[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...
And we never needed Apple's permission to have overlapping windows. Alas…
There was a long history of C&D letters and outright lawsuits. Heck, up until recently one of the head honchos of WotC was working at one of the companies being targeted by TSR in the 90s for their "Role Aids". A detente where you didn't have to worry about that as a small time publisher or hobbyist was rather appreciated.
Never mind that "mechanics" isn't as clearly described as we engineer type of nerds would like. So I'm writing my third party D&D-ish adventure. The players encounter a bunch of Orcs lead by an Evil Wizard. "Wizard" and "orc" existing way before D&D, so we're good here. But now I need to provide stat blocks, with abilities, hit points, "magic missile" spells etc. How far can I go where we move beyond "mechanics" and into "trade dress" or whatever lies beyond that legal dimension door?
Never mind that from a usability POV, there's a big benefit of having your stats exactly as WotC did them.
I often get the feeling that people citing the "rules can't be copyrighted!" adage don't game or are one of those people with three binders full of house rules.
Part of the problem is this is a gray area even in the law, just look at the kerfuffle around the Warhol prince print that is still ongoing.
This is something that I've been seen written over and over again.
While the mechanisms themselves are not subject to copyright, the rules, as authored by Wizards of the Coast, are. That is the specific implementation of those mechanisms (e.g. the definition of a feat, skill, or spell) is subject to copyright.
The OGL and D&D SRD allowed limited republishing of copyrighted material by third party publishers.
If you aren't using the words from the D&D rulebook you can publish a game that's 100% compatible with D&D. You would also have to spend a lot of time reimplementing the spell, skill, feat, and weapon boilerplate.. Which is why the D&D SRD and OGL were created.
It's like a hash table. While you can't implicitly[0] protect the concept of a hash table you can copyright and implicitly protect your hash table. Someone else can create a hash table but they can't copy and paste the code from your proprietary implementation. It's yours.. Unless you give them a license to use and/or distribute it.
The death of/community moving away from the OGL and D&D SRD is a good thing.
The RPG world is a victim of the OGL and D&D SRD's success. How many games are based on the six attribute format? I've been playing games like that for 30 years and I've had enough. When I pick up a book and see dex/str/con/wis/int/cha my eyes glass over. I want D&D to fade, I want publishers to create new, entirely novel, systems, and I don't care what it means the status quo. The ideas haven't been there for many years now.
What's great about the OGL and D&D SRD is that it brought an open source mentality to game publishing. It created a framework for companies can collaborate on a system and made that the default way of thinking about the creation of RPG material. That isn't going to go away. We're just going to be getting more and, possibly, better systems.
It's going to cause fragmentation, turmoil, consumer confusion, and it's going to be great. We'll get a burst of creativity, followed by a plateau, and finally everyone will congregate around a new system in a decade or so.
[0]: Copyright is implicit, patents and trademarks are not.
The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the system doesn't really matter. The game rules are incredibly secondary to the concept of role-playing - the universe, the people, the motivations, the personalities etc.
We've got a system, it works and everyone knows how to use it. We've met the bar for a foundation we can build our universes on (until now, and this controversy).
That said, I don't think I've spent enough time playing other systems to really be sure of my feelings on this - the above is based on the situation we've got to. I've got Call of Cthulu on the shelves next to me and plan to run a game, partly because I want to answer that question: "does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world"?
Even if technically game mechanics are fair use, where exactly to draw that line has never been tested in court, and in the past, well before the OGL, RPG developers publishing something that was intended to be compatible with someone else's game, have been sued over that. Including WotC itself in their early days.
So just that already gave WotC an incentive to want a more open license. And in the late 1990s, before they released the OGL, the RPG industry was shrinking, with each company on its own island, and no exchange of material between different systems. WotC reasoned that the value of an RPG comes primarily from how easy it is to find players to play the game with, and if all RPGs are built on the same core mechanics, they have a common player base and players can much more easily pick up a new game. That's why they created the OGL: to connect all the islands, create a common player base for everybody, make all RPGs more valuable as a result, and thereby make the entire industry bigger. A bigger pie, of which WotC got the biggest piece.
