y ago
I think they've completely misunderstood their product. The execs in charge of running the show come from video games, and watching what they're trying to do with DnD beyond makes it pretty obvious they're trying to introduce micro transaction hell and loot boxes into the product. Matt Colville whacked the nail on the head when he said D&D isn't really a game, it's a folk tradition and storytelling. Those are two very difficult things to monetize.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Yes, that is a critical part. They want to make DnD Beyond the core of the product. The main channel, where "ideally" both, DMs and players, have to buy each little piece of content and an expensive subscription to create their own scenarios instead of books, which are expensive to produce, ship etc. and then are shared in a group (or kept for DM's eyes only) And they "have to" extract as much revenue from third parties like Paizo and get consumers of their platform. If they get rid of story telling etc. they even can look at AI DMs leading a Dungeon Crawl to increase time of their consumers on their platform, even without fixed groups etc. Extract as much value as possible (and destroy the game)
  - secabeen 4y ago
    They either want microtransactions and loot boxes, or 30% of the overall revenue like Apple and Google do in their app stores.
    - wincy 4y ago
      Ah yes, and then if you try to tell even the slightest bit controversial story about say, adventuring in an ancient Egyptian city with slaves, that will be flagged as hateful content and you’ll be banned from D&D forever.
voakbasda 4y ago
Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents such from happening.
- crayboff 4y ago
  I mean, they did a huge thing that can't be backed out of, they released SRD 5.1 under creative commons. Yeah they did some not great stuff, but let's celebrate the successes when we get them!
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Sure, but the outrage from this change came about revoking the license for past works. By putting SRD 5.1 under CC, the situation for many indie creators of working with the SRD becomes clean and clear. Hasbro can do whatever they want going forward with D&D.
      - cma 4y ago
        Game rules/mechanics usually can't be copyrighted other than just the literal text of descriptions of them. Does this give anything you couldn't have by cloning the rules with different wording flair?
        Karrot_Kream 4y ago
pubby 4y ago
> how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think. I'm not saying this as a defense or anything, but I find it helpful to think about.
- tonfreed 4y ago
  The least they could do is sit down once a month with the game designers for a session of dungeon crawling. The main two in charge have both said they don't play
  - hinkley 4y ago
    The only thing worse than obstaining is half-assing it. Do you really want a bunch of detached people paying just enough attention to something you like that they feel like they can 'contribute' by changing it?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      Meeting once a month would be within the normal range for a group playing for fun. On the low side, I think, but it's not "so little attention that it's worse than nothing".
      - hinkley 4y ago
        People who are uni vested let things go as they are. People who are a little invested screw them up.
- TillE 4y ago
  Given the extremely fast and extremely comprehensive U-turn, it seems like a lot of people near the top did understand the community very well. Somehow, one person or one small faction made a different decision, and the overwhelming feedback proved it was the wrong decision.
roenxi 4y ago
I disagree because the fundamental core of this argument is "everyone in a community should think alike". That isn't realistic, and using that as a principle leads to bad results - we have to be used to having robust communities with questionable leadership. The natural state of leadership is to be a bit shabby and not quite up to the task. We have the internet now, we have great visibility on what leaders actually do and they can't meet impossible standards. Although that is why decentralisation is so powerful - WOTC doesn't run your games night and doesn't send out a goon squad to police that people aren't using house rules. WOTC don't have the same incentives as their community. A company producing a game almost never has the same incentives as their community. As long as their incentives align with folding in the face of solid negative feedback, that is enough. They made a mistake, they appear to have recognised the mistake and course corrected. Asking for more than that is going to get less - it encourages lies and bad, blandness.
victorvosk 4y ago
Real people have disagreements and work through them. Lets not be mad for the sake of being mad. It was completely within the rights of WOTC to do whatever they wanted. People complained and they decided not to do and guarantee they will never do it in the future. Be happy.
- ninth_ant 4y ago
  I understand what you’re saying, but attempting to revoke a widely-used open source license is not just something completely within their rights. Their sudden claim to have ability to “deauthorize” the 20+ year old OGL and destroy the partners and competitors who built businesses on the promises of a perpetual license - this was an egregious move that was almost certainly not within their rights. Legal analysts were quite consistent in that it’s impossible to be certain but this process wouldn’t have withstood a solid legal test. WotC, in trying to pull this, was attempting to leverage their expensive legal team to bully people into giving away their legal rights under the open license. That’s shady and deeply unethical, and shouldn’t be considered to be within their rights. Now for the future content they make, they can release that under a closed license if they want and that is within their rights even if I don’t like that license.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  Corporations are not "real people" and "they were acting in their rights" is not a defense against criticism for shitty behavior. Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it. Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.
- jbm 4y ago
  A minor point, but I am grateful for the self checkout lanes — they have greatly speeded up my checkout, and w/ covid spiking I just want to leave asap. I have never seen "no" registers open though.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Not the US, but no manned registers happens often enough across various store chains here in Dublin at least. To the point where you might have to wave down a staff member restocking a shelf because the self-service needs someone to authorise your alchohol purchase or whatever.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    Walmart seems to agree that they like them as well. Renovated stores are entirely designed to streamline the self-checkout experience.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    I don't mind the OPTION of self checkout, but not having the choice is a big fuck-you to the customers purely to make more millions of profit. At our local Wal Mart, they have registers for humans, but no humans are ever there. 100% do it yourself, with someone wanting to check your receipt. I never stop, if they want to see it's done right, hire someone to do it right. Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too. Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.
freshhawk 4y ago
It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this. They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest. So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?
- hellcow 4y ago
  That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work. The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase. DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_. And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    When I was a player the story was way more important than the mechanism. Many times we just reduced to a few D6 tbh
    - kcartlidge 4y ago
      Us too. Though in the end we settled on the Fighting Fantasy RPG rules as they were simple enough to play in the school playground whilst also providing just a little bit of authority to decisions.
    - alisonatwork 4y ago
      This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
If anything, this shows the power of a product that is driven by subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions sent a strong signal to how the player base felt and it was felt high enough that execs pivoted directions.
LegitShady 4y ago
agreed. a substantial amount of the playerbase and 3rd party creators are looking for non-DnD games moving forward, and Hasbro finally realized they handed the opportunity to take all those players and creators to their competition. I think people should still switch. Hasbro has shown who they are. Is there a DnD transformers crossover yet, like in MtG?
cleak 4y ago
I’d bet they anticipated the backlash, but thought it could be managed - some short term anger followed by long term profits. It so far hasn’t worked out that way, but these are still recent events; they may just wait to roll out changes more quietly.
- hinkley 4y ago
  They might be right long term, but that's 1) pretty cynical and 2) I think they might have just created the origin story for their competitors. So good news, they're making $1 billion, bad news they are now making $1 billion of a $1.7 billion market instead of $800 million of a $1 billion market.
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lincolnq 4y ago

