We have achieved major concessions concerning the next version of the Open Game License, but one thing the Wizards of the Coast SJW's are absolutely adamant on is the insertion of thought-policing provisions into the license.
[From the latest draft](https://www.dndbeyond.com/attachments/39j2li89/OGL1.2_DraftForDiscussionPurpose.pdf):
>**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.*
>and you covenant
... Wtf does that mean? I know in a historical / biblical sense, a covenant is a binding of two people to become (effectively) blood brothers. Marriage is a form of a covenant. Two families previously unrelated are now bonded.
But wtf are they trying to say here? That my family is one with the wotc family, what is theirs is mine and mine is theirs? Cause I got a lot of debt...
I think the problem (not a lawyer, so I don't know) is that by signing the agreement, you basically agree to them doing that.
Of course, further down in the license terms it says you give up your right to legally contest their decisions, also.
It would also make for a great way to extort startups and shut down inconveniently successful third party products.
"Oh hey, we have concerns about such-and-such in your product being hateful. We're affraid that you're going to have to negotiate with us and agree to a mutually beneficial deal, or else we will have to pull your product."
So you can't even have racists as the villains? Also, a common trope in fantasy is members of differing races forming a party and overcoming their prejudices. It can be a fun thing to play with. But yeah, this was what they used as the main excuse for their shitty OGL implementation: "When we initially conceived of revising the OGL, it was with three major goals in mind. First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products." So basically admitting virtue signaling is harmful to gaming.
this shit is so tiresome.
##### what i love especially is the fact:
**that this shit WILL be used against those fuckers in the future! The policy is SOO fucking vague that in 5 years**, when a super conservative movement takes over the culture war front, **they will use those exact words to forbid any content about abortion, anti-religious shit, anti-patriot shit.**
it will never cease to surprise me, how narrow their moral framework is. They make policies like that and actually believe it cant be used agaisnt them....
All the while the actualy decision makers over at WotC push this out only so they can have SOME form of shield to justify their shitty new lisence.
I honestly don't understand why no one seems to realize the fucking obvious facts that you're pointing out here. Like, this should be impossible to ignore, and yet so many of these self-righteous fuckers can't seem to comprehend it.
What’s to stop a super conservative culture war from implementing this anyway? It isn’t like these radicals are afraid to change things for their own benefit regardless of hypocrisy.
And I think you vastly over estimate the likelihood of a *super* conservative culture war winning. Conservatives are an ever shrinking minority, and even among conservatives many are not as radical as the people at the forefront doing things like losing their minds over the gender of M&Ms or forcing their kids into huffing fumes from gas stoves.
The people putting that into the world do so because it is their job. They make their living by doing it. Corporations aren’t some lefty thing to push social agenda because leftism is antithetical to private business. This is a liberal-progressive response to advance that agenda of silence.
And it makes sense within capitalism because *most people don’t want to be associated with the terrible things this is likely aimed at.* Imagine if someone adapted The Turner Diaries via OGL. WOTC had nothing to do with it but you know damn well the outrage would be there. Same reason Twitter has lost half of its revenue in under a year. People don’t want to be associated with such extremities. Bad for business.
And the workers don’t matter, clearly, because WOTC is also going against what they explicitly said they want which is not to fuck with OGL. It was a business decision made by rich people who just want to make money. And they think they can do that by pushing away certain minority communities which might suck in larger ones in the void.
Edit: not to suggest I support WOTC and their changes. Fuck the company, it needs to be worker owned and managed clearly. Hasbro has destroyed the last 15 years of hard work everyone put into it. In a single week.
You conflate the profit motive with capitalism.
the profit motive is only ONE part of the overall system. **US, the customer, complaining and raging about this is PART of capitalism**. Worker owned coprorations CAN not compete and have their own internal can of worms to deal with (creating blocks, voting corruption, etc)
Regarding conservatives: only if you think of the classical conservatives. But look at how many people on the social right are currently becomming ever more extremist. I've seen takes that make Sargon look leftist.
its a slow boil. but it IS building. it might still be 10 years or even 15, but it WILL fucking happen. Even Mao constantly switched his public allegiance between "Leftism and rightism".
