Dungeons & Dragons and the Open Game License

You might think you don’t care about Dungeons & Dragons, but you will after reading this article. There is a controversy raging on in the nerd-net right now over changes to the “Open Game License” established to provide an “Open Source” type license of Dungeons & Dragons. Here’s a tl;dr of what the license is, from Wikipedia as of December 22, 2022:

The OGL (v1.0) was originally published by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 to license the use of portions of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, via a System Reference Document (SRD), thus allowing third-party publishers to produce compatible material. This move was spearheaded by Ryan Dancey. Publishers could also use the separate d20 System Trademark License to include a logo indicating compatibility.

In an interview regarding this development, Ryan Dancey stated:

I think there's a very, very strong business case that can be made for the idea of embracing the ideas at the heart of the Open Source movement and finding a place for them in gaming. [...] One of my fundamental arguments is that by pursuing the Open Gaming concept, Wizards can establish a clear policy on what it will, and will not allow people to do with its copyrighted materials. Just that alone should spur a huge surge in independent content creation that will feed into the D&D network.

Wizards/Hasbro (Hasbro owns Wizards) has created a (leaked) version 1.1 of the license, more than two decades since the original license was created. In that time, moves were made to restrict it in 2008, and then it reopened in 2016, more in line with its original form. For more than twenty years, other people and companies have formed based on this license, with the understanding that it would exist as a perpetual “open-sourcing” of the non-copyrighted parts of Dungeons & Dragons. Independent artists and companies alike are dependent on the license.

What the 1.1 license brings is a revocation of all these long-standing principles. What it does in a nutshell is:

1. Collect a 25% royalty if you earn more than $750,000 a year

2. Establish Wizards’ right to use any content published under the license (effectively, Wizards will own it)

3. Ban D&D online sims

4. Revoke the old license

Number four is the big one, but we’ll tackle these in order. I promise we’ll get to the part about why you should care about this later.

In response to number one, you might say, “Well, what’s the big deal? That’s a pretty high cap for independent creators.” That’s true, but number two deals with them. But first, item one majorly effects direct competitors of Wizards, of which there are several. The major competitor is Paizo, which published the game Pathfinder (colloquially known as Dungeons & Dragons v.3.75), and recently Pathfinder 2. Both games are enormously popular. Any company of significant size will realistically have to make more than $750,000 a year to function. Employees must have a salary, and $750,000 does not leave much for that, plus growth. Imagine if a company had to give 25% of its revenue to its largest competitor, in perpetuity. It would be hopeless. So while item one does not quite establish a monopoly for Wizards, it does something not too dissimilar, by hamstringing existing large competitors.

Point number two cuts the legs out of any competition that could eventually arise from independent creators or brand-new companies. If any small business gains tractions, Wizards can effectively seize its assets by publishing the content themselves.

Point three is designed to force players who use online tools to play D&D virtually to use Wizards’ expensive $30-a-month subscription service for access to online rules and a virtual service. Separately, they view D&D as “under-monetized” in this fashion, since only the person responsible for running the game (the Dungeon Master) needs to pay for it. Wizards wants to make every player pay $30 a month. A typical group consists of one Dungeon Master and four players, so 80% of the current users are not “monetized.”

Point four is the worst. It is what forces points one, two, and three into effect retroactively by revoking the previous agreement. If the new license only applied to the new “One D&D” brand, that would be one thing, but it applies as far back as the original edition of the game. (Yes, they are really calling the next version “One D&D” — suitably evil, as if lifted from The Lord of the Rings.)

So, now that that’s out of the way, why care about this? Well, Dungeons & Dragons is not just some game that nerds play. It is firmly rooted in Western culture, and it is part of the ancient storytelling and mythology traditions of the West, filled with the themes of the West, especially those put forward by Tolkien. Wizards may “own” D&D, but this does not bestow upon them the right to do as they will with the game, any more than the desecrators of Tolkien have a right to create the Rings of Power show. In the aristocratic tradition, rather than the capitalist view, one doesn’t “own” something so much as have stewardship over it. A steward can exercise his authority in a good way or an evil way. Wizards, like the stewards of virtually every single other part of culture, have chosen evil. No amount of money or “property rights” can override this fact.