Can someone explain more about what happened here?

Wistar 4y ago
Here is a transcript of piece about the debacle from NPR from a few days ago. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1151474346 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1151474346
eslaught 4y ago
Here are a few of the prominent past HN posts: Dungeons and Dragons’ new license tightens its grip on competition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264777 An Update on the Open Game License (OGL) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370340 Basically WotC wanted to not only change their future content to a more restrictive license, they also wanted to retroactively switch older content to that license. It seemed like an obvious legal land-grab. Fans objected, and (at least to my surprise, others here seem to be more cynical) WotC did a 180 on the license and adopted CC-4.0-BY.
genderwhy 4y ago
WotC licenses some of their content using the Open Gaming License. It ostensibly covers both the rules* of D&D as well as key elements of the setting -- particular monsters, characters, place names, spells, etc. That license has allowed products and content creators to build on top of a shared platform -- using and reprinting portions of D&D's content to build their own worlds, stories, systems, etc. Note: not everything D&D publishes is covered by the OGL, just a set of core items they call the SRD -- Systems Reference Document. WotC/Hasbro leaked that they were working on OGL 1.1 which had a bunch of ambiguous (and many argued harmful) language that required creators to do things like license their content back to WotC, pay fees to license content, control what and what was not appropriate to build on top of OGL, etc. The OGL 1.1 was met with huge community backlash, and wotc has been fumbling for some time to figure out the next steps. It looks like they are taking those steps now. * Aside, it's not clear that the rules of D&D are even something that can be licensed in this way, as game mechanics are not protected the same way as copyrightable characters are.

djur 4y ago

Great news. I notice they don't say anything about the licensing of "D&D One", and I'm guessing there's a good reason for that, but there's a huge difference between using a different license for your new product and trying to change the license of your existing one.

throw0101c 4y ago

So no morality clause either?

