Pathfinder, a very D&D like game by Pazio, was originally based on D&D "3.5". Fourth edition was a wild departure from the rules as they were evolving between AD&D and 3.5. Many people call Pathfinder First Edition D&D 3.75.

It is my understanding, however, that Pathfinder Second Edition is pretty much a full rewrite and only includes the OGL as a way for third parties to build content around Pathfinder Second Edition.

There are a great deal of adaptations, under the OGL, of the original 'Moldvay' Dungeons and Dragons BECMI rules (Basic and Expert rules from the 80s) and the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules as well.

As it was originally written, backed up by testimony from 'the guys in the room', the orignal OGL was to be considered 'unrevokeable'.

So there are kind of two bad scenarios if Hasbro/Wizards goes ahead with their current plans. One scenario is, OGL 1.1 applies to 'One D&D' and therefore you'd have to sign and abide the 1.1 OGL if you want to build content (and only 'textual printed/pdf content' if I'm reading it right) for 'One D&D'. The worse scenario is that they attempt to revote the 1.0 OGL which basically means a bunch on in-print content evaporates because their publishers do not want to deal with 1.1 OGL.

An extended wrinkle being that 'One D&D' based on their current plans seems to be more of a Edition 5.5 than a new ruleset entirely.

I know about Pathfinder, but I don't understand this:

> It is my understanding, however, that Pathfinder Second Edition is pretty much a full rewrite and only includes the OGL as a way for third parties to build content around Pathfinder Second Edition.

Why did Paizo use a license not designed by them? And if they did a full rewrite, are they under any obligation at all to Wizards of the Coast? If they used the OGL to allow third-parties for Pathfinder, not D&D, what does this have to do with WotC? And cannot they simply switch to another license, if 2nd edition is truly a full rewrite?

There's something I'm definitely missing here.

> Why did Paizo use a license not designed by them?

Lawyers cost money.

> And if they did a full rewrite, are they under any obligation at all to Wizards of the Coast?

The theory is that they are not.

> If they used the OGL to allow third-parties for Pathfinder, not D&D, what does this have to do with WotC?

People point out that the PF2 works have OGL licenses.

I'm sure we'll all find out in the coming weeks/months

> Why did Paizo use a license not designed by them?

Why would they when there's a well-known and (before recent events) fully trusted license already established within the community?

That's probably why they used the OGL, agreed. But it's crazy, right? Using a license designed by a direct business competitor? If you can do a major rules rewrite (and I understand Pathfinder is on the more complex/crunchy side of RPGs), surely you have the know-how to design your own license?

Even if all the actors in this dramedy are profit-driven businesses, I can't wrap my head around the OGL not being driven by a consortium. How on earth does WotC have final say?

In any case, they are probably regretting it now. I hope this sets a precedent.

> But it's crazy, right? Using a license designed by a direct business competitor?

Not necessarily. In software we have the MIT license. Anyone can freeze any version of the product and use/distribute it freely in perpetuity regardless of whatever relicensing may happen later to other versions.

It sounds like the OGL was written in that spirit. Whether its legal language will back that up in court, maybe we'll find out.

I don't think the MIT license or the GPL (mentioned by someone else) are good parallels.

When you release software under an open source license such as those, you are not using a license designed and solely controlled by your business competitor!

The OGL situation would be like Microsoft releasing Windows under a license designed and solely controlled by Apple.

So what? Unless it has a clause that allows licensees to use a newer version of the license at their will (like GPL optionally has), it doesn't matter who "controls" the license at all. It has no impact on you and your work. You used a specific set of rules as a license for your work and unless you explicitly allowed it, these rules don't change.

Well, at the very least it seems unwise. Your core business shouldn't be put at the mercy of a competitor.

I see the new management of Wizards of the Coast as now arguing that "the OGL was never meant to fund competitors [to D&D's owners]". It seems they are echoing my sentiments!

Whether what they are attempting is lawful is besides the issue: what matters is that Paizo and whoever wouldn't be at risk had they not chosen a license designed by -- and completely controlled by -- their business competition!

> Your core business shouldn't be put at the mercy of a competitor.

Of course, but that's not what happens when you use someone else's license at all. And no, whoever used OGL with their project is not at any risk at all - unless they used or made derivative works of existing WotC's content licensed under OGL, in which case they had no other choice than to use OGL anyway.

Hard to understand what all the ruckus is about then.

> Of course, but that's not what happens when you use someone else's license at all. And no, whoever used OGL with their project is not at any risk at all - unless they used or made derivative works of existing WotC's content licensed under OGL, in which case they had no other choice than to use OGL anyway.

Other people in this comments section are arguing otherwise! Whose interpretation should I trust? Yours? Theirs? Wizards'?

Are they? I've read several lengthy threads by now and haven't seen such stance being proposed.

The issue with Pathfinder is that it was a derivative work of D&D, and although it has been rewritten since it's not clear whether the rewrite still is or not. If it is, then it couldn't be licensed on anything else than OGL and may be affected by OGL 1.1; if it's not, then it's simply unaffected by OGL 1.1 (or at least not in a way that will cause any troubles), since it's not up to WotC to decide how is this work being licensed.

> Are they? I've read several lengthy threads by now and haven't seen such stance being proposed.

Yes, they are. Use CTRL+F to find out. People here are arguing this can be interpreted to impact even games that are unrelated to D&D mechanics or setting. People are freaking out in a sense that would seem disproportionate if this only affected Paizo.

Also, please read the open letter mentioned in the link.

Of course, feel free to argue with them (either the commenters here or with the authors of the letter) if you want, but please not with me: I'm the one asking questions, not offering explanations.

The only sin of the open letter is apparently to mention games as examples that aren't bound by OGL but were simply released under the terms of OGL; it makes sense otherwise (I'm not familiar with those games enough to know whether that's their actual status though). It's pretty obvious that if I make a fully custom game and release it under OGL 1.0a now, WotC has nothing to do with it. Because of OGL's wording, someone may be able to use my work under the terms of OGL 1.1, which may be undesired from my point of view, but this doesn't influence the fact that I'm still offering it under OGL 1.0a to anyone who wants to choose that version of the license.

To guard myself from such situation, I'd have to state that I'm licensing it under OGL 1.0a only, at a cost of potentially making it incompatible with content released on a future version of the license - just like some GPL projects do (most notably Linux, which is GPLv2-only).

> I'm the one asking questions, not offering explanations.

And I'm offering explanations :)

> But it's crazy, right? Using a license designed by a direct business competitor?

Microsoft also publishes software under open-source licenses [0]. The license is short and well-understood, it's not like a large piece of software that might contain backdoors. Also, people trust(-ed) that license.

> If you can do a major rules rewrite [...], surely you have the know-how to design your own license?

Yes, but you'd just end up with a similarly worded license that people don't know. Why spend that money?

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but I can easily see why they decided against that. Also, Paizo is probably sufficiently funded by now that suing them is a bit dangerous for WotC, as they risk a bad precedent.

[0] Which are not necessarily competitors, but might also not be friendly towards MS.

> [0] Which are not necessarily competitors, but might also not be friendly towards MS.

Until not that long ago, Microsoft considered open source licenses a "cancer". While they have changed their stance since then, I'm sure they did some major risk assessment and have safeguards in place of the kind a company like Paizo simply isn't capable of. More importantly, the core MS line of products isn't licensed with a license they don't control.

"Not necessarily competitors" makes all the difference here! This is not a minor detail, but a major one. Look at how Wizards of the Coast is framing the issue, and I quote them [0]:

> “the Open Game License was always intended to allow the community to help grow D&D and expand it creatively. It wasn’t intended to subsidize major competitors, especially now that PDF is by far the most common form of distribution.”

and

> “OGL wasn’t intended to fund major competitors and it wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming. We are updating the OGL in part to make that very clear.”

[0] source: https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-ga...

>But it's crazy, right? Using a license designed by a direct business competitor?

Maybe, but a license is just an agreement between two parties on how they can use a copyrighted work. And in the original text, there was no means for WotC to revoke the license from other companies. It would be like if you released software using GPL2, then the GNU project released GPL3 which was much more restrictive, required you to pay rms for any software you release and tried to claim that anything licensed with GPL2 was now licensed with GPL3. You'd think that crazy, and nobody would be asking you why you released software with a license you didn't design.

> It would be like if you released software using GPL2, then the GNU project released GPL3 which was much more restrictive, required you to pay rms for any software you release and tried to claim that anything licensed with GPL2 was now licensed with GPL3.

Yes, but that's not so hard to imagine, it's basically:

Imagine the GPL is issued by a for-profit company not an ideological nonprofit, and imagine the “X or any later versiom” clause is replaced by or “Any authorized version clause”, and imagine that the for-profit company decides that the use of the older versions are contrary to its existing interests?

Heck, there is a reason that even as it is written, and even with the FSF being a nonprofit with a stable ideology, some people, when licensing their own work, usd GPLvWhatever without the or-any-later version clause.

I think the fact the OGL was designed by a business, not a nonprofit, and that this business' goals compete with your own, makes this situation radically different.

The FSF doesn't compete with your business and doesn't want a cut of your business.

