Game Changer
Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2023 2:14 am
So, I wrote back in April about my plans to include a Game tab in the Central Wongery with game statistics of the monsters, characters, and so forth for various RPGs. This wasn't something I had just thought of; it's something I'd planned for a long time—this was just the first time I'd written about it in a news post.
And, in fact, I'd been considering implementing the Game tab soon as my first major custom MediaWiki extension for the Wongery. Well, maybe it's just as well I hadn't gotten around to that yet, because something just happened that is going to affect those plans a bit—it won't change the overall direction of my plans, just some of the implementation. More specifically, I still intend to add the Game tab to the Wongery; what may change is exactly which games are included.
Anyone reading this who's at all plugged in to what's going on with the RPG industry certainly knows what I'm talking about: Wizards of the Coast has announced a major overhaul of the Open Game License.
For those not plugged in to what's going on the the RPG industry, maybe a little explanation is in order. The Open Game License, or OGL, was a license released with the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons that allowed third parties to make use of most of the core Dungeons & Dragons rules and some (but not all) of the monsters, spells, and magic items from the core books, provided they followed the terms of the license, which included, among other things, clear acknowledgement of which parts of their works consistuted "open game content" and were therefore available for use by other parties. Wizards of the Coast itself made its open game content clear by releasing it in a free System Reference Document, or SRD, which included everything from Dungeons & Dragons that was open for third-party use under the OGL, and nothing that wasn't. In the immediate wake of the OGL, there was a boom of companies creating content compatible with D&D, of highly variable quality. After Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition without an Open Game License (there was a "Game System License" (GSL), but it was much more restrictive and saw much less use), it reinstated the OGL for fifth edition, and again many people used it to create D&D-compatible adventures and supplements. Moreover, other companies used the OGL and the SRD to publish games based on older editions of D&D, though often with significant changes. And some companies simply used the OGL to license their own original games and allow third parties to publish material for them, without using any content from the SRD at all.
The Open Game License 1.0 has hitherto remained unchanged since its introduction in 2000, but now Wizards of the Coast is introducing a new Open Game License 1.1—which despite the name isn't an open license at all. Not only is the new license far more restrictive than the OGL 1.0, but Wizards of the Coast is also claiming that when the OGL 1.1 is released the OGL 1.0 will be officially unauthorized, and no new works can be created under it.
Whether they can even do this is debatable, or at least it's currently being debated. It was certainly originally intended that the OGL 1.0 would remain usable even if an updated version was later introduced—this was stated explicitly in the OGL FAQ. However, the OGL FAQ is not a binding legal document, and the OGL 1.0 never actually says it's irrevocable, so a case could be made that it can be, well, revoked. I've seen some arguments that attempts to enforce disuse of the OGL 1.0 might run afoul of contract law for various reason, but, well, I am not a lawyer, and even people who are lawyers seem to disagree or to be uncertain about the ultimate fallout from all this. Suffice to say, it's bad, although just how bad remains to be seen. Best-case scenario, anything written for the upcoming "One D&D" (and not under the aegis of the Dungeon Masters Guild) has to use the OGL 1.1, but either Wizards of the Coast drops the attempt to revoke the OGL 1.0 or it doesn't hold up in court and anything based on the OGL 1.0 continues as usual—except that even if that happens any third-party publishers relying on the OGL 1.0 are likely to distance themselves from it as quickly as possible in case WotC tries something like this again. (Well, actually, the best-case scenario is that Wizards of the Coast listens to community criticism and drops their plans for the OGL 1.1 entirely, but I'm not holding my breath for that.) Worst case scenario, the OGL 1.0 is completely invalidated; nobody can write material based on earlier editions of D&D; and all the companies with products relying on the OGL, from Paizo (Pathfinder/Starfinder) to Pelgrane Press (13th Age) to Onyx Path Publishing (Pugmire) to Necrotic Gnome (Old School Essentials), are going to have to either make some serious revisions to divorce their products from any OGL-derived material (and pull their products from sale in the meantime), discontinue their OGL-based product lines, or, if they rely too much on those product lines and can't weather the downtime for revision, go out of business entirely.
(Whoever is behind the OGL 1.1 license doesn't actually seem to know very much about the circumstances and purposes of the original OGL 1.0 license—or, if they do know, they're not being truthful about it. The announcement says that the original OGL 1.0 "wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming", but in fact the original OGL FAQ expressly addressed its use for computer software, and Wizards of the Coast even released a separate Software FAQ with guidelines on using the license for computer applications. This isn't to say that the motives behind the original OGL were altruistic; OGL architect Ryan Dancey openly said in an interview that the intent of the OGL was to drive more people to Dungeons & Dragons and strengthen Wizards of the Coast's market share. Still, it explicitly was not intended only for "printed (or printable) materials".)
