Cool! The BRP based version was later - the 2nd edition, I am pretty sure. They used their own system for the first edition and decided that the BRP system just made sense and switched over. The assumption on the Choasium side was always that a conversation at a con might have been misunderstood as permission, but it all worked out in the end. Honestly, I wish that more games used the BRP system - it’s super light and adaptable!
And I remember Fringeworthy! it came out toward the end of my time actually playing pen and paper games, but I remember reading the rulebook. And yes…I had a copy of Geriatric Wars when it came out. I was 15! What do you want from me!?
:puts on the ‘conspiracy tin-foil beanie’ for a moment:
This ‘leak’ could also have been intentional, in order to determine what kind of backlash they’d get and what parts to walk back, if only temporarily or water down.
:takes beanie off, crumples it up and puts it into the recycle bin:
Regardless if it was intentional or not, it was a massive PR mistake and it’ll take WoTC more than a few months to attempt to re-build the trust they just burned.
(And man, that tinfoil beanie was itchy, and I started hearing Alan Bell’s voice…)
The rumor is that the new OGL was quietly making its rounds to the publishers and content creators affected on the upper level of things, with NDAs involved.
I would not in the least bit be surprised by one of them leaking the text of it. Nor would I be by one of the Wizards of the Coast developers doing the same thing.
Cory’s analysis may be wrong, the EFF updated their post:
UPDATE January 11, 2023: As the community has scrutinized Wizards of the Coast’s past statements, it’s become very clear that Wizards always thought of this as a contract with obligations for both sides (for instance their 2001 OGL FAQ v 1.0). Unlike a bare license without consideration, an offer to contract like this cannot be revoked unilaterally once it has been accepted, under the law of Washington (where they are located) and other states.
I think this is perfectly summed up by Paizo’s announcement:
When we needed to quickly bring out Pathfinder First Edition to continue publishing our popular monthly adventures back in 2008, using Wizards’ language was important and expeditious. … By the time we went to work on Pathfinder Second Edition, Wizards of the Coast’s Open Game Content was significantly less important to us, and so our designers and developers wrote the new edition without using Wizards’ copyrighted expressions of any game mechanics.
So PF1E contained directly copied text while PF2E does not. PF1E needed the OGL to avoid (possible) copyright infringement, while PF2E uses many of the same mechanics, but without material that might be a problem without a license. My understanding is that Paizo feels they don’t need the OGL or any other license for PF2E, but they want something like it in place so others can build new games and new content on it the same way they once built off of D&D.
Precisely. IANAL, but this is pretty common knowledge. The text of the books and the intellectual property (specific monsters, settings, etc) are copyrighted, but you can’t copyright game mechanics. Video game companies have been trying to do this for decades and the courts have said over and over again that you can’t do it.
All this change might do is remove the words “Dungeons & Dragons” from a bunch of third party add-ons. They’ll call it “an expansion for everyone’s favourite medieval RPG” or whatever. They can’t even stop you using terms from the game like “hit points” and “armour class” unless those words are trademarked, which they would then have to defend in court. That’s not going to succeed because you can’t trademark common English words.
The courts can be used for bullying, and I doubt many of the small publishers can stand up, if Hasbro wants to sue. In the case of my example, ever hear of the video game “Gods and Monsters”? Probably not, since Ubi was bullied into changing the name by Monster.
Oh hey time to quote my comments from September last year that talked about these kind of underhanded tactics from Wotc
Yup, D&D cannibalizes the TRPG market. Roleplaying isn’t bigger D&D is bigger, 5e didn’t bring in new people to the roleplaying market, it brought in new people to D&D. The 20+ year old stereotype of D&D:ers seem to be stronger than ever; that people who play D&D are overwhelmingly allergic to try out other systems and stay away from the rest of the roleplaying world. And WotC has all the incentives in the world to keep it that way.
WotC is already making ways in moving away from other distributors and keeping in it in-house with their purchase of D&D beyond where they have full control on what they have available, they have already removed content that they feel have been superseded by newer books or wholesale change text/retcons in older books.
WotC have already been doing their best to kill of the local gaming store business with how they have been conducting the Mtg side of things for years so this is just going along with their plans of complete control of their products.
Opening Arguments does a good job of breaking down the difference between the Gizmodo article and what actually changes (spoiler: not much). According to Andrew Torrez (the lawyer) Gizmodo’s article starts lying in the very first sentence, and yet still seems to miss the worst part of the changes to the OGL.
If fell like so much of that podcast was about as disingenuous as the Gizmodo article.
There are a bunch of little factual inaccuracies, like reading the 5.1 SRD declaration and calling it a part of the OGL 1.0. Each work that uses the OGL 1.0a must include a declaration section to indicate what is Open Game Content and what isn’t, but this is not a part of the actual license. I’m not sure how much it matters that they kept saying OGL 1.0, instead of OGL 1.0a, but I would think a lawyer would do the whole “be overly specific” thing, because sometimes in law that matters, but IANAL so maybe it is not relevant.
They really liked saying “Sex Dungeons & Dragons” and claiming that under the OGL 1.0 there is nothing that WotC could do to stop it. Except that “Dungeons & Dragons” is explicitly excluded from the license, so they could just sue for Trademark infringement. (Also, the game they describe totally exists, it’s just not based on D&D, it’s probably one of the least playable games I’ve ever seen. It is continually the butt of jokes in one of my gaming groups.)
They also a clearly unaware of some other history. They make Paizo out to be a villain, they stole D&D to make their own game! Of course the actual history is a bit more nuanced. They harp on the 4 years that Pathfinder out sold D&D, which probably had to do with the fact that the community responded very badly to D&D 4E, both due to perceived gameplay issues and because of some prior licensing shenanigans from WotC. 5E was both more like 3/3.5 and was back to being under the same license, and promptly returned to outselling Pathfinder.
I also think they also don’t get the size difference between Paizo and WotC. (Paizo is about $12 million annual revenue, WotC is about $1.3 billion, or around 100 times larger.)
When this whole story started and it was from Gizmodo I had some healthy skepticism, I don’t find them the most level headed source. As more people weighed in, Roll for Combat for example had their own lawyer on to answer questions, it became more clear to me that even if Gizmodo had exaggerated their position something clearly was wrong with the changes.
For me, the textbook example is how Steve Jackson took the mechanics he developed when working for Metagaming, and basically reinvented Melee/Wizard/The Fantasy Trip as GURPS.
Good, now Evil Stevie has regained the rights to TFT and has revived it alongside GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy, but as I recall there was a push to license GURPS out to other publishers. To the best of my knowledge, the only real success was Prime Directive, which also managed to avoid Paramount by using the same license that Star Fleet Battles used—the one Franz Joseph had when he got permission to make the Star Fleet Technical Manual.
Hopefully the small publishers are in states with anti-SLAPP laws, which exist for exactly this purpose. The judge will throw out the case on sight and stick Hasbro with both sides’ legal fees.
I was thinking of having a level 20 legalmancer sacrifice 10d100 billable hours (and 1d10 toner cartridges as material components) to cast Discern Contract; but I’ve decided to just play Prisons and Pythons instead.
