A PhD Thesis on the OGL, Can't Revoke! | Roll For Combat

Canadian lawyer... lol. Maybe you didn't have a French one available.

There is A LOT of differences between Canadian and US law.

I am confident that the ruling will come down as the OGL can only affect from Date of release forward. anyone will be able to publish on OGL 1.0a but only on game system BEFORE the D&D One. Ideally everyone should just publish toward D20 only.

Did the word Irrevocable beocme common later than 2000s? Is that why?
Because as I read it: perpetual barred by authorised... is pretty clear cut (?)

Imagine WoTC calls you and asks you "We want to be good to the community and we still need to update the licence meeting all our goals. We want you to consult for us, suggest and give us feed back". What would you put in the new OGL that both covers WoTC licensing fears and ensures the community is protected and the hobby can grow?

If there is one thing our community has is a bunch of people who pay attention to rules as written and as intended. They messed up on both.

Evil wizards are trying to install devils into the kingdom, but an army of orcs besiege them.

Talking of competition for D&D, I remember back in the early 2000's that White Wolf Publishing with Werewolf, Vampire, and Mage having plenty of good games to try. It was only the OGL that kept D&D on top.

I saw an argument that WotC is trying to recapture revenue from their work from things like Critical Role and Stranger Things. It's revisionist history. It's because the OGL that these things were popular enough to create content. You wouldn't have nostalgia about D&D without the OGL keeping ttrpgs alive and you wouldn't have had Pathfinder (where Critical Role began) without the OGL. The OGL is gold, and trying to remove it is bad. But if push comes to shove, I'm looking forward to seeing ORC, project blackflag, etc.

It is soooo hard. Politicians need woke = broke for Inflation. Everyone must do nothing. Buy nothing.

Get those Dragon Magazines into a climate controlled area! :)

Fuck WotC, down with Hasbro and eat the rich.

so WoTC is trying to do for D&D what Oracle did for Java.
years later, I’m still picking up pieces from Oracle’s SAPFU. I don’t see The D&D community doing well with the new OGL - for that matter, WoTC is pissing off an impressive number of nerds. I don’t see this ending well for the side with fewer nerds.

D&D had powerful backing, it is Satan's Game! : )
Critical Role used a Pathfinder God in their 5E campaign in season 1!

Is it weird I watched your 1.5 vid speed at 1.5 speed

It very much matters if you have another system. It does not matter if you are heavily invested in a body of work in d&d ogl. This is only going to help Savage Worlds or Powered by the Apocalypse games, for instance. It might fracture the community, but the osr community does not universally use the ogl or even a d20 system in some cases, and they manage to remain fairly unified.

Foundry and such are going to have to pivot to play other games, but there is nothing they can do about that if they do not license them for 6e. If Hasboro had the ability to strike at distribution lines they would have already done it to Paizo by now.

Again, sucks if you have a lot in print that uses the ogl, but the community is not the ogl. If all the creators agreed to only use FATE or something like that, the community and the work would continue. Psychologists say you should never put your identity into something that can be taken away.

That's what Hasbro gets for hiring former Microsoft people: monopolists.

This was my thought as well. Mind you companies have gotten away with breaches in the past.

My concern with this whole situation is that whether or not they have a solid legal argument, they have billions of dollars to throw at the situation, and in the US, that’s probably the second best thing to bring right. Sure a small creator might be in the legal right, but Hasbro can drive the risk and cost to play up high enough that the vast majority of creators won’t be in a position to fight it.

Right now there’s a larger market than has ever existed before for games not connected to D&D; there’s plenty of games out there; there’s VTTs that already support some of these games. I understand how the larger the company, the harder it is to pivot, but if I were making 3rd party content, I’d pick a handful of the larger ones and start converting my products to those games. Most of them are rules lighter than D&D (most games are), so the conversions shouldn’t be terribly difficult. I’d do all of this because this isn’t the first time WotC has tried to kill 3rd party creators; they’ve done it before, and even if they back down, they’ll do it again, and they have the funds to drag anyone into a fight they don’t have the funds to fight.

Until WOTC backs-down and commit to the eternal legitimacy of the OGL 1.0a, or until a judge rules the same and forces WOTC to continue to abide by its 23 year promise, I will not give them a single penny more of my money on any product or service they offer, no matter how shiny, new and appealing. And I have spent hundreds, if not thousands of pounds on official WOTC product. I encourage EVERYONE to do likewise.

Minecraft is not open source. A few pieces of Minecraft such as the system that processes commands you type in are open source, but the game itself is not.

The word in the OGL 1.0 that we should focus on is "in perpetuity". You can't erase or end a perpetual license. If you produce anything based on the previous OGL, leaning on everything from 3.0 to 5e and not producing content for anything moving on, WotC can do frack-all to you. In Perpetuity.

perpetual

adjective

per·​pet·​u·​al pər-ˈpe-chə-wəl  

-chəl;

 

-ˈpech-wəl

1

a

: continuing forever : EVERLASTING

perpetual motion

b(1)

: valid for all time

a perpetual right

(2)

: holding something (such as an office) for life or for an unlimited time



Merriam-Websters definition of perpetual .. perpetual licenses being revoked should be illegal.