thebooktocome 4y ago
Morality clauses aren’t compatible with any Creative Commons license as far as I’m aware.

kayodelycaon 4y ago

Well. That was unexpected. Given what's been happening to Twitter, I didn't have any hope that WOTC would do anything sensible. I suspect they'll pull this bullshit again the next time someone looks at a balance sheet.

roblabla 4y ago
At least the SRD5 is now irrevocably in the creative commons. So the situation now is somewhat better, they can't simply revoke the license anymore for that document.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > At least the SRD5 is now irrevocably in the creative commons. They changed the underlying law of licenses that makes gratuitous licenses revocable at will independent of the content of the license? How?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    As applied to open source licenses, that is a legal theory, not settled law, and there are many people, including lawyers who professionally deal with F/OSS, who disagree with you. https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/ https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/
  - chrisoverzero 4y ago
    You've asserted something like this a few times on HN, and your responses are undetailed enough (or flavored with fake astonishment, like this one) that you seem to think it's obvious. Isn't the requirement of attribution the consideration in cases like this? Which would make it not gratuitous? Here's open source lawyer and HN user 'DannyBee saying so, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14557737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14557737
  - roblabla 4y ago
    IANAL, but from TFA: > By simply publishing it, we place it under an irrevocable Creative Commons license. I'd be very surprised if they still had their rights to revoke the license after explicitly saying otherwise.

tunesmith 4y ago

Is there actually not a catch here? I'm only somewhat familiar with the debate.

johnday 4y ago
Yep - not only is there no catch right now, but they literally can never add one. The SRD is released under CC-BY-4.0. The only point of contention is what happens to their new product, One D&D, which will probably retain some nasty payment structure, and almost certainly not be OGL'd. That's fine though - if they build a walled garden around One D&D, they simply won't be able to compete against the open community of 5e.
- tonfreed 4y ago
  It'll be funny if all those juicy royalties they think they're going to get never materialise because no one wants to develop for their system.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > not only is there no catch right now, but they literally can never add one. The SRD is released under CC-BY-4.0. They can't change that particular SRD, but material not in the SRD can be changed as can new material. Also, as they leave the old OGL intact, it is a catch in itself: 1) It's generally restricts rights much more than grants them [0], and 2) WotC believes they can revoke it at any time.
  - johnday 4y ago
    Yep, everything not CC is still under the sword of Damocles. The good news is that the vast majority of players and third-party publishers are using 5e, so this announcement protects them forever. It would not be unexpected for them to use this as a way to dwindle support for OGL1.0a, but either way the state of affairs today is far, far better than a few days ago.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Forgot my footnote: [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gpm 4y ago

CC-BY-4.0 for those wondering which creative commons license. That means attribution required, but no significant other limitations.

Pet_Ant 4y ago
I expected SA "share alike" (aka "viral")
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  SA would be worse for WotC; as they move to OneD&D, they would rather have the 5.1 derived third party products to be separate silos that draw on the 5.1 base rather than cross-pollinating. So third parties not sharing-alike is what they want.
account42 4y ago
Thanks, that really should have been mentioned in the post. "A Creative Commons license" doesn't say a lot.

jron 4y ago

WOTC (Hasbro) was trying to revoke a license the authors intended to be irrevocable. Everything else was a red herring. I'm guessing their legal team had more to do with this change of heart than consumer/publisher feedback.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> WOTC (Hasbro) was trying to revoke a license the authors intended to be irrevocable. WotC was the legal author, and gratuitous licenses are revocable at will, anyway.
- jron 4y ago
  The original author is on record stating that it was intended to be irrevocable. There was also a quote on the official WOTC website stating the license couldn't be revoked. IANAL but I wouldn't take that case to court.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    The original author was an executive at WotC, with access to professional legal advice. If they wanted the license to be irrevocable, they would have put it in the license.
    - Macha 4y ago
      If we look at other contemporary licenses reviewed by professional legal advice, like the GPLv2, Creative Commons v1-3, MIT, Apache v1, they all have the same omission of irrevocable, and it was about another ten years before they released newer iterations with that magic language (or didn't, in the case of MIT). It's also not speculation that that was the intent of the original author, they're on record from both the time of license publication as a wizards employee and recently in light of the controversy and both 20 years ago and today were consistent they meant it to be irrevocable
      - 4y ago

