D&D will move to Creative Commons license, requests feedback on new OGL

A new draft of the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License, dubbed OGL 1.2 by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is now available for download. The announcement was made Thursday by Kyle Brink, executive producer of D&D, on the D&D Beyond website. According to Wizards, this draft could place the OGL outside of the publisher’s control — which should sound good to fans enraged by recent events. It will take time to see, but the public can comment beginning January 20th and continuing through February 3.

The OGL was developed and refined in the lead up to D&D’s 3rd edition, and a version of it has been in place for more than two decades. This legal framework allows creators to create their own tabletop RPGs with Hasbro. This has led to the development of games such as PathfinderAs well as the successful businesses Paizo and Kobold Press. However, the OGL changes proposed by Wizards, first leaked to and reported on by Io9, appeared to have created an antagonistic relationship between Wizards, its creator community, and io9. That situation only intensified after a protracted silence by Wizards surrounding the leak — followed by a less than cordial initial apology.

Thursday’s release of the OGL 1.2 draft is accompanied by a much kinder tone — more in line with a second apology delivered on Wednesday. There’s a surprise as well: Wizards is opting here for a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that, by its own description, “helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s most pressing challenges.” As such, a Creative Commons license once enacted could ultimately put the OGL 1.2 outside of Wizards’ control in perpetuity.

“We’re giving the core D&D mechanics to the community through a Creative Commons license, which means that they are fully in your hands,” Brink said in the blog post. “If you want to use quintessentially D&D content from the SRD such as owlbears and magic missile, OGL 1.2 will provide you a perpetual, irrevocable license to do so.”

So much trust has been lost over the last several weeks that it will no doubt take a while for legal experts — armchair and otherwise — to pour over the details of the new OGL. These are the points Wizards promotes in its official statement.

– Protecting D&D’s inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You’ll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. Everyone deserves a safe and inclusive play environment. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn’t give us any ability to ensure it

– TTRPGs, VTTs.OGL 1.2 applies only to TTRPG content. It does not apply to electronic publications or books. No one should be concerned or wonder if the OGL 1.2 applies to other TTRPG content. It doesn’t.

– Deauthorizing OGL 1.0a.This is an important concern. That is what the Creative Commons licence and the open terms for 1.2 are meant to address. One key reason why we have to deauthorize: We can’t use the protective options in 1.2 if someone can just choose to publish harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content under 1.0a. You can still license any OGL 2.0a content you already have published.

Only very limited license modifications allowed OnlyOGL 1.2 will allow you to change two sections: How do you cite Wizards within your work, and How can we contact one another. We don’t know what the future holds or what technologies we will use to communicate with each other, so we thought these two sections needed to be future-proofed.

Fans are encouraged to read up and educate themselves on the fine points of intellectual property law, and then respond through official channels back to Wizards — much in the same way that new in-game content is tested out.

A revised version of this draft will be presented to the community again “on or before February 17.”

“The process will extend as long as it needs to,” Brink said. “We’ll keep iterating and getting your feedback until we get it right.”