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Dungeons & Dragons will release its 2024 ruleset under a Creative Commons licence
(www.dicebreaker.com)
Too little too late tbh
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Yeah I'm not buying shit from wotc/hasbro
I already have my rule book. I don't plan on updating it.
If it's under a CC license you can literally publish it yourself with a few things tacked on. That's what creative commons does. It's basically public domain at that point.
Exactly
Yeah, but if you make homebrew they don't like, they'll send the Pinkertons after you.
(I know that was about an MTG set. I'm just making a joke about how little faith I have in WOTC.)
This includes all class features, monsters, rules expressions and anything that isn’t trademarked as intellectual property. Essentially, you get mechanics for cover but not Beholders, martial archetypes but not the city and denizens of Baldur’s Gate.
Is this even necessary? Isn't all of that stuff already non-copyrightable?
You are correct. They do this because corporations in the past have sued over even though rules, etc. are fair use. When they first started the OGL they gained a lot of goodwill from the community.
Short answer, no. There is a lot of nitpicky fine print and "nuance" involved but while you cannot copyright rolling a twenty sided die you can copyright a bunch of distinct and organized thoughts and specific groups thereof, such as the collection of rules that make up a class or subclass. If that class, subclass, spell, made up monster with a specific name and abilities, etc is published in some work that is sold for profit then legal action can occur.
Anything under creative commons effectively becomes public domain. If it appears in a WotC book, digital content, etc and is not specifically under CC, like say spells and subclasses from any supplement not included in that (such as Xanathar or Tasha), it is copyrighted and WotC can and will sue you if you republish it.
Just finish dying already. I’m sick and tired of this drama. Everybody and their grandma has a better product and their shit keeps getting free exposure.
It's been so frustrating seeing people on YouTube and wherever who have spent the past 18 months "spotlighting" and "advocating for playing" other systems climb all over each other to praise this move. A move that does nothing but tell 3rd party publishers that they can safely go back to ignoring Shadowrun, Pathfinder, and OSR games.
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WOTC could offer to come suck me off and still wouldn't give them a fuckin dime. Fuck you Hasbro, you lazy sacks of shit wanted to have intellectual rights to work you didn't create just because it's in a rule system you have some IP in. You forever burned the bridge for me.
It's good news for sure. But I still don't trust WotC.
And Pathfinder 2e is just plain better. In four decades of playing TTRPGs I've never played a ruleset so tactical, so clean, so enjoyable. It's a thing of beauty. So I could care less what happens with D&D.
I'm playing Pathfinder for the first time after never having played D&D (aside from bg3 I guess) and man.... Maybe it's because I'm new to it, using roll20, the DM/group, or the campaign is just confusing but I can't fathom thinking it's clean.
I'm finding a lot of it very complicated and confusing. Everything seems to have some underlying system that requires different rolls and numbers and every time I try to look up an answer instead of asking, I wind up with more questions..
Please don't take that as an insult to the game - I AM having fun 15+ sessions in...I'm just surprised to see you describe it that way. The group is all veteran players who are willing to help me out but it feels like they're so much stuff that you have to memorize to do anything. So many caveats I wouldn't know if one guy wasn't a rules lawyer (that's a compliment)
Pathfinder 2e is definitely more complicated than DND 5e, but in return you get a much more interesting, expressive game, in my opinion. When people say it's cleanly designed they are normally comparing it to pathfinder 1e, which is a labyrinth of bizarre rules, pointless edge cases and overly crunchy rolls.
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I assume you are playing 2e.
I definitely get that. Pathfinder (like D&D and other rules-heavy TTRPGs) has a learning curve, and things can get confusing for newer players.
Imho any game is either rules-heavy, and as such closer to reality with more defined rules for various situations, or it is rules-light, where GM-Interpretation is other needed to determine what to role. (Or somewhere in between)
Any rules-heavy game is going to take time to learn, and sometimes it will be unclear what is correct. But I find that the PF2e rules are actually very clear, you just have to pay close attention to the wording.
For example, if you get an attack of opportunity(AoO), can you grapple instead of attacking? Can you trip?
The answer is in the descriptions of those actions. An attack of opportunity allows for a strike action. A grapple is a standard action. A trip is a strike action. So a trip is allowed, a grapple isn't.