Moreover, if you are going to use a license designed by a competing business for your main line of products (e.g. Pathfinder) you better make sure your competitor is not the sole arbiter of that license! A consortium of businesses would make more sense.

> But it's crazy, right? Using a license designed by a direct business competitor?

No? This kind of thing happens all the time with various kinds of contracts, e.g. in finance if one bank comes up with some kind of instrument most of their competitors will try to follow the same thing. It's like asking why would you use a file format designed by a direct business competitor.

But not really, right? Using a competitor's file format is a way of adding interoperability to your product. And a file format cannot dictate how you can legally use or sell the whole of your product; at worst you can be barred from using that particular format if your competitor sees it fit.

The bank analogy also doesn't match. A closer analogy would be if your bank must use their competitor's installations and infrastructure, and risk bankruptcy whenever the competitor thinks they don't want to lend them their installations anymore.

Using your direct competitor's license, fully under their control, is closer to handing them the keys to your company for no obvious benefit, right?

> The bank analogy also doesn't match. A closer analogy would be if your bank must use their competitor's installations and infrastructure, and risk bankruptcy whenever the competitor thinks they don't want to lend them their installations anymore.

No it isn't? The license is just the contractual agreement. Like, I'm not sure if the second bank to offer overnight repurchase agreements literally copied the first one's contract and just changed their name, but they certainly could've, and that's been normal practice with some newer financial products.

> Using your direct competitor's license, fully under their control, is closer to handing them the keys to your company for no obvious benefit, right?

No, not at all? How is it "under their control"? They can publish a new version of it but that has nothing to do with you unless you want it to.

But your bank analogy is still flawed, isn't it? This isn't a case of a bank following suit and copying another bank's offering, this is a case of a company using terms of another company and riding on their "infrastructure" (IP, licenses, etc). For a RPG company, these intangibles are infrastructure, not legalese. Remember, this runs on human brains, not on computers or ATMs.

> No, not at all? How is it "under their control"? They can publish a new version of it but that has nothing to do with you unless you want it to.

It is under their control because they are the only ones that can modify, add or remove provisions to the license. This is like a file format where only one company can determine the standard: it sucks for everyone else! At best you're playing catch-up, at worst the owner can bar you from using the format. A consortium would be less risky.

And apparently the current situation shows it was very risky indeed!

> This isn't a case of a bank following suit and copying another bank's offering, this is a case of a company using terms of another company and riding on their "infrastructure" (IP, licenses, etc). For a RPG company, these intangibles are infrastructure, not legalese.

Hold on, we're just talking about the license, aren't we? I thought the question was about why they were using the OGL, which is very much just the legalese/contract.

To be honest I think I managed to confuse myself. But that's because I think everyone is conflating everything in this case.

Some people seem to think the OGL is the "blood" of these third party companies, without which their business model doesn't exist. Surprisingly -- but I have trouble believing this -- some think OGL-licensed games are at risk even if they are unrelated to the D&D franchise and its gameplay mechanics (I hope this is just a misunderstanding!).

But let's say this is just legalese. Does it seem wise to let your core product be sold under contractual terms defined by your direct business competitor, which by their own admission has no interest in "funding the competition"? (they've been quoted saying this).

> But let's say this is just legalese. Does it seem wise to let your core product be sold under contractual terms defined by your direct business competitor, which by their own admission has no interest in "funding the competition"? (they've been quoted saying this).

I think it's probably fine. Like, if WotC is willing to sell their product on these terms, it's probably safe for me to sell my product on the same terms, especially if we're direct competitors. Obviously there's a risk, but there's a risk in not competing too. Compare price matching.

> And if they did a full rewrite, are they under any obligation at all to Wizards of the Coast?

The most reasonable opinion I have read on this is that Paizo themselves are not entirely convinced the second edition can be legally seen as an untainted full rewrite and use the OGL out of precaution.

They should be able to relicense but Hasbro might sue them arguing actually the licensing situation isn’t that clear.

> Why did Paizo use a license not designed by them?

Why do organizations other than the FSF use the GPL?

Well, the GPL doesn't put organizations that choose that license at the mercy of the FSF. The FSF isn't a business competing with the organizations that choose the GPL. The FSF also cannot change the rules of the license a posteriori.

The OGL doesn't look much like the GPL. Wizards of the Coast is a business in direct competition to others using the OGL. It's also crazy that something under the OGL falls in WotC's jurisdiction even if it uses no rules or settings from D&D -- I must have misunderstood this because this is simply too crazy to be true.

> The FSF also cannot change the rules of the license a posteriori.

GNU can and has changed the rules of one of their licenses. Specifically the GFDL 1.3 was released to allow all the wikis licensed under GFDL 1.1+/GFDL1.2+ to migrate to CC-BY-SA.

This is arguably a case of using the power for good, but fear of them using the power for bad is exactly why e.g. Linux is GPLv2-only rather than GPLv2-or-later

If I understand this correctly, your example isn't a case of retroactively modifying a license.

If you publish something under an X+ license, aren't you effectively saying "the conditions of this or a later revision apply"? You are willingly choosing to use this version or a later one. So if a later one changes one of the provisions of the prior version, this isn't a retroactive change but something you explicitly wanted when you used version X+. Version X isn't changed at all, it's just that you explicitly said you accepted version X+1 whenever it became available.

Is this the same situation with the OGL and Paizo? Is Pathfinder licensed under OGL version X+? Seems... unwise. Not like the GPL or whatever, because the GPL is not aimed at restricting your business success and is not designed by your direct business competitor!

> Is this the same situation with the OGL and Paizo? Is Pathfinder licensed under OGL version X+?

Yes.

There are two reasons for this, one is that the first edition of pathfinder had to be, because it used material from D&D 3.5, and then the second edition didn't want to break compatibility with the first edition's ecosystem, and the second is it would violate the copyright of the OGL itself to use a modified version without an "or later version" clause. The same would be true for the GPL, except the GPL expressly provides a mechanism to choose to use the or later clause or not.

Ah, I get it! So Pathfinder 1st Ed was based in a version of D&D (3.5) which already used version OGL+! That's the piece of the puzzle I was missing: the minute Paizo decided to fork D&D, they became locked into this unfortunate licensing choice, at the mercy of future license updates. I also understand you cannot decide to use a "pinned" version if the original you're licensing is already using a "plus" version.

In hindsight, it looks like a terrible decision for Pathfinder to have accepted those terms. Had I been then, I would have made an entirely new game "in the spirit" of 3.5 but starting from scratch. I guess they opted for the more appealing route of trying to more directly appeal to disgruntled fans or D&D, and now they are facing the downsides of that. It sucks, agreed.

I guess this is a lesson about the risks of trying to ride another company's success instead of making your own thing. And yes, it happens with software as well.

(I'm still not convinced this will affect companies/games using the OGL for things entirely unrelated to D&D. That'd be surreal!)

If you navigate to the comment you want to reply to, it doesn’t appear to be rate limited. Only when viewing the full thread

I’m referring to the actual rate limit because dang and I disagree about the average quality of my comments, not the idiosyncratic UI.

huh, I don't think I've ever actually triggered that and I've done some marathon posting sessions where I replied within <30 seconds. Is that a per user rate limiter?

I thought that Pathfinder 2e was much like software development: The latest commit in a branch which has OGL 1.0 at its root.

Does OGL 1.1 mean that /all/ branches are affected?

That is what Wotc is trying to do, yes. They are trying to post-facto invalidate 1.0a after 20+ years.

The software equivalent would be if the FSF found some sneaky legalese, and came out with a hostile GPL 5 and simultaneously invalidated all previous versions of the GPL. Thus rendering everyone pre-v5 unable to publish going forward, with the only recourse to “upgrade” to the new version.

It’s sick, and likely not legal, but in the D&D example Hasbro have a much bigger legal team than the people they are trying to bully. So the threat of a potentially expensive lawsuit to force small fish into a legally dubious license.

> Why did Paizo use a license not designed by them?

I don't know their exact reasoning, but I always add licenses when publishing software I write, and they always are ones I didn't design (because I've never written a license myself). I don't think it's that crazy to use an established license that seems to be working well in a community you'd like to emulate when trying to launch you're own; I doubt Paizo had any more idea than the rest of us that WotC would pull something like this.

> And if they did a full rewrite, are they under any obligation at all to Wizards of the Coast? If they used the OGL to allow third-parties for Pathfinder, not D&D, what does this have to do with WotC? And cannot they simply switch to another license, if 2nd edition is truly a full rewrite?

My (admittedly primitive) understanding of licensing was that once something was released publicly with an indefinite license, it generally wouldn't be possible to retract that later. The copyright holder can change licenses as they see fit, but nobody will be bound by the new license unless they accept it or use a new version of the product that doesn't offer the old license. This leads me to theorize that one of a few things could be going on here:

1. The new version of the OGL (1.1) disallows you to continue using the old version (1.0) once you start using something with it. If this turns out to be the case, then people would be able to continue using the materials as-is at the last point where the OGL 1.0 was offered, but they wouldn't be able to use any future changes without accepting version 1.1 as a replacement for all of the preexisting content as well. WotC might have only intended this, but due to poor communications and/or wording in the license change, people got worried and then the narrative got out of control 2. The license works like I described in option 1 due to WotC knowing that they can't actually retroactively change the license for people already using it, but they intentionally obfuscated this to try to scare people into switching to using the new version even if they shouldn't technically have to * The license does actually a say that it's overriding the previous one, which is not actually something a license is supposed to be able to. WotC either doesn't realize this or is hoping that in a legal battle they either can either prolong it to starve their opponents of resources or manage to convince a judge to rule against the existing consensus and establish a new precedent.

