Why the Tabletop Role-Playing World Is Furious About Changes to Dungeons & Dragons’ Open Game License

Tabletop role-playing games are big business these days, and if you need more proof of that, check out the controversy over the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).

Wizards of the Coast, publisher of D&D, has been working on the rollout of a new edition of the popular role-playing game. Wizards also announced in December that, along with the new edition, it’s updating its Open Game License (OGL), which controls how third-party publishers can use D&D material in their own works.

Last week, Gizmodo obtained a leaked draft of the OGL 1.1, as Wizards of the Coast is styling it, and it shows that the company wants to tighten its control over the lucrative intellectual property. Gizmodo reports that the new license would, among other things, make it mandatory for all publishers, no matter how big or small, to report their projects and revenues to Wizards of the Coast, and give Wizards the legal right to reproduce and resell creators’ content. It imposes a 20 percent to 25 percent royalty on gross revenues above $750,000. The new license can also be modified or terminated at any time.

The draft would be a seismic shift in how the world’s largest role-playing game handles its copyright. For those who care about intellectual property (I.P.) freedoms, this is a big deal: In some ways, the revised OGL, which would claim to deauthorize the previous royalty-free license, represents a threat to the very idea of open-source, free-to-use I.P. If nothing else, it is likely to undermine what has been a major success story for open-source approaches to I.P. For decades, D&D has been one of the open-source, loose-copyright movement’s big victories, and a model for the rest of the tabletop industry. If it goes into effect, the new restricted licensing regime would almost certainly turn it into a huge defeat.

Because of all this, the leak has, to understate it, upset the tabletop role-playing community. An open letter to Wizards of the Coast appeared this week under the rallying cry/hashtag “#OpenDnD.” The letter calls the new OGL an “attempt to dismantle the entire RPG [role-playing game] industry.”

“WotC has shown that they are the dragon on top of the hoard, willing to burn the thriving village if only to get a few more gold pieces,” the letter says. “It’s time for us to band together as adventurers to defend our village from the terrible wyrm.”

To understand why everyone’s madder than a bugbear, you have to understand what the status quo has been, more or less, for the past 20 years. The OGL 1.0 was first introduced in 2000, along with the third edition of D&D. It grants other publishers “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive license” to use a chunk of the core D&D rules to create new games and material, royalty-free. The OGL wasn’t putting this material in the public domain, but rather offering a license agreement so that everyone understood what they could use without risk of getting sued. (The OGL argua