kderbyma 4y ago

Sweet. That's nice to see

ArtWomb 4y ago

>>> For the fewer than 20 creators worldwide who make more than $750,000 in income in a year, we will add a royalty starting in 2024. So, even for the creators making significant money selling D&D supplements and games, no royalties will be due for 2023 and all revenue below $750,000 in future years will be royalty-free. My "Star Frontiers" fan video game is go! https://www.starfrontiers.com/ https://www.starfrontiers.com/

codazoda 4y ago
As an FYI my browser blocks all your JS because it's served over http even though the page is https.
- nix23 4y ago
  Yeah same here with: -Firefox -Privacy Badger -uBlock origin -LocalCDN

sundarurfriend 4y ago

So from a little bit of digging around for context (as a non-DnD player): * SRD = System Reference Document [1], is a kind of specification of the DnD rules, that people use to create add-on DnD-related content. * OGL = Open Game License [2], which the SRD is licensed under. * There was a(n apparently very unpopular) proposal to move to OGL 1.2 (which I guess is more restrictive). * Now it seems like SRD 5.1 will be dual-licensed under both OGL 1.0a and Creative Commons. (I can feel a rabbit hole awaiting me if I dig further, and I've gotten enough of a gist to satisfy myself, so I didn't look into what a VTT policy is.) [1] https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/System_Reference_Document https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/System_Reference_Doc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License

djur 4y ago
VTT is a virtual tabletop. It's useful to be able to load the game's rules into the software so it can keep track of stats, equipment, etc.
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Macha 4y ago
For more context: Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast (the company that has owned D&D for the last 20 years) released the rules text and some basic creative content like classes, some monsters, etc. for D&D 3.5 under a custom open source inspired license called the OGL. It's sort of a weird blend of GPL-esque virality clauses but the actual restrictions it places are much more akin to a permissive license like Apache. This led to an explosion of third party content. When D&D 4e came around, Wizards felt they didn't want to compete with that so they released D&D 4e under a new license called the GSL which was much more restrictive to allow them to shut down competitors, which caused third parties to shun 4e and continue publishing 3.5e content. Partly because of the continued existence of the 3.5e ecosystem (along with some controversial video game inspired gameplay changes), 4e largely failed and alienated the fanbase. So they released 5e with a number of peace offerings to the community, one of which was that 5e would use the OGL again. Now Wizards are on the cusp of releasing OneD&D (6e). Part of their strategy for 6e is their own virtual tabletop (VTT) product. A virtual tabletop is effectively a software product which gives players a chatroom + shared map and drawing tools so they can effectively play tabletop games which are designed around more props online. Wizards plan for their own VTT includes a very video game inspired monetisation model where they would sell skins, spells, subclasses etc. The problem they have is this: they are a very late comer to the VTT market, since they haven't launched their product yet, while their competitors (especially roll20) have been going for near a decade now. And these competitors were perfectly in their right under the OGL 1.0a license to use enough content to enable their players to play D&D on it. Wizards did not feel having more content and a higher fidelity product was going to be sufficient to drive players to their microtransaction filled product, so they did not want to release 6e under OGL. But they remembered the 3.5e/4e problem. They didn't want to release their new, more locked down 6e and have everyone just keep playing 5e and 5e derived content under the OGL. So they decided they would try exploit some of the wording of OGL 1.0a to de-authorize it and replace it with a new OGL 1.1 which was a very draconian license given Wizards royalty-free unlimited licenses to other 1.1 content, yet imposing royalties, attribution, registration and field of use restrictions on third parties. That way nobody could keep making 5e VTT plugins, 5e addons, etc. and everyone would have to go to 6e and the competitor VTTs would die from not being able to support the most popular game. This leaked when they asked third parties to sign it, to much bad press, so Wizards announced OGL 1.2. It did roll back many of the more egregious restrictions from the 1.1 version, but it still kept veto power with wizards (wrapped up in an anti-hateful content clause, but one that was so broad and required waiving a right to contest to the extent wizards could define competing too closely with them as hateful behaviour), and it still put limits on what VTTs could do and allowed them to change the rights of VTTs at any moment. Players still felt this was not enough and did largely vote with their wallet by cancelling subscriptions to D&D beyond, D&D's online content distribution and character builder service that was to be the baseline of the new planned VTT, to such a level that Wizards have now had to capitulate and roll back their planned changes to existing and older editions at least.

tptacek 4y ago

So this is a clean, complete win, right? Once the license controversy started, there was no reasonable ask beyond this outcome?