I think that option 2 is the most likely by a slight margin, but I might be biased as someone who played PF1 and now plays PF2. Option 3 would be the scariest to me given that a prolonged legal battle seems like it would be the most insulated from public opinion, which I think is mostly against the new license right now.

> I don't know their exact reasoning, but I always add licenses when publishing software I write, and they always are ones I didn't design (because I've never written a license myself). I don't think it's that crazy to use an established license that seems to be working well in a community you'd like to emulate when trying to launch you're own; I doubt Paizo had any more idea than the rest of us that WotC would pull something like this.

I understand this, but you don't use licenses designed by your business competitors whose main product is in direct competition to your own. The analogy here would be Microsoft using a license designed by Apple for Windows and MS Office! Or whatever their major line of products is nowadays.

And yet Apple run iCloud on Linux servers on Microsoft Azure. Is it really that different? (EDIT: Google says they moved to GCP in 2018, but doesn't change the point)

I think it's different. In your example, what is the license Apple is using for its major product that was designed by Microsoft?

A software platform is not a license. But also, Apple moved to GCP, problem solved. This doesn't seem to be the same situation as Paizo's, is it?

If Paizo wholly owns the IP (PF1E: No, SF: Maybe, PF2E: Probably), then they can move to a competing license like CC-BY-SA. That would solve the "cannot distribute their own products" problem, but it would mean their entire ecosystem including third parties would need to propagate that change.

It also doesn't change the fact that Wizards could argue they have an OGL v1.0a+ license, and use OGL v1.1 to put pathfinder 1e srd on their new vtt without paying paizo for example

Yes, now I understand. Thanks for this and your other explanation.

If I were Paizo I would sever Pathfinder entirely from the OGL, especially if they rewrote their game from scratch, and ask modules writers to switch to the new licensing. But what do I know?

> Why did Paizo use a license not designed by them?

Let's imagine a scenario:

1. Paizo releases Pathfinder 1E. It's uses material from D&D 3.5 SRD which requires it to use the OGL.

2. A third party releases a campaign for pathfinder 1E. It uses material from pathfinder 1E which requires it to use the OGL

3. Paizo releases Pathfinder 2E. They change to CC BY-SA for their open components.

4. I now want to update that campaign to the 2E rules. But the original campaign publication insists I must use OGL, and Pathfinder 2E insists I use CC BY-SA and now I cannot.

I think a mix of (a) the scenario above, (b) legal CYA in case it was found Pathfinder 2E was too close to 3.5e material and (c) using what they're used to led to the decision to continue to use OGL for Pathfinder 2E.

I see.

All the "fun" of software licensing, only for pen and paper games. It's like we are already in hell.

On top of what the other said about having a license that is well known, one of the rationale is not having to spend a lot of time and money being sure that nothing covered but the OGL in version 1 is used in version 2

A friend invited me to a DnD game he was starting for his son. I’d never really played regularly before that. He said he invited a few other friends who reacted “Oh, 4e? No thanks”

I understand the dedication to 3.5 - it was years, if not decades of experience, commitment, and buy in. It can’t be helped to see the several editions since as desperate effort to get more sales from WoTC

* * *

Reading your post it suddenly downed on me that the only good thing which might come out of Hasbro botching the OGL is that people might start playing games with actually interesting rules rather than D&D.

But "what is interesting" ??

If you just want to perform improv-roleplay out some scenarios, then Dread is probably the best. The only action the players do is:

1. Pull piece out of the Jenga Tower

2. Roleplay the result (success == You succeeded at the current situation. Tower-falls == you die).

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There's better systems out there (aka: Dread) if you really just wanted simplicity. World of Darkness is probably the more mainstream "simple / roleplay heavy" game of importance. (Dread is perhaps overly simple, but that's the point of it. Its basically improv / roleplaying simulator and that alone)

D&D, for all of its faults, is a fully specified battle simulator. It doesn't mean that everything makes sense (what were the grapple rules again?), but most everything has been thought out, and what "should happen" is often written down somewhere.

On the other hand, many people prefer improv / rules-free systems (like Dread, or World of Darkness to a lesser extent).

Anyway, there's plenty of other games. But the niche of D&D is the well specified set of rules of how magic and physical interact with each other. (This magical force field has X HP and 30 Hardness, interacting with your Adamantine sword that ignores hardness 20 and less, etc. etc.)

Oh yeah, I realise that my opinion is far from universally valid and that I both don’t play much tabletop roleplaying and came to it from an improv background which means I’m not necessarily looking for the same things that other players are.

Still I’m firmly in the camp of those thinking D&D focus a lot of attention to the insanely boring and uninteresting part of role playing - aka how a sword interacts with a magic shield in excruciatingly tedious mathematical details - and very little attention to what’s actually fun which is, well, playing a role.

I think its rules, its prevalence and the fact it’s mostly played in somewhat bland heroic fantasy settings have been a major turndown for a lot of people who would actually enjoy roleplaying so in a way I guess I should celebrate anything making it less popular.

As a lot of my friends like to say, the two players are roleplayers and rollplayers.

Roleplayers are here for the improv / acting.

Rollplayers are here for the combat. D&D absolutely is combat focused.

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Lets take an example: When a Wizard casts Disintegrate, and a friendly Druid casts "Wall of Stone" to block it, what should happen? Are you interested in debating / improvising the result? Do you want it to be defined?

Improv players want this to be ill-defined. They want to make something up, depending on the current situation / feel of the game. If its a big boss fight and the Wizard is the evil big bad guy, maybe the Disintegrate goes through and hits the players. If its just some mook, maybe its a "weaker disintegrate" and gets blocked by the stone wall.

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This is terrible for combat / tacticians. A tactician wants to know that Disintegrate _always_ makes exactly a "one 10-foot cube" hole in the stone structure (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/disintegrate.htm), and always counters-and-dispels Force effects. Because the tactics + interactions have been agreed upon ahead of time, it means that the tactics of the game are focused. Its a battle closer to chess, or perhaps war-simulators / war-gaming, where you need to know what interacts with what, and how, to proceed.

You can't just make stuff up in a war-simulator. They need to have pre-defined actions. Knowing that this level 5 spell (Wall of Stone) can effectively counter a level 6 Disintegrate is an oddity in the hierarchy of magic (usually, you need an equal, or higher-level spell to counter other magic). But taking advantage of resource-management (they spend level 6 spell, you spend level 5 spell, so you have more resources left over afterwards) is just part of the game.

To give you an idea of how wide the gap is, I don’t ever have to think about an interaction between two named spells. My issue is not that the interaction is too precisely defined. It’s that it shouldn’t have to be here at all. That’s a narratively uninteresting part of the situation. If there is to be a fight between people with fantastical powers, I want the rules to solve the thing quickly without unnecessary fuss so we can get back to what matters. Your two last paragraphs are just tedium from my point of view.

> I never ever want to have to think about the interactions between named spells in a fight.

Alas, that's not how games work. Someone casts "Insanity", can it be removed with Dispel Magic? What about Antimagic Field? What happens if you kill the person, then resurrect them, do they come back with the insanity effect?

The story must go on. You either decide that you want it ill specified (ie: whoever improvs the best gets the decision), or you have a rulebook that carefully lays out the interactions.

You don't have to know the interactions. Simply knowledge that millions of other players have come across this game, and have likely already come across this situation and have analyzed the rules + made a decision is enough.

No person wants to memorize rulebooks. But we dungeon masters do so to ensure fairness in our decisions. If someone doesn't like the ruling, i can always point out the rulebook (or if not the rules, then an online discussion of a similar situation) that will settle the debate.

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Because if you know a thing about players, they will try everything to "Just for flavor, have that +5 Magic Sword on their Gorilla because its awesome" (when they really just want to roll more damage than everyone else in the party).

If I let the Druid effectively have twice the magic items of everyone and letting his pet-gorilla play a Fighter, then everyone else loses (because there's no way they can keep up with the damage output of a Gorilla using weapons locked to martial class). Martial weapons are locked to martial classes for a reason: those classes lose spellcasting but gain more damage to gain another role (the damage-dealing role) to play in this game.

In effect: the 1d8 fists of a Gorilla are there and balanced against the needs of everyone else. The Druid + Pet-Gorilla already play with two turns per... turn. They're already considered quite strong in the game, I as the dungeon master, need to know where "too much damage" starts to seep in and where "Improv rulebreaking" can start making the Druid stupidly overpowered.

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I've played with lots of "Improv" people. Even with their best interests at heart, the game innately becomes a "Lemme bullshit my own powers to be better than everyone else's, so that I'm the star of this show".

