DND OGL - Is anyone following this? Thoughts?

It’s even worse than that. I’m morally certain that Paizo has long been considering a completely independent system that didn’t require being tied to the OGL but didn’t want to risk action legal against its current products or any customer backlash. Now with this flareup, WotC and Hasbro look like the venal machinates that they are, and Paizo has all of the reason they need to set up a totally independent license (or use Creative Commons, or whatever) not only for themselves but as an umbrella for other third party content creatures, making themselves look like benefactors. And Paizo doesn’t need to have special protections for their own system and material beyond normal copyright for settings and so forth because they produce high quality gaming and supplement products that customers want.

I’m not sure they really have to. First of all, although the draft OGL 1.1 might give ostensible legal grounds for Hasbro to go after third party content creators, what benefit does that actually give them? Paizo aside, the vast majority of third party content is produced by small teams of writers and artists, and is niche enough that it really isn’t worth enough to expand it. I’m sure some ‘wizard’ was thinking that a content creator using their license would come up with the next World of Darkness or whatever, and then they’d be able to snatch and expand upon it without paying any royalties or buying them out but setting aside what a long shot that is, it also mean that WotC would actually have to produce good complementary content of their own to expand it which is clearly not their business model; more than likely they would just squash such new content to prevent gamers from being diverted from their branded content. This is similar to car companies like GM and Daimler buying innovative upstarts to control the patents in order to squash the technology lest their competitors use it, which (sort of) makes sense in the context of big companies fighting with one another but would be totally inane for one big company to just try to destroy innovation that didn’t come from in-house work.

And a campaign of suing tiny publishers would not only be bad press but their is probably some boutique IP firm that would take the case on pro bono just for the publicity it would offer, especially as it doesn’t seem that Hasbro has a strong case to begin with. WotC and Hasbro wouldn’t just look greedy but actually be characterized as actively trying to destroy the very market they are selling to.

Setting all of that aside, attacking third party producers is just stupid in its own right. Even a large company like Wizards of the Coast can only publish so much quality content on its own, and third party publishers produce material for GMs and players who don’t want to make their own. In a zero sum market it takes away dollars that might go to Hasbro; in reality it maintains enthusiasm, particularly when those aftermarket products are related to a setting or other licensed IP that WotC owns. Unless another company is getting so large as to be an actual competitor it makes more sense to license them at some marginal royalty and give small makers creative freedom to produce content royalty-free as long as they conform to standards that don’t compromise brand integrity.

This is exactly what the ‘new’ (post-Krank) Chaosium has done with their Miskatonic Repository and Jonstown Compendium have done with Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha respectively; not only do creators have access to use the setting and own all original IP they produce, Chaosium also offers templates, artwork, and editorial resources. Most of these products aren’t at the same standard as what Chaosium (in its current iteration) publishes but they’re generally a big improvement over the Krank-era output and more importantly they help fill in the gap for Keepers and players between official releases of new settings and content, as well as serving as a ‘farm league’ for Chaosium to recruit writers, artists, and content promoters, many of whom are developing new settings and rules that could be integrated into the official product lines. In short, encouraging third party publishers, is a big net benefit because it promotes the game. Now, Call of Cthulhu has only a single digit percentage of the TTRPG market and RQ:AIG even less so it isn’t quite the same as a company that has dominated the market from inception, but nonetheless their is great wisdom in recognizing that making a healthy profit is more about promoting your game and setting and producing good content than squashing any perceived competition, especially when that competition is doing a lot of the work of sustaining interest.

WotC isn’t going out of business any time soon, and they’re going to keep making money hand over fist on collectable card games and so forth, but they really stabbed themselves in the foot repeatedly with this decision in terms of the TTPG market. Even if people keep making “5E compatible” products, the fact that Paizo is going to offer a competing open license without constraints undermines any attempt for WotC to attract new producers to support their product line, and if online content producers explicitly move away from D&D and into other systems (or just ‘go generic’ and don’t make any explicit references to the system they are using) it hurts their core brand even more.

Stranger

Stranger

And, of course, this is the second time that Paizo has had WotC/Hasbro take (or propose) an action which struck at the heart of their business model.

Paizo came into being after Hasbro bought WotC, and decided to spin off WotC’s magazine business; Paizo’s original business model was focused on publishing Dragon and Dungeon Magazines in support of 3E/3.5 D&D, under license from WotC.

