Looks Like the Future is Now?

For those of you who are unaware, Hasbro has some big changes to the open gaming license brewing, most or all of which have already been leaked. If instated, it would place serious restrictions on independant content publishers as well as siphoning a larger share of their profits. Most of the community reaction that I've heard has been negative.

Up to this point, the open gaming agreement has been that the majority of the game is open source, and anybody is free to write adventures, supplements, et. al., that follow a few basic guidelines. For example, independant content creators cannot use any of WoTC's intellectual property (signature beasts such as mind flayers, beholders, et. al, signature characters such as Mordenkainen, Elminster, etc. etc. so forth). Otherwise, everything in the entire universe is pretty much fair game. Any independant publisher could create content for the game within a few completely reasonable boundaries.

The new OGL being proposed by Hasbro is significantly stricter. Just in terms of size, the current OGL is about 900 words, and the new one, as it stands now, is 9000 words. One of the biggest and most egregious changes to the OGL is that it wishes to nullify all previous versions. Now, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I would not recommend putting too much weight on my words. But I was under the impression that this was attempted for 4th Edition and failed miserably. Nullifying the old OGL did not hold up in court then, and I don't know why it would now. But... Hasbro has an army of lawyers ready willing and able to engage in any malevolent treachery it may take to advance Hasbro's agenda. This alone puts quite a few publishers' tits in a ringer: Paizo, Green Ronin, Kobold Press and more. They are probably shitting their pants and/or scrambling to update their business model as quickly as possible... assuming they're not going to accept the new license. (Which seems to me like a safe assumption).

A large philosophical shift is taking place in the OGL as well. Quoting Hasbro:

The “OGL wasn’t intended to fund major competitors and it wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming. We are updating the OGL in part to make that very clear.”

Hasbro appears to be stating that any future use of an OGL earlier than 1.1 is not valid, and any publishers wishing to create open gaming content will be beholden to this new agreement going forward. (Fun rumor, I hear Disney's Star Wars d20 game is using the OGL, and many in the community are chomping at the bit to see a Disney vs. Hasbro legal battle. I'd be willing to guess if Hasbro thinks it's going to be a problem Disney will just get grandfathered in.)

The problem, Hasbro, is that these publishers are not your competitors. Okay, well, Paizo is. But they weren't before 4e, and they only became your competitors because of essentially the same shenanigans you are attempting right now, and the others are all continuing to provide content and expand the D&D multiverse. This basic shift in philosophy is extremely problematic and egregious. Even if nullifying the old licenses did stand in court, I wonder (again, not a lawyer), if this would merit an anticompetition lawsuit. Paizo Inc., publisher of the Pathfinder RPG, D&D’s largest competitor, have remaind conspicuously silent on the matter. They have stated only that "the rules update was a complicated and ongoing situation." Reading between the lines, I'm guessing they're figuring out what needs to be done to wash their hands of it and become entirely their own thing. PF2.0 is unique enough that they didn't even have to call it open gaming, but they did anyway, I think to encourage 3rd party publishers to develop material for Pathfinder.

Another problematic portion of the new OGL requires all publishers to report everything they're making back to WoTC/Hasbro. A publisher earning greater than a certain threshold of income from their open license materials will have to pay royalties to WoTC/Hasbro. This all adds up to a lot of restrictions and barriers being constructed by WoTC/Hasbro to impede or prevent the little guy from creating/sharing/profiting.

To be fair, some of what has been leaked seems pretty reasonable to me. The overall philisophical shift of wanting some degree of power over what publications can bear this license makes sense, and the new license now enables WoTC/Hasbro to revoke its authorization for any publisher provided they give at least 30 days notice. (Which is not a lot at all, that could seriously fuck or even sink a smaller producer who was already invested neck deep in OGL projects but not progressed enough to have them on the market within 30 days). But at any rate, I don't disagree with this. I've seen some of what the darker side of this phenomena can be, and it's not pretty. Putting the keibosh on Justin LaNasa and his ilk is necessary and merited─lest someone get the impression that such ideas are in line with what RPG's are about.

At any rate, all this adds up to a couple implications for Syseria and me personally.

1. I'm lucky in the sense that I have not yet gone to market (which was never a sure thing anyway) with Syseria as an OGL product, because I'd probably be fucked now. Even if none of these leaked OGL changes come to pass, or it becomes significantly more favorable (which I really don't think will happen), I do not wish to be beholden to such shenanigans in the future.
2. When I set out to begin tinkering with the mechanics, I knew already that I wanted to change so much that I had to ask myself whether I just wanted to write a whole new system from the ground up or try to tweak d20 into doing what I wanted it to do. I ended up deciding that I wanted to tweak d20. I felt that adding a whole new RPG to the setting was probably counterproductive and also would fracture my player base. But as it stands now, I can't use a modified d20 system (as far as I'm concerned). So much of the progress in September's vaguepost may be unusable. (I was still doing lore and replacing copyrighted images with art I can legally use, among other things).
3. A lot of what I like about 5e is that most of my playing is on VTT/Roll20 these days, and the 5e character sheet is wonderful. I didn't want to have to get into programming my own character sheet. Well, looks like I'll have to sooner or later.
4. For my current players and anyone that will be playing with us in 2023, I will probably be doing, for the most part, something mechanically very similar to what we've done in the past albeit with a few new tweaks. For the most part you'll be able to play it straight or use material from the books, as well as the Syseria bible of course. However in the longer term, it has become apparent that the whole 5e and/or d20 track must be fully abandoned so I can ditch the OGL.

That's about it for now. More as things develop.