Maybe you don't do it, but *someone* in the group always tries to do this. You need to cut them down and restrict them so that their power level remains roughly on the same level as everyone else in the party. Knowing the limitations of spells, as well as the limitations of weapons, is a good starting point to ensuring fairness at the table.

------

Going back to the top. Insanity is 7th level and is explicitly stated that only 7th level spells and above (like Limited Wish) can remove it. Trying to bullshit a 3rd level spell (Dispel Magic) into removing Insanity means that the Wizards / Sorcerers become overpowered, relative to the abilities of everyone else. You have to make them spend a 7th level slot to heal this particular curse.

> Alas, that's not how games work.

Plenty of games work this way thankfully.

What you describe after is hell. That’s exactly what I hate about RPG. You don’t have to care about balancing power level and people “bullshiting“ their powers if your game simply doesn’t have these mechanics. I don’t want to have to play through a detailed combats ever especially in a heroic fantasy setting. That’s as far removed from fun a situation as I can imagine.

It’s interesting because our discussion makes it obvious that there are entirely orthogonal way of enjoying RPG with next to no overlap.

To give my perspective, I fully agree with you and I'm not an "improv" kind of gamer. I want combat, but I also want simple rules and a fast flow to the gameplay, not tedium.

D&D is not only tedious to me, it's also a "mechanicist" (for lack of a better word) approach to fantasy. It's rules-based rather than fun-based. It doesn't tell a story, it tells how spell X interacts with weapon Y and how to read charts and stats. A fight in movies doesn't happen like that, the flow and thrill is entirely different.

I'm ok rolling dice, it's fun! But give me a result fast and make it narratively meaningful, nothing breaks immersion like arguing whether a level 35 Pastamancer can cast Fireball against a level 5 shield of enchanted wood.

> A fight in movies doesn't happen like that, the flow and thrill is entirely different.

If we look at real life games, such as Fencing... and less "combat" like games, like Football or Baseball, we end up with huge rule systems to fairly resolve conflicts.

One can say "I just want to throw a ball and have fun". But there is no _GAME_ here. If you want to play "Basketball", and get good at "Basketball", it becomes very important to define a fowl.

Same thing in the D&D world. You may not necessarily have to define what is or isn't a fowl in your games, but should combat grow intense and adversarial, then it becomes a necessity.

No, Dread is no good, I'm not interested in role-playing. Dread seems barely a game at all.

I disagree about your sports analogy. D&D is the worst possible engine to simulate the fast paced flow of a sports game.

Or a fight. It's a mechanistic simulation, way too emphasis on interactions between low level rules. It's like attempting to design a good soccer game by writing lots of rules about the physics of the ball, how each bristle of the grass interacts with the ball, how the materials of the shoe affect the kick -- and all of this must be consulted in several charts every time there is a kick!

A wargame designer I know once put it like this: if your rules take an your of play to simulate something that in real life takes a few minutes, you are doing something wrong!

> Alas, that's not how games work. Someone casts "Insanity", can it be removed with Dispel Magic? What about Antimagic Field? What happens if you kill the person, then resurrect them, do they come back with the insanity effect?

> The story must go on. You either decide that you want it ill specified (ie: whoever improvs the best gets the decision), or you have a rulebook that carefully lays out the interactions.

> You don't have to know the interactions. Simply knowledge that millions of other players have come across this game, and have likely already come across this situation and have analyzed the rules + made a decision is enough.

You need a way to resolve conflicts. But that doesn't need to be some kind of zillion-layer spell simulation game (and in fact I'd argue that that just lends itself to its own kind of bullshitting, where people find ways to do things like the peasant railgun or locate city nuke).

> Going back to the top. Insanity is 7th level and is explicitly stated that only 7th level spells and above (like Limited Wish) can remove it. Trying to bullshit a 3rd level spell (Dispel Magic) into removing Insanity means that the Wizards / Sorcerers become overpowered, relative to the abilities of everyone else. You have to make them spend a 7th level slot to heal this particular curse.

OK so why bother having specific named spells with specific mechanics? Just say that guy's a level 7 wizard so his spell has strength 7+d6, my guy's a level 3 wizard so my spell has strength 3+d6, we make our rolls and the explanation of what happens (he bewitches my mate to make him insane and I try to dispel it) is purely flavour? That's no less objective, no less easy to be fair about (in fact it gives me far fewer avenues to try and bullshit you), but it doesn't require us to go memorize a textbook's worth of spell names and interactions.

Think about how you as a DM resolve non-combat conflicts in D&D - I want to persude the King's council to do this, another party member wants to blackmail the chancellor to vote against me - something that's a far more interesting part of most RPG games than "the party kills all the orcs". Why isn't that worth simulating in all this mechanical detail? Or is it that simulating it in such detail wouldn't actually enhance the experience? Then why not treat combat the same way?

Some games indeed take the approach you suggest. It's just that D&D has convinced its fan base that you need lots of names, details and complications.

> like the peasant railgun

Which doesn't exist in the game. When the last peasant lets go of the object, it falls to the grown on the same square as the peasant.

It only becomes "bullshit", when the improv player comes in and argues that because the object traveled 500-squares in less than 5-seconds, it must be going at X speed or Y momentum and carries forward.

But that's just bullshit. There's nothing in 3.5 that discusses "momentum", or "acceleration". It is "It is a move action to hand an object to another player". That's the rule.

People who mess with shenanigans are the problem, including peasant railgunners.

> It only becomes "bullshit", when the improv player comes in and argues that because the object traveled 500-squares in less than 5-seconds, it must be going at X speed or Y momentum and carries forward.

This is very much not an improv-player attitude IME; improv-players mostly want in-genre things to happen. When you simulate the nuts and bolts, you're more likely to attract the kind of player who sees that as an abstract puzzle to optimize and does so.

(And I note you skipped the Locate City nuke, I guess because that does work in-game? Fundamentally rule-based magic systems tend to be exploitable, because if you want the kind of things that fictional magic does in-genre to be possible, you have to make your magic be able to do impossible things, but the rules that allow that will tend to allow other impossible things which are more min-maxable).

> People who mess with shenanigans are the problem, including peasant railgunners.

Sure. My point is that adding more detailed mechanics does nothing to deter that; quite the opposite.

> This is very much not an improv-player attitude IME; improv-players mostly want in-genre things to happen

Hardly. Everyone likes to pretend "they're just in it for the story", but in my experience, they just want to give themselves advantages in my experience.

> And I note you skipped the Locate City nuke

3.5 is known to be pretty busted. I'm not aware of this sequence of events being possible in Pathfinder, which is my preferred crunch.

There are certainly busted things in Pathfinder (see Summoner). But upon recognition, I talk with the player and we work something out. (see Summoner Unchained).

If something is busted and truly too much for the system to handle, I stomp down as dungeon master. That's my duty above all, to ensure fairness in the game.

> Hardly. Everyone likes to pretend "they're just in it for the story", but in my experience, they just want to give themselves advantages in my experience.

Meh, at some point the only solution is "get better players". I've had if anything the opposite problem, with players who enjoy doing a dramatic death scene so much that they'd rush to these moments of sacrifice and loss even when they weren't really necessary. Improv-oriented players as I know them enjoy telling a story and are there for that; the problem you get is every player trying to hog the narrative spotlight (often with their moments of tragic suffering) rather than every player trying to be more powerful than the others.

> Think about how you as a DM resolve non-combat conflicts in D&D - I want to persude the King's council to do this

If your players are anything like my players, they'll cast Dominate Person on the King's Council. I'll have to note with them that the King's Council are elite and therefore expected to have Mind Blank, offering them immunity to their attempts.

They can work with persuasion, but if they are under the effect of Glibness, the King's Wizard would be able to see Glibness as an aura. The King's Paladin may use Zone of Truth to counteract the effects of Glibness, or maybe point out Glibness as "cheating" in the King's Court.

(Mind Blank doesn't help vs Glibness. Glibness simply makes the party's Bard's lies more believable. Its not an actual enchantment upon the King's Court, but instead a "buff" given to the Bard. So additional levels of security for the King's Guard are needed.)

As such, the battle of spells, trust, and other such interactions becomes a game. How well have the players prepared for the social encounter? Are they trying to use spells to "cheat"? How are the king's guards, Wizards, and Clerics trying to prevent the cheating?

Should I let the players get away with cheating? Well, I don't decide. I let the dice decide. As well as the rules that the game are around.

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Maybe the party is able to successfully hide the Glibness through some means. If they thought through their attempts to +40 Bluff check to convince the King's court of their intentions, I will grant them the +40 bluff check.

But if their Glibness / attempts at cheating are discovered, I'll grant a heavy penalty (-15) to their interactions for the rest of court.

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Players _WILL_ attempt to cheat (aka: use a spell to "solve") social encounters. This is just part of the game, and part of the fun. Are you, the dungeon master, ready to offer them a proper game of wits and preparation?

> OK so why bother having specific named spells with specific mechanics? Just say that guy's a level 7 wizard so his spell has strength 7+d6, my guy's a level 3 wizard so my spell has strength 3+d6, we make our rolls and the explanation of what happens (he bewitches my mate to make him insane and I try to dispel it) is purely flavour? That's no less objective, no less easy to be fair about (in fact it gives me far fewer avenues to try and bullshit you), but it doesn't require us to go memorize a textbook's worth of spell names and interactions.