In 2007, when WotC announced Fourth Edition, they also yanked back the rights to Dragon and Dungeon from Paizo, which had the effect of removing Paizo’s primary revenue source. Paizo survived (and then thrived) by using the OGL to create Pathfinder.

Given that history, I can’t blame anyone at Paizo for having very little trust in WotC.

Chaoisum is also offering PDFs of their RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu starter sets for $0.99, and The Design Mechanism is offering Mythras Classic Fantasy for the same.

Stranger

A friend of mine, who’s been a freelance game writer for years, shared this on her Facebook page today:

3.5 got crazy what with people taking a dip in several prestige classes, and thus finding some nasty loopholes.

We didn’t want PF 2, and they jiggered it to cater to the trolls on the message boards, several/many of whom openly admitted they didn’t even play Pathfinder. They were screaming that all the classes had to be equally powerful at all levels, and honestly, the players didn’t really care about that. Not to mention doing PF2 just as 5e was hitting it’s stride was an error.

Don’t get me wrong, we loved Pathfinder- it was 3.5 with most of the bad stuff taken out or fixed ( altho there were still loopholes that were exploited). Very fun.

What benefit did it give Games Workshop to sue Fan art creators? True-

But GW still did, and they still sell tonnes of overpriced crap to dudes with their Mom’s credit cards, so it didn’t really hurt them.

Interesting. This seems like a more recent development, which I did not get an email about. :frowning_face: Maybe they realize what you were saying, that people are more interested in their specific settings than in their general rules.

I am a bad gamer (or I suppose, more accurately, an unusual gamer) in that, although I’ve been playing RPGs since college, and have run games at Gen Con for four or five years now, I’ve never actually played D&D itself. My first RPG was Call of Cthulhu, so Chaosium’s system is old hat to me, and feels quite natural. There really are plenty of other games and systems out there, for players who are willing to branch out a bit. Maybe this will give some of them an impetus to do so.

It is, of course, not a coincidence that Chaosium is including RuneQuest, their heroic fantasy game, among their reduced price offerings.

One nice thing about Rolemaster was that Body Development (which gave hit points) was a skill you could increase like any other.

Not bad, but, holy cow, unique is right. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who plays RPGs who didn’t play D&D at some point in their life. I didn’t think it was possible.

Yeah, the usual story is “I think games X, Y, and Z are better, but I play D&D because that’s all I can find a group for/that’s what my friends play”.

My wife is one.

I have a regular gaming group I’ve been playing with for decades. Many of them don’t like D&D. My wife has only played games with me and that group (and she’s done quite a bit) but since they don’t play, neither has she.

LegalEagle weighs in:

I would like to sometimes play other systems, but none are “better”. Just different. The system doesnt matter, it’s the DM and the players that make a great game.

There are systems that are definitely easier to learn, more flexible to apply to different genres and settings, and which have mechanics more geared toward narrative play. Whether that makes them ‘better’ depends on the interests and objectives of the group but Dungeons & Dragons (all editions) are pretty limited to a combat-focused dungeon crawl or heroic quest type of game, and it takes a lot of fudging and house ruling to make it do other types of gameplay.

Stranger

Naw, we have done it several times. It isn’t hard. True, that is what D&D started as.

But you know, several games systems have that issue. They are designed for a certain genre and do not work well outside of it. GURPS is the big exception- it works “okay but not great” in just about any setting.

I suppose that’s the story with me. The group I started out with in college, as I said, was a Call of Cthulhu campaign, which I got into largely through my enjoyment of Lovecraft. None of us were really big D&D players, although some of the guys had played it before. Over the years I’ve played more Cthulhu, Marvel Super Heroes (the old TSR game with the FASERIP stats and the color-coded charts), DC Heroes, Shadowrun, the Buffy roleplaying game, and some of the newer Powered by the Apocalypse games. But never D&D. Somehow it just never came up. Like I say, I’ve run several games at Gen Con using various systems, and I’ve never had trouble filling a table.

BTW, this morning I did get another email from Chaosium advertising their sale price on the two Starter Sets. Also, being a bit more serious in this one, they said that they had joined Paizo’s Open RPG Creative License initiative, and that they have “concerns” about WOTC’s current and proposed new OGL.