Really, I suppose it doesn't serve much purpose for me to write here about this now. Our hard launch won't happen for almost a year; nobody knows about this site yet; and by the time anyone else is reading this news post—in early 2024 at the earliest—the questions about the consequences of the OGL 1.1 are likely to have long been settled one way or another. And depending on how it all falls out, I guess it's possible this post may end up coming across as either absurdly alarmist or naïvely optimistic. Heck, the official release of OGL 1.1 is supposed to be on the thirteenth, so if I just wait a few days there'll be at least a little more known about the matter and a little less I'll have to speculate about. Still, I don't know; this kind of seems like a big thing, and it's something I feel like I should acknowledge here, even if by the time anyone else reads this most of what I'm writing here is going to be very old news.
So anyway. The OGL 1.1 is looking to be a big thing for the RPG industry and community, and not in a good way. But what does it mean for the Wongery?
Actually... not all that much. (It throws a huge monkey wrench in some other plans I had, unrelated to the Wongery, but that's beside the point.) Role-playing game statistics aren't the main purpose of the Wongery anyway; its main purpose is just to present information on some detailed imaginary worlds (well, okay, they're not all that detailed yet; we have a lot of writing to do) that people can make use of in various ways—as settings of role-playing games being just one of those ways. But even that aspect of the Wongery won't be hugely impacted. Like I said, my plans to add the Game tab are going to proceed apace. There are a lot of games that I was planning on including statistics for that don't rely on the OGL at all, and that won't be impacted by the OGL 1.1 brouhaha, like Basic Roleplaying, Dominion Rules, EABA, GURPS, Savage Worlds. There are other systems that are licensed under the OGL 1.0, but don't actually include anything from the Standard Reference Document and could simply be released under a different license—and almost certainly will if the OGL proves problematic—like OpenD6 and the Year Zero Engine. And then there are some that may use some material from the SRD, but have been changed enough from D&D that they can probably be divorced from the SRD and the OGL with a little work, and are owned by companies with enough resources they can probably survive the downtime if they do this, like 13th Age, Mutants & Masterminds, Pathfinder, Starfinder. The survival of these games is a little more uncertain than the previous categories, but they'll probably pull through.
So, yes, I'm still going to go ahead and implement the Game tab in the Wongery, and when I get the time I'm going to start posting some game stats for some of the monsters and other elements. But... I think I'll start with Basic Roleplaying and GURPS and some of the other systems, and hold off on Pathfinder and the like until it's a little clearer which way the wind is blowing. (As I said, I do expect Pathfinder to survive this, one way or the other... but if worse comes to worse it may have to survive this by publishing a new edition.) And I'm definitely going to hold off on posting any Dungeons & Dragons stats. Which is kind of funny, because going in I would have thought if there was any one system for which I'd be most likely to include game statistics on the Wongery, it would probably be D&D... but I certainly didn't see this OGL 1.1 fiasco coming...
And, in fact, I'd been considering implementing the Game tab soon as my first major custom MediaWiki extension for the Wongery. Well, maybe it's just as well I hadn't gotten around to that yet, because something just happened that is going to affect those plans a bit—it won't change the overall direction of my plans, just some of the implementation. More specifically, I still intend to add the Game tab to the Wongery; what may change is exactly which games are included.
Anyone reading this who's at all plugged in to what's going on with the RPG industry certainly knows what I'm talking about: Wizards of the Coast has announced a major overhaul of the Open Game License.
For those not plugged in to what's going on the the RPG industry, maybe a little explanation is in order. The Open Game License, or OGL, was a license released with the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons that allowed third parties to make use of most of the core Dungeons & Dragons rules and some (but not all) of the monsters, spells, and magic items from the core books, provided they followed the terms of the license, which included, among other things, clear acknowledgement of which parts of their works consistuted "open game content" and were therefore available for use by other parties. Wizards of the Coast itself made its open game content clear by releasing it in a free System Reference Document, or SRD, which included everything from Dungeons & Dragons that was open for third-party use under the OGL, and nothing that wasn't. In the immediate wake of the OGL, there was a boom of companies creating content compatible with D&D, of highly variable quality. After Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition without an Open Game License (there was a "Game System License" (GSL), but it was much more restrictive and saw much less use), it reinstated the OGL for fifth edition, and again many people used it to create D&D-compatible adventures and supplements. Moreover, other companies used the OGL and the SRD to publish games based on older editions of D&D, though often with significant changes. And some companies simply used the OGL to license their own original games and allow third parties to publish material for them, without using any content from the SRD at all.
The Open Game License 1.0 has hitherto remained unchanged since its introduction in 2000, but now Wizards of the Coast is introducing a new Open Game License 1.1—which despite the name isn't an open license at all. Not only is the new license far more restrictive than the OGL 1.0, but Wizards of the Coast is also claiming that when the OGL 1.1 is released the OGL 1.0 will be officially unauthorized, and no new works can be created under it.