Notice the above interactions. Glibness, despite level 3, avoids the Mind Blank preparation. Mind Blank does protect vs the more direct forms of enchantment (ex: Suggestion, Dominate Person, Geass), but it isn't a complete defense for the King's guard.

Of course, maybe the King's Dragon simply casts Anti-magic field and negates all magical preparations for the encountrer.

Note that Artifacts (aka: items from god) are immune vs mortal magic, and are one able to avoid the effects of Anti-magic field. This is where the DM has an opportunity to override the rules of the system and provide a story. (You can, at any time, "win the bullshit" fest by declaring an item a special artifact).

But you want to ensure that if you ever do declare a god-level artifact in play, that the players "saw it coming" to an extent (foreshadowing), or otherwise works in your story.

This is far more tactical, and even story-driven, than rolling a d6 and saying "my dice was higher than yours therefore I win".

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A skilled DM will also do this when its story-appropriate. I would _NEVER_ have an Orc-King's court pull these shenanigans (outside of maybe one Half-Orc Cleric who the players would be familiar with). But the opposite problem may happen, the Orc-King, upon losing an argument to skill alone, may claim the adventurers were cheating at the argument/debate through magic and it'd be up to the players to prove (to a non-magical being) that they were in fact, not using magic.

Etc. etc.

With skill, you can setup good stories more easily through these interactions.

> As such, the battle of spells, trust, and other such interactions becomes a game. How well have the players prepared for the social encounter? Are they trying to use spells to "cheat"? How are the king's guards, Wizards, and Clerics trying to prevent the cheating?

> Players _WILL_ attempt to cheat (aka: use a spell to "solve") social encounters. This is just part of the game, and part of the fun. Are you, the dungeon master, ready to offer them a proper game of wits and preparation?

> This is far more tactical, and even story-driven, than rolling a d6 and saying "my dice was higher than yours therefore I win".

Yes and no. You can offer the players a tactical game of spells, but to the extent that you folow the standard rules this is inherently an abstract puzzle, not really any more attached to the story than rolling a die. Some players enjoy puzzling out a magic system, but many do not. And to the extent that you make it depend on story-relevant artifacts, the rules framework isn't really helping you set things up.

How do the players "win" or "solve" the puzzle? Either they make the sensible, competent, mainstream move - which is fine, but not really narratively relevant and not worth spending a lot of time on - or they find a loophole in your magic system (or in the border between your magic system and common sense), which will almost certainly be against narrative and genre, and you'll have to either allow it or disallow it and either one is pretty unsatisfying - or they notice specifics of the story you've been foreshadowing - something you can do just as well without a standard mechanical magic system. (Yes, if you're very skilled then maybe you can work with the logic-puzzle approach and create an artifact which interacts in a novel way with some standard spell, and the player spots a way to use that that you intended. But more likely they spot a different, more powerful interaction than the one you meant for them to, and then we're back to finding a loophole in the magic system).

> With skill, you can setup good stories more easily through these interactions.

Maybe. In my experience even in genre fiction the best stories aren't, and shouldn't, really be about the magic or the tactics - they're about the deep human themes, trust, betrayal, arrogance and all that Shakespearean stuff. Gandalf fighting the Balrog isn't about him realising that Moria stone was carved by the dwarves and would be vulnerable to magic, it's about him realising that this enemy is undefeatable and sacrificing himself for the sake of his fellows.

The best and most satisfying way for a player to "win" or "solve" a scenario, IME, is a) for them to notice setting or character details that they can exploit (maybe the younger prince is jealous of the elder? Maybe the chancellor is obeying the tenets of a less-popular faith that a party member has ties to?) or b) them to come up with something creative that I hadn't thought of but that is still genre-appropriate and sufficiently "realistic". And I don't think a detailed mechanics system helps a lot with either of those, because at the end of the day either the detailed mechanics system gives you an answer that lines up with common sense or it gives you one that doesn't, and either way it's not helping much.

> How do the players "win" or "solve" the puzzle?

Through fun, ultimately. Maybe its fun if they don't win.

So they try something, they fail. Its just a social encounter, now the King's guard is distrustful of them and the story continues. No biggie, I can handle that as a dungeon master.

Win or lose, the story continues. The importance is that the players have agency in the process, as well as knowing the limits of their own powers and capabilities.

> The best and most satisfying way for a player to "win" or "solve" a scenario, IME, is a) for them to notice setting or character details that they can exploit (maybe the younger prince is jealous of the elder? Maybe the chancellor is obeying the tenets of a less-popular faith that a party member has ties to?) or b) them to come up with something creative that I hadn't thought of but that is still genre-appropriate and sufficiently "realistic". And I don't think a detailed mechanics system helps a lot with either of those, because at the end of the day either the detailed mechanics system gives you an answer that lines up with common sense or it gives you one that doesn't, and either way it's not helping much.

Or they could just... ya know... beat me (the Dungeon Master / chief antagonist) in the game. Or defeat the foes that I've laid out before them.

Generally speaking, social encounters shouldn't be high risk. The high-risk actions in my experience should be combat. If the players die, they know trouble will happen as the bad guys move forward and wreck the kingdom or whatever.

> Maybe. In my experience even in genre fiction the best stories aren't, and shouldn't, really be about the magic or the tactics - they're about the deep human themes, trust, betrayal, arrogance and all that Shakespearean stuff. Gandalf fighting the Balrog isn't about him realising that Moria stone was carved by the dwarves and would be vulnerable to magic, it's about him realising that this enemy is undefeatable and sacrificing himself for the sake of his fellows.

I don't need a story to play Axis and Allies.

> Through fun, ultimately. Maybe its fun if they don't win.

> The importance is that the players have agency in the process, as well as knowing the limits of their own powers and capabilities.

Sure; my point was: what is it that makes the difference between the players winning or losing? If it's about whether they spotted (narratively relevant) connections, understood things, had good ideas, that's interesting. If it's about whether they had a clever leap of genre-appropriate logic, that's interesting. If it's about whether they solved an abstract logic puzzle, that's less interesting; if it's about whether they out-argue you or browbeat you that's deeply uninteresting. But distinguishing between "came up with a clever way to use the detailed abstract magic system" and "came up with some bullshit" is, if anything, harder than distinguishing between "came up with a clever piece of imaginative improv" and "came up with some bullshit"; better for a powergamer to come up with something stylish and genre-appropriate that benefits them than for them to find some bizarre spell interaction that does something absurd that benefits them.

(If it's about whether they rolled higher or lower that's not really interesting, but it's quick and avoids interrupting the flow, so that's fine for a low-stakes moment. Certainly making one roll for a narratively unimportant encounter is better than making dozens).

> Generally speaking, social encounters shouldn't be high risk. The high-risk actions in my experience should be combat.

Why? D&D pushes you towards doing it that way, but it's not narratively satisfying. Making a lot of dice rolls can give a certain kind of player the illusion that they had agency in winning or losing (particularly important if you want them to accept the death of their character), but in reality it all averages out and who wins a given combat is largely a question of what everyone's stats look like going into it. (Or you allow the players to come up with tactics that you consider clever enough to give them advantages - but then we're back to you having to judge whether they've come up with something good or some bullshit).

> I don't need a story to play Axis and Allies, Chess, Go, or a myriad of other games though. When playing an adversarial game with my friends, its not about story. Its about combat and adversaries.

Right - but roleplaying and adversarial games go poorly together. If a game is adversarial then players have to do mechanically optimal things (and, as you say, will look for every excuse to give their characters a mechanical advantage) rather than the narratively interesting things. Why should a player to try to act in-character when it can only disadvantage them?

> Why? D&D pushes you towards doing it that way,

Because D&D is a combat board game.

If you want to play roleplaying, try Dread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_(role-playing_game)

> Making a lot of dice rolls can give a certain kind of player the illusion that they had agency in winning or losing (particularly important if you want them to accept the death of their character), but in reality it all averages out and who wins a given combat is largely a question of what everyone's stats look like going into it. (Or you allow the players to come up with tactics that you consider clever enough to give them advantages - but then we're back to you having to judge whether they've come up with something good or some bullshit).

That's like saying Chess or Backgammon isn't satisfying because you're just moving pieces around or rolling dice.

People can love the game itself. Positioning, selection of spells, cooperation with allies. Etc. etc. D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder is a good game at its core.

The same cannot be said of all systems of combat. (IE: World of Darkness). World of Darkness's dice seem more like a randomization element. But then again, this is a roleplaying game, rather than a rollplaying game.

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All the "roleplayer" wants is a random element. Someone to have randomly decided to have been the winner / loser, and then to roleplay the new situation. From this perspective, D&D is counterproductive.

So don't play D&D. Play the myriad of other, roleplay heavy games (like Dread, World of Darkness, Changeling, Vampire, etc. etc.). They're perfectly good games.

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> but it's not narratively satisfying

Don't turn D&D into something it isn't. If you're not satisfied by the combat of D&D, then do not play it. There are plenty of other games that have far better focus on the roleplaying aspect of this genre.

