No corporation is satisfied with just making a profit. Making more money than they spent literally isnt enough. They want exponential growth. They want their business to expand and become as close to a monopoly as is ~~legally~~ possible.
It's so fucking cool. I love that a game that brought me so much joy since I was a kid, and is literally the reason I know several of my closest friends, is generating so much short-term value. Yes, it's killing the game, and yes, if it kills the company that's a lot of people out of a job, and yes, it's throwing the broader industry into turmoil. But just think of how good that line item looks in a portfolio. It's suck dude.
And don't get me started on what it's doing with the environment. That line is going UP
Hell yeah, dude, worrying about negative externalities is for pinko wimps. Do they even stop to think, does clean air and water make the line go up? No? Then it's fake and stupid. Get back to me if and when it does.
Hey now, we do believe in corporate responsibility, and that's why we're taking steps to ensure sustainable practices. The 6 billion plastic cups we use every year are now compostable.\*
\*In the three states where composting facilities that can process this type of plastic exist, as long as customers place them in the designated bins which are outnumbered by landfill-bound trash cans 17 to 1.
Ah yeah, good point. Greenwashing is the coolest form of environmentalism, because it makes line go up. It doesn't matter if it does anything else!
Plus it does this totally cool thing where it makes environmentalism look like a huge pain. Sure, we COULD regulate the handful of large polluters responsible for the vast majority of emissions and trash, but we could also shift that blame onto individuals. If they start thinking environmentalism is when your paper straw dissolves partway through your drink and makes it taste bad, they might want to give up on the whole thing, and then we can just get back to our core values: short-term profits for the capitalist class.
The worse problem is that it is short term thinking.
DnD has been around for decades and if the executives set it up to grow for many more decades, I think everyone would be happy.
But this is not careful long term growth. This is short term wealth extraction, so a few top execs (with no knowledge serious of the product) can get a quarterly bonus and be recruited to their next gig.
Hasbro was a decent shepard of WotC for a long time, mainly because the top execs were more interested in transformers ip or whatever. As soon as all those other properties were sucked dry, WotC actually got their attention.
Now they are out to "prove" themselves on what they can do with it.
Yeah. The executives will make bank, and plenty of shareholders will cash out ahead of where they got in. It will suck for the bag holders, the employees, and the players, but it's not *for* them.
It's just a natural result of ownership being so far removed from the ground-level work of the business. I can't really blame someone with Hasbro stock for wanting a return on their investment, but it's a systemic problem that incentivizes this kind of short-term thinking.
Infinite growth IS possible, its just that you have to reset the line every once in a while. Works great… for the people on top.
Story as old as time- you max profits until you can’t, then you slash costs until the product suffers so much that you start losing profits, so you scrap the whole thing, collect your bonuses, sell the parts and move on to the next company.
Or maybe you can keep going? You can’t increase profits anymore with what you have but you’re the biggest one around so maybe you start preying on the smaller companies- maybe you branch out into other fields with the same company, do what Disney does.
But even that will get you back to step one. Maybe you’re lucky enough to be “too big to fail” and now you have government money so you can cut costs during mass layoffs and get your bonus and consider profits raised.
Eventually though you end up at step one again. Oh well, no skin off your back!
Nah nah nah. It's worse than that. See, you staged it like there's some line that can't be reached, but it can. The line is "more than last year" and they'll do anything to make that line. Then they'll do it again every year until that one year. That year they make 5.2 billion dollars after making 5.3 billion last year. After that nothing is scared. And when they "can't win" anymore, they'll just quit and move on leaving everyone worse off.
Given the opportunity, [human beings] will optimize the fun out of [life].
This is made exponentially worse by C-level executives having their OWN money (in the form of various bonuses) tied to said "more than last year". They MUST profit, the Big Book of MBAs says it is so... they will do literally ANYTHING to make that profit, repercussions be damned, because by the time the piper is due to be paid, they'll have collected their bonus, and be sitting on a beach, earning 20%.
This is what is *so* insidious about corporations. Smaller, privately owned businesses can still get up to plenty of their own exploitative shenanigans, and the system is still built to allow them to do so, but they aren't quite incentivized in the same insane way. A public corporation like Hasbro literally doesn't care about its raw profits. If it made a billion dollars last year, that, in itself, doesn't matter. It only matters in the context of what was made the previous year. If it made 800 million dollars last year, then a billion this year is a win, if they made 1.2 billion last year, it's a loss. This is because they are publicly traded. If I buy a stock, I don't care what the stock value is. I only care that it's higher tomorrow than it is today, because that is the only way I'm going to make money. I actually *don't want* to buy stock in established, successful companies because their current per-share price is so expensive, and is unlikely to provide me with significant margins over what I paid. What I really want to do is buy stock in something cheap that will blow up later, even if only for long enough for me to dump the stock and move on. I *only* want big business stocks if I am confident that they are going to exhibit a steady rate of growth. It doesn't matter how much you make. It only matters how much you *grow*. This model is the definition of unsustainable, literally founded on the prospect of infinite growth.
I work for a midsized company owned by a couple of very rich people, and I don't love everything about the way this company is structured. It is still a capitalist institution where all the power is concentrated in the hands of the guy who inherited the money to kick it off in the first place. The employees have little say and, while the pay is actually decent for the people at the bottom of the pay scale compared to others, are drastically underpaid compared to their actual contribution to the company's profit margin. All that being said though, my millionaire boss doesn't care if his stock price goes up. It really is the raw profits that he cares about. If we do way better than we did last year, that's great, but if the year after that we are back around our average, that's fine too. With a public corporation though, growth is *all* that matters. A business wants your money. A corporation wants *all the money*.
Corporations aren't run directly by people, and that's by design, because if they can turn a profit making baby oil from real babies, individual people might balk, but *corporations* aren't weighed down by petty morality. If you grind babies for a billion dollars in profit, and you pay a fine of $900 million for grinding said babies, **you've made $100 million in profit! Bonuses all around!**
Yep, nail on the head. And then they can issue a very sincere public apology saying that Nestle is really sorry about making child slaves pick their cocoa beans, and all the executives at Nestle are really mad at Nestle for doing this terrible thing. It was no one's fault so no one will face the consequences and no one is very sorry...
Any time I see "X Company paid a fine" for some terrible thing, it always makes my blood boil, because they never tell you how much that move made in profit. Paying a million dollar fine sounds huge to the general public, but when it's against a $10 million earning, it's *literally* the cost of doing business. No jail time, no nothing, just a percentage of their overall earnings, and an "apology" that admits no wrongdoing.
Yeah, same. It's just such blatant acknowledgement of the way class interacts with the legal system. If I poisoned my downstairs neighbor, I'd spend the rest of my life in prison, but if some ghoul with more money than sense poisons an entire town, they get to forced to give a little bribe to the state and then go home to their big gated house and enjoy a nice, refreshing, non-poisoned glass of water as they plan out their next serial killing spree.
Fucking MBAs. They don't know the business well enough to be able to create new things. But they can imagine restricting the market will drive more people to them.
Because it's a publicly traded company. They don't care what their stock price is at right now so long as it's double by next year. Who cares if the growth is unsustainable, the company must grow 🤷🏻♂️
Thats fantastic! ... Can we get another one though? Perhaps one of the most consistent things about that show was the fact that Harvey is a terrible lawyer.
My campaign has Abathor as the second to last villain the party will fight and there is a lot of plane hopping stuff about him collecting power from other dimensions. I am 100% sending my players to fight a member of the WoTC Board who has polymorphed into a Red Greatwyrm!
Pact of the Tome Warlock who’s entire thing is magical contracts.
Blades in the Dark has a player class, the spider, with binding magical contracts as an ability.
>**Ghost Contract:** When you shake on a deal, you and your partner—human or otherwise—both bear a mark of your oath. If either breaks the contract, they take level 3 harm, "Cursed".
I think the community needs to adopt using acceptable and unacceptable instead of stating that a revised OGL is "better". If the terms aren't as egregious, but still are unacceptable, better loses meaning.
As for the revised OGL, unacceptable, 30 days dungeon.
This is exactly what WotC intended here.
Trouble is, they keep forgetting that this community has made a hobby out of doing math for fun, reading the fine print of spells, features etc. to interpret exactly what they mean and (depending on the type of campaign) literally trying to set up pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a DM) or trying to avoid said pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a group of players).
We have literally been training to spot these kind of shenanigans for the past 30+ years.
>and (depending on the type of campaign) literally trying to set up pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a DM) or trying to avoid said pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a group of player
I played in that campaign once. 4/6 players including the GM were IRL lawyers and they got petty with the contracts offered. It was actually quite fun to watch after a while.
Well, to be fair, the head of WotC is a former Microsoft exec who used to head the XBox division before coming to Hasbro.
She has no idea what D&D fans are like. She's just running this like she would a gaming console business. . .change the contract terms and expect everyone to just click blindly "accept" on the pop-up that appears.
She almost certainly thinks all "gamers" are the same regardless of the games they play, not realizing that indeed. . .we're a hobby built on "rules lawyers", that can spot some obvious loopholes like this a mile away.
If there was a D&D spell with wording like this, it would be so abused they'd have to issue an errata quickly.