Macha 4y ago
I'd say this is 99% of a win. The one thing it does still leave is the claim they can de-authorize 1.0a at will later. For active products this is not a problem, as CC BY is a strictly more permissive license and they just move to claiming they're using the CC license. However, for second-order derivatives there is still one problem. 1. Third Party A uses OGL 1.0a content from Wizards, licenses its own work as OGL 1.0a as a result 2. Later Third Party A goes out of business 3. Third Party B reused Third Party A's content under OGL 1.0a. 4. There's no one left to relicense Third Party A's content under CC BY. But "don't make second order derivatives of abandonware content" is a lot easier to work around than "don't make stuff compatible with the large existing ecosystem"
- rsstack 4y ago
  Note that the license is CC-BY-4.0, not -SA. Doesn't change anything material in what you wrote, just FYI.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Thanks, luckily the edit window is still open so I fixed my post
wolverine876 4y ago
It's as if nothing happened, afaict. As I understand from IP attorneys who have discussed the issue publicly, 1) The SRD is all/mostly material that is non-copyrightable anyway; it doesn't matter how it's 'licensed'. 2) Partly as a consequence of that, the old OGL 1.0a - the license that they say they agree to continue to use - takes away rights that people legally have and offers very little in return (e.g., it offers rights to the SRD, which the licensee already has by law). You are better off publishing without it, in most cases. 3) For those who for some reason care about OGL 1.0a: Wizards of the Coast began by saying they were revoking the OGL 1.0a. Publicly commenting IP attorneys said that, because OGL 1.0a doesn't say it's irrevokable, that Wizards could probably do that. Now Wizards is leaving it in place, but presumably they could revoke it at any point. IOW, nothing has changed and the licensing was a scam to start with. The SRD license is worthless and the license for which people were clamoring actually hurts their interests. For a legal analysis that supports the above, from a credible source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...

ivanstojic 4y ago

My TTRPG group has been playing together for several years - on and off. We'd been mostly playing D&D 5e, even though we had members clamoring for other systems. After the WotC fiasco started blowing up, we finally bought a couple of Pathfinder 2e books, ran a few trial characters and one-shots. We are now in process of starting a new campaign entirely based on Pathfinder that we expect could take a couple of months to play out. It really only took us one session to figure out the major mechanical systems in the gameplay, and a few we are still learning about. The major component remains the role playing experience which is the same, no matter which dice you throw to decide outcomes of situations. I think Hasbro will soon realize that while the social impact of the name D&D is deep, the stickiness of the system is much lower than they gambled on. It's unlikely that any of my member group will soon buy anything new from them.

hellcow 4y ago
My group is finishing up a multi-year 5e campaign. None of us had ever played a TTRPG before this, so we've never experienced anything outside of 5e. We were all super excited for OneDND... But when the OGL changes hit, we canceled our DNDBeyond subscription and are switching to Starfinder as soon as our campaign is done. This announcement from WotC is too little, too late. The fun is getting together with friends. I don't need WotC or microtransactions for that.
- ecshafer 4y ago
  I always recommend people try systems outside of DnD. I've been playing RPGs for almost 2 decades now, and I always liken it to being a fan of movies, and always watching the same movie every week on movie night. DnD is the most popular RPG, and that is really it's strongest point. There are tens of thousands of other games out there, and in my opinion most of them are better than DnD, a lot of them are better at being DnD than DnD is at being DnD.
PaulKeeble 4y ago
They spent enough time with this license issue a lot of people have had time to jump over to Pathfinder 2E and settle into a campaign. Its not particularly difficult to do so and when the ORC arrives with 150 independent companies releasing content they likely will never leave. Some of the exodus is going to be permanent especially since in many ways Pathfinder solves a lot of the rules issues people have in DnD.

vaylian 4y ago

A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring. * WoTC fails to meet expectations and the stock prices plummet * To do damage control, WoTC/Hasbro annouces a "fireside chat" for their shareholders where they try to explain the situation but basically just say "we did nothing wrong and we are trying to extract a lot of money from Dungeons and Dragons next" * Unlike the MTG community, the DnD community is very good at organizing a unified response and the shitstorm came swiftly and took WoTC by surprise. (Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who know how to call together a group of people) The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.