EDIT: Moods shift. Sometimes I feel like combat. I use D&D / Pathfinder / etc. etc. for that. Maybe Ikusa or Axis and Allies as well.

Sometimes I feel like roleplaying. I pull out World of Darkness instead

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Like, if the 400-pages of spell-interactions and obscure flanking rules is counterproductive to your enjoyment of the game... maybe don't choose that system? But I've derived plenty of enjoyment from these systems (3.5, Pathfinder, etc. etc.) so I can say its worthwhile... if you're into it. But don't force yourself to like it if you're not into it...

> People can love the game itself. Positioning, selection of spells, cooperation with allies. Etc. etc. D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder is a good game at its core.

I enjoy playing Mordenheim-style small squad miniatures combat games (and that's what D&D is at its heart) on occasion. But I've never found a game that can succeed at being both a competitive game and a roleplaying game at the same time (not just RPG-style games, I had this problem with Android the board game too). One can't be a servant of two masters.

> So don't play D&D. Play the myriad of other, roleplay heavy games (like Dread, World of Darkness, Changeling, Vampire, etc. etc.). They're perfectly good games.

Right. You seemed to originally be claiming that having a less mechanically detailed, more roleplay-oriented system inherently made games less balanced and more unfair. "Lemme bullshit my own powers to be better than everyone else's, so that I'm the star of this show" is a problem in fully freeform systems, but you don't need a detailed combat system to resolve it; light systems where conflict is a simple roll (even WoD is a bit heavy for my tastes personally) handle fair conflict resolution just fine. (And I'd argue that they end up being fairer than mechanically heavy systems where the powergamers with min-maxed builds have an advantage over players who just picked a build that felt fun).

I think there's a third position, the one I hold:

I've zero interest in LARP'ing or "acting" my role, but also zero interest in crunchy stats-heavy combat. I prefer light adventures with fast paced combat where not every fart is regulated by a chart. A Frostgrave level of complexity is about right for me; or Risus.

I do find narrative experimental games such as Trophy Dark appealing, but they may require too much from players.

My main problem with 4e wasn't that it was oversimplified but that combat took forever to resolve. I was never sure exactly why.

Combat in 3.5 averages at like, 4 rounds, even for a boss fight. With the 1st, maybe 2nd round, deciding the results of the combat.

Indeed: there are spells (Phantasmal Killer, Baleful Polymorph, Dominate Person, Power Word Kill, Banishment), that ends combat in a singular turn.

You're right in that 4e combat was much slower and purposeful. I'm... neutral to this. I can say that 3.5 / Pathfinder 1.0 combat is unusually brutal... to a non-intuitive degree. 3.5 / Pathfinder 1.0 heavily relies upon resurrection magic in practice due to its unusual brutality.

I had a strong negative reaction to 4e without having consumed any media that would have primed me to dislike it.

It felt like it was designed by people who thought the kids are playing World of Warcraft instead of D&D, and tried to design a game that would appeal to them with similar party roles and a layout of cards in front of you that perhaps would remind you of a WoW inventory with all its timers. The problem with that while the same people might want to play both a table-top RPGs session and raid night, they don't like them for the same reasons.

5e's approach was much smarter: simplify a few annoying things (like level 1 damage), tweak the design and add a bunch of cool stuff, but otherwise just let D&D be D&D and lean on marketing the aesthetic/nostalgia and the ability to play without needing to find someone local to teach it to you and your friends.

There are a number of games released under the OGL, e.g.:

1. 13th Age

2. Castles & Crusades

3. Fudge

4. Pathfinder

Note that some of these (e.g. Pathfinder) make use of the D&D base rules and setting (System Reference Document, SRD) covered by the OGL. However, not all the games released under the OGL are tied to elements of the SRD.

The issue with the revocation of the OGL 1.0a license is that it affects all of those games.

Then there are all the publishers (Critical Role, MCDM, etc.) creating settings and campaigns for D&D and related systems under the OGL.

The OGL 1.1 license affects video (like Critical Role's Legends of Vox Machina) and other content. It affects people using Patreon for revenue, and possibly (through mentioning pantomime) things like cosplay on TikTok and Patreon.

The full implications are not fully known, and a lot of this would likely need challenging in court. It also depends on how much WotC/Hasbro are willing to challenge/go after.

> The issue with the revocation of the OGL 1.0a license is that it affects all of those games.

How so, if they're not using WotC IP?

Honest question, it seems absurd to me that the can cancel a license and have it affect people who licensed their own IP under those conditions.

IANAL. I am looking at a copy of OGL 1.0a and find this paragraph:

    9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License.

I believe that the crux of the matter is "authorized version of this License". I can see a few ways to argue that this phrase gives WotC the right to revoke any version of the license other than the most current one.

I don't read that as "we can revoke this retroactively on anything, even non-WoTC games" but I guess the lawyers will hash it out.

The OGL 1.1 license (according to the leaked draft/text) explicitly says that OGL 1.0a is no longer an authorized license.

The 1.1 license is clear that any content using SRD (System Reference Document) content will be in violation unless they update to the 1.1 license (and thus comply with either OGL 1.1 Commercial, OGL 1.1 Non-Commercial, or the Fan Content license).

The situation around non-SRD OGL content is murkier.

So not being a lawyer and not giving legal advice, to me this seems to say that as someone producing something with OGL1.0, "you MAY replace it with a newer, authorized version" means that if you don't, the old version stays, or goes away entirely ? I,e. you then may decide to use another new fresh license of your own choosing ? Or it becomes unlicensed ?

Because if there is a requirement that at anytime an authorized version were to be used, wouldn't the language needed be "you MUST replace it with a newer, authorized version" ?

Same question, I cannot wrap my head around this. If this is true, the OGL was a trap. But how did they not realize this, did they have no lawyers going over the license?

> How so, if they're not using WotC IP?

The concern is that changing that making OGL 1.0a unauthorized (has this already happened to 1.0?) has the effect banning further use of it with new works derived from works originally licensed under it or OGL 1.0 under the terms of ant OGL version (this relies on the any authorized version clause being seen as restrictive, not permissive.)

Its theoretically fixable for non-WotC dependent content, if everyone upstream relicenses under different terms starting from the root, but that's not going to help where creators are out of touch or license compatibility led to WotC content cross pollinating.

You can't revoke a license. Any change in the OGL will affect new products, not what was already made.

You can't revoke it but the question is whether it can affect future redistribution of pre-existing derivatives. The license appears to say so, but even if it does it may not be legal and thus would be voided.

Yeah, I understand it's complicated, but there is already a lot of FUD in the world about what copyright and licensing mean. The WotC/OGL discussion deserves a sober discussion by people who understand copyright and licensing, not going along with the fever emanating from places like Twitter.

You can if it's argued that the license was revocable, or forced to use new licenses. That's why everyone is angry, it's vague and who can afford to fight Hasbro in court when they use the vagueness to start a bully campaign against smaller creators first?

> affects video (like Critical Role's Legends of Vox Machina)

I would like to see them try biting into that apple. :) While we know that the origins of the show is in DnD there is nothing in it they could claim copyright over. It is the same as if a shower manufacturer would like to claim an idea I had while showering.

And while the CR team is quite small next to Hasbro, they have Amazon Studios as a producer who could probably lend them firepower.

CR Campaign 1 was on Pathfinder until they started trying to broadcast. You can see in the first few episodes how they struggle with remembering that the rules are different, Taliesen Jaffe ended up with a completely custom class because nothing mapped.

The hunter also keeps thinking that her pet is useful, which apparently is a thing in PF, but is definitely not in 5e.

As for:

> I would like to see them try biting into that apple. :)

They are already getting a bite of that apple. It's called free advertising, which they've been getting for almost 10 years now and all of the attendant profits from people trying to start their own Critical Role and buying models and books to go along with it.

And in the case of CR, they're also the publishers for some books based on CR, which means they're getting royalties from that as well.

I said this is double-dipping, but it's triple-dipping. It's just greed. Of the same sort we often have to deal with here, where something is done to build a community and then the bean counters try to figure out how to maximize profits. This isn't just bad for WotC or RPGs, things like this continue to set precedents that every company is lying to you and any outreach project is just about getting free labor.

They will have a proper licensing agreement of their own that WotC will be happy to amend with pretty much whatever, given the crazy marketing value they have.

They don't call it by name, but the prominent and frequent use of the Bigby's Hand spell seems like a vulnerability. My understanding is that WOTC defends their IP rights to the spells with specific characters' names attached (Tenser's, Bigby's, etc.)

I don't see how Wizards can "revoke" the OGL retroactively.

I really don't see how they can "revoke" the OGL on non-WoTC games.

Maybe Wizbro is mad that they're not getting any of the money that youtube and roll20 are taking in, but pulling a Nintendo seems completely counterproductive, since youtube and streamers are basically advertising D&D and helping newcomers learn how to play the game, and roll20 expands the group of players who can play (and also enabled groups to continue - or start - during the pandemic!)

OGL 1.0a:

    9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License.

If next OGL says that OGL 1.0a is no longer authorized - then it's retroactively invalidated.

This clause doesn't grant updated versions the authority to deauthorize prior versions.