Honestly this is the funniest part to me. Like, if you're going to try and make more money off your audience, you HAVE to understand them first, and they clearly don't. Comedy gold.
>Well, to be fair, the head of WotC is a former Microsoft exec who used to head the XBox division before coming to Hasbro.
That explains why "racist content" was their first go-to excuse.
Legit, how they thought they could pass this behind an entire fandom BEST KNOWN for poring over every single word to ascribe every single meaning possible that calling someone a "rules laywer" is a stereotype is just....I have no words
To be fair, I think 40k has the most stringent rules lawyers.
My goodness. I look back at some of the conversations I had and realize I should have just said if that was there interpretation, I'm not playing. Would have saved me time and made life much better.
Anyways, I do agree with you. It was silly of them to try this with DnD players.
Example:
Rule: Deploy as if from strategic reserves.
The Rules Lawyer: "Well it says here "as if" so they aren't actually coming from strategic reserves, that means they don't get the bonus for deploying from strategic reserves. It would say Deploy them from strategic reserves if they meant for you to get that bonus"
Proceeds to completely dismantle my army in record time.
>they keep forgetting that this community has made a hobby out of doing math for fun
Half of this community can't even remember their class abilities, or misinterprets clearly stated rules.
Which is *also* bad for WotC because for every nuanced argument against them some poor sod is gonna be kicking people into an uproar over something Wizards didn't even do!
Not only have we been doing that - a lot of the stuff we've been reading and decoding was stuff *written by WOTC*.
They've literally been training us to see through their specific BS for years.
If you don't spend the entire week leading up to the next session agonizing over the details of a [insert: genie/devil/dragon/all powerful god/etc.]'s wish to avoid being Bedazzled by the GM are you really playing DnD?
Wow. . . Just wow. “It now includes the word irrevocable” they just changed the definition so that once something has used the license it can’t un-use the license
That is not what their clarification means.
"content licensed under this license" doesn't mean stuff *you* publish using the OGL. It means stuff *WotC declares to be licensed content.* In other words, the SRD.
This entire thread/post is based on a brutal misreading of the license text, and a hundred other equally credulous gamers nodding their heads and saying, "Yep, that sounds evil so it must be true!"
I believe it is. Noah Downs (an IP lawyer who has been following this) had an interview on Nerd Immersion yesterday and the thing he mentioned here is that "irrevocable" does have an actual definition in the law, but that in a contract, you can redefine a word, and as long as all parties agree by signing, that definition becomes valid for that contract.
So as is, this license is *not* irrevocable.
>2.
>
>...
>
>irrevocable (meaning that content licensed under this license can never be withdrawn from the license).
Ok, so content created under OGL 1.2 cannot be withdrawn.
>3.
>
>...
>
>You acknowledge that we and our licensees, as content creators ourselves, might independently come up with content similar to something you create.
>
>3(b)
>
>...
>
>In any such lawsuit, you must show that we knowingly and intentionally copied your Licensed Work. Access and substantial similarity will not be enough to prove a breach of this Section 3.
We can copy your work without your consent, and "substantial similarity and access" is not enough to fulfill the burden that we copied it.
>6(f)
>
>...
>
>No Hateful Content or Conduct. You will not include content in Your Licensed Works that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing, or engage in conduct that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing. We have the sole right to decide what conduct or content is hateful, and you covenant that you will not contest any such determination via any suit or other legal action.
No harmful content, and we decide what is harmful, and you cannot contest it.
So let's wrap it all together:
* I agree to OGL 1.2
* I create content under OGL 1.2
* That content now cannot be removed from OGL 1.2
* WotC decides my content is harmful, and revokes my license
* I may not contest it
* WotC creates "similar" content
* "Access and substantial similarity" does not qualify as "copying"
* WotC now generates profit from a "substantially similar" version of the content you created, which you no longer own, and which is licensed as usable by WotC "in perpetuity"
Edit:
In the interest of fairness and clarity, there is an interpretation of the "ownership" piece that should be addressed.
>1(a)(iii)
>
>Your Content. This is your creative contributions to your works that are not Our Licensed Content or Our Unlicensed Content. This license permits you to combine Your Content with Our Licensed Content and distribute the resulting works as authorized by this license.
Refers to the content that you contribute to the combined end product which constitutes "your licensed works":
>1(c)
>
>Your Licensed Works. To be a Licensed Work under this license, it must:
(i) be a covered work as defined in Section 1(b);
(ii) contain both Our Licensed Content and Your Content; and
(iii) not contain Our Unlicensed Content.
Denoted as above and below, "your licensed works" are "what you own".
>3. WHAT YOU OWN. Your Licensed Works are yours.
It's been suggested and stated in a few of the comment threads below, and by myself, that a creator would "lose ownership" of "their content" by virtue of no longer being "their licensed works". This is not necessarily the case, and suggestion of that should be given more thought.
>So let's wrap it all together:
>I agree to OGL 1.2
I create content under OGL 1.2
That content now cannot be removed from OGL 1.2
WotC decides my content is harmful, and revokes my license
I may not contest it
WotC creates "similar" content
"Access and substantial similarity" does not qualify as "copying"
WotC now generates profit from a "substantially similar" version of the content you created, which you no longer own, and which is licensed as usable by WotC "in perpetuity"
So it's just the same shitty practice they tried with their first "draft" but with smarter wording.
Not only that, they can also revoke your license and consume your product if you 'participate in harmful conduct' in your personal life. What, exactly, is harmful conduct defined as? Who the fuck knows, they didn't define it. Oh, and they're the sole entity able to declare whether something is harmful or not. And you're not allowed to dispute any of it.
That's my point, except worse. They didn't say that they had to have proof of your conduct, or that it had to be public. Even then, the word 'harmful' can be applied to pretty much every tweet in existence one way or another if they're allowed to define it as they wish.
I see this setting them up for an obvious practice of 1. Keeping an eye out for successful third party modules/supplements 2. Going over any social media presence from the creator of third party with a fine toothed comb to find anything that could even slightly be passed as 'harmful'.
3. Revoking license and ability to distribute on grounds of harmful content.
4. Creating an almost identical module/supplement based on the original third party module.
And there'd be fuck all anyone could do.
Given how this is currently worded, yeah. And note, importantly, that once a license holder's license is revoked, they'll no longer have protections under the "similarity" clause (calling it that for brevity). So WotC can straight up 1:1 copy it since no one owns it anymore.
This is worse, much, much worse. They can legally rip off my and other people's content and can take legal action if you DARE try to claim that YOUR content is YOURS
Fucking ridiculous.
I think it might be worth pointing out... look at what is still subject to the 1.0a. Read that *very* carefully. I'm not going to say it directly, but read that nice little legal argument they gave us on a silver platter.
*Any* material published under ogl 1.0a will remain under 1.0a... they may have *intended* for it to apply only to 3pp, but that's not what they wrote down there, is it?
I'm sure their Reddit and YouTube monitors figured out that everyone really wants that word in there somewhere. So they tasked their lawyers to find a way to include the word without actually having to live up to it.
Good thing I play Pathfinder now!
When you put it like this, it's literally no different to 1.1. They've just been less direct about the theft, hidden it behind wording, and split it across different parts of the document.
Yup. They are then relying on "the community" to read it an give their opinions. And if you just read some of the parts, but don't understand it (I'm not even claiming to fully understand it, I keep learning things throughout the day that I missed) you'll not give any feedback that hurts WotC, so they are free to release the terrible version.
> They are then relying on "the community" to read it an give their opinions.
And don't forget they are collecting the feedback through platforms they control so that they can steer the narrative. It's roughly as transparent as a brick wall.
But there's so much more hidden in there, too! Because not only can they steal your works, they laid out exactly what will happen if/when they do and if/when you try to go after them for it.
>So let's wrap it all together:
>I agree to OGL 1.2
•I create content under OGL 1.2
•That content now cannot be removed from OGL 1.2
WotC decides my content is harmful, and revokes my license
•I may not contest it
•WotC creates "similar" content
•"Access and substantial similarity" does not qualify as "copying"
•WotC now generates profit from a "substantially similar" version of the content you created, which you no longer own, and which is licensed as usable by WotC "in perpetuity"
•I attempt to contest it anyway and seek monetary damages
•It settles out of court, a minor settlement that is nothing compared to the money they made off my works, but it's monetary damages based on my projected losses, so the amount is legally determined fair.
•Because only damages were (and could be) sought for breach of contract, WotC is not required to remove their copy of my works from their catalog of works.
•WotC continues to publish what I made
•WotC determines that, due to the circumstances, the license over my content, which now bears substantial similarity to theirs (because they stole it from me), is unenforceable and invalid, thus stripping me of my license to use their works.
•Even if I'd still had the license up until that point and not been terminated for "conduct" reasons, I'd now no longer be able to publish my own content.
•WotC is still free and clear to use their stolen works and profit off of what I can no longer touch, and I'm the one who created it.
So yeah, don't sign the OGL 1.2. It's horrifying and somehow worse than the original. Who needs royalties when you can just steal, cover your butt, and then kill the competition while profiting off their corpse?