This is not completely accurate. Hasbro bought WotC before 3.0 launched and was there for the first OGL. (They bought them in Sept 1999.) Hasbro has been there since the beginning. What I don’t know is if 4E was their (first?) attempt to get rid of the OGL?

I also think that Paizo would have been just fine continuing to do adventures but they didn’t like the GSL of 4.0. That’s what forced them to create and move to Pathfinder.

I thought 3.5 tried to clean that up from 3.0? They spread out the Paladin’s class abilities across more levels than just level one.

goes to check

Yep to paladin but then bard got more at first in 3.5. So, not sure what they did overall. I do know they really changed spells in an attempt to make magic items more important.

I can say I didn’t want the PF2 they did. I wanted a PF1.5 where they cleaned things up, a la Unchained, and perhaps reduced the number of bonus types from nineteen! Not all apply or can apply to AC or attacks but they could have done a bounded accuracy by reducing those instead. I love the three action economy and use it in my PF1 game. I know the group that is playing Level Up would prefer that but we are playing RAW as much as we can in our first game of it.

I don’t do the iterative attack penalty in PF1, for reasons, and the downside of that for me is that combat is a bit more static than I prefer. Meaning they get next to bad guys and attack instead of move around. Hmm. Maybe I need to implement that only for some classes? Part of the reason I didn’t do it was it’s a pain to track. Further, does a combat maneuver count against that or not? Easier to remove the penalty altogether.

I also have feats mean more. If you take the Vital Strike chain, you get it on every attack. So do bad guys. It’s a lot more damage done but also at levels that can take it.

One of the things I don’t like about PF2 is level bonus. I didn’t like it in Star Wars SAGA edition, which is where I first saw it. The idea is to make it easy and not have to distribute points. I don’t like it when a tenth level character grains proficiency in a new skill and goes from 0 bonus to +10 +2 for trained + attribute. That’s too big of a jump for me. Further, when you remove level bonus, imo, PF2 looks a lot like 5E in skills, AC, and saves.

I think most role playing games have to find how they will use the “role playing” aspect. If the player convinces the GM of whatever social argument, does that work for their character? If the player doesn’t like role playing can they just roll, knowing their character is good at it? Should good role playing give a bonus? Should bad have a penalty? I don’t know and systems advice varies on that.

Further, I think a lot of games need later editions and growth to really do what they want to do. Vampire the Maquerate until 5th edition is super heroes with fangs. I asked on the forums and the small set of responses I got was that over ninety percent never dealt with feeding and assumed all vampires started refreshed and with a full blood pool. Even though the tagline was to try and keep their humanity and not become a monster, most didn’t play it that way. The fifth edition of it has mechanics to back up being careful or become a monster.

I’m going into this because I think the mechanics influence gameplay. If a system promotes a thing, the mechanics should back it up. Equally, if the mechanics have something to limit the characters, it needs to be explained well. squints at Exalted’s Limit Break

I maintain that whatever a group enjoys means they are doing it right!

Thanks for the replies!

And there’s nothing that any rules system can do to prevent this, and even were it possible, I would still give the DM final say over es campaign. Bringing a character to a new DM necessarily involves negotiating details like this in order to fit the character in. It’s the DM’s game.

Not really. In 3.0, the best bard builds used only a single bard level, because all of the music abilities depended only on your ranks in Perform, not on your bard level. So you’d dip Bard 1, and then rogue and sorcerer for whatever mix of skills and spells you wanted.

It’s not that it’s not accurate, it’s that I didn’t include every detail.

Hasbro bought WotC in 1999 (i.e., about a year prior to the launch of 3E). Yes, Hasbro owned WotC when 3E was launched, and when the original OGL was released (and I never said, nor meant to imply, otherwise).

It was only a few years after their purchase of WotC (in 2002) when Hasbro decided that they didn’t want to be in the magazine business, and Paizo was created/spun out of WotC, originally to handle the magazines.

Yeah, but I am talking one or two level dips in Prestige classes, not base classes. (My Fighter, being no dummy, dipped into Monk. )

And now, in 5e, The Performance skill doesn’t really do much if anything for the Bard. This was- imho- an overreaction to that. (Of course 5e went through Pathfinders pockets for the loose change, but that is only fair).