* * *

You definitely can, and many do. But D&D is the lingua franca of this space. If you say you're casting Magic Missile, I know you're going to toss a few d4 on the table. Even if I'm brand new to your adventure, if you say you're a Level 15 Magician, I know you're a pretty righteous dude. No other system has the same level of familiarity across such a broad audience.

I think you're right though. No one with eyes on a big audience is going to want to tie their brand to a Wizards product after this decision. Shame.

Magician is not a class in D&D

D&D Terminology gets quite arcane, especially around the arcane casters.

So Wizard is the class, but the title inside of D&D depends on the school the Wizard specializes in. Much like how we call a "Doctor" also a "Brain Surgeon", the "Wizard" could be an "Enchanter", if they specialize upon memory-rewriting / charming / brain-bending magic. (Ex: Charm Person, Suggestion, Geass, Dominate Person).

But IIRC, there is no "Magician", as you said. But there are Evokers, Universalists, Conjurers, Diviners, Illusionists, Transmuters, Enchanters, Necromancers, and more. There are also Sorcerers (_totally_ different), Witches, Magi, Alchemists, Clerics, Druids.

Frankly, I'm personally surprised that there's no "Magician" yet. Its like someone stepped into D&D and surprisingly guessed at the one word that wasn't actually in the game yet... (The closest word, "Magi" is a "Magus" IIRC, not a "Magician")

If we go back to old school AD&D... from the Player's Handbook (1e) the class titles for a Magic-User were:

    1. Medium
    2. Seer
    3. Conjurer
    4. Theurgist
    5. Thaumaturgist
    6. Magician
    7. Enchanter
    8. Warlock
    9. Sorcerer
    10. Necromancer
    11. Wizard
    12+ Wizard (nth level)
    ...
    16. Wizard (16th level or Mage)
    17. Wizard (17th level)
    18. Wizard (18th level or Arch-Mage)

Screen shot of a scan of the first part of the table (it spans two pages and the 2nd page is uninteresting): https://imgur.com/a/WOS2TAF

sure .. but you'll note that he says a 15th level magician .. no such thing ;) Also I played a fuckton of AD&D .. i don't think anyone has ever used a class title in actual play that I know of.

That's what very good illusionists want you to think.

Yahhhh it's been a while for me :) I thought about googling but decided to gamble on my memory. Guess I lost :)

You just rolled a 1, that's all.

It has enabled developers to freely use the mechanics that make up much of the DnD - the "game engine" so to speak: the attribute system, levels, skills, classes, and so on - without paying license fees. The consequence of this is that franchises like Pathfinder now have to pay license fees for these mechanics. The consequence is that video games set in this universe [1] now have to pay liceses to WotC.

I assume these games will just slightly tweak the formula: use D30s instead of D20, change some class names, and so on. It's exceptionally hard to robustly copyright and enforce mathematics, but WotC's lawyers probably pose a significant enough threat to scare away developers.

1. for example: https://www.gog.com/en/game/pathfinder_kingmaker_explorer_ed...

FWIW general game mechanics are not copyrightable. So you don't need a license for core ideas like AC, character attributes, D20 skill/attack/save rolls, modifiers, advantage/disadvantage, equiptment yadda yadda.

It's the specifics of D&D's implementation where you need a license. You'd certainly need to develop your own feats, spells (and not just change the names!). You'd need new classes, or at least major changes (no re-using the level progressions or traits).

You'd need to play test the new variants because changes would be large enough to require new balncing.

All in all not a trivial modification.

Obligatory IANAL, but I think it's the text itself that's copyrighteable. So you can definitely use the same die rolls or whatever as long as you significantly paraphrase.

Spells and classes names cannot be used if they are trademarked, right? But if WotC didn't trademark "fireball", "paladin" or "hobgoblin", you can totally use them.

So you can't have a spell called "arcane missile" that does 1d4 damage every 2 levels of the caster? Can you really copyright the concept of an ability that deals (level // 2) * 1d4 damage to an enemy?

My understanding is that this is where things get tricky: realistically WotC probably can't go after anyone that creates an ability that is mechanically identical to DnD ability. Things like spell names, might be, but "fireball" is far too general to be copyrighted. But what about a spell called "fireball" that also has the same mechanics? That's where things can get complicated.

So what if they just doubled all HP values and damage values, and changed any names that are not unambiguously generic ("invisibility", "fireball", etc.) ? Damage values no longer overlap, and spell names are different. On what basis does WotC have to claim infringement?

> So you can't have a spell called "arcane missile" that does 1d4 damage every 2 levels of the caster?

I think you can. I don't think copyright covers gameplay mechanisms, it just covers the actual text of the rules. But IANAL.

I think for a single spell there's fairly little you'd need to modify (just the actual text of the description, and changing unique names). Not even changing damage dice.

The problem is making a whole spellbook with a one-to-one correspondence to WoTC's spellbook, even if each of those entries has been modified. The spellbook is more than just a bunch of separate spells - it's a collection carefully designed for balanced gameplay and has protection in itself. See [1] for one way that "compilations" can be treated as having more rights.

The EU also allows copyright of databases [2], and I think the spell list meets the criteria.

And don't forget you'd also be doing the same thing with races, classes, equipment, monsters, conditions, deities, feats, blah blah blah. Put together I think it's pretty likely to be infringing somewhere! Certainly enough that a lawsuit isn't getting dismissed.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf [2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...

Not a lawyer, but my understanding last I looked into it was that names and rules cannot be copyrighted (names can be trademarked though). In very limited cases a novel mechanic could be patented (famously MTG 'tapping' of cards). The issue overall is that no one wants to risk it in court, so there's no recent precedent to take inspiration from.

> Not a lawyer, but my understanding last I looked into it was that names and rules cannot be copyrighted (names can be trademarked though)

That's what the person you're replying to wrote.

Interestingly, I got a conclusive answer to this question when working at S2 on Heroes of Newerth.

The CEO accidentally CC'ed me (he meant to CC Sean, not Shawn) on a letter from Valve's lawyer threatening us with legal action for copying Beastmaster's mechanics. They had a side-by-side of ours (https://hon.fandom.com/wiki/Tundra) vs theirs (https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/Beastmaster), and pointed out that the mechanics were identical.

It was very surprising. So the answer is "Maybe not, but that won't stop companies from threatening to sue you." Or "Maybe it is, and companies will threaten to sue you." No one really knows, since it hasn't been tested in court.

I think people are mostly worried about old material which will fall into a grey zone distribution-wise if Hasbro revokes the previous version of the OGL.

Are they actually trying to revoke the previous version? I do not know, which is why I ask; honest question.

I observe that 1.0 contains the verbiage:

"Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and Distribute any Open Game Content originally Distributed under any version of this License."

which at least to my open source license not-a-lawyer read says that they basically can't revoke it.

They can relicense stuff going forward under 1.1, and that may be bad, but I wonder if people are misunderstanding and treating it as apocolyptic when it's just bad. It seems like the worst case scenario is the community undergoes a de facto fork and you can stick to a 1.0 world if you want, not that all the 1.0 stuff goes away.

This smells to me like many similar panics in our community when some project goes to relicense and people don't generally understand that the relicense only applies going forward, because in general you can't retroactively relicense an open license. (There are nuances to that statement which I'm skipping over, but I'd say that's the most correct short summary. The thing that people think is happening is not what is happening.) Of course it is still valid to be upset about the relicensing going forward! It just may not be quite as much a kick in the teeth as people think.

I guess the crux will be the meaning of the word "authorized". If Hasbro claims the OGL 1.0 is no longer authorized and can convince a court that this totally normal and OK, 3rd party vendors will have a problem.

They would also have to convince a court that Paragraph 9 is intended to be restrictive, rather than permissive. Nowhere does it say that only authorized licenses can be used, and it seems obviously wrong for a license to preclude its own use.

Unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to prove what is obvious in court. WOTC and Hasbro are counting on their money and lawyers to have a chilling effect.

FWIW Pazio would probably have enough money to bring this up for litigation. Still, a crappy position to be in.

Thank you, to you and the others. That makes this make a lot more sense.

> Are they actually trying to revoke the previous version? I do not know, which is why I ask; honest question.

Apparently they are. There is some uncertainty about their right to do so. The few layers opinions I have read tend to say they probably don’t but it’s not entirely clear cut. Someone would have to go to court for it to be ascertained but I doubt anyone wants to fight Hasbro for some old content generating no revenue.

Not to mention that it is incredibly expensive in the U.S. to get a court case to a point where it creates binding precedent - and arguably there is no such thing in the modern political environment. So even if every single case is won or settled largely in favor of independent content creators, there will still be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect on the entire scene, especially on creators whose works would require essentially-from-scratch rewrites to use a different system.

The phrase "any authorized version" is what people are worried about here, because the 1.1 leak includes language indicating that 1.0 is no longer authorized.

Part of the leaked 1.1 states that 1.0a is explicitly no longer "authorized"

> which at least to my open source license not-a-lawyer read says that they basically can't revoke it.

Its complicated.