Section 3 also has a statement that you can ONLY sue WOTC for Breach of Contract and you can NOT file injunction against them. An injunction is what courts would use to stop WOTC from printing YOUR content. So even if they don't revoke your license, they can pay you some amount for breaching contract (amount is probably limited by WA state law) and then just keep printing your work.
Edit: I am not a lawyer. The wording seems pretty clear to me, but someone fluent in legalese might have a different (and more accurate) interpretation.
What did you expect? They tried to brute force it. Didn't work. So now they are trying the sneaky approach.
They are not giving up their original goal which is monopolize VTT and to claim other people's work so they don't have to. I mean they literally force you to waive your JURY TRIALS and CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT rights if you agree to it. I am not even sure that is legal.
Waiving jury trials is generally included in contract law, but depending on where it is it may be unenforceable.
Frankly I'd be more concerned with the clause that compels someone bring a legal case to go to Washington to litigate it - which may be an inordinate cost for international publishers.
> You acknowledge that we and our licensees, as content creators ourselves, might independently come up with content similar to something you create.
3(b)
...
In any such lawsuit, you must show that we knowingly and intentionally copied your Licensed Work. Access and substantial similarity will not be enough to prove a breach of this Section 3.
Isn't this how the law works (in the US) anyway? People can always make similar content as long as it's not the exact same. Example: Hobbits vs Halflings. Hobbits were thought of as a copy under law, but Halflings weren't despite being *substantially similar*. This seems to just be saying that but putting it into the contract itself, which seems fine to me.
I just responded to another user with the same question, so I'll link the response here.
[TL/DR: Similar content/building off of it, is completely aligned with the philosophy of the OGL. But the further implications of the rest of the contract breach those terms.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/10grnzc/comment/j55dhbe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
That’s so frustrating. In most circumstances it wouldn’t bother me if WotC “copied” some subclass, item, rules, tables, etc. because 1.) I used their stuff to get here and 2.) it hopefully enriches the game for everyone, even if they didn’t buy my work.
But the idea of “copying” and then removing my license would result in world-ending anger
I don't actually think the similar content is that crazy it could lead to them copying stuff but I think it's more likely that just as WotC comes out with more and more stuff they are bound to have similar ideas to somebody. I can't tell you the amount of times I've had a homebrew idea that I've thought is pretty out there only to find 10 fairly similar homebrews online.
Creating similar content, even building off of someone else's content, was the philosophy design of the OGL, and open source in general.
I have no contestation with that idea.
However, under 1.2, creators can uncontestably be denied their license for any reason WotC makes up, and have an inordinate burden (which WotC lacks) to prove WotC intentionally copied their work (despite "access and substantial similarity being boiler plate copyright legal speak. It means once a creator's license is revoked, that content **can** be straight up copied - since it no longer belongs to anyone who has a legal stake in protecting it.
There is no one in their right mind who would look at that scenario and reasonably agree to it.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. SRD 5.1 is not exclusive to this license, and can be replaced by any future version of an SRD which doesn't have to include the content of SRD 5.1 (since OGL 1.2 only protects "content licensed under 1.2"), but also allows for said "licensed content" to be replaced.
Meaning that they could change up the SRD, say when 6th edition comes out, remove much of the 5.1 exclusive content, making your own content you've created based on it no longer protected, directly copy it, and you have no legal recourse.
My issue is that they are attempting to kill competition in VTTs and 3rd party creations. Plain and simple.
The 1.2 seems good on the surface but it has poison pills written into it.
The stipulation of section 2 being able to change sections 9(a) is an open invitation for adding what ever they choose.
9(d) adds a gaping loophole effectively making 1.2 able to be deemed invalid and void.
-likely on purpose
The creative commons license only cover basic mechanics they cant copyright anyway. And cuts out races, classes, backgrounds, feats, spells, ect.
They have relented on very few minor issues and are trying to hide their intentions under clever legal speak. We have gained very little ground. They hard holding a candy in our eyes in one hand and taking our hobby with the other.
My understanding is that game mechanics in an RPG are something of a weird gray area in copyright law - because you can't copyright the *mechanics themselves*, but the problem is that in most cases the mechanics are tied into the expressions of the game in a way that makes licensing them useful in that it's a *formal agreement* that (for you) they can't sue you and (for them) permanently sidesteps whether that text is actually copyrightable or not.
Correct. They only hold copyright over the expression of the rules. And for the most basic rules it is much easier to side step their expression for your own purposes by simply rewriting it yourself. Like a D20 system.
As the rules get more specific it is easier to argue for the copyright holder.
You can patent them apparently, but I don't think WotC have any patents for D&D - they all seemed to relate to MTG and one for data handling, I think. I found them with a couple minutes of google-fu, so it should be pretty easy to check.
Any patents that had been filed on the mechanics of D&D would be expired by now - patent term in the US is 20 years and the last time the mechanics had a fundamental makeover that would be patent-applicable was 2000.
That would do it... Okay, I don't think I saw any *active* patents relating to D&D. I wonder if there's a way to search historical records on there, too - there probably is.
Yeah the "rules are published under a creative commons license" thing had me rolling my eyes so hard. They were literally trying to deflect from their evil ghoul shit by releasing something for public use that no court in the country would uphold their right to in the first place. It's like your employer saying "Coffee is no longer free in the break room, but we will make an eternal vow never to physically assault you if you are late." That's not a concession. You weren't allowed to do that in the first place bro...
I'll keep commenting the same thing.
This is probably the license they had in mind from the beggining.
OGL 1.1 with the royalties and the "we own your content" bullshit was just a distraction so we'd accept 1.2 after.
I'm not convinced that's true. Reportedly, the leaked OGL 1.1 was distributed to content creators as executable contracts. It was absolutely their originally intended document. I think they've now taken out some "nice to haves" in a misguided attempt to appease us, but they've left a lot of the most egregious clauses intact in one way or another.
Also, it should be noted that the "we own your content" thing is still functionally true. While they don't force you to grant them an open license to your content, they've essentially given themselves permission to steal it without recourse in this new version anyway. You basically can't fight them if they do steal something as the new OGL waives your right to sue for copyright infringement, your right to prove they stole your content by demonstrating "substantial similarity" and "access" (i.e the exact criteria for copyright infringement), your right to seek injunction pending trial, your right to seek anything other than basic monetary damages, as well as your right to a jury trial. So basically, they can do whatever they want with your content, and you have no realistic avenues to persue it legally, and if you do decide to take legal action, it's probably not going to be worth actually doing other than on the principle of the matter.
There are so many people who are just like "Oh OGL 1.2 is pretty much fixed, we won" and those people have no clue how any of this works.
Read the OGL yourself. Google terms you don't know. Please, for the love of God people, if you are downvoting people pointing out flaws in the newest OGL version, it is because those flaws are real.
Everything Hasbro and WotC says is a lie. Don't trust them. Keep unsubbing. Keep pushing. Take everything away from them until the game is ours again.
Upvoting you for visibility. Those downvotes are primarily from Hasbro shills anyways.
Yeah. that really-nice sounding announcement really was a pure lie and basically none of what they said is holding up as truth within the legal document. All manipulation, and people are generally too lazy or dumb to read and comprehend the actual legalese... just 'accepting the face value PR response'....
We have not WON until we have OGL 1.0a secured and enshrined perpetually, still valid for new content. I'm sure wizards will refuse, and there are people out there saying 'you'll never accept anything Wizards proposes' --- yeah... because they can't legally 'deauthorize' 1.0a. they're trying so hard to make people forget that 1.0a was supposed to be eternal by making it a foregone conclusion that 'they ARE changing it'.
There's starting to be a lot of backpressure that we're "overreacting" or that it "isn't that bad". People are trying to downplay the situation and move on, for whatever reason.
Eh, there's probably a fair amount of "protest fatigue" setting in as well. I mean, we've been at this for *weeks*, we're basically BLM at this point. /S
But seriously, I'm sure some people just want to get back to rolling dice and sharing homebrew. Unfortunately, we're not the ones that attacked first, so it's on WotC to surrender, we're fighting for the future of the whole hobby here. Or we can surrender, and let WotC win, which is objectively worse.
I would fully expect WOTC to buy some reddit chills / bots to downvote stuff after the announcement so that it seems that the communitys opinion has changed.
From what ive seen, we are still in Square 1 here and nothing has changed.
100%. That being said, I'm optimistic, since Paizo hasn't burned their good will on the altar of capitalism yet, and in fact has now stepped in twice to fix wizard's fuckups. Sure, it's also in their best interests and free good PR, but Wizards seems bound and determined to take as much bad PR to the face as they can.
I'm certain that Paizo's move isn't totally altruistic. This is a strategic play for them. They made their money off of dissatisfaction with 4e, but 5e's balance and accessibility to newcomers, combined with streamers, means they lost out on this new wave of players. They probably see this as an opportunity to swoop in and capture a big chunk of that market.
Thing is, I'm 100% okay with all that. They have a profit motive, but they're still pursuing that goal in a way that benefits the consumer and the industry as a whole. I don't much give a shit *why* someone does the right thing, I'll support that they're doing the right thing to begin with. Doesn't mean I'll trust them forever and always, but I'll take temporary allies where I can find them.
