Dungeons and Dragons Remains, the World’s Greatest RPG

I really wish I had more time right now to make a great blog post.

But I am running off for the weekend – but would like to say – D&D will now remain, forever, an open game. The Creative Commons License now licenses the ENTIRE 5.1 SRD. The original OGL remains in effect too!

Click to access SRD5.1-CCBY4.0License.pdf

What This means

• Creators who have put 2 decades of work into their products (which includes Paizo, the maker of Starfinder, the SciFi game I love) now do not have to worry about fear of lawsuit.
• The tabletop RPG community will still be able to have a common language around certain table top concepts.
• The dignity of the license is now protected by Creative Commons, preventing future executive turnback.

Going Foward

Some people are saying they still can’t bring themselves to support WotC. That is not the case for me. Even if one argues the case that their executives are bad, their workers are not. And the CC License is a license I can trust. I feel the past and ongoing efforts of creators have been respected.

And, though this whole thing has taught me the value of analog culture, I do think there is real value that Hasbro has the unique market position to offer if they are creative enough to provide it. I genuinely believe that. And Wizards is not obligated to release future things under these licenses. The current indie projects can go forward indefinitely with the ideas licensed for the past 20 years , so freedom of creators is respected. But if Wizards for legitimately reasons want some new ideas going forward locked down more, they are free to do that. But now they cannot retroactively take anything away.

I still think an ORC License would be a benefit to the community, so that there can be a license, that separates game mechanics and other content (which the CC does not unless you manually do the separation yourself – this was the purpose of the OGL). So I am still excited for project Black Flag and ORC.

But now I am very excited that D&D, once again, can be a leader in the community. We have a need for our OG. And I am glad this story now has a happy ending.