01-14-2023, 09:18 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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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
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Open Content, WotC OGL 1.0
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01-15-2023, 12:05 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Saint Louis or thereabouts
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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?
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01-15-2023, 06:57 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Alsea, OR
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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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. |
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01-15-2023, 07:16 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
The factual part of game mechanics can't be copyrighted either. So large parts are open to use no matter the license.
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01-16-2023, 08:59 AM | #15 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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.
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01-16-2023, 10:26 AM | #16 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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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/
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature Last edited by Polydamas; 01-16-2023 at 11:32 AM. |
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01-16-2023, 07:44 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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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
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01-16-2023, 08:59 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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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.
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01-17-2023, 04:07 PM | #19 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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...
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01-17-2023, 05:40 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Paizo unveils new, perpetual and irrevocable gaming license
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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.
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature Last edited by Polydamas; 01-17-2023 at 06:38 PM. |
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gaming license, paizo, wizards of the coast |
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