Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Saint

I know very little of the Paizo games. I was always under the impression the original Pathfinder was pretty similar to D&D 3.5.

Pathfinder never used any of the stuff that was protected by the OGL (1.0) -- that is, the "Product Identity" (as you can see below, that's all setting specific details and book titles), and doesn't try to include things like actual game mechanics, never mind overall feel or "similarity". As OGL 1.0 says, "All of the rest of the SRD5 is Open Game Content as described in Section 1(d) of the License." The SRD goes on for 380 pages after the legalese detailing open content items like races, their abilities, classes, class features, spells, magic items, monsters, rules for combat and spellcasting, adventuring gear, etc. You could play a game using nothing other than the SRD.

Paizo has their own setting, "Golarion", with its own iconic characters, pantheon of deities, unique monsters, and so on.

Pathfinder 2 is further yet from D&D 3.5, never mind D&D 5.0 or whatever 6e turns out to be. It's still very much in that class-based fantasy D20 RPG niche, of course -- and every bit as much "not D&D" as the OGL required. There will no doubt be a legal argument as to whether a "perpetual" license is "revocable", and whether you can reclaim IP rights that were deliberately abandoned, but it's hard to see WotC being able to just jerk the past granted rug out from under them after two and a half decades.

Ongoing licensing of new material is another question, but Paizo's long since been defining their own classes, spells, feats, and mechanics. They could do PF development in a clean room, totally sealed off from D&D 5 or 6, and I doubt that would change their course at all.

Product Identity as defined by WotC in OGL 1.0

Spoiler:  

The following items are designated Product Identity,
as defined in Section 1(e) of the Open Game License
Version 1.0a, and are subject to the conditions set
forth in Section 7 of the OGL, and are not Open
Content: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, Player’s
Handbook, Dungeon Master, Monster Manual, d20
System, Wizards of the Coast, d20 (when used as a
trademark), Forgotten Realms, Faerûn, proper
names (including those used in the names of spells
or items), places, Underdark, Red Wizard of Thay,
the City of Union, Heroic Domains of Ysgard,
EverChanging Chaos of Limbo, Windswept Depths of
Pandemonium, Infinite Layers of the Abyss,
Tarterian Depths of Carceri, Gray Waste of Hades,
Bleak Eternity of Gehenna, Nine Hells of Baator,
Infernal Battlefield of Acheron, Clockwork Nirvana
of Mechanus, Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia, Seven
Mounting Heavens of Celestia, Twin Paradises of
Bytopia, Blessed Fields of Elysium, Wilderness of the
Beastlands, Olympian Glades of Arborea, Concordant
Domain of the Outlands, Sigil, Lady of Pain, Book of
Exalted Deeds, Book of Vile Darkness, beholder,
gauth, carrion crawler, tanar’ri, baatezu, displacer
beast, githyanki, githzerai, mind flayer, illithid,
umber hulk, yuan-ti.

Open Content, WotC OGL 1.0

Spoiler:  

"Open Game Content" means the game mechanic
and includes the methods, procedures, processes
and routines to the extent such content does not
embody the Product Identity and is an enhancement
over the prior art and any additional content clearly
identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor

[Saint]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Pathfinder never used any of the stuff that was protected by the OGL . . .

Thanks for your answer. I have been doing a lot of reading on the current kerfuffle and your summary of the situation is as good as any I've seen. But, why the spoilers?

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Saint

Thanks for your answer. I have been doing a lot of reading on the current kerfuffle and your summary of the situation is as good as any I've seen. But, why the spoilers?

Keeps the material collapsed and out of vision for those who don't care to read them.

One of the things that is important is that open content is not the same as released to the public domain content. At least, not under present laws in the US. One only gets to use open content in accordance with the license's allowances.

[dcarson]

The factual part of game mechanics can't be copyrighted either. So large parts are open to use no matter the license.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

Keeps the material collapsed and out of vision for those who don't care to read them.

Exactly. Not that I was "spoiling" anything; rather the opposite, posting stuff a lot of people had probably seen before. I just didn't want to take up a lot of screen space.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Anders

Following the controversy around Wizards of the Coast decision to unilaterally change their Open Gaming License, Paizo has decided to strike back with the own, Open RPG Creative License.

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v57...en-RPG-License

Is this bad? Good? What will it mean for the future of roleplaying?

My understanding is that the OGL basically clarified the existence of rights which were consistent with US law but which WotC could have disputed in court (and that is expensive, and WotC/Hasbro have more money for lawyers than anyone else in the RPG industry). After 22 years of precedents, many games companies feel comfortable asserting those rights directly (and Paizo in particular is highly financially motivated to defend them, and had a time when they had so much money they could hire good intellectual property lawyers to advise them).

Edit: Doug Cole says that Paizio has dropped from about as big as WotC ten years ago to 10% as big today but it does not seem like they are as worried as some people on the Internet https://gamingballistic.com/2023/01/...ease-reaction/

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Edit: Doug Cole says that Paizio has dropped from about as big as WotC ten years ago to 10% as big today but it does not seem like they are as worried as some people on the Internet [/url]

Paizo's lack of worry might be because it wasn't so much that they *dropped* as that WoTC *grew* from a c. $10-15M slump in the doldrums of 4e to a $100-150M growth spurt thanks to 5e and the popularity of Critical Role and other streamers, Stranger Things giving a PR boost, and so on).

One thing is that people often conflate the OGL (or ORC) license, which is certainly a very useful tool, with the 3.0 SRD that was released under it.