TigeriusKirk 4y ago
There's only so much water in the well, though, and they might well be close to that limit. It's not an infinitely growable market, it's a niche product. True, the niche has gotten quite large in recent years, but at this point it's at least as likely to shrink as to grow.
- jachee 4y ago
  > It's not an infinitely growable market This needs to be said more often about more markets.
  - saghm 4y ago
    One would think that it would be true of pretty much _any _ market. I know it's not being meant literally, but even so, there are only so many people in the world, and people only have so much money. Even something that's essential for everyone like food is going to be limited by that; eventually you'd need to wait for there to be more people if you want to be able to sell more.

david2ndaccount 4y ago

Disappointed this is only the 5e srd and not the 3.0/3.5 one.

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VyseofArcadia 4y ago

I hope whoever made the call to needlessly burn all of WotC's goodwill gets the boot. I'm sure Paizo and Kobold Press are going to go ahead with ORC and Black Flag now that WotC has shown them its priorities.

miiiiiike 4y ago

All of the tumult of the past few weeks has been fun, and, just what D&D needed. If Wizards had been savvier (or more malicious) they would have pulled back on the OGL little by little. I’ve been following the OGL since its release back when I was a a broke HS kid obsessed with the idea of Free Software. I even had a (very) short conversation with Richard Stallman about it “it’s good enough for a game.” I didn’t agree. This is great, and, completely expected if you know anything about the people involved. Being able to publish anything you want and still make use of the SRD is a great thing for D&D.. But I still kinda hoped they’d blow it up so we’d get a bloom of new systems. Whatever, at least publishers are more likely to move away from OGL-like licenses and over to CC now.

PostOnce 4y ago

WotC does not own the concept of elves, dwarves, or dragons. Nor the concept of dice. D&D is a strong franchise, but the merchandise and rulesets are hardly necessary to play the game. To play RPGs, even practically-D&D-in-all-but-name, all you need is dice and paper. Nerds are wont to roll their own. I may not be a regular guest feature in the HBR, but it seems like common sense even to me that this is a strategically, financially dangerous path to take given their customer base.

wolverine876 4y ago

A reminder that the old OGL (the one they say they will now continue with) is still nonsense: According to at least some IP attorneys, it restricts your existing legal rights for little benefit, and in most cases you're better off without it. Here's the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h... Also, they claimed they could revoke the old OGL at any time; I assume that hasn't changed.

miiiiiike 4y ago
The OGL is not nonsense. Before today if you wanted to use the SRD, a work protected by copyright, you needed to do so under the terms of the OGL. The 5.1 SRD is now under CC, which is a much better (i.e. less restrictive) license and addresses all of the concerns raised in the linked article.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > Before today if you wanted to use the SRD, a work protected by copyright, you needed to do so under the terms of the OGL. According to the IP attorneys I read, the SRD entirely/mostly contains uncopyrightable content. Wizards said you needed the OGL to use it, but that is not true. You could use it without a license. For example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...

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lofaszvanitt 4y ago

But Baldur's Gate III will bring in a lot of money. Maybe wait for that.

trynewideas 4y ago

WotC's PDFs are untagged and convert poorly, so if you want a Markdown version, try https://srd.wiki https://srd.wiki. If you absolutely must convert it yourself, use pdfminer, which does a good job with the columns and doesn't need a ton of editing to smooth out.

ulizzle 4y ago

The silver lining in this shitstorm is that a lot of D&D-like games are going to be getting lots of attention. There's better systems out there. IMO, D&D proper died out at 4e, when it tried to copy WoW. If you like horror, check out Kult: Divinity Lost. And for a tight game-system, check out Blades in the Dark, which is like...steampunk Peaky Blinders.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

They gotta eat some humble pie and take a page from chesscom's playbook. Let people on Arena have all the cards but sell memberships

jeh993 4y ago

It takes a lot of chutzpah to think you're going to get a 3 or 4 page license past a customer base that enjoys reading hundreds of pages of rules (and exploiting said rules) as a hobby.

trollied 4y ago

There's 2 great episodes of the Opening Arguments podcast that cover the begginings of this extensively: https://openargs.com/oa675-gizmodos-critical-hit-piece-on-wizards-of-the-coast/ https://openargs.com/oa675-gizmodos-critical-hit-piece-on-wi... https://openargs.com/oa677-our-critical-hit-piece-on-the-gizmodos-critical-hit-piece-on-wizards-of-the-coast/ https://openargs.com/oa677-our-critical-hit-piece-on-the-giz... The Legal Eagle youtube video on this subject is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQJQYqhAgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQJQYqhAgY