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This is fantastic news. They also said they will go to court over if WoTC try to “deauthorise” OGL 1.0a which is just epic.

Edit: The site went down lmao. Epic stuff.

Edit: BTW, Paizo is the company that also recognised their Union without requiring it to go to vote or hiring anti-union shitheads.

  • JohnBrownsBussy [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    You can't copyright game mechanics, but you can copyright the expression of game mechanics, and you can use litigation over game mechanics and their expression to drive your smaller competitors out of business whether or not the claim is sound.

    The OGL was effectively a do-not-sue agreement. Basically, WotC wouldn't try to test its ownership of these mechanics/expressions in court. In exchange, you were able to make products in the d20 ecosystem as long as you didn't claim compatibility.

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Honestly make me wonder now since all of the video games (some owned by Lucas Arts and now Disney) utilized the OGL to design their mechanics (KOTOR and KOTOR 2 being some of the famous ones). This feels like whoever has the biggest dick lawyer energy will win which is why all the famous 3rd party designers are jumping ship on to other systems or designing their own.

        • Bloobish [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah I've heard that too, seems the other claim is that the d20 mechanics were utilized (but could have been utilized under a different agreement since WOTC also publish an earlier Star Wars RPG before FFG published theirs)

            • Bloobish [comrade/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Right? I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of weird fringe early 2000s game dev lore on how convoluted some shit was before Disney just bought everything in existence

        • Bloobish [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          So from one convoluted reddit post it's the d20 system of the WOTC public SW RPG, that was then swapped for the FFG SW RPG that utilized some form of the OGL for 3rd edition (or at least that's the claim). Of the actual verifiable information is that they do use the D20 system of 3rd edition for all of the background math (feels like this is a dive into early 2000s game design lore and law).