Recent leaks have suggested that Wizards of the Coast is aiming to revoke the previous Open Game Licenses (OGL 1.0 and OGL 1.0a) to enforce a new, highly restrictive OGL 1.1.  If successful, this move would immediately disenfranchise thousands of content creators and rob the Dungeons and Dragons franchise of the diversity and variety that has made it the world’s most popular roleplaying game.  It must be fought.

Since 2000, the OGL has granted third-party creators the ability to create content for Dungeons and Dragons thru the usage of its Standard Reference Document (SRD), a document that affords said third parties the right to use specified content for their creations, commercially and non-commercially.  As the 1.0 and 1.0 licenses state, this right is guaranteed into “perpetuity.”  Wizards of the Coast is potentially trying to nullify that perpetuity by making these original agreements “unauthorized.”  What this will mean is a new agreement with potential licensing fees, approval processes that never existed before, royalty payments, and other elements that were never included in the original OGL license.  All this to further monetize the hobby.

The effect of this license revocation would be to strangle the creativity and diversity that has added to the D&D hobby for over 20 years.  It would immediately affect the livelihoods of current D&D content creators, and potentially even stifle the OSR (Old School Renaissance) community, who seek to simply recreate the beloved experiences of their childhood playing the game they love exactly as they used to play it.

This cannot stand.  As such, we must tell WOTC that the OGL has been written in perpetuity and cannot be revoked.  Should they attempt such a revocation, then the community that has supported Dungeons and Dragons for nearly 50 years must act accordingly.  We will not help the D&D brand in any of its forms – tabletop games, video games, movies, television series, et al.  In effect, WOTC’s actions might very well usher in a post-Dungeons and Dragons hobby, where the community seeks out those RPG publishers who have a much more rational approach to supporting the very people who made them so popular.

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