The Dungeons & Dragons community imploded over a leaked draft of a license change

For over 20 years, the Open Gaming License has made it possible for tabletop role-playing game companies to create products based on Dungeon & Dragons’ rules without having to pay royalties to its owner Wizards of the Coast, or risk a lawsuit. The OGL was broad enough that some tabletop RPG designers adapted it to let others publish work with their own rulesets, which were unrelated to D&D. The threat of that status quo potentially changing has unleashed chaos in the D&D community.

As reported by Gizmodo (opens in new tab), and corroborated by several publishers of OGL works, Wizards of the Coast drafted an “OGL 1.1” license that imposed far tighter restrictions on D&D-based content. It asked companies making over $750,000 on OGL products—or companies raising the same amount or more via crowdfunding—to pay royalties to WotC. It also asked creators to log their use of the license with WotC, and grant the company more rights and control over those third-party works, including the power to revoke the license entirely. The previous OGL would have been declared no longer valid by this new document, despite an old FAQ (opens in new tab) once claiming, “even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there’s no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.”