The entire game is built like this. Can a barbarian use this action while raging? Well, does it have the rage trait? If not, then no. Spells no longer have levels, they have ranks, so that no one confuses them with character level. It's all in the wording.
But again, I'm approaching this as a TTRPG veteran who has GMed systems like shadowrun and world of darkness, that are basically the poster-children for needlessly complicated and/or conflicting rules. I totally understand that any rules-heavy game can be confusing.
Imho any game is either rules-heavy, and as such closer to reality with more defined rules for various situations, or it is rules-light, where GM-Interpretation is other needed to determine what to role. (Or somewhere in between)
I don't think more rules necessarily mean more like reality. You can have a bunch of rules for grappling, and create a system that anyone who actually does hand-to-hand stuff would say is nonsense.
That said, I think a lot of people would enjoy lighter systems than d20. Maybe not the people who get a kick out of the "lonely fun" of reading about builds online, but the people who just show up to play and the people who are there for a story? They'd probably be happier in Fate.
I do agree. The most fun I've ever had with a TTRPG is as a player in a Monster of the Week game, which is super rules-light. And we do get a very good representation of real life using these mechanics, but that's because thw GM is really good at making decisions about how mechanics work for a particular PC abilities, and then sticking to it.
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The system is clean. The books?... They could explain the system a little more clearly in some places.
I would love to play a Baby's First Pathfinder Campaign that introduced the systems one by one. Though maybe that's just a d&d campaign...
Agreed so much praise for pathfinder but honestly I don't see it.
The group I'm with can't stand d&d and I didn't want to play with strangers so I'm "stuck" with it. It's not bad, just a lot to take in
It feels too tight for me. I dislike Wizards but 5e offers the right level of crunch and juicy mixed. Too much crunch becomes a war tactics simulator I'm not about.
I prefer systems like Straight to VHS that really let creativity fly. I don't need a feat to tell me what makes me special
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They've already lost me to Kobold Press 5e materials as well as games like Wanderhome and Kids On Bikes 2
Now if only there were any chance it would be a good rules set and not the blandest thing on the menu
This is in reference to the 5e rules. You know, the line they are ready to replace?
Yes I know. 5e is the blandest rpg system going
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put everything under the orc license and we can talk.
Until the next time they try to revoke the license, you mean?
@wahming @HubertManne There's no revoking a Creative Commons.
There's no revoking the OGL either. That didn't stop them from trying.
the writing of the ogl was a little loose with that which allowed them to try. orc was made to fix that.
Source? That was not my understanding of the OGL. It guaranteed a perpetual license to users, and there is no legal precedence for such a revocation. That didn't stop them from trying to bully everybody into submission. What reason is there to think any other license would make a difference? It's not about the chances of them winning, it's about the legal trouble and bills they can cause. I'm not sure why anybody would trust hasbro / wotc after that fuckup, regardless of their promises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License
Linda Codega, for Io9 in January 2023, reported on the details from a leaked full copy of the OGL 1.1 including updated terms such as no longer authorizing use of the OGL1.0. Codega explained that while the original OGL granted a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive license" it also included language around authorized versions of the license and "according to attorneys consulted for this article, the new language may indicate that Wizards of the Coast is rendering any future use of the original OGL void, and asserting that if anyone wants to continue to use Open Game Content of any kind, they will need to abide by the terms of the updated OGL, which is a far more restrictive agreement than the original OGL".
basically their lawyers combed through and thought they found a way around it. ORC was cleaned and and to make it clear that is not possible has this:
b. Modifications. This ORC License may not be amended, superseded, modified, updated, repealed, revoked, or deauthorized. Neither You nor Licensor may modify the terms of this ORC License; however, You may enter into a separate agreement of Your own making provided such agreement does not seek to modify the terms hereof. This ORC License does not, and shall not be interpreted to reduce, limit, restrict, or impose conditions on any use of the Licensed Material that could lawfully be made without permission under this ORC License.
Big team of lawyers beats moral high ground every time. The law is pay to win.
The text of OGL 1.0a does not say that its irrevocable, and that was the big problem. It does say perpetual, but not irrevocable, and that was where the supposed crux of the argument came in. That said, during the OGL debacle, i saw it pointed out that the legal licensing definition of "irrevocable" was decided in court years after the ogl was written. I know the original writers of it had come out and said that they had intended it to be irrevocable, though
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They don't control the ORC. They can't even LARP revoking it, unlike the OGL.
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