Open Tabletop RPG Gaming

Some Background

For the last 22 years there has existed something called the Open Gaming Licence (often abbreviated to the OGL); it has existed with only minor revisions in that time (the current version in Jan 2023 is v1.0a).

This licence, unlike other “open” licences, is presided over not by a non-profit or a legal firm one or more steps removed from the products that are licenced, but by Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company who purchased TSR back in 1997 and therefore owns the rights to the (now) massively popular Dungeons and Dragons RPG.

When WotC set up the OGL in the year 2000, they and their parent company allegedly made representations that it would exist in perpetuity. They did this to convince third party publishers to make things for their games, taking the less profitable work of creating adventure materials and extra content out of their hands, freeing them to make most of their money through the main game products (successive core rulebooks, player handbooks etc.).

In late 2022 and early 2023, an attempt was made to not only replace the OGL, but to “de-authorise” the existing one (v1.0a). The intended replacement “OGL v1.1” contained a number of provisions that are untenable to the wider community of third party publishers, home-brew creators, and Games Masters (GMs). Perhaps predictably, the backlash to this has been massive, and WotC’s handling of the situation will likely become a case study for both legal and marketing professionals for years to come.

The outcome of this situation remains in flux at the time of writing (Jan 17th 2023), but I won’t go any further into the minutiae of the situation, but I will provide some links to some of the more mainstream coverage below if you’re interested, or if you’re more into the doomscroll, head over to #OpenDND on the bird site.

Io9/Gizmodo – Linda Codega’s article breaking the story
Io9/Gizmodo – WotC breaks silence on OGL after week of backlash
Guardian (UK) – ‘People are leaving the game’
Io9/Gizmodo – Cancelled D&D Beyond subscriptions force Hasbro’s hand
CNBC – OGL update delayed following fan backlash
IGN – Game Makers Flee D&D amid licensing concerns
UK Financial Times – Dungeons & Dragons & Fear & Loathing

**There was an update to this story on 27th January 2023: more details here!

The Future of Open Gaming

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, a lot of things have happenned in response to WotC’s exposure as an unreliable custodian of the OGL. A few of the more mainstream being:

• Numerous third party publishers and home-brew creators have cancelled projects reliant on the OGL. This has put games designers, illustrators, artists and others in a difficult position as work they relied on to pay their bills has evaporated.
  
• MCDM Productions have decided that in light of the OGL, they will be shuttering the Arcadia magazine, perhaps the closest thing to TSR’s original Dragon Magazine, after only two years of publication.
  
• Games Masters from all over the Dungeons and Dragons community have commited to leaving the game for greener pastures elsewhere, in other games sytems (more on this later) and players and GMs from all over the TTRPG space (i.e.: those that use those other systems) have been for the most part immensely welcoming.
  
• Third party publishers including Chaosium, Paizo, Monte Cook Games, and others have rushed to put on massive discount sales or give away their games to encourage people to move away from Dungeons and Dragons.
  
• A rough coalition of these third party publishers, led by Paizo, have committed to creating a NEW, truly open, perpetual and (crucially) irrevocable Open RPG Creator’s Licence, appropriately acronym’d ORC. Backed up by the same legal firm who drafted WotC’s OGL back in 2000.
  
• Numerous others have announced or accelerated efforts to create new RPG systems which aren’t subject to the whims of WotC or another external entity.
  

On the one hand, this could be viewed as a bad thing; a splintering of the Dungeons and Dragons fanbase to the winds. However, as someone who doesn’t play that game (I was due to play my first ever in person campaign in D&D the week after COVID-19 lockdowns hit!) and who was “brought up” in the hobby playing games like Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, RuneQuest III and similar, I can only see the widespread exposure of the previously monopolised D&D player base to other systems as a boon for the wider TTRPG industry, though it is a horrible shame that it took the implosion of that game to do it.

Of course, it could be that WotC is playing 4-dimensional chess and this is all part of some big play, but I doubt it…

For my part, I am hoping that this will bring about a wider renaissance of the TTRPG industry, with older systems getting reprints and updates (come on Chaosium, update BRP already!), new systems coming from across the spectrum, and a wider community of third party publishers being able to make space for themselves in the industry when the ORC Licence comes into being.

Speaking of the ORC, I plan to follow along closely as Paizo and co. develop the licence, I’ve dabbled in home-brewing myself as a GM, and perhaps the ORC will be the thing that finally makes me dig out my old scenarios and core rulebooks and start actually making things… only time will tell.

An Update – Capitulation

As of Friday 27th January 2023, Wizards of the Coast have apparently capitulated to the demands of the #OpenDND movement. Reaffirming the status of the OGL v1.0a for existing game systems (i.e.: D&D 5e and previous editions). Furthermore, in a move that has been widely welcomed, but is far beyond the expectations of the community, WotC have released the entire System Reference Document for D&D edition 5.1 under a Creative Commons, Attribution Licence (CC-BY 4.0).

What spurred this move is (at the time of writing) unknown, it could have been for any one of a number of reasons, including the community backlash, pressure from shareholders, the financial costs of holding their prior position (lost D&D Beyond subscription income), the threat of a boycott of the upcoming D&D Movie, an effort to forestall the loss of players to other systems or to undercut the efforts of Paizo et al. in the creation of the ORC licence. More than likely it was a combination of these and other factors. Until WotC staff talk about it, it’s likely we’ll never really know.

An Update – ORC Licence v1.0

As of Friday 7th April 2023, Paizo have published the first version of the ORC Licence, further details fo this can be found here.

Tell me about your TTRPG Systems!

Let me know about any TTRPG Systems I missed!