On Friday, after days of uproar in the board game community, Dungeons and Dragons Publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC) attempted to roll back the most controversial changes in a leaked draft update to its decades-old Open Gaming License (OGL). However, that effort could end up being too little too late.
Many prominent third-party RPG publishers now say they are abandoning the OGL, regardless of what changes WotC officially releases in an upcoming new version. Additionally, many in the community have now lost faith in WotC’s management of the licensed rules system that has underpinned much of the industry’s past two decades.
Introducing the ORC
Pioneer publisher Paizo Inc. is behind perhaps the biggest effort to steer the industry away from OGL from WotC. The company announced last thursday that it is creating a new Open RPG Creative License (ORC) designed to be “open, perpetual and irrevocable.”
that”irrevocable“The italics are in the original and are intended as a strong criticism of WotC’s leaked plans to de-authorize the original version of the Open Gaming License after the publishers signed off on the update. “Paizo does not believe that OGL 1.0a can be de-authorized. ‘, never, ” Paizo write in your ORC ad. “While we are prepared to argue that point in a court of law if necessary, we don’t want to have to, and we know many of our fellow publishers are not in a position to.”
Regardless of the OGL’s legal fate, Paizo says it wants to “irrevocably and unquestionably keep the spirit of the Open Gaming License alive” with its new ORC. The system’s agnostic license, designed with the help of intellectual property law firm Azora Law, will eventually be controlled and protected by a nonprofit organization similar to the Linux Foundation, the company says. Until that new license is in place, upcoming Paizo products will be printed without any explicit license, the company says.
Paizo’s ORC effort has already garnered significant support from the community. call of cthulhu other rune quest publisher Chaosium, which never used WotC OGL for its products in the first place, however writes that he is “very happy to work with the rest of the industry to create a system-wide OGL that anyone can use.”
Popular D&D Module publisher Kobold Press has also supported Paizo’s ORC product, but has stopped short of committing to using it for just announced core fantasy Set of rules, codenamed Project Black Flag. Instead, Kobold says that it is “wait[ing] to see exactly what form the Open Gaming License might take in this new era” and “we will review the terms and consider whether they fit the needs of our audience and our business objectives” when the updated OGL is finally published.
mutants and masterminds the editor Green Ronin is so on board with the orcwith founder and president Chris Pramas publicly comparing the current OGL fiasco for WotC’s disastrous attempt to push for a new gaming system license for the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons in 2008.
“Who knows when new people will take over the D&D brand, and who can say what their vision will be?” pramas wrote 15 years ago from the WotC gaming system license push. “Who knows when the political winds in WotC will turn again and things will become even more restrictive? We don’t want to operate under that cloud in the future…”