A planned change in the licensing system for the popular board role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons has caused a furor in the community in recent weeks.
Wizards of the Coast, the company behind D&D, issued a partial denial of the rumored changes on Friday, apologizing for the situation.
This came at the same time as rumours restrictions and brutal price increases on services.
Wizards of the Coast
The drama reached a climax in the middle of the week, when a number of players began canceling subscriptions to the official resource website DnDBeyond. Many went so far as to ask to have their user accounts deleted from the service. The action is more dramatic than simply canceling the subscription, since deleting the user will remove all products they have previously purchased.
The boycott went viral through websites like reddit.com and several groups devoted to D&D and RPGs in general.
Changes in the license scheme
The discontent started when the upper management of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast began work to update an existing license for D&D, called OGL 1.0(a) (Open Gaming License).
What is the Open Gaming License?
view more
OGL 1.0(a) is not about the rules of the game, but is a license that allows players and fans to use the official ruleset to create new material for the game – and potentially make money from it, without worrying about legal issues problems on Wizards’ part.
The agreement does not actually give the players rights they do not automatically have under American law, but expresses these in somewhat clearer and understandable text – and sets clear limitations on Wizards themselves, where there should be gray areas or something undefined.
Wizards planned to update this license in conjunction with an upcoming major update to the game itself, and sent an unfinished draft of the new text to several partners, developers, and other players. This text was then leaked to the general public, who did not receive the changes particularly well.
Many in the D&D community saw the changes in the new version as a draconian attempt to claim ownership of all third-party material created for D&D, or even prevent such material from being created or shared freely, as it has always been done.
Wizards of the Coast
Previously, D&D existed under the license agreement OGL 1.0(a), which largely leaves the core material of D&D free for creators who wish to expand the content of the game.
The new draft text appears to place much stricter restrictions on the kind of products and material that can be created in association with Dungeons & Dragons, as well as mechanisms to allow D&D owners to claim royalties, or take over ownership altogether.
Perhaps most drastically, Wizards of the Coast claims the changes are retroactive to previous versions of the game – so-called deauthorization of the license – something the company has always promised they would never do, and it’s unclear if they even can do.
Breaking up with partners
Kobold Press and Wizards of the Coast
view more
Kobold Press has previously worked exclusively with material for D&D and related systems.
They have worked directly for Wizards as a partner and developer for some of the official material in D&D 5E (the current edition).
For example, they wrote the adventure Hoard of the Dragon Queen for D&D, and have also released a lot of additional material under the existing license.
This was of course met with everything from skepticism to outrage – among those who create content using D&D, and in the general player base otherwise.
It didn’t take long before some of the bigger players in the environment took action to show their own displeasure, and give support to the environment from which they themselves arose.
Last week, the company Kobold Press went out with the announcement of a new game which should give players a free alternative to D&D. The game is codenamed Project Black Flag.
Others, like the popular online podcast Critical Rolehas expressed himself more cautiously, but still leans towards the more deregulated side of the debate.
An alternative, independent license agreement
Paizo and Wizards
view more
Paizo had also previously been a partner of Wizards, and publisher of the gaming magazines Dragon and Dungeon.
Pathfinder was a development of D&D 3.5, and was possible because 3.5 was still covered by OGL 1.0(a).
Additionally, many of the game developers at Paizo were former Wizards employees, and veterans of D&D 3.5.
On Thursday last week, Paizo – the publisher of D&D’s biggest competitor, Pathfinder – came up with its response to the situation by announce their own licensing schemecalled the Open RPG Creative License – or ORC.
ORC shall be a system-agnostic framework (meaning that it is independent of the game in question), and it shall be open to all role-playing game developers to use it.
At the time of the announcement, they could already confirm that a number of leading players were already on board, including Paizo itself, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and “a growing list of publishers”.
Paizo
In addition, the scheme must be managed independently of any of the participants, to prevent personal financial interests from interfering with the common framework.
For now, the responsibility rests with the law firm Azora Law, which was founded by Brian Lewis, one of those who originally created the Wizards’ OGL. The plan is that a “non-profit” organization will eventually be established to manage the work.
“We rolled one”
Wizards of the Coast management had planned a response to the complaints last week, but had to postpone it twice when other bad news got in the way.
Admittedly, this isn’t the first time Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro has tried to change the OGL
view more
In connection with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (the previous edition from 2008), the old license was completely set aside, and the game was released under the Game System License (GSL) agreement, which was far more in Wizards’ favor than the OGL 1.0( a) was (or OGL 1.1 would be).
This change – and D&D 4th Ed. as a whole – was unpopular enough that D&D lost a large share of the market when game developer Paizo released the game Pathfinder.
In this sense, Wizards created its biggest competitor by releasing D&D 4th Ed.
Last Friday finally came Wizard’s statementwhere in practice they lay flat.
The statement clarifies why they wanted to make changes to the agreement in the first place.
- They want better tools to protect the game and the environment from hate speech and discrimination. This has been a problem in the past, and is a desired element from the environment.
- They want to protect the game from dishonest players – especially within the crypto/NFT industry, which did not exist when the OGL was first designed.
- They also want to make it clear that the OGL must apply and protect players, and smaller players at player level – not the commercial purposes of large companies.
Wizards of the Coast
They openly admit that the draft that was leaked (and is meant to be nothing more than a draft) is completely inadequate to advance these ideas and nurture the environment as they desire and as the old agreement did.
The management says in the statement that “it is clear from the reaction that we rolled a one. It has become clear that we cannot achieve all three goals and at the same time stay true to our values.”
Furthermore, they say that the work on the agreement want continue, but that future drafts not will include the most controversial points, such as royalties or delicensing. “You want to own the content you create. We don’t want to.”
Just before the weekend came a new message which promises that Wizards of the Coast will hold subsequent discussions about changes to the license in more open and transparent forms, and all material released under OGL 1.0(a) will remain untouched.
Here they also clarify what the license actually regulates and what is covered by other, unchanged agreements.
How this will be received remains to be seen. Dissatisfaction and skepticism are still high in the environment.
READ ALSO: Our impression of Baldur’s Gate 3 so far: – A reassuring taste of future success”