On top of that, they hoped that third party contributions would also improve D&D itself. Inspired by ESR's the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
But the real thing that convinced other publishers to contribute to this common OGL system, much more than any of the legalities, is the trust that WotC built. The OGL was a solemn promise that they would never sue anyone who stuck to the rules in the OGL. Instead of the vague complexities and grey areas of copyright law, there were now clear lines drawn about what you could and couldn't do. And that is what convinced other RPG publishers to go along with this. To trust WotC. And everybody benefited from it.
And now WotC destroyed that trust, and may never be able to repair that. Paizo is trying to rebuild a new similar agreement and the accompanying trust from the ruins of WotC's sudden idiocy.
WotC seems to be seeing the RPG industry as a zero-sum game, where any money made by someone else, is money not made by them. That's not how it works. WotC benefited enormously from the OGL. The biggest editions of D&D are those that used the OGL (3.x and 5), whereas 4 was significantly less popular, and at some point even outsold by Paizo's Pathfinder. RPGs have always been a community effort. 20 years ago, WotC understood that. Modern Hasbro leadership only thinks in terms of products and consumers, and that attitude is going to hurt D&D.
A new license is absolutely necessary in the context of the modern court system.
Correct. This is where patents come into place.
For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 and https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-milli...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3208754A/en is another fun one.
But lore and wording gets into trouble. Is "Magic Missile" copyrighted? How about Halfling ( https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/116283 )?
> A missile of magical energy darts forth from your fingertip and strikes its target, dealing 1d4+1 points of force damage.
> You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.
Without looking which one is D&D and which one is Pathfinder?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/magic-missile/
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Magic%20Missile#content
Would the pathfinder version be considered a derivative work of the D&D version (well, not that D&D version since that was 5e... still).
Excepting a few, most of their monsters are generic fantasy monsters too or random combinations of "let's stick this head on this body".
The stuff that is copyrightable they do a terrible job at monetizing (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberon, various planes, higher powers, etc.)
On the other hand, claiming copyright or trademark on D&D terms and mechanics that have diffused throughout the RPG universe for nearly 50 years (experience points, hit points, ability scores, spell levels, character classes and levels, alignment, saving throws, initiative, etc.) seems like a fool's errand.
Really curious to see if the new license will be closer at all to something like Creative Commons or FOSS software licenses than the OGL was, or if it'll stay relatively close. My suspicion is Paizo will still want to keep control over their story/setting/etc so it'll likely lean towards the OGL in that way.
But other than that, the content will be very similar. An open gaming license like this will always have to account for protected property rights. People will want to make Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter games. That requires a clear separation between the shared mechanics and the protected property, and they have to be able to be published in a text where they are deeply integrated with each other.
I'm not sure if the Linux Foundation is just a relevant example here or an actual contender to be the steward.
I kind of hope it's the latter. TTRPG rules are close enough to code right? Structured instructions executed by humans with some flavor text at least.
They really should just rename it to "The Foundation Foundation"
But regardless of that, open source licences have nothing to do with what the code is doing; they are about using certain specific code in other products. Code is not copyrightable, so you can take some closed-source code and replicate its functionality in a different way - using different language idioms, or a completely different language - completely legally.
It might not be patentable, except it is under some jurisdictions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent
In a way, I always knew this was coming. When lots of the people behind 3e left, I assumed that the OGL wouldn’t last forever, once there was enough money on the table. It took a decade longer than I thought, and I wasn’t expecting them to revoke the previous license, but instead remove the OGL from new versions. Either way, rent seekers gotta rent seek.
Well, to be fair they did do exactly that with D&D 4e and the GSL. Which bombed spectacularly, as their audience continued to play 3.5 and Pathfinder which continued to use the OGL.
