From a personal standpoint, I’m mostly interested in what the impact would be on Paizo and other commercial publishers, but neither this video nor the Opening Arguments podcast he refers to say much about that.
I started RPGs with GURPS. D&D felt too restricted compared to that, so I never sought it out. I’m college, the RPG of choice was Vampire: The Masquerade. I’ve never had the opportunity to play D&D.
I guess I’m hoping you understand my side. It’s not just the DM’s game. The DM needs the players as they need the DM. Bad gaming is NOT better than no gaming at all.
Ah, those are good points. There are later bardic abilities that grant bonuses to other abilities. I guess I’m lucky my players didn’t do that.
Fair points. Plus it’s not as if skills improve that much.
I apologize if I put words into your mouth. My point was more that Hasbro always knew about it. You had good points that WotC created Paizo when they wanted out of the magazine business.
I got lucky that my players didn’t do that. Most multi classing they have done was at least due to concept of the character.
I apologize if I have offended or misconstrued anyone comments. I appreciate the discussion! Thanks!
GURPS is great. But the combat that will take all sessions in GURPS? You can hammer out 4 D&D combats in the same time. Now, that is both good and bad. Is the combat the Thing? Or is it just an encounter on the way to the Thing? (Rescuing the princess, getting the MacGuffin, finding the guy who killed your family, whatever)
The first time I ran through module I-6, Castle Ravenloft, we used GURPS. These days, my players would rather take a cheese grater to their faces than play GURPS.
I have played many systems. No system works better than GURPs for low powered super heroes. Or really buffed humans.
Once in a while I get to thinking, seriously, I think sometimes, and I’m sometimes amazed by games I used to play back in my youth that I simply don’t have the patience to play today. GURPS is a great tool set, but I just can’t be bothered to build my own settings using it. It’s not like I don’t have time, I’m at a point in my life where my career is established and my familial obligations are low, but I just can’t be bothered.
I tried playing Battletech again in 2019, a game I absolutely loved to play from the late 1980s until around 1999, and it was so damned slow and tedious that it pretty much dried up any interest I had in playing it. Wild centaurs couldn’t get me to play AD&D despite how much I enjoyed it when I was younger.
No worries! My point was that this is now the second time that Paizo (which was birthed by WotC, and was originally largely staffed by former WotC employees) is now, for the second time, seeing WotC making a business decision which strikes at the heart of Paizo’s core business.
There’s nothing about changing character stats to fit a particular DM’s game that is inherently bad. There’s also nothing inherently good about acceding to every stat that the player likes to have. It’s a negotiation in which the DM has final say. That might come out good or bad given the particular DM or the particular player or the particular negotiation, but the basic rule is that the DM’s judgment must rule.
In general, it seems that my players want a mix of role playing and combat. When we do have combat, my players, ranging from newer players to those who have played for decades, like the “tactics” of finding those extra bonuses. Flanking, sneaking, spells, or other items to give them that edge. PF1/LU have just enough of those to give that feeling without getting too much in the weeds.
Have you tried the Battletech game by HBS? I might scratch the itch of wanting to play and letting the computer do the tedious parts. Further, the ideas they had to make it a video game probably would be huge in the tabletop game. Not that I’m playing that or have any idea of the state of it now.
I spent thousands and thousands of hours, maybe dollars, on 1E/2E and there is no way I would play it, either. Or, as I have said, if I’m running it, it would be so modified as to not be that system anymore.
I agree and am really happy that Paizo is doing this!
Thanks for the replies!
In case anyone hasn’t seen this group before:
New OGL 1.2 was released.
Link to the actual doc in the article.
- Protecting D&D’s inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You’ll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. We want an inclusive, safe play experience for everyone. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn’t give us any ability to ensure it.
- TTRPGs and VTTs. OGL 1.2 will only apply to TTRPG content, whether published as books, as electronic publications, or on virtual tabletops (VTTs). Nobody needs to wonder or worry if it applies to anything else. It doesn’t.
- Deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. We know this is a big concern. The Creative Commons license and the open terms of 1.2 are intended to help with that. One key reason why we have to deauthorize: We can’t use the protective options in 1.2 if someone can just choose to publish harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content under 1.0a. And again, any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a will still always be licensed under OGL 1.0a.
- Very limited license changes allowed. Only two sections can be changed once OGL 1.2 is live: how you cite Wizards in your work and how we can contact each other. We don’t know what the future holds or what technologies we will use to communicate with each other, so we thought these two sections needed to be future-proofed.
Summary: a bunch of semantic bullshit by a company desperately trying to backpedal from a previous attempt to control players and block anyone providing alternative compatible content in an anti-competition measure.
Stranger
“We had to make this shameless cash grab for your intellectual property because it was the only way we could protect the queers and the brown people!”
Man, fuck you Hasbro. Don’t try to pin responsibility for this shit on me. As someone who doesn’t actually consume any WotC products, I’ve been mostly amused by this, but now I’m actually kind of pissed. I may have to start playing 5th edition just so I can quit in protest over how they’re handling this.
I mean, was the Aryan Nations threatening to Kickstarter a “Peoples of Blood and Soil” campaign setting for 5E? This seems like it would be more of a Games Workshop type of problem.
Stranger
Gary Gygax’s son has been pushing some rather disgustingly racist material, while trying to imply that it’s the real D&D, not like those imitators at Wizards of the Coast. And I’m not talking “Well, we didn’t intend that imagery to come across that way, and we’re removing that image, and apologizing”; I’m talking like “Negroids are like humans, except with penalties to all of their stats compared to normal humans”.
Is he doing it under the existing OGL? No? Then my dog likes peanutbutter.
Stranger
One company did use the OGL to put out blatantly racist content.
The game in question is called Star Frontiers: New Genesis, which claims to be a refreshed version of one of TSR’s original role-playing games, but which has been the centre of a huge amount of controversy throughout the year. You can catch up on some of the drama here in this Dicebreaker report, but suffice to say there has been some gross shit.
For this suit, Wizards are citing stuff like an early build of Star Frontiers that was released in July, which contained text like:
> …races in Star Frontiers NewGenesis are not unlike races in the real world. Some are better at certain things than others, and some races are superior than others…
The suit also cites documentation saying “a ‘negro’ race is described as a ‘Subrace’ in the game and as having ‘average’ intelligence with a maximum intelligence rating of 9, while the ‘norse’ race has a minimum intelligence rating of 13.”
“The game also refers to the Black Lives Matter movement as ‘radical’,” it continues, while adding “Star Frontiers New Genesis also contains offensive transphobic material: it includes a specific gender option for the characters ‘Male/Female no bonuses, and no Trans’.”
And due to the old OGL, there wasn’t much WotC could do about it.
So yeah one company put out blatantly racist shit.
Yep.
No, a bunch of semantic bullshit by a company desperately trying to stop blatant racism in a game using their system, and purporting to be the “real” D&D. Very reasonable.
Under the “old” OGL, yes.
That didn’t have anything to do with the OGL. It was a trademark dispute. The publishers of the new Star Frontiers game had acquired the TSR trademark, and thought that meant they had the rights to old TSR IP. They were wrong, those rights were still held by WotC.
Edit: I can’t find any info on how the case turned out, so it’s possible TSR LLC proved they did own the trademarks to Star Frontiers. Regardless, the case had nothing to do with the OGL, and no changes to the OGL would have prevented the Star Frontiers debacle.