Whether they can even do this is debatable, or at least it's currently being debated. It was certainly originally intended that the OGL 1.0 would remain usable even if an updated version was later introduced—this was stated explicitly in the OGL FAQ. However, the OGL FAQ is not a binding legal document, and the OGL 1.0 never actually says it's irrevocable, so a case could be made that it can be, well, revoked. I've seen some arguments that attempts to enforce disuse of the OGL 1.0 might run afoul of contract law for various reason, but, well, I am not a lawyer, and even people who are lawyers seem to disagree or to be uncertain about the ultimate fallout from all this. Suffice to say, it's bad, although just how bad remains to be seen. Best-case scenario, anything written for the upcoming "One D&D" (and not under the aegis of the Dungeon Masters Guild) has to use the OGL 1.1, but either Wizards of the Coast drops the attempt to revoke the OGL 1.0 or it doesn't hold up in court and anything based on the OGL 1.0 continues as usual—except that even if that happens any third-party publishers relying on the OGL 1.0 are likely to distance themselves from it as quickly as possible in case WotC tries something like this again. (Well, actually, the best-case scenario is that Wizards of the Coast listens to community criticism and drops their plans for the OGL 1.1 entirely, but I'm not holding my breath for that.) Worst case scenario, the OGL 1.0 is completely invalidated; nobody can write material based on earlier editions of D&D; and all the companies with products relying on the OGL, from Paizo (Pathfinder/Starfinder) to Pelgrane Press (13th Age) to Onyx Path Publishing (Pugmire) to Necrotic Gnome (Old School Essentials), are going to have to either make some serious revisions to divorce their products from any OGL-derived material (and pull their products from sale in the meantime), discontinue their OGL-based product lines, or, if they rely too much on those product lines and can't weather the downtime for revision, go out of business entirely.
(Whoever is behind the OGL 1.1 license doesn't actually seem to know very much about the circumstances and purposes of the original OGL 1.0 license—or, if they do know, they're not being truthful about it. The announcement says that the original OGL 1.0 "wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming", but in fact the original OGL FAQ expressly addressed its use for computer software, and Wizards of the Coast even released a separate Software FAQ with guidelines on using the license for computer applications. This isn't to say that the motives behind the original OGL were altruistic; OGL architect Ryan Dancey openly said in an interview that the intent of the OGL was to drive more people to Dungeons & Dragons and strengthen Wizards of the Coast's market share. Still, it explicitly was not intended only for "printed (or printable) materials".)
Really, I suppose it doesn't serve much purpose for me to write here about this now. Our hard launch won't happen for almost a year; nobody knows about this site yet; and by the time anyone else is reading this news post—in early 2024 at the earliest—the questions about the consequences of the OGL 1.1 are likely to have long been settled one way or another. And depending on how it all falls out, I guess it's possible this post may end up coming across as either absurdly alarmist or naïvely optimistic. Heck, the official release of OGL 1.1 is supposed to be on the thirteenth, so if I just wait a few days there'll be at least a little more known about the matter and a little less I'll have to speculate about. Still, I don't know; this kind of seems like a big thing, and it's something I feel like I should acknowledge here, even if by the time anyone else reads this most of what I'm writing here is going to be very old news.
So anyway. The OGL 1.1 is looking to be a big thing for the RPG industry and community, and not in a good way. But what does it mean for the Wongery?
Actually... not all that much. (It throws a huge monkey wrench in some other plans I had, unrelated to the Wongery, but that's beside the point.) Role-playing game statistics aren't the main purpose of the Wongery anyway; its main purpose is just to present information on some detailed imaginary worlds (well, okay, they're not all that detailed yet; we have a lot of writing to do) that people can make use of in various ways—as settings of role-playing games being just one of those ways. But even that aspect of the Wongery won't be hugely impacted. Like I said, my plans to add the Game tab are going to proceed apace. There are a lot of games that I was planning on including statistics for that don't rely on the OGL at all, and that won't be impacted by the OGL 1.1 brouhaha, like Basic Roleplaying, Dominion Rules, EABA, GURPS, Savage Worlds. There are other systems that are licensed under the OGL 1.0, but don't actually include anything from the Standard Reference Document and could simply be released under a different license—and almost certainly will if the OGL proves problematic—like OpenD6 and the Year Zero Engine. And then there are some that may use some material from the SRD, but have been changed enough from D&D that they can probably be divorced from the SRD and the OGL with a little work, and are owned by companies with enough resources they can probably survive the downtime if they do this, like 13th Age, Mutants & Masterminds, Pathfinder, Starfinder. The survival of these games is a little more uncertain than the previous categories, but they'll probably pull through.
So, yes, I'm still going to go ahead and implement the Game tab in the Wongery, and when I get the time I'm going to start posting some game stats for some of the monsters and other elements. But... I think I'll start with Basic Roleplaying and GURPS and some of the other systems, and hold off on Pathfinder and the like until it's a little clearer which way the wind is blowing. (As I said, I do expect Pathfinder to survive this, one way or the other... but if worse comes to worse it may have to survive this by publishing a new edition.) And I'm definitely going to hold off on posting any Dungeons & Dragons stats. Which is kind of funny, because going in I would have thought if there was any one system for which I'd be most likely to include game statistics on the Wongery, it would probably be D&D... but I certainly didn't see this OGL 1.1 fiasco coming...