This is actually WotC learning from their mistakes. If they launched 5.5e with a regressive and user-hostile licence, people would just ignore it and splinter the community and hurt the new edition.
Instead — the way wotc is attempting here — they blow up the old editions entirely and shut down all their competition in one legal maneuver. Existing customers have little recourse, they still enjoy ttrpg with their friends and d&d has significant brand strength as well as being the only company left publishing. Nerds will whine but the company now is now well-positioned to be the sole competitor in the increasingly profitable digital future. They don’t have to spent 10 figures on the next dndbeyond, they can just sue them. They don’t have to built a better vtt than foundry, they just shut down foundry and theirs is better by default — tada!
They may have underestimated how loudly nerds like me are whining, and voting with our wallets. And perhaps also o overestimating how successful their legal shenanigans would be — I’m not a lawyer but so much I’ve read from legal analysis suggests wotc is in a dubious position and unlikely to succeed here.
Source: I own a tabletop RPG publisher.
I still don't understand the value of the OGL spelling out reserved IP. That's already protected if the only open-licensed part is the rules text, which (not a lawyer) happens with a CC BY SRD and any other copyright license on the derived works.
Wizards leaving reserved IP in their official SRD was a bug, not a feature. Back when Paizo still self-hosted Pathfinder 1E's SRD, they solicited pointers to and removed protected terms that they accidentally left in it so it'd be more ergonomic for publishers.
Some specific troubles:
- Most game mechanics cannot be copyrighted they can only be patented. I believe CC recommended the OGL contain a patent grant similar to the one in the (software license) Apache License 2.0, though one directly as such did not make the final OGL. (There is something of an implied grant, but no specific clause and definitely not as well spelled out as Apache License 2.0.)
- Many elements are more subject to trademark laws than copyright laws. Things like the names of spells or skills or things like that. A TTRPG has to explicitly define which "vocabulary" is subject to trademark enforcement in a way that doesn't turn the trademarks into generics that puts them at risk of loss in a court case.
- The very nature of splitting an SRD from other game materials is somewhat unique to this TTRPG model. A lot of the OGL is legally trying to explain what an SRD even is and how it differs from any other book in the "same" RPG (so that it can then limit the scope of most things back to "just the SRD is open").
That said, there's a unique community of CC licensed games on itch.io especially and it certainly seems to work well when the entire game is licensed that way. Most of those authors and companies don't have a lot of trademarks to defend.
I could still see a usefulness in that community for some sort of easy to apply patent-grant license, though. (I was debating the other day if a dual-license situation where you did something like CC-BY/Apache License 2.0 could work if you have some way to add the legal language equivalent of "where and as these systems/rules define algorithms, those algorithms are considered to be open source under the Apache License 2.0" to try to broadly apply a patent grant.) I'm curious to see what Paizo does with ORC as maybe that's something their lawyers might help them address in a reusable way even for small RPGs.
>According to several lawyers who have weighed in on the situation, if a document does not specifically say it is “irrevocable,” it can be revoked. While the old OGL uses the term “perpetual,” it does not use the word “irrevocable” in writing, and Dancey’s use of the word in interviews and emails may not be sufficient for the courts.
This move will likely cement them for some time to come as the major tabletop gaming company that actually cares about their customers.
From where I sit, the only better outcome we could see from this OGL debacle is if some coalition of TTRPG designers could get together and come up with a fully open TTRPG in the same basic mold as D&D and Pathfinder.
They're basically defunct after the nazi scandal after Paradox bought them, Paradox licensed out their material for a few years and now has a new in-house team for World of Darkness.
> In November 2018, as a result of backlash generated by material pertaining to "murder of gay Chechens" published in a Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition source book as well as the inclusion of optional neo-Nazi aesthetic in the Brujah vampire clan,[7] it was announced that White Wolf would no longer function as an entity separate from its parent company, and would cease developing and publishing products internally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wolf_Publishing#Purchase...
They will be looking towards groups like the Linux Foundation to own the license once developed.
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