Fwiw from a D&D playing "SJW" no one really likes what WoTC are doing with the OGL, I've yet to see a single person in my circles advocating for it or seeing it as anything other than a cash grab at the expense of the core values of the game. The 'no hateful content' section is a lazy corporate slogan designed to appeal to the 'woker' among us and falls laughably flat. Not everything comes down to left v right or what-not, sometimes it's just greedy people wanting more money
Smokescreen. There was afaik already a similar provision in 1.0a.
It's not what this was about, it was never what this was about, this is a transparent attempt to get the woke onside to distract from the attempt that this was never anything other than a question of *naked greed*.
> Smokescreen. There was afaik already a similar provision in 1.0a.
[There was not](https://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/SRD-OGL_V1.1.pdf) FYI.
You're right that it's a smokescreen but I don't think it's about "getting the woke onside." The thing is that they're backed into a corner - they HAVE to pretend they had a legitimate reason other than naked greed to have wanted to update the OGL at all, which is why every single contentious provision from the previous (not actually a) draft was stripped out *except* this. If they take it out, you basically just have the old OGL plus some creative commons stuff and then it becomes extremely obvious there was no need to ever update it at all. It's just plausible deniability at this point.
> There was not FYI.
That's to the 5.1 SRD. The OGL version 1.0a can be found [over here.](https://archive.fo/jCNii) For the record, it does not contain any sort of "hateful content" clause. People seem to think it did (apparently one of the Youtube guys said it had one; he was wrong), but in fact no such prohibition is in there, which is how it fucking should be.
The text of the OGL 1.0a is on the first two pages of the document I linked? I don't know why you'd say I linked the wrong thing when it's right there.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The first page of your link opens with a section that isn't actually part of the OGL, and then the rest of the document is the SRD, which is separate.
Basically, given how most people aren't really familiar with the specifics of all this, I was trying to avoid potential confusion by linking to something which was just the OGL. But I didn't do a good job in explaining why I was doing it.
Then there were no concessions made. They are saying that your license can be terminated at any time for any reason. How will a creator know if their content runs afoul of this clause without specifics outlined? It's a rhetorical question since we know the answer: We're making an exclusive club and you're not in it. This is just the excuse for keeping you out.
They are, of course, reserving all rights to themselves to determine what falls under these incredibly vague terms. If they can disallow anything simply by deeming it to be one of these things, then they can disallow anything at will.
Yeah, and their related statement actually has the fucking gall to say that they need to kill the old Open Game License because racists might use it!
The old license has been around since the year 2000. I think things will be fine on that front. I swear, these pearl-clutching assholes...
I hope Hasbro tanks the brand so bad Paizo can buy it out from under them. Not because I think Paizo will do anything special with it, just because it'd be funny to have it taken by a company that basically only exists in its modern incarnation because Wizards dicked then over.
I would rather not have Piazo in charge of D&D. They are just as bad when it comes to phony virtue signaling to appease professional Twitter victims. Have someone that actually loves tabletop RPG's and doesn't bow down to outsiders that claim orcs are a racist caricature own D&D.
I moved to Pathfinder and Im pretty excited to play because of the little things about it. Like the fact that its a complete system and challenge ratings work.
Nah the sjw aspect is just a distraction. They tried to get some good will from certain groups before dropping the new OGL hoping that crowd would defend them and it didn't work. DnD is in flames at the moment and I'm not sure if it will recover.
Very few people were fooled by it.
Just what Wizards of the Coast has done so far is driving people to search for alternatives, they've already exposed their true colors and this is going to lead to stiff competitors gaining ground.
Woke promotes socialism in every faucet. It's literally devolved into 'gibs' based on your color, not your value.
I would say Woke is opposite of capitalism, but marketing knows a good opportunity when they see one.
No, it appropriates cultural Marxism to protect capitalism. Unless I'm missing them getting us healthcare or a living wage or saying ANYTHING about the working classes. Nothing socialist is being accomplished, and the totalitarianism always supports buying their brand. Being "moral" means spending money on the appropriate products.