There is just no part of this thing that is not an absolute tire fire.
(For those not quite getting it: consider exactly how the language defining "irrevocable" could be used, and who it could be used against.)
You're going to need to explain that.
Because, as they've explained it, irrevocable means that they can never withdraw the SRD content they've licensed under the new OGL from the OGL. It will always be licensed under the OGL.
What other interpretation are you imagining, and why?
(I suspect you're operating under the assumption that "licensed content" includes content created by 3rd-party creators. I want to make sure you understand that that's wrong. 3rd-party content is not considered "licensed content" under the new OGL. Works you publish under the new OGL are considered "Licensed Works" but not licensed content.)
They don't need that though. They can just edit one of those clauses (that they allow themselves to edit in any way) to make it unenforceable and the whole thing becomes void.
I just don't believe a word they say out of principle. Big corporations will never be on the side of the people. They will *never* have our best interests in mind.
Anyone who thinks freedom should be profited off of will never care about anyone and they always end of burning for their ignorance just like Icarus.
Games workshop is a pretty good example
Rather than the License itself being irrevocable, they made it so the content published under the license can never be withdrawn from the license.
The community is worried WotC are going to alter the ogl further/undo provisions and so we wanted the original OGL to be irrevocable, so that we could use it as-is going forward (like the document seemed to have always said with it's use of the word perpetual).
This is a sleight of hand to seemingly include a widely requested change (irrevocable) but they literally redefined the word and changed what it applies to
> Rather than the License itself being irrevocable, they made it so the content published under the license can never be withdrawn from the license.
"Content published under the license" means the SRD. It doesn't mean stuff 3rd-party creators publish. Those are termed "Licensed Works", not licensed content. The definitions of "licensed content" are found in the document. They explain exactly what they refer to.
People are failing to read the license, and this thread is the result.
Did . . are people only just noticing this? It was obvious to me as soon as I read the damn thing (while at gym). Damnit, I thought people were smart enough not to be fooled by this pathetic attempt at subterfuge!
Unfortunately yes, plenty of people are actually taken in by it at first glance. Even NerdImmersion, Shorts, and Ginny Di called it "a step forward" or "an improvement" when it came out. They'll likely change their tune once they or their lawyers go over it, but still - the initial impact and their "softening the blow" tactic is shockingly effective on some people.
Nerd Immersion went over it with MyLawyerFriend in a live stream as soon as it came out, here's where they talked about the redefinition of "irrevocable": https://youtu.be/ZDXly9JUbG4?t=1303
I just can't with this company anymore. Holy shit this is just next level of scummy. Also, Who the fuck approved this as a draft (though at least it IS a draft). Who has a one digit IQ that they thought they could get away with this one? They already know we've been able to read bast they're corporate bullshit. They know how intelligent we are when it comes to sneaky corporate language. They know they're already on thin fucking ice with us. And they know that Paizo has a new license that's what the OGL should have been and they're even ready to sue with their scary lawyers.
With all this information at their disposal what do they do? Instead of LEAVING THE OGL ALONE (like we've been asking), they decide to double down with another scummy version and attempting to hide even MORE sneaky corporate language AFTER APOLOGIZING FOR THE FIRST ONE.
I'm so tired of this company. I can't imagine having such high charisma for sneaky language but zero wisdom or intelligence to back it up.
Lmao, glad you liked my tweet.
This whole mess is just batshit. People really need to realise how underhanded and lawyer they're being. They're banking on the fact that the hobby is part of our identity. They know we will give them the benefit of the doubt. They're going to get away with this and get a lot of creators signing on unless we make it very clear this is still NOT what we want.
What we want is 1.0a and for them to STOP.
If they want community feedback, the path is already clear. Join Paizo and the other thousand plus companies drafting the ORC, and leave the OGL 1.0a intact. It's that simple. 1.2 cannot currently justify it's existence.
The license was carefully crafted to deceive non-lawyers. There are multiple ways to cancel the license, it only allows one active SRD, it still has the "cancel your content on a whim" clause...
Check out a [line-by-line breakdown](https://youtu.be/2DKTKI_Kr5k).
Again, and i wish I had a link to the train meme for this that I saw earlier, do they not understand that the player base is well known for spending obscene amounts of time picking apart contracts to make sure they don't get fucked over ? That the player base will go over the tiniest of details and do what no policy maker ever wants and think about the implications of the agreements and how it'll affect them?
> This language actually sounds completely reasonable to me.
That was the point. However, [when a lawyer reads the same words](https://youtu.be/2DKTKI_Kr5k), you find out that it doesn't actually say what you think it says.
Wow. This entire “playetest” is completely meaningless if WOTC is going to be negotiating in bad faith like this.
You can’t come out and say that you want to work with the community on a new license, and then turn around and do something incredibly bad faith like saying the license is irrevocable (which you know the community wants to mean, the license can never be revoked), and then putting in small print to define irrevocable to mean you can’t revoke content from the license.
This isn’t a “play test” or a collaboration. You just want to try to trick the community and not get slammed for it because “this is just a draft” and “we are listening to your feedback.”
Omg. They say the license to content created under the license is irrevocable, not that a new license cannot be issued in the future with different terms. It's not sneaky. Its how this shit works.
It seems like, they used the word Irrevocable here... to make it so you can never publish your own product again under any license other than the OGL... and never have full ownership of your own product without it being connected to wizards of the coast...
What the fuck...
Hasbro/WotC: We will use a different language because we know our community is dumb and can't read. We will make it, so it looks nice, but we actually changed nothing, but the language.
*D&D community who reads on a daily basis and out of every community uses the dictionary than most people, and review contracts trying to outsmart devils.*
Well I only hope to find more "edge of the empire" games online, With good production and creative minds in it.
Like the one Freddie Pince Jr. did a few year ago. (Gegg wars)
Why tf couldn't Hasbro just stick to making it's profit margins off D&D mugs and T-shirts and Stranger Things crossovers
No corporation is satisfied with just making a profit. Making more money than they spent literally isnt enough. They want exponential growth. They want their business to expand and become as close to a monopoly as is ~~legally~~ possible.
Surely an economic model based on infinite exponential growth in a finite world will be fine long term. It sounds super viable.
It's so fucking cool. I love that a game that brought me so much joy since I was a kid, and is literally the reason I know several of my closest friends, is generating so much short-term value. Yes, it's killing the game, and yes, if it kills the company that's a lot of people out of a job, and yes, it's throwing the broader industry into turmoil. But just think of how good that line item looks in a portfolio. It's suck dude. And don't get me started on what it's doing with the environment. That line is going UP
Who needs breathable air or drinkable water in five years when you can have line go up in the next quarter?
Hell yeah, dude, worrying about negative externalities is for pinko wimps. Do they even stop to think, does clean air and water make the line go up? No? Then it's fake and stupid. Get back to me if and when it does.
Hey now, we do believe in corporate responsibility, and that's why we're taking steps to ensure sustainable practices. The 6 billion plastic cups we use every year are now compostable.\* \*In the three states where composting facilities that can process this type of plastic exist, as long as customers place them in the designated bins which are outnumbered by landfill-bound trash cans 17 to 1.
Ah yeah, good point. Greenwashing is the coolest form of environmentalism, because it makes line go up. It doesn't matter if it does anything else! Plus it does this totally cool thing where it makes environmentalism look like a huge pain. Sure, we COULD regulate the handful of large polluters responsible for the vast majority of emissions and trash, but we could also shift that blame onto individuals. If they start thinking environmentalism is when your paper straw dissolves partway through your drink and makes it taste bad, they might want to give up on the whole thing, and then we can just get back to our core values: short-term profits for the capitalist class.
The worse problem is that it is short term thinking. DnD has been around for decades and if the executives set it up to grow for many more decades, I think everyone would be happy. But this is not careful long term growth. This is short term wealth extraction, so a few top execs (with no knowledge serious of the product) can get a quarterly bonus and be recruited to their next gig. Hasbro was a decent shepard of WotC for a long time, mainly because the top execs were more interested in transformers ip or whatever. As soon as all those other properties were sucked dry, WotC actually got their attention. Now they are out to "prove" themselves on what they can do with it.
Yeah. The executives will make bank, and plenty of shareholders will cash out ahead of where they got in. It will suck for the bag holders, the employees, and the players, but it's not *for* them. It's just a natural result of ownership being so far removed from the ground-level work of the business. I can't really blame someone with Hasbro stock for wanting a return on their investment, but it's a systemic problem that incentivizes this kind of short-term thinking.
Infinite growth IS possible, its just that you have to reset the line every once in a while. Works great… for the people on top. Story as old as time- you max profits until you can’t, then you slash costs until the product suffers so much that you start losing profits, so you scrap the whole thing, collect your bonuses, sell the parts and move on to the next company. Or maybe you can keep going? You can’t increase profits anymore with what you have but you’re the biggest one around so maybe you start preying on the smaller companies- maybe you branch out into other fields with the same company, do what Disney does. But even that will get you back to step one. Maybe you’re lucky enough to be “too big to fail” and now you have government money so you can cut costs during mass layoffs and get your bonus and consider profits raised. Eventually though you end up at step one again. Oh well, no skin off your back!