What Wizards has attempted, however, is actually much worse than what Amazon did with Tolkien. A bad Lord of the Rings story can just be ignored. Wizards is actually interfering in the social fabric of peoples’ lives. Wizards is establishing the category of an “unlicensed social experience,” which is akin to the kind of “unlicensed social experience” that you are banned from having on Twitter, YouTube, and virtually every single “social” (really, they are anti-social) form of communication.

Much like in GamerGate, nerds are realizing once again that these mega-corporations do not, and never will, care about the integrity of elements of culture under their stewardship. In this capacity, there is something to be learned beyond “Greedy capitalist bad!” What Wizards is doing isn’t evil simply because the “community” is against it — “community,” in this case, being a sort of Progressive buzzword bandied about to describe any group. Whenever a group’s social form is a self-described “community” (e.g., the “LGBT community”), you know it is basically Progressive-converged. I know this for a fact about Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s useful to point out.

Therefore, what Wizards is doing is evil not because it is against the opinion of the “community,” as if whatever some customer group thinks in a mass-democratic sort of way ought to determine what should be done; it is evil because it is fundamentally against the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons, which is that of an open, social, storytelling game experience.

Warhammer 40K is undergoing a similar cultural war that has been brewing for some time, which is the obviously-oncoming introduction of female Space Marines. The community is “ready for it,” they say. In Warhammer 40,000, the year is 40,000-and-something, and humanity, governed by the interstellar Imperium of Man, is besieged by aliens on all fronts, within and without, material and spiritual, and there is only war. The Imperium has many factions. The Imperial Guard are the mainstay “grunt” forces of the Imperium, modeled after the Red Army, complete with Commissars, female soldiers, and mass-man attacks. The Space Marines themselves constitute a kind of Männerbünde, with each “Chapter” forming its own elite warrior brotherhood. There is a “Sisters of Battle” faction that is effectively an all-woman Space Marines chapter. Although technically not Space Marines, they provide a roughly equivalent role for women in this way, but even if they didn’t, my point stands. If there is anything that does not characterize the Imperium of Man, it is “openness and inclusivity.”

Some lore junkies will argue that, because the Imperium can create Space Marines who are males but no longer considered properly “human” through the sheer number of new organs and genetic modifications performed, they can also create female Space Marines. Of course, the Imperium could, in a theoretical sense, within the story, but this says nothing about whether or not it should be done by the writers of that story. The answer to that is a resounding no. It destroys the Männerbund, which is what the Space Marines are and always have been.

The fact that creation of “female Space Marines” would be so fundamentally against the spirit of Warhammer 40K is exactly why it must not be done and cannot be accepted by any true fan of Warhammer. Any other opinion is polluted and corrupted by politics, which is never a justifiable reason to disrespect the integrity of the story.

This is where a bridge can be made between the two camps. Everyone reading this article ought to agree on what is right regarding D&D; but any left-minded people who happen to wander this far into the article may disagree on Warhammer.

The “capitalist” subversion of D&D goes hand in hand with its cultural subversion, as has been the case in virtually every single other nerd-hobby, especially since 2010 onward. The total corruption of a formerly beloved property through absolute financial exploitation always goes hand in hand with a simultaneous cultural destruction.

Not too long ago, there was some minor controversy in D&D lore regarding “racist” concepts that were then removed from the game. Essentially, this sort of thing revolves around the idea of Orcs, for example, being generally evil. There has always existed openness to “good” Orcs and player character Orcs, because openness is fundamental to D&D. In response to a controversy around a reprint of old materials called Spelljammer and a people called the “Hadozee”:

We [Wizards] recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website does not reflect the values of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end.

The funny thing is that although Wizards appeared to believe very sincerely that erasing history would be wrong, they did a complete reversal only days later, with the same degree of apparent sincerity:

Effective immediately, we will remove the offensive content about Hadozee in our digital versions — and these will no longer be included in future reprints of the book. Our priority is to make things right when we make mistakes. In addition, we’ve initiated a thorough internal review of the situation and will take the necessary actions as a result of that review.

This reversal is as fraudulent as the reversal they are pulling right now with the Open Game License. In response to the backlash against the OGL 1.1, Wizards released a 1.2 license with a slew of apologies. Following that, the controversy seemed to resolve in favor of the “community,” with what amounts to a total capitulation from Wizards, and the publication of some content under the “Creative Commons” license. None of these statements are sincere, and are only made in absolute avarice.

