WotC’s Possible New OGL Is… Not Great

Yesterday, Linda Codega at io9 reported that the upcoming OGL 1.1 for OneD&D has some… troubling aspects of it. The copy she got is a leak, and could be inaccurate, or could be a trial balloon, but taking it at face value, it looks bad.

Essentially, if followed to the letter, all actual plays, Youtube channels, and podcasts would be rendered illegal if they make money. Any content created with the OGL will need to be submitted to Wizards, not for approval, but you will need to include all kinds of other information to them.

Lots of stuff is allowed by their fan content policy, including videos and podcasts, but what happens when those start to make money? Does that render them illegal?

While the original OGL was 900 words, and the new one is 9000, it seems to make things LESS clear than the original OGL did.

At this point, I’m not sure I’ll be sticking with D&D once 6e comes out (and I think we can all admit it’s 6e). I’ve found lots of other games I’d rather be running. If I play a D&D-like game, it’ll likely be Knave or some other type of super simplified retroclone, or 4e (so if you see me raving about 4e online, IT DOESN’T COUNT!)

As I said in the first paragraph, this may all be a trial balloon. While this order for a new OGL that does these things likely came all the way down from Hasbro corporate, it’s entirely possible it was leaked at the request of some designers at WotC in order to amp up the outrage machine to show their corporate overlords that this is definitely not a popular choice to go with. Perhaps in a month we’ll see an updated and revised OGL that removes a lot of these issues. I’ll keep you updated if so.