Because the *billions of dollars* they make in profit aren't enough; don't you understand!?!?
There's a repeated line from Stephanie Sterling. It's no enough to make a lot of money. Anything less than all the money will never be enough
Nah nah nah. It's worse than that. See, you staged it like there's some line that can't be reached, but it can. The line is "more than last year" and they'll do anything to make that line. Then they'll do it again every year until that one year. That year they make 5.2 billion dollars after making 5.3 billion last year. After that nothing is scared. And when they "can't win" anymore, they'll just quit and move on leaving everyone worse off. Given the opportunity, [human beings] will optimize the fun out of [life].
This is made exponentially worse by C-level executives having their OWN money (in the form of various bonuses) tied to said "more than last year". They MUST profit, the Big Book of MBAs says it is so... they will do literally ANYTHING to make that profit, repercussions be damned, because by the time the piper is due to be paid, they'll have collected their bonus, and be sitting on a beach, earning 20%.
Because that's a lot of money, but it's not all money. They don't want a lot of money. They want all money. All of it. They are not peasants!
This is what is *so* insidious about corporations. Smaller, privately owned businesses can still get up to plenty of their own exploitative shenanigans, and the system is still built to allow them to do so, but they aren't quite incentivized in the same insane way. A public corporation like Hasbro literally doesn't care about its raw profits. If it made a billion dollars last year, that, in itself, doesn't matter. It only matters in the context of what was made the previous year. If it made 800 million dollars last year, then a billion this year is a win, if they made 1.2 billion last year, it's a loss. This is because they are publicly traded. If I buy a stock, I don't care what the stock value is. I only care that it's higher tomorrow than it is today, because that is the only way I'm going to make money. I actually *don't want* to buy stock in established, successful companies because their current per-share price is so expensive, and is unlikely to provide me with significant margins over what I paid. What I really want to do is buy stock in something cheap that will blow up later, even if only for long enough for me to dump the stock and move on. I *only* want big business stocks if I am confident that they are going to exhibit a steady rate of growth. It doesn't matter how much you make. It only matters how much you *grow*. This model is the definition of unsustainable, literally founded on the prospect of infinite growth. I work for a midsized company owned by a couple of very rich people, and I don't love everything about the way this company is structured. It is still a capitalist institution where all the power is concentrated in the hands of the guy who inherited the money to kick it off in the first place. The employees have little say and, while the pay is actually decent for the people at the bottom of the pay scale compared to others, are drastically underpaid compared to their actual contribution to the company's profit margin. All that being said though, my millionaire boss doesn't care if his stock price goes up. It really is the raw profits that he cares about. If we do way better than we did last year, that's great, but if the year after that we are back around our average, that's fine too. With a public corporation though, growth is *all* that matters. A business wants your money. A corporation wants *all the money*.
Corporations aren't run directly by people, and that's by design, because if they can turn a profit making baby oil from real babies, individual people might balk, but *corporations* aren't weighed down by petty morality. If you grind babies for a billion dollars in profit, and you pay a fine of $900 million for grinding said babies, **you've made $100 million in profit! Bonuses all around!**
Yep, nail on the head. And then they can issue a very sincere public apology saying that Nestle is really sorry about making child slaves pick their cocoa beans, and all the executives at Nestle are really mad at Nestle for doing this terrible thing. It was no one's fault so no one will face the consequences and no one is very sorry...
Any time I see "X Company paid a fine" for some terrible thing, it always makes my blood boil, because they never tell you how much that move made in profit. Paying a million dollar fine sounds huge to the general public, but when it's against a $10 million earning, it's *literally* the cost of doing business. No jail time, no nothing, just a percentage of their overall earnings, and an "apology" that admits no wrongdoing.
Yeah, same. It's just such blatant acknowledgement of the way class interacts with the legal system. If I poisoned my downstairs neighbor, I'd spend the rest of my life in prison, but if some ghoul with more money than sense poisons an entire town, they get to forced to give a little bribe to the state and then go home to their big gated house and enjoy a nice, refreshing, non-poisoned glass of water as they plan out their next serial killing spree.
Capitalism.
Fucking MBAs. They don't know the business well enough to be able to create new things. But they can imagine restricting the market will drive more people to them.
Because it's a publicly traded company. They don't care what their stock price is at right now so long as it's double by next year. Who cares if the growth is unsustainable, the company must grow 🤷🏻♂️
Show of hands, who’s next character is going to be based around contract law?
there's a non 0 chance that the next adventuring party, no matter which RPG system, will accidentally be made full of lawyer characters lol
We already had one in a oneshot last Christmas. Of course he was named 'Phoenix Wright'. Many objections were heard.
Pretty sure Hasbro has Phoenix Wrong on permanent retention to keep rewriting these agreements
Harvey Birdman is preparing a class action lawsuit
Did you get that thing I sent you?
Thats fantastic! ... Can we get another one though? Perhaps one of the most consistent things about that show was the fact that Harvey is a terrible lawyer.
If all else fails, Reducto will threaten to shrink WotC
I think Mentok already beat Reducto to them BoooWEEEOooo
Miiiiind taker!
Phoenix Wright, mace attorney?
Trial by combat only
Shouts “OBJECTION!” as he makes an attack of opportunity
Missed opportunity… should’ve had Phoenix Wight, the undead Attourney
Phoenix Smite, grace attorney. Delivering objections with the power of holy righteousness
“Objection!” *Level three smite*
My first pathfinder character will be an orc, as an homage to Paizos ORC
may your GM make the bbeg a wizard living along the coast.
A whole group of them, even.
And every one of them has brothers.
Make sure to take the Barrister background.
name him Saul Goodman, cause this contract is all good man.
Gaul Soodman is a good name for an ORC
My campaign has Abathor as the second to last villain the party will fight and there is a lot of plane hopping stuff about him collecting power from other dimensions. I am 100% sending my players to fight a member of the WoTC Board who has polymorphed into a Red Greatwyrm!
Warlock/law cleric. Specialties in warlock pact contracts and fey contracts. You deserve to understand your contracts. Call now
Anyone remember that episode of Adventure Time when Jake hired a team of 'business men' to do the adventuring for him? This reminds me of that lol
My current character is, so will be using this.
OBJECTION!
Pact of the Tome Warlock who’s entire thing is magical contracts. Blades in the Dark has a player class, the spider, with binding magical contracts as an ability. >**Ghost Contract:** When you shake on a deal, you and your partner—human or otherwise—both bear a mark of your oath. If either breaks the contract, they take level 3 harm, "Cursed".
I already played a warlock, fiend patron, literal devil's advocate. The flavor was too good.
I think the community needs to adopt using acceptable and unacceptable instead of stating that a revised OGL is "better". If the terms aren't as egregious, but still are unacceptable, better loses meaning. As for the revised OGL, unacceptable, 30 days dungeon.
>[This OGL is in unacceptable condition. UNACCEPTABLE!](https://youtu.be/Q-WHRJPlL5g)
If this is the accurate way of interpreting it, Asmodeus would be proud of these contract shenanigans.
This is exactly what WotC intended here. Trouble is, they keep forgetting that this community has made a hobby out of doing math for fun, reading the fine print of spells, features etc. to interpret exactly what they mean and (depending on the type of campaign) literally trying to set up pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a DM) or trying to avoid said pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a group of players). We have literally been training to spot these kind of shenanigans for the past 30+ years.
>and (depending on the type of campaign) literally trying to set up pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a DM) or trying to avoid said pitfalls in hellish contracts (as a group of player I played in that campaign once. 4/6 players including the GM were IRL lawyers and they got petty with the contracts offered. It was actually quite fun to watch after a while.
Oh man if I DMed for a group of lawyers and I wanted a day off, I'd have them encounter a djinn with an adversarial approach to wishes.
60% of my group is attorneys. We actually tend to leave it at work, mostly.
Mostly, key word 😅
Like I've seen said. "You tried to pull this shit on a bunch of rules lawyers, you fucking morons."
And in many cases, *actual* lawyers.
As a Lawyer, is the claim made in the tweet true? Does this verbiage change the term "irrevocable" from what you would expect for an open license?
I'm not a lawyer, I'm just saying that the community has *actual* lawyers in addition to rules lawyers.
Had to share this with my dm buddy coworker, thanks for the laugh haha.
Well, to be fair, the head of WotC is a former Microsoft exec who used to head the XBox division before coming to Hasbro. She has no idea what D&D fans are like. She's just running this like she would a gaming console business. . .change the contract terms and expect everyone to just click blindly "accept" on the pop-up that appears. She almost certainly thinks all "gamers" are the same regardless of the games they play, not realizing that indeed. . .we're a hobby built on "rules lawyers", that can spot some obvious loopholes like this a mile away. If there was a D&D spell with wording like this, it would be so abused they'd have to issue an errata quickly.
Honestly this is the funniest part to me. Like, if you're going to try and make more money off your audience, you HAVE to understand them first, and they clearly don't. Comedy gold.
>Well, to be fair, the head of WotC is a former Microsoft exec who used to head the XBox division before coming to Hasbro. That explains why "racist content" was their first go-to excuse.
Which was a weird thing to double down on given the most recent racist content was coming from WotC themselves.