The apparent difference is that in the case of Spelljammer, the “community” won with almost no trouble, but it took the combined organization of virtually every influential figure in the D&D community to win in the other case. With Spelljammer, Wizards made the changes almost immediately, and they stuck. And yet it took a mighty struggle with multiple concessions from Wizards to achieve success in the case of the Open Game License. Why in one case was it so easy to convince Wizards to be “good” and in the other case, it seems like Wizards was no longer “good” and struggled to the bitter end over the issue?

Simple: both “diversity and inclusion” and “capitalist exploitation” are motivated by selfishness, and they therefore go hand in hand. The desire to force any story to be “for everyone” is perfect for maximizing the potential market for any product, so it suits the selfishness of money. Culturally, it is a selfish aim, because it therefore makes everything for you, or at least, to conform with your vision. There is no way to accomplish this with integrity.

In the case of Spelljammer, left-minded persons might tend to agree with the outcome, but as with Warhammer, the outcome is fundamentally against the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons, against the spirit of openness. It, in fact, demonstrates the exact opposite: closedness. It is a closing off, an erasure, of a part of a story that existed. This is not to say that Wizards ought to print “racist” material in their books — they can print whatever they want; however, the Hadozee are a part of the story’s history, and to attempt to remove that history is wrong. In D&D, there is always room for more, not less.

Novel stories can be used to political ends, but to take a story that exists and mutate it in the service of power, as the One Ring does, is evil. Even if that power is, or sees itself as, the “underdog” (like a Hobbit). The concept that unifies all of these cases is the aggressive exercise of power over something that originally had no relationship with power. Power is only used for good when used in an impersonal way to defend that which is true (such as the true or original form of a story).

That is why in all three of these cases — the Open Game License, Space Marines, and D&D races — the right path is to respect the tradition of what something is. When the left-minded talk about community, they actually mean tradition; they simply lack the vocabulary and concomitant understanding to reckon it as such. It is tradition that defines how something should be stewarded. Without this recognition, it is impossible to avoid acting in the service of corruption.

What should be done isn’t about what you like, or what the community likes. It is defined by something more transcendent than group opinion. Even if the “community” desperately wanted Wizards to privatize D&D and milk it for everything it was worth, and then discard the husk, that wouldn’t make it right. By this example, while we can see that opinion can sometimes be a sort of barometer, it says very little at all about that which is absolute.

Because Wizards fundamentally lacks integrity, the “win” in the case of the Open Game License will not stick. Veterans of the game will know that Wizards tried something similar for D&D 4th edition. They will try again. Note how there is no possibility of “regression,” however, on the “diversity and inclusion” front, but there is on the “corporate greed” front. Refer to the previous paragraphs to see how. The “concessions” on Spelljammer were not concessions at all, because diversity and inclusion subverts the game in order to make possible the concomitant capitalist subversion. Ironically, the left-minded persons in this equation are much more free-market capitalists than this author. What you will see now is that all of the sturm and drang will fade away, and because Wizards is now offering a product the community likes, the community will buy it. It’s simple free-market economics.

But nothing has changed at Wizards. Wizards of the Coast is still a company that lacks integrity, as they have made clear by their actions. Nothing has changed in the company’s ethics — only in their strategy. A strategy that will work brilliantly, because their customers have a low time preference and cannot muster the discipline to overcome their desire for consumption of D&D products in order to achieve a genuine shift in the values of the company. Wizards will try and try again until they eventually succeed, and then everyone will be worse off, because despite the moral outrage of customers, they were not boycotting Wizards on the basis of moral integrity, but simply on the basis that they wanted a better product.

In conclusion, it is worth noting developments pertaining to a previous article this author published for the Old Glory Club. Please read it for context. We can see that the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, after suffering a setback similar to that of Wizards due to public outrage, they are now quietly proceeding with the same plans anyway. You can have no doubt that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro are doing the same.

Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 @TurnipMerchant

After suspending it, the president of the LC-MS has affirmed that the New Catechism is in line with the LC-MS’s teachings and has resumed its distribution.