They're still going through with it and maintaining that they have the right to change the terms whenever they feel like. As expected they're rolling back one or two things (which they can undo whenever they want) and acting like people won. Fuck WotC.
oh yeah ill definitely trust a corporation that tried to rent seek an entire industry, sure
pathfinder is an objectively superior system and I made this account to talk about it, actually. otherwise I don't really post at all. play pathfinder and support their union
Pathfinder relied on OGL, I'm not sure what Paizo is planning in reaction to this.
So apparently all the stuff that the OGL "allows" is actually stuff Hasbro can't copyright, like the game rules. Paizo already pretty much moved past all that stuff, too. So there isn't really much if anything that Hasbro owns that they're actually using.
Apparently the OGL was kind of a scam to trick 3rd party companies to agree to rules that were more restrictive than fair use. Since D&D is built on so many commons things like mythology, religion, or just books that Hasbro doesn't own, there's only a limited amount of D&D stuff that Hasbro has any claim too.
So Hasbro's ability to stop anyone from making D&D supplements is actually really limited. As long as they don't use any copyrighted language 3rd party companies can make whatever they want.
The whole reason the OGL existed was because 90% of that shit can’t be copyrighted and the OGL was basically an agreement that no one wanted to figure it out in court
Why can capitalists never remember why they made decisions in the first place?
Honestly kinda funny when you realize the OGL was made to have DnD as the main deliveyr point (since you used their system and core rulebooks) and then could bolt supplements on to it. Another case of capitalists brutally butchering their golden goose and then getting confused when there's no more golden eggs.
Paizo is writing their own OGL with a bunch of other small publishers, while also saying they'll take WotC to court if they try to 'rugpull' OGL1.0a.
And to be fair, Pathfinder 2e doesn't use OGL for much, at this point its mostly just a few names and concepts; they've said they decided to publish 2e on OGL mostly for convenience's sake, so they didn't have to have a lawyer look over everything written to make sure it didn't 'steal' stuff.
Paizo's Pathfinder card game isn't OGL, and as a result has stuff like "Arcane Barrage" instead of "Magic Missile".
Paizo have released the ORC license in response and have made it clear they intend to go to court if the original OGL license is deauthorised.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v
"Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that." Just straight up lying, how could this be true when we only knew about the new ogl due to leaks
a couple of the leaked contracts were sent to creators with the intent of being signed as an actual contract, so how could they have ever been "just drafts"
Oh this is just some pr flack pushing air out of it's chitinous mouth plates to approximate human speech. There's no semantic meaning.
they wanted to solicit the parts of the community that agreed with them
First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products.
I love the fact that they keep frontloading this, as if a single person criticizing the new OGL was saying "what if I want to make a racist D&D book?"
edit: anyway, the damage is frankly already done, no matter what Hasbro tries to claw back. Their biggest competitor is releasing a new license, which will be held by a neutral organization, which is going to be superior to what the OGL was already, much less the gimped version that WOTC intends to release next.
The real question is whether this saga will actually create a change in the market. I'm a bit cynical to the idea that everyone will suddenly switch to Pathfinder instead of D&D 6 - right now Pathfinder is only about 1/10th the size of D&D, and every other TTRPG barely shows up as a blip compared to those two, and I just don't see the kind of seismic shift happening that would need to happen to break that status quo. Everyone publishing TTRPG materials will need to publish D&D materials in order to make money, which should force the OGL 1.1 to have a big install base even if it's a reluctant one.
Everyone publishing TTRPG materials will need to publish D&D materials in order to make money
you mean just 3rd party supplements?
Right yeah. Though I think it would be really funny if we saw the major 3rd party publishers do two things:
- Publish supplements for 🅱️ungeons & 🅱️ragons, which is legally distinct from that other game
- Publish supplements simultaneously for multiple systems, esp. if you're primarily selling PDFs there's no reason why you could have alternate versions with different game mechanics
I doubt this will push the pen and paper market that much but the VTT market is very noticeably changing already if you follow all of the patreon creators.
Pathfinder will get a bit of growth but it's not positioned to be the lifeboat it was with 4E. Pathfinder 2E is a very different system with different design principles and you can't convert characters from D&D like they could last time. The good news is that being its own thing will give it a much stronger position in the ensuing legal battles, but the drawback is that it'll be harder to get people to switch.
If there's going to be a system that emerges as a clear lifeboat, it's probably one of the ones being developed in response to this happening.
Hopefully people will end up giving Pathfinder 2E a good try, IMO a better system. I've been in a game for a couple of years now and its pretty good.
silver lining:
hopefully this pushes people to play things other than 5eComplete horseshit. Just a way for them to reduce the amount of people criticising them right now and maybe get people to stop cancelling their DNDBeyond subs.
It is clear that no matter what, they will move forward with a new OGL, which will be worse for creators. The only thing to do is to divert away as much attention as possible from D&D and into other systems. Whether that’s Pathfinder or something else.