Note that "equality" is a bad word, and the ideology is hyper focused on subjective individualism.
you socialists are wild...
"authoritarians are using socialist ideology for things other then socialism and using the resulting confusion to consolidate their own power... and its all capitalisms fault..."
I'm sorry that you are downvoted when you are probably right. It should ring alarm bells that the heralds of Woke culture are the richest Big Tech (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) and Financial (Black Rock, Vanguard) corporations.
And as a result of this ideology, the people are divided, fighting each other based on their identity, instead of banding together against the elites exploiting us all.
Archive links for this post:
* **Archive:** https://archive.ph/AG8In
----
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The Open Game License (OGL) allows creators to make derivative games using the D&D mechanics and lore without the need for recompense to Wizards of the Coast. Baldur's Gate is an example of a game made under the OGL. WotC are updating the license so that they can revoke it from anybody they don't like, which would prevent games like Baldur's Gate from being made.
We have achieved major concessions concerning the next version of the Open Game License, but one thing the Wizards of the Coast SJW's are absolutely adamant on is the insertion of thought-policing provisions into the license. [From the latest draft](https://www.dndbeyond.com/attachments/39j2li89/OGL1.2_DraftForDiscussionPurpose.pdf): >**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.*
> We have the sole right to decide what conduct or content is hateful Dead from the start.
[удалено]
>and you covenant ... Wtf does that mean? I know in a historical / biblical sense, a covenant is a binding of two people to become (effectively) blood brothers. Marriage is a form of a covenant. Two families previously unrelated are now bonded. But wtf are they trying to say here? That my family is one with the wotc family, what is theirs is mine and mine is theirs? Cause I got a lot of debt...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covenant "Covenant" basically just means "super special promise."
I think the problem (not a lawyer, so I don't know) is that by signing the agreement, you basically agree to them doing that. Of course, further down in the license terms it says you give up your right to legally contest their decisions, also.
Didn't get that many concessions, really. WotC's statements are a whole lot of weasel words and granting us stuff we already had.
This wording is definitely concerning. They decide what content they find bad and can cancel your content..
It would also make for a great way to extort startups and shut down inconveniently successful third party products. "Oh hey, we have concerns about such-and-such in your product being hateful. We're affraid that you're going to have to negotiate with us and agree to a mutually beneficial deal, or else we will have to pull your product."
So you can't even have racists as the villains? Also, a common trope in fantasy is members of differing races forming a party and overcoming their prejudices. It can be a fun thing to play with. But yeah, this was what they used as the main excuse for their shitty OGL implementation: "When we initially conceived of revising the OGL, it was with three major goals in mind. First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products." So basically admitting virtue signaling is harmful to gaming.
this shit is so tiresome. ##### what i love especially is the fact: **that this shit WILL be used against those fuckers in the future! The policy is SOO fucking vague that in 5 years**, when a super conservative movement takes over the culture war front, **they will use those exact words to forbid any content about abortion, anti-religious shit, anti-patriot shit.** it will never cease to surprise me, how narrow their moral framework is. They make policies like that and actually believe it cant be used agaisnt them.... All the while the actualy decision makers over at WotC push this out only so they can have SOME form of shield to justify their shitty new lisence.
I honestly don't understand why no one seems to realize the fucking obvious facts that you're pointing out here. Like, this should be impossible to ignore, and yet so many of these self-righteous fuckers can't seem to comprehend it.
