Celebrating Half a Year of CC-D&D 5e's Independence
The D&D 5e System Reference Document (SRD) provides a subset of D&D 5e: enough of the rules, monsters, spells, etc. at the core of what D&D had made available in 2014 to serve as foundation for third-party publishers to build upon: adventures, additions, modifications, etc. Today half a year ago, in a sense, D&D's fifth edition (5e) system-reference document (SRD) became independent of D&D's owner Wizards of the Coast (WotC): On January 27th 2023, after a month of controversy about the future of the Open Gaming License (OGL), under which the SRD had originally been published, WotC republished the SRD without any changes under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.
Thus, January 27th 2023 marks the Independence Day of a system that, following a suggestion made in a discussion of a fitting name on Mastodon, I shall call CC-D&D 5e (the "winner" of a small survey conducted via Mastodon actually was Open 5e, but I do like the ring of CC-D&D 5e).
Before, January 27th 2023, using content from the SRD meant binding oneself to the OGL and certain terms and conditions set by WotC in the OGL. That, to be fair, did not seem like a big deal at the time: the license's conditions were in no way onerous and general consensus was (backed up by an FAQ that WotC had published) that the rights granted by the OGL could never be taken away again. Then, in the fall of 2022, WotC's lawyers came up with a possible loophole in the OGL's text that might allow WotC to change the OGL to their heart's delight. When WotC's plans became public through an article published by Linda Codega on January 5th 2023, that sent shockwaves through the D&D community, players, DMs and third-party publishers alike.
The danger of changes in the OGL that threatened the buisness of third-party publishers for D&D (and thus all DMs and players who have come to rely on non-WotC-made content to up their game) has passed with CC-D&D 5e's independence of WotC! Today's half-year mark of this joyous occasion is cause for celebration and a look back of how things have developed over the past half year seems worthwhile.
WotC's Behavior since Independence Day
There is no consensus on how to treat WotC after their actions of December/January 2023. Some consider everything touched by WotC as tainted and have sworn to never send another dime into their direction. Others, happy about how everything has resolved itself, have forgiven WotC and treat them and their products as they did before. Between these two extremes, there is a large spectrum, whose "middle" maybe can be described as "generally happy with how WotC is currently behaving, not averse to buying a D&D products that really is of interest, but wary about how WotC will behave in future."
I am in that middle ground: On one hand, I was (and am) absolutely appalled that WotC attempted to throw its weight around like a playground bully, declaring what they themselves had said for roughly a decade null and naught. There should be a meme You do NOT just remove an FAQ about your license and claim the opposite. Such behavior, based on the certainty that most would think not twice, but two hundred times before taking on a relative juggernaut like WotC/Hasbro in court, undermines the belief in the rule of law and any feeling of security one might have when reading a license text.
On the other hand: WotC is not a person but a corporation consisting of many persons, the majority of which, I am certain, really want to make/keep D&D a great game and act properly towards the D&D community. Unfortunately, in corporations, it sometimes takes just a few persons in key positions to swing the behavior of the firm into a direction that would have been unthinkable before (sounds familiar, ex-Twitter, or should I say X-Twitter?) Thus I cannot treat WotC, which has changed course for the better, like a single person, whose past actions might have convinced me once and for all of their bad character and general untrustworthyness. The key question for me therefore is, whether WotC's behavior has swung into a better direction and how likely it is to stay there. At the moment, WotC reminds me a bit of kids after they have done something really, really wrong, are being punished for it (no more screentime for you, WotC!), and actually do know that what they did was not great and probably should not be repeated. WotC tries to present itself at its best behavior, is (at least to me) quite believable in its efforts to do better, but cannot quite avoid the occasional slip-up. In the case of WotC, the slip-up had more to do with Magic: The Gathering than with D&D, when they sent the Pinkertons to a customer's house to retrieve cards they themselves had erroneously shipped.
In the short term, my main yard stick for measuring WotC's behavior will be whether there will be an updated and usable SRD available, once the 2024 edition of D&D has been published. By usable I mean that new content that is essential for building upon D&D 2024 be part of th SRD. For example, since feats seem to be gaining in importance, the basic feats required for character creation must be contained; if monsters are changed in any meaningful way, at least updates of the monsters that are part of the current SRD must be updated in the new SRD; changes to the magic system must be part of the new SRD, etc.