The general law of gratuitous licenses (in the US) is that they are revocable at will; terms of the license do not overcome this. Whether the restrictions in a license like this are limitations on the permissions it grants (leaving it gratuitous) or consideration in exchange for permissions (making it a license contract) is not always an easy question.

Further, even if things for which the license has already been uses might be protected, the license text is an offer, and the offer can be withdrawn. This is important, because the OGL 1.0a isn’t sublicensable; every new user making a new work directly licenses all ancestor works under it, rather than sublicensing through the immediate parent.

But, even to the extent it is recovable, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may limit the effect on parties who have already reasonably relied on the promise of irrevocability.

Yeah, they explicitly had that FAQ on the OGL with stated that it was in WotC's best interest never to make a worse OGL since if they did that people would always be free to use a prior version, as explicitly stated in the license - that sure sounds like a promise. It also sounds like a description of their interpretation of the contract, which is also relevent.

The OGL does explicitly use the phrase "in consideration for", which you'd hope would make this non-gratuitous. Then again, IANAL.

They are going to "revoke" that license in the way that you will no longer be able to sell content with that license in the stores they control (which are all of the ones that matter).

Oh, so this is retroactively re-licensing existing stuff? That's bad.

The thing a lot of folks seem to miss is that it isn't just D&D using the OGL, there are non-D&D games (such as Fate, Fudge. Etc) which license themselves using the OGL.

But they don't need to update the license they use, right? So the other games can just issue their existing and current material with the existing license and it's all good?

So, the exact wording of the license includes a clause saying you can distribute under "any authorized version" of the OGL.

I dont think people expected wizard's to try and interpretation that as something they can try and revoke. But they are trying and it might go to court.

Hmm, so no connection at all to D&D? Does this affect them at all, then? What benefits do they draw from using the OGL at all?

It just seemed like a good license to use to allow others to build on their games. Just like it's not just the FSF distributing original software under the GPL.

But the FSF is never a competing business (it's not a business) and the GPL doesn't grant the FSF any rights over your stuff. So the OGL is not really analogous.

> and the GPL doesn't grant the FSF any rights over your stuff

Neither did the version of OGL they published their stuff over.

Imagine that the FSF goes crazy and writes a new version of GPL which gives them ius primae noctis, and also in the same new version they state the previous old version is no longer valid. That is the approximate analogy here.

But that's not how the existing license works, so who cares about any new GPL license? Unless you explicitly said "I want my work under the GPL or whatever crazy new version of the GPL ever exists", with the extra detail that the GPL is designed by a business competitor who is jealous of your success.

It'd be crazy.

Other communities were also concerned about the core team trying to take control of the system/assets. The Fate core folks specifically went with OGL to allay those concerns.

So are you saying the license is good (or so they thought) for third-parties making modules or content for any OGL-licensed game?

Fate Core is dual-licensed under the OGL and CC-BY. https://www.faterpg.com/licensing/licensing-fate-cc-by/

Sounds like the space is ready for development of an open framework that doesn't rely on corporate approval.

"One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it."

If you make all of your money off of books and models in a world full of wikis, web-apps and amateur typesetters, and especially 3D printing, they may worry that their revenue streams will dry up if they don't lock down the IP (which will be something an IP lawyer told them to think).

And now they'll put the idea into people's heads by trying to avoid that situation.

You don't want Matthew Mercer to have Creative Commons on his radar. Or a bunch of voice mail from other publishers who smell blood in the water. You don't want him thinking about ten years of fan donated artwork. Or that he hopes to retire some day and he and his friends can still play RPGs together, built on this world that is now in danger.

The D&D world is not covered by the OGL. its the core mechanics that have been mirrored by not just other TTRPGs, but video game RPGs as well.

This is like if the names of the functions in the c++ STL (and their argument/return types) was released under gpl, and they came out and "updated" their license to be basically cc-by-sa-nc but worse and also claimed it retroactively applied to the license. It could technically have repercussions to other languages that mirrored the style.

Now the fun question! how much of what was covered by the OGL was actually copyrightable?

Ideas and facts are not copyrightable, arrangement of ideas and facts can be copyrightable with a higher bar of 'creativity', but the barrer to change before it becomes a new 'arrangement' and not covered is also lower.

Ah, the OGL is just core mechanics?

I cannot imagine this being a big hurdle to videogames from now on, then. It's not that difficult to use entirely different mechanics in a computer RPG, and they had the details anyway. If the world/setting doesn't matter, I can't see how this can affect videogames not set in D&D worlds.

That is, I don't see video gamers rejecting a CRPG because its rules are not based on D&D. They'll get to kill monsters or whatever in Fantasyland, what does it matter that the inner workings are entirely new?

It might be difficult for virtual tabletop software called “roll20” to pivot away from the concept of using 20 sided dice to make decisions and determine success at an activity.

Hasbro definitely doesn't own the concept of a d20 roll.

The D20 is not owned by D&D.

Frostgrave is D20 based and owes nothing to the OGL or D&D.

> How important is it to stick to the D&D franchise?

Nor very important in my experience. I get that it's the most popular system globally, but the popularity seems uneven. Where I grew up people played Warhammer, Legends of 5 rings, vampire masquerade, and some others. I can't remember anyone playing DnD specifically. So... there are larger communities that don't really care about that one.

In practice it's much harder to avoid. Especially with the new players driving all the recent growth.

The brand is so dominant that in any group most of the players will play D&D or they will not play. If you don't have the brand on your 3rd party product then the average number of units you will sell is around zero.

It's not really Windows, D&D is Windows+Apple+Linux and everything else is one of the BSDs.

> The brand is so dominant that in any group most of the players will play D&D

I cannot wrap my brain around this. For boardgames, which is a growing market and has been for years now, people are buying and learning new games every day, especially geeks who are only too eager to teach them to their gaming groups.

How come for RPGs it's too difficult for one geek to evangelize a new RPG to their group, especially if they are newbies not too invested in an ongoing RPG campaign?

D&D is a very complex system, there are far simpler, newbie-friendly rules out there. How come you cannot convince your newbie friends to try one? One other commenter was mentioning how complex D&D is, how every spell and level and weapon is interconnected in very restricting ways in order to prevent overpowered characters -- that cannot be easy to teach! I played plenty of D&D based video games, like Icewind Dale, and for the life of me I'm thankful the computer hides all the complexity; I wouldn't have played them otherwise!

I honestly don't understand it completely, but there are a lot of casual players who will not even read the rules intro in the players handbook, and will play for a long time without ever learning how their character works. They don't want to leanr anything, they just want their DM friend to take them through some games and make it fun, so learning something they aren't even vaguely familiar with sounds like a lot of work.

It's also a longstanding, odd thing that even experienced players will spend a huge amount of time homebrewing hacks to D&D to make it work as a different kind of game instead of learning a new system that works well for the kind of game they want to play. Ttrpg systems seem to have a lot more momentum/brand loyalty than you would guess.

A lot of D&D players play a fairly "adversarial DM" style and, rightly, don't want to play the more narrative focused or rules-light systems that are easy to learn, because giving players freedom will lead to them abusing it. The dynamic is players wanting a power fantasy and relying on the DM to stop them from ruining the game with their rule bending.

I'm one of those people who likes learning new ttrpg systems and trying out different systems, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this. It seems like it's a lot of compounding factors, including a lot of growth being driven by streamers and new players who want to play D&D, not some nerd stuff they've never heard of.

Afaik D&D is the ttrpg game that has the biggest market share, more that 50% iirc. It's the only one known to the general public with several forgettable movies (one more soon), many games, and a lot of references in other cultural creations (such as the successful serie stranger thing) and was on the top of the wave created by the recent renaissance of boardgames/ttrpg.

As for the OGL license, you have to understand that ttrpg companies are usually very small (some people, sometimes only one) so they can't really spend a lot on exploring what is the best license or publicize a new one. So they take the license that is the most used in their domain which is the OGL

I understand D&D is the "Windows" of RPGs. I understand the market- and mind-share it enjoys. (Those movies: not many people remember or know about them though!). Obviously when Paizo forked D&D 3.5 and started Pathfinder, they were riding on the popularity of this particular RPG. Also evident is why there is a cottage industry of third-party modules, campaigns and gadgets for D&D: it makes sense to make these for the most popular system.

The thing is, it's much harder to implement "vendor lock-in" for RPGs than it is for hardware or software which has business uses. The cost of switching to another RPG system is very low: all it takes for a group of friends to start a new RPG is for the geekiest of them to buy a rulebook and evangelize it, there's almost zero cost (but the rulebook(s), of course).

I find videogames are a red herring as an argument for D&D, since most people playing CRPGs based on D&D don't even need to understand the rules; the computer does everything for them. And people will buy a flashy CRPG regardless of the underlying engine, all that matters is that the game is fun, hyped, has nice graphics, and friends are playing.

Don't forget there is a new movie coming very soon and I've just read a TV serie is in preparation.

IMHO WotC is pursuing a double strategy. On one side they try to pull a marvel, meaning becoming big in the media industry with movies, series and videogame (I expect to see many D& D games in the future if the movie is successful). On the other side they will try to create a subscription based walled garden in the RPG world.

you're right that for the moment switching to a new system isn't really expensive, it may change if wotc manage to create this walled garden