It was the two together that made the difference! The 3.0 and later SRDs under the OGL allowed 3rd parties to (a) rapidly produce their own RPGs by simply dumping in and, if they wished, rewriting, proven game rules with a fraction of the game design and writing labor otherwise required and (b) to easily replicate prior or abandoned D&D editions as partial or full retroclones or variant D&D systems and (c) if they wished, to produce stat blocks for supplements or adventures that were fully compatible with either the current D&D official edition or their choices of any of the clones or variant systems.

It is worth pointing out that ORC on its own does not come with any rights to the original 3.0 or 5.0 SRDs, and thus cannot by itself do any of things.

Releasing your prior OGL games under ORC provides absolutely NO legal protection should WOTC decide to try suing you for copyright infringement; you'd have to fight that out in the courts just the same as you would if you didn't use the ORC license. ORC is only about providing a mechanism for sharing new, original content, e.g., creating a totally new open SRD, or rule system with some open content, as one wishes.

It is certain that Paizo and other companies who support ORC will opt to release SRDs of their own RPG systems (e.g., Pathfinder 3.0, etc.), or at least declare parts of their game open content under the ORC, thus permitting others to borrow rules for their own games or write adventures, etc. for their game. However, given that in many cases these are planned as successors from prior editions that were based, however loosely, on original SRDs, people who use these will have to have to diligently examine them to ensure they are comfortable that they really are different enough from WOTC's own copyrighted rules. Or have a lot of trust in that company's lawyers.

Now, people may be rightly confident enough that Paizo's own legal team and designers can and will design a Pathfinder 3.0 that is obviously "original" enough to avoid a court case, but should, for example, WOTC disagree, they might, say, collectively sue Paizo (and every company that used its new SRD?) if they felt that the new game still contained their own intellectual property, which, no longer being covered by OGL, retains all the vulnerabilities the OGL was designed to avoid. Again, the ORC would provide absolutely no protection against this. This also applies to companies creating successors to their rules without the legal or editorial muscle of Paizo. If Mister Small OSR Publisher re-releases their OSR game under the ORC, but somehow fails to diligently rewrite their rules enough, they could also get in copyright trouble ... as would anyone using that through ORC

Again, all of these issues can be avoided just by designing a more or less original game with the same care as any non-OGL game was designed, of which thousands exist, or by releasing such an existing game under ORC. Indeed, a release of, say, Call of Cthulhu / BRP system or the FATE system or the Savage Wirlds system or the d6 system or the Traveller 2d6 system under ORC (or the GURPS system, not that this is likely) has no such risk and would be a safe harbor!

But the point is the ORC license is itself useful, but it's ability to do what the old OGL does depends entirely on the quality of the SRDs or other games released with it. Moreover, the more divergent these games are from each other, the less likely it is that the old style OGL/d20 community based on mutually similar variations of the D&D rules will reappear. It is *possible* - and Paizo doubtless hopes it to be the case - that everyone will end up adopting some form of the Pathfinder 3.0 SRD, or whatever Kobold does, or what one of the more popular OSR systems, and they're all be kind of mutually similar. It's also possible that despite this, everything will fragment

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

It is certain that Paizo and other companies who support ORC will opt to release SRDs of their own RPG systems (e.g., Pathfinder 3.0, etc.), or at least declare parts of their game open content under the ORC, thus permitting others to borrow rules for their own games or write adventures, etc. for their game. t

For me and my group it's the adventures that are key. Paizo built it self up by publishing adventures and it was those adventres that facilitated my group playing the games they were written for.

I used to buy new games just to look at the system but after a few decades of doing that I perceive little need to keep doing it. However, i have a steady need for new adventures and having fully developed adventures makes it far, far easier for us to play that game.

So the original OGL/SRD combo looks to me a lot like Tom Sawyer getting the other kids to whitewash his fence for him. There has been conventional wisdom that you can't make money selling adventures but a few decades of watching the industry tells me that you can sure go out of business because no one plays your game.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

There has been conventional wisdom that you can't make money selling adventures but a few decades of watching the industry tells me that you can sure go out of business because no one plays your game.

Very true. Even for companies that don't want full open content, there are ways to set up community programs, or just contract one or two authors to provide a couple of short new adventures every month and put it under the ad budget...

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Paizo's lack of worry might be because it wasn't so much that they *dropped* as that WoTC *grew* from a c. $10-15M slump in the doldrums of 4e to a $100-150M growth spurt thanks to 5e and the popularity of Critical Role and other streamers, Stranger Things giving a PR boost, and so on).

One thing is that people often conflate the OGL (or ORC) license, which is certainly a very useful tool, with the 3.0 SRD that was released under it.

It was the two together that made the difference! The 3.0 and later SRDs under the OGL allowed 3rd parties to (a) rapidly produce their own RPGs by simply dumping in and, if they wished, rewriting, proven game rules with a fraction of the game design and writing labor otherwise required and (b) to easily replicate prior or abandoned D&D editions as partial or full retroclones or variant D&D systems and (c) if they wished, to produce stat blocks for supplements or adventures that were fully compatible with either the current D&D official edition or their choices of any of the clones or variant systems.

Thanks for the detailed comment! I am 10 or 15 years out of reach of the d20 world, but I kind of get the impression that there is already a lot of fragmentation now that everyone and their sister has a OSR game?

I believe that Gumshoe is an open system now too.

A tabletop RPG world without 5e as the default basis for third-party D&D content would be different.