Unfortunately, unlike with 4e, D&D today is way bigger than it ever was. Which means there are way too many casual people who learn about it from Stranger Things and the new movie that is coming out. We can’t stop that.
But it is absolutely vital to stop the online means of casual people getting into D&D: all the actual play livestreams and videos and podcasts. This means your Critical Roles and Dimension 20s. They have to stop playing and promoting D&D and move to alternative systems. That is the only way to meaningfully stop making D&D such a huge part of the ttrpg scene.
He left a long time ago before he got outed. He visibly was making the group uncomfortable in his last episodes so I kinda think there was more to it than was public.
I forgot about that. Dude ate nonstop and kept touching and creeping on one of the girls. He also godmoded, argued constantly with the dm and players, almost never paid attention while constantly demanding attention, stole ideas from the other players (his character basically had all the other characters gimmicks by the end) and accepted tons of gifts from the fanbase. Those early episodes are almost worth watching for him being a constant trainwreck -- like just everything you shouldn't ever do
I found him to be unwatchable. I'm not even sure if it is worth watching him be a trainwreck After the worst he ever was on an episode, he left and you could see the rest of the crew was visibly more at ease
Even if WotC some how regains every last bit of good will it lost this has still been a massive win for the ttrpg community and especially VTTs. D&D has lost its momentum, players are looking at other games, creators no longer feel safe creating d&d specific assets. Watching all the people on patrion switch from 5e to Pathfinder or system agnostic is beautiful and can never be undone.
Paizo was already officially supporting foundry and yesterday gave away so many starter packs their site crashed. D&D has lost the VTT war.
Pandemic ruined my attempt to get into D&D, but even as an outsider I'm loving watching them crash and burn.
and yesterday gave away so many starter packs their site crashed
This?
Explore the world now with a free PDF copy of the Lost Omens World Guide . Simply add the PDF to your cart and use discount code OPENGAMING at checkout.
yeah, I thought they gave away some other stuff too, but by the time I was paying attention to their give aways everything was lagging and crashing so I'm not 100% sure. Also if you play their system on foundry you get all of their iconics premade plus all the rule books are all there free, but that's always been that way.
support indie TTRPG developers, there is even one on hexbear !ttrpg@hexbear.net
The greatest criticism of social democracy is that no one has just shot v*** in the head and dumped his body in a fjord.
Doesn't he live with his wife and kids on some farm in France these days
Yeah because social democracy is a failure and nobody shot him in the head
yall talk about shooting him in the head, but wouldn't it be more appropriate to stab him in the back 54 times?
Don't know who that is, buut I looked it up and saw this funny sentence
best known for his early black metal albums and later crimes.
At one point in prison he decided that metal was not white enough because rock music was invented by black people or something so he made shitty synth music
I also saw that he got into Nazism and Paganism, so he's definitely one of those metal guys.
He is THE one of those metal guys, the archetype, the progenitor
Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.
ChatGPT, what's the equivalent of "omaewa mo shinderu" but translated to mean "you're already a corncob"
Lmao dorks
"Uh um we just wanted to update the license to stop (pst frank, what does the fans say they hate?) Stop the Racists! And NFTS!"
Glad I dropped WotC content over the last couple of years. Well, mostly, I still play 3.5 sometimes, but out of the stack of books I own.
(admittedly, I never used DnD beyond or MTG arena, but that's mostly because I hate centralized web services. Shit feels like it always ends up like this)
I just wanna play Call of Cthulhu.
But actually i kinda don't cause learning new systems does not agree with my brain right now, don't have the attention span.
Call of Cthulhu looks cool but apparently it really takes the right dm. It's very heavily investigation based and if your dm can't lead a mystery right the game just doesn't work, any rail roading at all completely ruins the experience. Had a friend play with a bad dm and they said it was the worst game they ever played in. Still seems like it would be awesome with some one adept at story telling leading it.
Yeah no sense of dread at all there. "as you walk through the woods a feeling of unease begins to take hold, (roll for perception) you notice your shadow is growing longer and longer while those of your companions stay the same" Much different atmosphere.
I ran it once and it took place on an ocean ship and my plan was for to have a creature break into the food stores and use the looming threat of starvation for suspense, like the players start having to eat hard tack infested with maggots and stuff to survive.
The first time the players sat down in the dining room they immediately started cracking a bunch of jokes about how it's the 20's so all the food is probably like hard tack with maggots or something and I'm sitting there like :side-eye-2:
The Call of Cthulhu chapo episodes were pretty fun. RIP Virgil.
Give Delta Green a try. It feels like a pared down version of CoC and it's a modern setting so there's much less explaining you have to do for new players. A lot of great modules already published for it as well.
This OGL shit has made really wary of putting out this dungeon stuff I'd been working on. I guess I could retool it for Pathfinder? Idk, fuck wizards of the coast for this shit