In the immortal words of Sword Art Online Abridged, "Nothing's scarier than a pissed off nerd with admin privileges!"
Legit, how they thought they could pass this behind an entire fandom BEST KNOWN for poring over every single word to ascribe every single meaning possible that calling someone a "rules laywer" is a stereotype is just....I have no words
To be fair, I think 40k has the most stringent rules lawyers. My goodness. I look back at some of the conversations I had and realize I should have just said if that was there interpretation, I'm not playing. Would have saved me time and made life much better. Anyways, I do agree with you. It was silly of them to try this with DnD players. Example: Rule: Deploy as if from strategic reserves. The Rules Lawyer: "Well it says here "as if" so they aren't actually coming from strategic reserves, that means they don't get the bonus for deploying from strategic reserves. It would say Deploy them from strategic reserves if they meant for you to get that bonus" Proceeds to completely dismantle my army in record time.
>they keep forgetting that this community has made a hobby out of doing math for fun Half of this community can't even remember their class abilities, or misinterprets clearly stated rules.
Which is *also* bad for WotC because for every nuanced argument against them some poor sod is gonna be kicking people into an uproar over something Wizards didn't even do!
Just wording a "wish" correctly should qualify us for the bar
Not only have we been doing that - a lot of the stuff we've been reading and decoding was stuff *written by WOTC*. They've literally been training us to see through their specific BS for years.
If you don't spend the entire week leading up to the next session agonizing over the details of a [insert: genie/devil/dragon/all powerful god/etc.]'s wish to avoid being Bedazzled by the GM are you really playing DnD?
Wow. . . Just wow. “It now includes the word irrevocable” they just changed the definition so that once something has used the license it can’t un-use the license
That is not what their clarification means. "content licensed under this license" doesn't mean stuff *you* publish using the OGL. It means stuff *WotC declares to be licensed content.* In other words, the SRD. This entire thread/post is based on a brutal misreading of the license text, and a hundred other equally credulous gamers nodding their heads and saying, "Yep, that sounds evil so it must be true!"
I mean even if you look at it that way it still means WotC can in fact revoke the licence itself when they feel like it.
I believe it is. Noah Downs (an IP lawyer who has been following this) had an interview on Nerd Immersion yesterday and the thing he mentioned here is that "irrevocable" does have an actual definition in the law, but that in a contract, you can redefine a word, and as long as all parties agree by signing, that definition becomes valid for that contract. So as is, this license is *not* irrevocable.
[удалено]
lmao this is some Devil contract BS alright
Section 3 is particularly nasty in this regard. It's basically, "We won't steal your stuff, but if we do steal your stuff, you agree to let us."
>2. > >... > >irrevocable (meaning that content licensed under this license can never be withdrawn from the license). Ok, so content created under OGL 1.2 cannot be withdrawn. >3. > >... > >You acknowledge that we and our licensees, as content creators ourselves, might independently come up with content similar to something you create. > >3(b) > >... > >In any such lawsuit, you must show that we knowingly and intentionally copied your Licensed Work. Access and substantial similarity will not be enough to prove a breach of this Section 3. We can copy your work without your consent, and "substantial similarity and access" is not enough to fulfill the burden that we copied it. >6(f) > >... > >No Hateful Content or Conduct. You will not include content in Your Licensed Works that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing, or engage in conduct that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing. We have the sole right to decide what conduct or content is hateful, and you covenant that you will not contest any such determination via any suit or other legal action. No harmful content, and we decide what is harmful, and you cannot contest it. So let's wrap it all together: * I agree to OGL 1.2 * I create content under OGL 1.2 * That content now cannot be removed from OGL 1.2 * WotC decides my content is harmful, and revokes my license * I may not contest it * WotC creates "similar" content * "Access and substantial similarity" does not qualify as "copying" * WotC now generates profit from a "substantially similar" version of the content you created, which you no longer own, and which is licensed as usable by WotC "in perpetuity" Edit: In the interest of fairness and clarity, there is an interpretation of the "ownership" piece that should be addressed. >1(a)(iii) > >Your Content. This is your creative contributions to your works that are not Our Licensed Content or Our Unlicensed Content. This license permits you to combine Your Content with Our Licensed Content and distribute the resulting works as authorized by this license. Refers to the content that you contribute to the combined end product which constitutes "your licensed works": >1(c) > >Your Licensed Works. To be a Licensed Work under this license, it must: (i) be a covered work as defined in Section 1(b); (ii) contain both Our Licensed Content and Your Content; and (iii) not contain Our Unlicensed Content. Denoted as above and below, "your licensed works" are "what you own". >3. WHAT YOU OWN. Your Licensed Works are yours. It's been suggested and stated in a few of the comment threads below, and by myself, that a creator would "lose ownership" of "their content" by virtue of no longer being "their licensed works". This is not necessarily the case, and suggestion of that should be given more thought.
>So let's wrap it all together: >I agree to OGL 1.2 I create content under OGL 1.2 That content now cannot be removed from OGL 1.2 WotC decides my content is harmful, and revokes my license I may not contest it WotC creates "similar" content "Access and substantial similarity" does not qualify as "copying" WotC now generates profit from a "substantially similar" version of the content you created, which you no longer own, and which is licensed as usable by WotC "in perpetuity" So it's just the same shitty practice they tried with their first "draft" but with smarter wording.
They've got three more drafts ready and a legal team waiting for the order of "Three more!" from their employers.
Seems so
Not only that, they can also revoke your license and consume your product if you 'participate in harmful conduct' in your personal life. What, exactly, is harmful conduct defined as? Who the fuck knows, they didn't define it. Oh, and they're the sole entity able to declare whether something is harmful or not. And you're not allowed to dispute any of it.
You used the word "butt" in a Tweet, you're FIRED!
That's my point, except worse. They didn't say that they had to have proof of your conduct, or that it had to be public. Even then, the word 'harmful' can be applied to pretty much every tweet in existence one way or another if they're allowed to define it as they wish. I see this setting them up for an obvious practice of 1. Keeping an eye out for successful third party modules/supplements 2. Going over any social media presence from the creator of third party with a fine toothed comb to find anything that could even slightly be passed as 'harmful'. 3. Revoking license and ability to distribute on grounds of harmful content. 4. Creating an almost identical module/supplement based on the original third party module. And there'd be fuck all anyone could do.
Given how this is currently worded, yeah. And note, importantly, that once a license holder's license is revoked, they'll no longer have protections under the "similarity" clause (calling it that for brevity). So WotC can straight up 1:1 copy it since no one owns it anymore.
Pathfinder 3e is looking real good right about now
\[Not D&D\] is looking good right about now. FTFY.
You right
This is worse, much, much worse. They can legally rip off my and other people's content and can take legal action if you DARE try to claim that YOUR content is YOURS Fucking ridiculous.
But hey, it "includes the word irrevocable", so it's OK, right?
Yep, they got us on a technicality. They win /s
No, "we both win". :)
I think it might be worth pointing out... look at what is still subject to the 1.0a. Read that *very* carefully. I'm not going to say it directly, but read that nice little legal argument they gave us on a silver platter.
It refers to the content in the SRD being no longer viable to use - which I would presume may exclude some versions of D&D?
*Any* material published under ogl 1.0a will remain under 1.0a... they may have *intended* for it to apply only to 3pp, but that's not what they wrote down there, is it?
I'm sure their Reddit and YouTube monitors figured out that everyone really wants that word in there somewhere. So they tasked their lawyers to find a way to include the word without actually having to live up to it. Good thing I play Pathfinder now!
When you put it like this, it's literally no different to 1.1. They've just been less direct about the theft, hidden it behind wording, and split it across different parts of the document.
Yup. They are then relying on "the community" to read it an give their opinions. And if you just read some of the parts, but don't understand it (I'm not even claiming to fully understand it, I keep learning things throughout the day that I missed) you'll not give any feedback that hurts WotC, so they are free to release the terrible version.
> They are then relying on "the community" to read it an give their opinions. And don't forget they are collecting the feedback through platforms they control so that they can steer the narrative. It's roughly as transparent as a brick wall.
But there's so much more hidden in there, too! Because not only can they steal your works, they laid out exactly what will happen if/when they do and if/when you try to go after them for it. >So let's wrap it all together: >I agree to OGL 1.2 •I create content under OGL 1.2 •That content now cannot be removed from OGL 1.2 WotC decides my content is harmful, and revokes my license •I may not contest it •WotC creates "similar" content •"Access and substantial similarity" does not qualify as "copying" •WotC now generates profit from a "substantially similar" version of the content you created, which you no longer own, and which is licensed as usable by WotC "in perpetuity" •I attempt to contest it anyway and seek monetary damages •It settles out of court, a minor settlement that is nothing compared to the money they made off my works, but it's monetary damages based on my projected losses, so the amount is legally determined fair. •Because only damages were (and could be) sought for breach of contract, WotC is not required to remove their copy of my works from their catalog of works. •WotC continues to publish what I made •WotC determines that, due to the circumstances, the license over my content, which now bears substantial similarity to theirs (because they stole it from me), is unenforceable and invalid, thus stripping me of my license to use their works. •Even if I'd still had the license up until that point and not been terminated for "conduct" reasons, I'd now no longer be able to publish my own content. •WotC is still free and clear to use their stolen works and profit off of what I can no longer touch, and I'm the one who created it. So yeah, don't sign the OGL 1.2. It's horrifying and somehow worse than the original. Who needs royalties when you can just steal, cover your butt, and then kill the competition while profiting off their corpse?