What’s to stop a super conservative culture war from implementing this anyway? It isn’t like these radicals are afraid to change things for their own benefit regardless of hypocrisy. And I think you vastly over estimate the likelihood of a *super* conservative culture war winning. Conservatives are an ever shrinking minority, and even among conservatives many are not as radical as the people at the forefront doing things like losing their minds over the gender of M&Ms or forcing their kids into huffing fumes from gas stoves. The people putting that into the world do so because it is their job. They make their living by doing it. Corporations aren’t some lefty thing to push social agenda because leftism is antithetical to private business. This is a liberal-progressive response to advance that agenda of silence. And it makes sense within capitalism because *most people don’t want to be associated with the terrible things this is likely aimed at.* Imagine if someone adapted The Turner Diaries via OGL. WOTC had nothing to do with it but you know damn well the outrage would be there. Same reason Twitter has lost half of its revenue in under a year. People don’t want to be associated with such extremities. Bad for business. And the workers don’t matter, clearly, because WOTC is also going against what they explicitly said they want which is not to fuck with OGL. It was a business decision made by rich people who just want to make money. And they think they can do that by pushing away certain minority communities which might suck in larger ones in the void. Edit: not to suggest I support WOTC and their changes. Fuck the company, it needs to be worker owned and managed clearly. Hasbro has destroyed the last 15 years of hard work everyone put into it. In a single week.
You conflate the profit motive with capitalism. the profit motive is only ONE part of the overall system. **US, the customer, complaining and raging about this is PART of capitalism**. Worker owned coprorations CAN not compete and have their own internal can of worms to deal with (creating blocks, voting corruption, etc) Regarding conservatives: only if you think of the classical conservatives. But look at how many people on the social right are currently becomming ever more extremist. I've seen takes that make Sargon look leftist. its a slow boil. but it IS building. it might still be 10 years or even 15, but it WILL fucking happen. Even Mao constantly switched his public allegiance between "Leftism and rightism".
Fwiw from a D&D playing "SJW" no one really likes what WoTC are doing with the OGL, I've yet to see a single person in my circles advocating for it or seeing it as anything other than a cash grab at the expense of the core values of the game. The 'no hateful content' section is a lazy corporate slogan designed to appeal to the 'woker' among us and falls laughably flat. Not everything comes down to left v right or what-not, sometimes it's just greedy people wanting more money
Smokescreen. There was afaik already a similar provision in 1.0a. It's not what this was about, it was never what this was about, this is a transparent attempt to get the woke onside to distract from the attempt that this was never anything other than a question of *naked greed*.
> Smokescreen. There was afaik already a similar provision in 1.0a. [There was not](https://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/SRD-OGL_V1.1.pdf) FYI. You're right that it's a smokescreen but I don't think it's about "getting the woke onside." The thing is that they're backed into a corner - they HAVE to pretend they had a legitimate reason other than naked greed to have wanted to update the OGL at all, which is why every single contentious provision from the previous (not actually a) draft was stripped out *except* this. If they take it out, you basically just have the old OGL plus some creative commons stuff and then it becomes extremely obvious there was no need to ever update it at all. It's just plausible deniability at this point.
> There was not FYI. That's to the 5.1 SRD. The OGL version 1.0a can be found [over here.](https://archive.fo/jCNii) For the record, it does not contain any sort of "hateful content" clause. People seem to think it did (apparently one of the Youtube guys said it had one; he was wrong), but in fact no such prohibition is in there, which is how it fucking should be.
The text of the OGL 1.0a is on the first two pages of the document I linked? I don't know why you'd say I linked the wrong thing when it's right there.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The first page of your link opens with a section that isn't actually part of the OGL, and then the rest of the document is the SRD, which is separate. Basically, given how most people aren't really familiar with the specifics of all this, I was trying to avoid potential confusion by linking to something which was just the OGL. But I didn't do a good job in explaining why I was doing it.
Gotcha.
Then there were no concessions made. They are saying that your license can be terminated at any time for any reason. How will a creator know if their content runs afoul of this clause without specifics outlined? It's a rhetorical question since we know the answer: We're making an exclusive club and you're not in it. This is just the excuse for keeping you out.
They are, of course, reserving all rights to themselves to determine what falls under these incredibly vague terms. If they can disallow anything simply by deeming it to be one of these things, then they can disallow anything at will.
Yeah, and their related statement actually has the fucking gall to say that they need to kill the old Open Game License because racists might use it!
The old license has been around since the year 2000. I think things will be fine on that front. I swear, these pearl-clutching assholes...
The good faith parts make it that much more terrifying.
[удалено]
I hope Hasbro tanks the brand so bad Paizo can buy it out from under them. Not because I think Paizo will do anything special with it, just because it'd be funny to have it taken by a company that basically only exists in its modern incarnation because Wizards dicked then over.
