The OGL Mess Resolved?

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It is fair to say that almost all 3rd party publishers (3PP) or small tabletop RPG publishers spent a good chunk of time this past month thinking about the OGL change Wizards of the Coast (WotC) wanted to push through. It caused us at Inkwell Ideas to scramble to release our new Decks of Beasts to Kickstarter to backers a bit early (the digital versions) just in case the OGL was “de-authorized”. Now that WotC has backed off (by saying they won’t de-authorize the OGL & putting the 5.1 SRD into Creative Commons), the situation isn’t as dire but we will get the files to our printer within the next week.

Most feel the situation is back to at least the status quo, maybe better. I never thought WotC would try to block the current SRD, but now that it is also under a Creative Commons license that is hopefully impossible to try again. To me, that’s status quo because I didn’t feel WotC could de-authorize the OGL. A Creative Commons license does give 3PP’s a bit more, but it is somewhat negligible.

However, if WotC still has the same execs in charge is it likely their thinking has changed?  When planning to grow income & profits, they could have taken a “high tides lift all boats approach” and made truly collaborative deals to get percentages from 3PP’s for new things such as publishing to D&D Beyond. They could also have taken an approach to grow D&D as a whole by using the new movie and TV show to bring in more new players. (How about a 3 minute clip of Critical Role or similar before the movie showings?)  But instead of trying to grow the pie, they tried to get a bigger piece just for themselves at the expense of others. They tried to box-out other publishers by saying other VTT’s and online tools aren’t allowed, among other things, and demanding a percentage from 3PP’s who might just want to say “tiefling”. (If a 3PP wants to use much specific D&D lore they already must use DMs Guild where WotC does get a significant percentage of each sale.)

So what’s next for WotC.  I see two paths: 

  1. They truly learn the lesson and try to grow their profits by enlarging the overall hobby.  Hopefully the movie & TV show and exposure in other media can be used to bring in others. Also as mentioned above, they can work with 3PP’s in a collaborative manner to get on the D&D Beyond site/tools in exchange for a percentage. Perhaps they can even approach some best-selling 3PP’s to include their work in core D&D updates in exchange for fair compensation.
  2. They don’t learn the lesson from the past month and decide to still try to block out other publishers and/or VTTs/online tools from One D&D by making it a little less compatible than planned–sort of what 4e D&D did. Maybe that will take the form of unique names for spells/feats/powers/etc. Maybe there will be some new subsystems that don’t have easy 5e equivalents. But as with 4e, doing so would have two problems:
    1. Anger some of their most strident fans (3PP’s promote the game a lot, and D&D’s biggest fans who aren’t already 3PP’s often want to publish their own material eventually or at least want good 3PP options). These fans will move on to other systems and promote them instead as with Pathfinder.
    2. Change the game to the point many folks say “this isn’t D&D to me.” (It may still be a good game, but not have the same feel.) This was a common critique of 4e–and many would work the critique much more harshly. And this would also drive folks to either stick with 5e, or look for a 5e-revised system like Level Up from EN Publishing or the upcoming Black Flag from Kobold Press, among others.

And they may do a combination of those paths (some carrot, some stick) or start with only carrot and add some stick when they think they can get away with it. But at this point they hopefully realize they can’t start new shenanigans soon. And it is encouraging how the hobby banded together and will hopefully better position itself to not be controlled by one actor.