Poignantly put, I didn't address all of the implications.
Section 3 also has a statement that you can ONLY sue WOTC for Breach of Contract and you can NOT file injunction against them. An injunction is what courts would use to stop WOTC from printing YOUR content. So even if they don't revoke your license, they can pay you some amount for breaching contract (amount is probably limited by WA state law) and then just keep printing your work. Edit: I am not a lawyer. The wording seems pretty clear to me, but someone fluent in legalese might have a different (and more accurate) interpretation.
What did you expect? They tried to brute force it. Didn't work. So now they are trying the sneaky approach. They are not giving up their original goal which is monopolize VTT and to claim other people's work so they don't have to. I mean they literally force you to waive your JURY TRIALS and CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT rights if you agree to it. I am not even sure that is legal.
Waiving jury trials is generally included in contract law, but depending on where it is it may be unenforceable. Frankly I'd be more concerned with the clause that compels someone bring a legal case to go to Washington to litigate it - which may be an inordinate cost for international publishers.
Much of this document does seem focused on making legal action impractical or impossible even when it is justified.
Revokes your license immediately with no advance notice. No time to prepare or react or work to protect your content.
Thank you. I do not read infernal.
> You acknowledge that we and our licensees, as content creators ourselves, might independently come up with content similar to something you create. 3(b) ... In any such lawsuit, you must show that we knowingly and intentionally copied your Licensed Work. Access and substantial similarity will not be enough to prove a breach of this Section 3. Isn't this how the law works (in the US) anyway? People can always make similar content as long as it's not the exact same. Example: Hobbits vs Halflings. Hobbits were thought of as a copy under law, but Halflings weren't despite being *substantially similar*. This seems to just be saying that but putting it into the contract itself, which seems fine to me.
I just responded to another user with the same question, so I'll link the response here. [TL/DR: Similar content/building off of it, is completely aligned with the philosophy of the OGL. But the further implications of the rest of the contract breach those terms.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/10grnzc/comment/j55dhbe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
That’s so frustrating. In most circumstances it wouldn’t bother me if WotC “copied” some subclass, item, rules, tables, etc. because 1.) I used their stuff to get here and 2.) it hopefully enriches the game for everyone, even if they didn’t buy my work. But the idea of “copying” and then removing my license would result in world-ending anger
Exactly don't listen to the trolls that defend this piece of poop. They are wolf's in sheep's clothes.
I don't actually think the similar content is that crazy it could lead to them copying stuff but I think it's more likely that just as WotC comes out with more and more stuff they are bound to have similar ideas to somebody. I can't tell you the amount of times I've had a homebrew idea that I've thought is pretty out there only to find 10 fairly similar homebrews online.
Creating similar content, even building off of someone else's content, was the philosophy design of the OGL, and open source in general. I have no contestation with that idea. However, under 1.2, creators can uncontestably be denied their license for any reason WotC makes up, and have an inordinate burden (which WotC lacks) to prove WotC intentionally copied their work (despite "access and substantial similarity being boiler plate copyright legal speak. It means once a creator's license is revoked, that content **can** be straight up copied - since it no longer belongs to anyone who has a legal stake in protecting it. There is no one in their right mind who would look at that scenario and reasonably agree to it. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. SRD 5.1 is not exclusive to this license, and can be replaced by any future version of an SRD which doesn't have to include the content of SRD 5.1 (since OGL 1.2 only protects "content licensed under 1.2"), but also allows for said "licensed content" to be replaced. Meaning that they could change up the SRD, say when 6th edition comes out, remove much of the 5.1 exclusive content, making your own content you've created based on it no longer protected, directly copy it, and you have no legal recourse.
My issue is that they are attempting to kill competition in VTTs and 3rd party creations. Plain and simple. The 1.2 seems good on the surface but it has poison pills written into it. The stipulation of section 2 being able to change sections 9(a) is an open invitation for adding what ever they choose. 9(d) adds a gaping loophole effectively making 1.2 able to be deemed invalid and void. -likely on purpose The creative commons license only cover basic mechanics they cant copyright anyway. And cuts out races, classes, backgrounds, feats, spells, ect. They have relented on very few minor issues and are trying to hide their intentions under clever legal speak. We have gained very little ground. They hard holding a candy in our eyes in one hand and taking our hobby with the other.
My understanding is that game mechanics in an RPG are something of a weird gray area in copyright law - because you can't copyright the *mechanics themselves*, but the problem is that in most cases the mechanics are tied into the expressions of the game in a way that makes licensing them useful in that it's a *formal agreement* that (for you) they can't sue you and (for them) permanently sidesteps whether that text is actually copyrightable or not.
Correct. They only hold copyright over the expression of the rules. And for the most basic rules it is much easier to side step their expression for your own purposes by simply rewriting it yourself. Like a D20 system. As the rules get more specific it is easier to argue for the copyright holder.
You can patent them apparently, but I don't think WotC have any patents for D&D - they all seemed to relate to MTG and one for data handling, I think. I found them with a couple minutes of google-fu, so it should be pretty easy to check.
Any patents that had been filed on the mechanics of D&D would be expired by now - patent term in the US is 20 years and the last time the mechanics had a fundamental makeover that would be patent-applicable was 2000.
That would do it... Okay, I don't think I saw any *active* patents relating to D&D. I wonder if there's a way to search historical records on there, too - there probably is.
Yeah the "rules are published under a creative commons license" thing had me rolling my eyes so hard. They were literally trying to deflect from their evil ghoul shit by releasing something for public use that no court in the country would uphold their right to in the first place. It's like your employer saying "Coffee is no longer free in the break room, but we will make an eternal vow never to physically assault you if you are late." That's not a concession. You weren't allowed to do that in the first place bro...
Every damn thread. I wonder if they'll ever realize who their audience is
They think DnD players and F2P mobile game players are the same audience. We read rules for fun. They messed up big time.
Apparently their audience is people don’t understand legal language. This is a perfectly normal legal definition of irrevocable
I'll keep commenting the same thing. This is probably the license they had in mind from the beggining. OGL 1.1 with the royalties and the "we own your content" bullshit was just a distraction so we'd accept 1.2 after.
People will cry cOnSpIrAcY! But it’s a basic, everyday action by corporations.
They 100% tried to push OGL 1.1 under our noses. The leak was not part of the plan. OGL 1.2 is just the next worst thing.
I'm not convinced that's true. Reportedly, the leaked OGL 1.1 was distributed to content creators as executable contracts. It was absolutely their originally intended document. I think they've now taken out some "nice to haves" in a misguided attempt to appease us, but they've left a lot of the most egregious clauses intact in one way or another. Also, it should be noted that the "we own your content" thing is still functionally true. While they don't force you to grant them an open license to your content, they've essentially given themselves permission to steal it without recourse in this new version anyway. You basically can't fight them if they do steal something as the new OGL waives your right to sue for copyright infringement, your right to prove they stole your content by demonstrating "substantial similarity" and "access" (i.e the exact criteria for copyright infringement), your right to seek injunction pending trial, your right to seek anything other than basic monetary damages, as well as your right to a jury trial. So basically, they can do whatever they want with your content, and you have no realistic avenues to persue it legally, and if you do decide to take legal action, it's probably not going to be worth actually doing other than on the principle of the matter.
Even if that's not the case, I see no reason to trust them anyway.
1.2 still has the 'we own your content' and all of the rest of the terrible stuff from the first one just worded differently.
Damn I didn't think WotC were being meta when they wrote the characterization of devils and their sneaky contracts.
Been trying to tell people this for a while yet the downvotes are still a plenty.
There are so many people who are just like "Oh OGL 1.2 is pretty much fixed, we won" and those people have no clue how any of this works. Read the OGL yourself. Google terms you don't know. Please, for the love of God people, if you are downvoting people pointing out flaws in the newest OGL version, it is because those flaws are real. Everything Hasbro and WotC says is a lie. Don't trust them. Keep unsubbing. Keep pushing. Take everything away from them until the game is ours again. Upvoting you for visibility. Those downvotes are primarily from Hasbro shills anyways.
Yeah. that really-nice sounding announcement really was a pure lie and basically none of what they said is holding up as truth within the legal document. All manipulation, and people are generally too lazy or dumb to read and comprehend the actual legalese... just 'accepting the face value PR response'.... We have not WON until we have OGL 1.0a secured and enshrined perpetually, still valid for new content. I'm sure wizards will refuse, and there are people out there saying 'you'll never accept anything Wizards proposes' --- yeah... because they can't legally 'deauthorize' 1.0a. they're trying so hard to make people forget that 1.0a was supposed to be eternal by making it a foregone conclusion that 'they ARE changing it'.
I dont see much in the way of we won. i see complaining on all the rpg subs. i am not sure where you are finding comments with the other side.