An equally important measure of whether WotC remains on good behavior will be their stance concerning third-party VTTs. Will they attempt, both by design of D&D 2024 and actions regarding licensing etc. make it increasingly difficult for players to use VTTs that are not D&D Beyond?
Activities of Other Publishers since Independence Day
Both third-party publishers of D&D 5e-compatible material as well as publishers of related (e.g., Pathfinder) and unrelated (e.g., Call of Cthulhu) roleplaying games had a windfall, with demand sometimes outstripping supply. Some third-party publishers started efforts to "de-OGLify" future projects by changing wording of their base rules. Whether that would have stood up in court can be questioned, but luckily, that won't be necessary, since at least as far as the 5e SRD of WotC is concerned, de-OGLifying is as as easy as replacing the statement regarding the OGL with an attribution following the rules of CC-BY.
Koboldpress and MCDM announced their own RPGs well before WotC caved in and published the SRD under CC-BY; it seems that Cubicle 7 announced the C7d20 system exactly on "Independence Day" (but this obviously must have been planned and decided before.) The spectacular success of Koboldpress' "Tales of the Valiant" Kickstarter of over one million dollars certainly profited from continued ire against WotC and a wish to support alternatives to D&D. The even more spectacular success of the "Shadowdark" Kickstarter (more spectacular, because compared to "The Arcane Library", Koboldpress is a giant) definitely was not hurt by WotC's actions, but I am not sure whether WotC's behavior was instrumental for the success: it seems to me that Kelsey Dionne very much had her ducks in a row in terms of preparation and community engagement when Shadowdark was kickstarted.
Most interestingly: having a SRD under are rather permissive license now seems to be considered "good manners" for RPGs. My impression is that WotC's move to publish under the extremely permissible CC-BY license has set an example that some other publishers are following now. Which brings us to the license space.
The License Space since Independence Day
In the early days of the OGL debacle, a lot of fuss was made about a new ORC license, which aimed to be a replacement for the OGL license, with a strong emphasis on share alike aspects. I am no expert, but I would be surprised if the ORC license were to take the RPG world by storm: it is five pages long, compared to a two pages for the OGL, not to speak of the few paragraphs required for describing the meaning of CC-BY. Shadowdark's proprietary (and very permissive) license is just a single page long. With D&D's SRD under CC-BY and the new Level Up Advanced Fifth Edition SRD under CC-BY, I am really curious, whether the above-mentioned new RPGs that are currently under development will be using the unwieldy ORC license or opt for something more lightweight.
The OGL will stay relevant for a long time. Even though theoretically, WotC could have another go at changing the OGL, the probability of this happening is so close to zero that the risk is completely irrelevant: with the SRD published under CC-BY, why would they want to change the OGL? And there is a huge amount of material published under the OGL, more and more of which is readily available via Open5e.com - a great resource both for reference and, since everything is available in machine-readable form, for building tools.
My Personal Way Forward: The importance of a comprehensive SRD
The greatest bane of RPGs in the digital age is the inability of tinkerers and enthusiasts to build comprehensive supportive tools because of license issues. One can create and make available, e.g., a character builder for D&D 5e, as long as one restricts oneself to what is in the SRD. That means no support for backgrounds not in the SRD, subclasses not in the SRD, etc. The more an RPG includes in its SRD, the better it can be supported without having to go into license negotiations.
That is why I am excited about the growing SRD of Level Up Advanced 5th Edition. The new A5E SRD under CC-BY is not finished, yet, but it seems to become comprehensive, aiming (unlike the D&D SRD) for completeness: for example, it contains all backgrounds, all cultures, etc -- thus, everybody can build a fully-featured character-builder for A5E!
Also, the quality of Level Up A5E is excellent, too - it is not for nothing that Sly Flourish has named the Monstrous Menagerie his favorite product of 2022. And A5E is already available now, no need to wait!
Therefore Level Up A5E is my CCD&D 5e based system of choice for the future and I can only hope that other publishers will emulate what A5E is doing: supply us with permissively licensed SRDs that are comprehensive enough to support the creation of digital tools covering the whole game rather than only a subset.
Happy (half-year) Independence Day everybody!
An Adventure as Treatment of the OGL Debacle
I am trying to write an adventure that is a treatment of the D&D OGL debacle. While that was going on, somebody on EN World quipped: "Wouldn't it be awkward, if one of the heists in 'Key from the Golden Vault' was about surreptitiously replacing a contract with a different document?" THAT is the adventure I have been working on for the past six months. Things take a lot longer than expected – follow along with my developer's diary!