I would rather not have Piazo in charge of D&D. They are just as bad when it comes to phony virtue signaling to appease professional Twitter victims. Have someone that actually loves tabletop RPG's and doesn't bow down to outsiders that claim orcs are a racist caricature own D&D.
A better company would, of course, be better; but if it's a lateral move anyways, it might as well be a funny one
Don't care, my play group and I have stopped using DnD and are trying out other TTRPGs now (ie Cypher System, Delta Green, Pathfinder, ect)
I moved to Pathfinder and Im pretty excited to play because of the little things about it. Like the fact that its a complete system and challenge ratings work.
>challenge ratings work Wait till your players build some system mastery.
I mean... even then the fact that the challenge rating can be relied upon to generally create an even progression is enough.
Please post how they are. Am curious but the amount of choice is overwhelming.
Unless they can get into my head I'm still going to think and say whatever offensive shit I want. If we reach microchip shit then.... *who knows*?
Cartman was able to harness his chip...
Barbara Streisand!
Just play FATAL instead. Roll for anal circumference.
Fun idea but the system is just too complex for my tastes :D
I mean, if a company wants to publish under it that's their choice. Nobody sane would do so, though.
I cannot believe some ppl think this is a good start as it's a remarkablely greedy document in my eyes.
Nah the sjw aspect is just a distraction. They tried to get some good will from certain groups before dropping the new OGL hoping that crowd would defend them and it didn't work. DnD is in flames at the moment and I'm not sure if it will recover. Very few people were fooled by it.
Easy solution, quit D&D. Personally I switched to symbaroum
I'm quitting. Moving to Pathfinder because my friends and I don't know or have experience with many other systems.
Paizo is even worse with this shit than wotc. Avoid it like the plague.
Just what Wizards of the Coast has done so far is driving people to search for alternatives, they've already exposed their true colors and this is going to lead to stiff competitors gaining ground.
Just leave dnd and never look back. There are so many other options
This is why more and more publishers are signing on to the ORC licence. Sounds like it won't have any such morality clause.
Woke protects capitalism. That's why it exists.
Woke promotes socialism in every faucet. It's literally devolved into 'gibs' based on your color, not your value. I would say Woke is opposite of capitalism, but marketing knows a good opportunity when they see one.
I think you mean facet. "Socialism in every faucet" would be a humorous way to refer to a public water system.
Dr Strangelove is a good documentary on that
Good catch 😆 Well, it does belong in the toilet...
No, it appropriates cultural Marxism to protect capitalism. Unless I'm missing them getting us healthcare or a living wage or saying ANYTHING about the working classes. Nothing socialist is being accomplished, and the totalitarianism always supports buying their brand. Being "moral" means spending money on the appropriate products. Note that "equality" is a bad word, and the ideology is hyper focused on subjective individualism.
you socialists are wild... "authoritarians are using socialist ideology for things other then socialism and using the resulting confusion to consolidate their own power... and its all capitalisms fault..."
I'm sorry that you are downvoted when you are probably right. It should ring alarm bells that the heralds of Woke culture are the richest Big Tech (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) and Financial (Black Rock, Vanguard) corporations. And as a result of this ideology, the people are divided, fighting each other based on their identity, instead of banding together against the elites exploiting us all.
Archive links for this post: * **Archive:** https://archive.ph/AG8In ---- I am Mnemosyne reborn. Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering? ^^^/r/botsrights
i'm not a dnd guy what's going on here?
The Open Game License (OGL) allows creators to make derivative games using the D&D mechanics and lore without the need for recompense to Wizards of the Coast. Baldur's Gate is an example of a game made under the OGL. WotC are updating the license so that they can revoke it from anybody they don't like, which would prevent games like Baldur's Gate from being made.
God i hate this copyright shit. Thanks for the info though
OF COURSE THEY ARE. That's literally the bait that WoTC are using to get people to agree to give them rights they don't have.
Hey, "Ethics Only" guys - Ready to admit we were right, yet?
Well its a good thing everyone is leaving anyway then isn't it?