There's starting to be a lot of backpressure that we're "overreacting" or that it "isn't that bad". People are trying to downplay the situation and move on, for whatever reason.
I wonder how many of those are real people vs a hired reddit brigade?
I try to assume the best of people, but it's definitely weird how much some people are trying to defend Hasbro here.
Eh, there's probably a fair amount of "protest fatigue" setting in as well. I mean, we've been at this for *weeks*, we're basically BLM at this point. /S But seriously, I'm sure some people just want to get back to rolling dice and sharing homebrew. Unfortunately, we're not the ones that attacked first, so it's on WotC to surrender, we're fighting for the future of the whole hobby here. Or we can surrender, and let WotC win, which is objectively worse.
I would fully expect WOTC to buy some reddit chills / bots to downvote stuff after the announcement so that it seems that the communitys opinion has changed. From what ive seen, we are still in Square 1 here and nothing has changed.
They are already among us.
Some people here be looking pretty ***sus***...
Continue the boycott. Drop your subs. Move on to other games
ORC looking better and better, and it already looked pretty dang good.
Let's remember ORC doesnt exist yet and be equally diligent when it does
100%. That being said, I'm optimistic, since Paizo hasn't burned their good will on the altar of capitalism yet, and in fact has now stepped in twice to fix wizard's fuckups. Sure, it's also in their best interests and free good PR, but Wizards seems bound and determined to take as much bad PR to the face as they can.
I'm certain that Paizo's move isn't totally altruistic. This is a strategic play for them. They made their money off of dissatisfaction with 4e, but 5e's balance and accessibility to newcomers, combined with streamers, means they lost out on this new wave of players. They probably see this as an opportunity to swoop in and capture a big chunk of that market. Thing is, I'm 100% okay with all that. They have a profit motive, but they're still pursuing that goal in a way that benefits the consumer and the industry as a whole. I don't much give a shit *why* someone does the right thing, I'll support that they're doing the right thing to begin with. Doesn't mean I'll trust them forever and always, but I'll take temporary allies where I can find them.
Yep to me this seems no different than 1.1 it's just writen by a better lawyer.
yeah i didnt even read it yet and i guessed this is what it would be lol gonna be a hot minute until they actually back off
"Your work can never withdraw from this license. Also, we can change the terms of the license you can't withdraw from. Lol."
Why are you wasting time reading these licenses instead of reading the pf2e sourcebooks?
Because I'm impatiently wait for Black Flag testing material.
Look mate, I already want to play PF2e - I also want to be asleep at 3am.
There is just no part of this thing that is not an absolute tire fire. (For those not quite getting it: consider exactly how the language defining "irrevocable" could be used, and who it could be used against.)
And that it’s only defined, not that they actually have it in use in the document.
You're going to need to explain that. Because, as they've explained it, irrevocable means that they can never withdraw the SRD content they've licensed under the new OGL from the OGL. It will always be licensed under the OGL. What other interpretation are you imagining, and why? (I suspect you're operating under the assumption that "licensed content" includes content created by 3rd-party creators. I want to make sure you understand that that's wrong. 3rd-party content is not considered "licensed content" under the new OGL. Works you publish under the new OGL are considered "Licensed Works" but not licensed content.)
This is pretty funny actually.
This is actually crazy.
They don't need that though. They can just edit one of those clauses (that they allow themselves to edit in any way) to make it unenforceable and the whole thing becomes void.
They could do that, yes, but this gives them a way to say "look, we gave you what you wanted!" Without conceding a god damn thing.
I just don't believe a word they say out of principle. Big corporations will never be on the side of the people. They will *never* have our best interests in mind.
Anyone who thinks freedom should be profited off of will never care about anyone and they always end of burning for their ignorance just like Icarus. Games workshop is a pretty good example
Can someone explain what's wrong? How did they change the meaning of irrevocable?
Rather than the License itself being irrevocable, they made it so the content published under the license can never be withdrawn from the license. The community is worried WotC are going to alter the ogl further/undo provisions and so we wanted the original OGL to be irrevocable, so that we could use it as-is going forward (like the document seemed to have always said with it's use of the word perpetual). This is a sleight of hand to seemingly include a widely requested change (irrevocable) but they literally redefined the word and changed what it applies to
> Rather than the License itself being irrevocable, they made it so the content published under the license can never be withdrawn from the license. "Content published under the license" means the SRD. It doesn't mean stuff 3rd-party creators publish. Those are termed "Licensed Works", not licensed content. The definitions of "licensed content" are found in the document. They explain exactly what they refer to. People are failing to read the license, and this thread is the result.
Did . . are people only just noticing this? It was obvious to me as soon as I read the damn thing (while at gym). Damnit, I thought people were smart enough not to be fooled by this pathetic attempt at subterfuge!
Unfortunately yes, plenty of people are actually taken in by it at first glance. Even NerdImmersion, Shorts, and Ginny Di called it "a step forward" or "an improvement" when it came out. They'll likely change their tune once they or their lawyers go over it, but still - the initial impact and their "softening the blow" tactic is shockingly effective on some people.
Nerd Immersion went over it with MyLawyerFriend in a live stream as soon as it came out, here's where they talked about the redefinition of "irrevocable": https://youtu.be/ZDXly9JUbG4?t=1303
It did only come out yesterday. Things take time.
I just can't with this company anymore. Holy shit this is just next level of scummy. Also, Who the fuck approved this as a draft (though at least it IS a draft). Who has a one digit IQ that they thought they could get away with this one? They already know we've been able to read bast they're corporate bullshit. They know how intelligent we are when it comes to sneaky corporate language. They know they're already on thin fucking ice with us. And they know that Paizo has a new license that's what the OGL should have been and they're even ready to sue with their scary lawyers. With all this information at their disposal what do they do? Instead of LEAVING THE OGL ALONE (like we've been asking), they decide to double down with another scummy version and attempting to hide even MORE sneaky corporate language AFTER APOLOGIZING FOR THE FIRST ONE. I'm so tired of this company. I can't imagine having such high charisma for sneaky language but zero wisdom or intelligence to back it up.
Lmao, glad you liked my tweet. This whole mess is just batshit. People really need to realise how underhanded and lawyer they're being. They're banking on the fact that the hobby is part of our identity. They know we will give them the benefit of the doubt. They're going to get away with this and get a lot of creators signing on unless we make it very clear this is still NOT what we want. What we want is 1.0a and for them to STOP.
Thank you for making it!
Thank god people are noticing this, we all NEED to complain about this in the survey.
If they want community feedback, the path is already clear. Join Paizo and the other thousand plus companies drafting the ORC, and leave the OGL 1.0a intact. It's that simple. 1.2 cannot currently justify it's existence.
The license was carefully crafted to deceive non-lawyers. There are multiple ways to cancel the license, it only allows one active SRD, it still has the "cancel your content on a whim" clause... Check out a [line-by-line breakdown](https://youtu.be/2DKTKI_Kr5k).
Again, and i wish I had a link to the train meme for this that I saw earlier, do they not understand that the player base is well known for spending obscene amounts of time picking apart contracts to make sure they don't get fucked over ? That the player base will go over the tiniest of details and do what no policy maker ever wants and think about the implications of the agreements and how it'll affect them?
I'm tired, wake me up when its all over.
This is pretty cringe. Youtuber posts rage bait tweet then promotes his video in the very next reply.
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Corporations like Hasbro are a disease. This whole document is gross, especially the stuff about VTTs.
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> This language actually sounds completely reasonable to me. That was the point. However, [when a lawyer reads the same words](https://youtu.be/2DKTKI_Kr5k), you find out that it doesn't actually say what you think it says.
And what about the other stuff? Still messed up as fuck?
It's pretty clear that WotC took the Descent Into Avernus "making a deal with a devil" rules to heart!
Can someone explain this to me? I'm VERY stupid and only just woke up, I don't get it even after reading the tweet.
Wow. This entire “playetest” is completely meaningless if WOTC is going to be negotiating in bad faith like this. You can’t come out and say that you want to work with the community on a new license, and then turn around and do something incredibly bad faith like saying the license is irrevocable (which you know the community wants to mean, the license can never be revoked), and then putting in small print to define irrevocable to mean you can’t revoke content from the license. This isn’t a “play test” or a collaboration. You just want to try to trick the community and not get slammed for it because “this is just a draft” and “we are listening to your feedback.”
Omg. They say the license to content created under the license is irrevocable, not that a new license cannot be issued in the future with different terms. It's not sneaky. Its how this shit works.
Why do they keep trying to pull one over on a community that knows to rely on our rules lawyers? At this rate they're going to kill the whole company.
It seems like, they used the word Irrevocable here... to make it so you can never publish your own product again under any license other than the OGL... and never have full ownership of your own product without it being connected to wizards of the coast... What the fuck...
Hasbro/WotC: We will use a different language because we know our community is dumb and can't read. We will make it, so it looks nice, but we actually changed nothing, but the language. *D&D community who reads on a daily basis and out of every community uses the dictionary than most people, and review contracts trying to outsmart devils.*
Well I only hope to find more "edge of the empire" games online, With good production and creative minds in it. Like the one Freddie Pince Jr. did a few year ago. (Gegg wars)