And now Kobold Press is designing its own TTRPG system!

Great video as always!

Now that Hasbro got slammed by BoA for milking mtg as a cash cow, that merely made them look for more cash to squeeze instead of actually listening and learning how they are destroying their players perception of them, and will self-destruct if they keep doing this crap

Companion Mouse does not believe that they will be able to revoke the OGL 1.0a. Remember they distributed this with NDAs and contracts to get people to buy into One D&D and the OGL 1.1. Seven days to make their decision. They knew no one will buy into their new initiative to monopolize the tabletop gaming industry and it's a problem for them.

Hasbro "This is the new OGL"
Montoya "You keep using that word. I think it does not mean what you think it means."

The biggest problem with all of this is that WotC is setting up a high stakes game of chicken. Even if everyone in the world agrees that 1.0a can't be revoked it would still require someone to spend hundreds of thousands in court on a gamble that the judge agrees.

keep milking that ''OGL view cow '' XD
''In Todays rpg news: OGL in title gives massive views! ,so massive your channel might turn into a generic dnd channel ! XD ''
Good marketing though ;-)

One D&D to rule them all, One D&D to find them,
One D&D to bring them all, and in OGL 1.1 bind them

Never played. But the kerfuffle has me interested. The game must be important to a lot of people are really stingers-out over these changes. Hope you can sort it out.

So essentially, the misnamed OGL 1.1 is an attempt to claw back copyright, ownership and other rights that were essentially gifted to the community decades ago to keep the game alive and fresh for perpetuity.

The more I think about this, the more I think someone at WOTC is an unsung hero for leaking it out. I believe WOTC knows full well that the new OGL has no legal chance, but they were gonna just suddenly drop it out there, and send everyone into panic, either willing to sign this garbage, or heading to court. If everyone headed to court, I think WOTC was counting on the old corporate trick of bankrupting em before the verdict. Happens a lot in business. But now, they can’t catch anyone by surprise.

Just FYI, the donation in "CHF" that you received means the currency is Swiss francs.

Problem is it wont make it in front of a judge they will simply have drivethru take your work down.

they are not going to be able to control all the tools. There are to many of them, or enterprising people will see the money and develop them. It is probably a better thing for the consumers in the long run.

I want to see at least 80,000 signatures on that Open Letter. Since they were so sure the 40k who filled out the survey was enough to justify the changes in that first OneDnD playtest.

The only thing I disagree with that you have said so far is that Pathfinder 2nd edition is it's a good game it was rushed and sloppy done, and they should go back to the drawing board

Third comment: Something I have been thinking about since 1.1 got leaked is, why hasn't Wizards come out and made an official statement, other than the one made on 21 December 2022?

Because at this point, we are now less than 72 hours from when Wizards is claiming everybody has to comply with OGL 1.1. And the thought that keeps going through my mind is, "Silence is acquiescence," or, if you will, "Silence is agreement."

Which means that ever since OGL 1.1 was leaked, and Wizards never made a statement or even offered a more polished, less draconian version of 1.1, the closer we've gotten to 13 January 2023, that Wizards' silence on the whole kerfluffle means that they agree with what the TTRPG community is saying about 1.1, yet they do not care whatsoever about this community. They do not care about the content creators, the publishers, the game companies, or anyone who has gone ahead and made something under OGL 1.0a for the last 23 years. Basically, silence on the part of Wizards is their apathy for everybody who isn't Paizo or Critical Role. Kobold Press, by the way, has made a statement you can read by going to the channel Tenkar's Tavern, which has a video talking about press releases regarding OGL 1.1. Additionally, an article by someone at Arbiter of Worlds, also linked from Tenkar's Tavern, confirms everything that Steven has said here in multiple videos about how bad OGL 1.1 really is. I just hope that after the dust clears, OGL 1.0a is still around to be published under. Because if that isn't the case, and somehow OGL 1.0a is gone, people like me who wanted to publish under 1.0a, are utterly screwed, if we have to sign OGL 1.1 -- which means that my supplement, maybe my actual book, never gets published. Which would be sad to say, but that would be better than letting me publish my work and Wizards not only stealing it by revoking 1.1, but also in the same instant, not paying me for my work. Because I don't know about anyone else, but I don't work for free, and neither does anyone else I know of.

The usual strtegy. Toss the rock, and see the reaction. If no reaction, enforce it silently. If not, back off and say it was just a bad joke from unconfirmed source. This tactic is routinely used by EU echelons.
The lessons here is that if this attempt will fail they will try again after some time, maybe in a more devious way.
This means that content creator have to start figuring out a open source RPG that is structurally free from private ownerships.
Hasbro may own D&D, but it will never own the RolePlay.

Corporations are dictatorships. Communities are democracies.

It looks like that is going to be very obvious to everyone again, especially in a brewing war for control and a war of liberation.

That's why they want the shock and aww tactics. Kickstarter just screwed themselves.
Finally some good news.

One thing I can tell you. I'm revoking giving WotC any more money. Between a busted randomizer in MTGA and then this crap.

As someone whose interests in open source licenses originated with OGL 1.0a, I agree that the OGL 1.0 is unrevocable.