The Fate of D&D and OGL 1.1
As of the time of writing this, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has yet to respond to leaks about the latest 1.1 version of the OGL. They have had several days to do so, and so we can only take their silence as affirmation. Yes, those leaks are correct. Yes, they do intend to drain anyone using the OGL dry. No, this is not good for the health of the community.
For those who don’t know what is going on with the OGL, or simply want a refresher on what the OGL even is, the next section is for you. If you already know and are just curious about my, and by extension, Dump Stat’s opinion, skip to the next section.
What is an Open Gaming License?
The Open Gaming License (OGL) is a license created by WotC in 2000 as an olive branch to the TTRPG community at large. It offered their system to be used by anyone to create products that utilize their rules and mechanics, like classes, spells, magic, and more. It allowed non-game designers to create a game without having to figure out how to design a game.
But Why?
A good thing to consider when a company does anything is to figure out why they would do something. Typically, this means that they are likely to make money from their actions. But… how is giving your competitors the ability to use your game system supposed to make WotC money?
Back at the start of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition, the system was in a problematic era. At the end of 2nd edition, Dungeons & Dragons was looking like it was going to collapse and there would be nothing to show for WotC’s most recent purchase. Instead, WotC created a document that allowed their game to flourish. They created the OGL 1.0a.
What this did was bring tons of creators to their game system. While you might not be buying the core rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition at first, if you were playing a game based on the OGL, then you already knew the rules for Dungeons & Dragons. You can now be on-ramped into their system that much easier, making the act of learning the rules much easier to do (which is often a big roadblock for many players).
Or maybe you were really excited about a specific setting, but no one was making that setting until the OGL came out and now you had the perfect setting you always wanted to play in… and you are now buying 3rd edition books released by WotC to supplement that setting book created by a third party.
This license brought tons of new ideas, content creators, players, and more to Dungeons & Dragons and its system because it allowed more than one company to create products, some of them very niche, while WotC focused on the more generic sourcebooks plus creating setting books for their campaigns. This made them money because now everyone was using their system and they were the largest supplier of their system.
WotC was benefitting from having dozens of other creators in their space, even if they weren’t making 100% of the money. They were still making more money than if they had kept their game a closed system.
OGL 1.1
The leak for OGL 1.1 was broken by several different third-party creators on January 4th, 2023 - I first heard about it from the folks at Roll for Combat via their Twitter page. On January 5th, 2023 Gizmodo released their article on the leak, which really started being an eye-opening situation for many.
As of January 9th, as I’m writing this, WotC has made no responses to the leak.
Do We Need An Updated OGL?
No. The simple and complete answer is no. For the past twenty years, companies have been using the OGL without issue. WotC was still making hundreds of millions of dollars off of Dungeons & Dragons every year. What they are doing is predatory and in an effort to bankrupt other companies and keep them from producing content.
What’s So Bad In There?
For players and GMs who don’t create their own content for distribution to the public. Nothing in there will be changing your table beyond the reduction of homebrew and mechanics created by others.
What this means for creators, like Dump Stat, is a lot.
We must sign up on DnDBeyond and upload everything we create for WotC and ensure that we keep them up to date on our financials.
If you make $750,000 or more selling content, you are going to have to give WotC 20% to 25% of your REVENUE after that point. This isn’t profit (which would already be extreme) this is all the money you take in - which effectively means you make no profit and are probably even losing money because few, if anyone, operates with a 25%+ profit line on their products. Even WotC only had a profit of 11% based on their revenue in 2021 according to their reports.
WotC owns all of the rights to the products that YOU make. They can take your hard work and redistribute it in their products and they don’t have to credit you, pay you, notify you, or anything. It is their product now, they are just ‘letting’ you distribute it as well, that is they are letting YOU distribute your own work.
All of the terms in the 1.1 license can change based on the whims of WotC. This means they could decide to decrease that $750,000 number to $50,000 instead, instantly affecting a ton more creators just because WotC thinks that they are ‘under-monetizing’ their product and could be making thousands more.
You can not create any product that isn’t a physical book or a PDF of a book. So this means VTTs are out, digital character sheets, music, and more are strictly prohibited. This could even mean that blogs devoted to Dungeons & Dragons could become illegal per the terms of the 1.1 - this could be the end of this blog even though we don’t focus exclusively on Dungeons & Dragons in all our articles.
In effect, this is bad. Not just for us, but for all creators.
What Will Happen
I don’t know what will happen. I imagine a lot of legal proceedings, a ton of creators ending their projects, new D&D clones that are legally distinct enough to not be Dungeons & Dragons (but totally are) will pop up everywhere, and WotC may see a large exodus of fans (or maybe not - this doesn’t affect the casual player after all).
Several large companies, like Paizo, Free League, Chaosium, Kobold Press, etc., have created products based on the OGL - this could spell the end for them. Or maybe they will just no longer work on Dungeons & Dragons projects, instead focusing on their own products and thus making the Dungeons & Dragons space that much smaller.
Regardless of what does happen, what will happen is that the Dungeons & Dragons community will be fractured. Many of the hardcore creators will go to other systems and there will be less for the casual player to engage with, potentially causing them to drift away to other systems. The system and the community will grow smaller with fewer resources.
Maybe that is a good thing and for the best. Those in charge at Wizards of the Coast are becoming more and more distant from their roots. It is no longer the game designers in charge at WotC, but rather the executives and the suits who have no connection to this hobby.
What Can You Do?
If you dislike the direction of the 1.1 license and don’t want to see Dungeons & Dragons thrown into turmoil, you have a few options. While it may not be enough to keep this community healthy, we can only try and show that 1.1 is only a negative for our community.
You can start voicing your displeasure to WotC. You can cancel your subscription to DnDBeyond. You can join the OpenDnD petition. You can tweet out your support. If you don’t want the community to fall apart, you can join us and thousands of others.
But, perhaps it is time for a company that is more connected to the hobby at the executive level to take over where WotC has failed the community.
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