Story of the Year So Far - the OGL Thing

 

Well WOTC has managed to stir up a whole lot of people without really trying. Details can be found here.

I see the OGL as nothing but a great thing that gave us tons of material for D&D and far more, including Mutants and Masterminds among others. The idea that Wizards might undo it -pretty much out of nowhere- is disturbing. It is especially disturbing since it has been stated repeatedly and emphatically by the architect of the document and the company itself that it could not do so.

Now what I suspect, and where some later rumors seem to point, is that this is more like the GSL - if you want to publish new material for One D&D then you have to agree to this new license which voids your right to publish under the old license. That would make more sense business-wise and legality-wise and it avoids a whole lot of negative blowback from business partners and customers. I really hope that this is the case.

If this was ten years ago I would assume this would meet the same reception as the GSL did - mass non-adoption. Why would anyone cut themselves out of the wide OGL opportunities out there for a narrowly-focused option to publish for one game. I'm a little less sold on that this time as there is a new factor - some people think you need a screen to play D&D and those people are numerous enough to have an impact.

For the record, my stance is that you do not need a screen or an internet connection to play D&D . You never have, you never will, and you never should. 

That said if you want to use some kind of application to play it you should be able to, sure. There have been various programs or apps around from the earliest days to generate characters or track combat and that's fine. As a DM I've used Combat Manager to run Pathfinder and Hero Lab to run combat for M&M. In my case they were just tools to make running my game easier - I never required a player to use one.

All the chatter around One D&D now though ... this feels like they are aiming for a subscription model. Whether it's strictly tied to an optional tool or becomes the primary way of releasing material I am not sure but I am not a fan of it and the day I have to pay a subscription to access rules for D&D is the day I will stop playing it ... lord knows I have enough material on the shelves already. 

I'm sure it's part of the corporate push to generate more revenue and  I get that. Hasbro has discussed "monetizing the D&D brand more" and that often means we're going to start charging you for things that may have been free or unlicensed before and we're going to start charging more for things we've been doing. Hey, we all need to eat but that's rarely been a phrase that leads to a better product and a happier customer base in my experience. So once we started hearing that, once the One D&D talk started up, well, it put me on notice that its going to change and probably not for the better.

This has also been accompanied of course by all the talk that "it's not an edition change - call of it will be backwards-compatible" - I mean, sure. Compatibility across editions has been a variable quality over the years and maybe there will be zero conversion needed to run Princes of the Apocalypse  in One D&D but if it's not an edition change why are you publishing a new Players Handbook? That's a pretty strong signal, right? We're not just changing the cover art, right? So despite the disclaimers it looks like a new edition to me. 

So we have a new edition of the rules coming, a new licensing agreement to publish alongside those rules, and probably some additional changes we have yet to see. For myself, my main question is "are you going to keep printing books with all of the content for the current version of the game?" No "online exclusive" supplements or other way of making the paper version limited in some way? If that's the case then there's some hope for the future. Beyond that if you kill off future third party publishing, well, that's not good. If you retroactively interfere with existing third party publishing ... well now we're getting into a much more actively hostile approach and that's going to be a problem. OGL interference would potentially affect a bunch of games and publishers I like and I can't support that. Pathfinder, M&M, Labyrinth Lord, Star Without Number - I believe all of these have some tie to the OGL and that's just the first 4 I thought of - there are many more. 

An edition change is a good time for people to try other games. A licensing re-work is a good time for publishers to explore other options. With a movie coming out soon there is more D&D chatter online and there are already posts about it being targeted with negative takes on this whole situation. It seems like this would be a time to try to get people excited rather than make controversial moves but you never know what some people are thinking.

Hopefully all of this gets worked out soon and without leaving a crater on the industry.