Happy New O5L

Very late to this party, and the first thing I’ll note is how wrong I was. I was expecting more stick, but what we got instead was a big, juicy carrot. I think that was the smarter path to take.

Which is not to say that there aren’t some thorns among the roses. But first, to sum up for those of you who haven’t already seen it, there’s an OGL for 5e and it looks pretty darn similar to the one for 3e. That, of course, makes how they differ all the more interesting, and 5e’s SRD has a few interesting wrinkles in it. For instance, while the SRD discusses the existence of things like subraces, backgrounds and feats, the SRD only actually lists one of each. This means you can’t just drop the SRD into a reskinned game where orcs are the heroes and elves are the villains, unless you’re willing to rebuild large chunks of character creation options from scratch. It also means you can’t play the game with just the SRD; combining the SRD with the Basic pdf will allow you to do things like add Warlocks to your Basic games, but only the flavor that is beholding to demons and devils; the Warlock flavors tied to the Fey or cthulhic monsters aren’t included in the SRD.

It may not seem that odd a choice (after all, it means that if you want to play the game, you still need to buy the books if the Basic free-taste leaves you wanting more), but it does indicate a very different strategy. 3e’s OGL was clearly about making the d20 system ubiquitous. Every game and setting was being translated into d20, and that was clearly by design.

Just as clearly, 5e’s SRD, while not preventing that sort of thing, isn’t encouraging it, either. You can still make your 5e version of Shadowrun or World of Darkness if you wish, but you won’t have a stack of backgrounds, feats, and character class options to just lift straight out of the game to drop into yours.
The other thing your 5e-version of another game won’t have is a fancy d20 logo. This lack of “a unified, consumer-friendly compatibility logo” means the only things that will come with a WotC imprimatur will be the stuff sold in their Dungeon Masters Guild web store, and that stuff has to be set in the Forgotten Realms.

(I wonder, as an aside, if this is part of how they hope to avoid rules-bloat: let all those barnacles afix themselves to the Forgotten Realms, then burn it all down as they announce the NEW official campaign setting is now Greyhawk, and start all over again.)

Again, I’m not seeing anything that prevents the release of a gazillion splatbooks and all the horrors that come in their wake. However, I’m not seeing anything that encourages that sort of behavior, either. They’re clearly hoping to encourage more Forgotten Realms-focused content.

I’m only seeing good news for the OSR/DIY crowd. If you’ve been enjoying 5e so far, but have been put off by a lack of a license allowing you to publish your homebrew mega-dungeon or zany science-fantasy setting, happy days are here again. If you’ve been hesitant to toss up your 5e campaign setting or adventures online for sale, you now have an umbrella agreement to use for legal cover. If you’ve got something that’s not for 5e but you want to include a conversion document with it, it looks like you’ve got cover for that as well. I anticipate we’ll be seeing a lot more 5e stuff popping up from the more creative and interesting corners of the online RPG community.

An OGL for 5e

So, assuming WotC decides they want an OGL of some flavor for 5e, what should it look like?

The original OGL was intended to encourage DMs to publish their adventures. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that adventures were necessary to support an RPG, but in general cost more to make than they brought in. As with “box sets killed TSR” it was part of the conventional wisdom that turned out to be untrue as Paizo and James Edward Raggi IV proved, both building empires on a foundation of adventures.

Granted, the OGL and d20 license didn't work as planned. Instead, they resulted in a rash of splatbooks. If WotC is lucky, they'll get that again with 5e.

It's pretty obvious that WotC is following Paizo's lead with their linked adventure “storylines” like Tyranny of Dragons. They want to continuously publish entire campaigns worth of adventures, teased and supported by their weekly play Encounters program. And they want to keep the barriers to entry into the game low, hence the free-to-download Basic D&D PDF.

And because of that, they need to avoid 4e's new-hardback-every-month policy like the plague. It didn't take long for that to result in needing software to actually generate a character. Keep that sort of nonsense up, and D&D will lose its status as gateway product into the hobby.

(In comparison, notice how Paizo, in the 6 years they've been doing the Pathfinder thing, have only released two additional books of character classes. Frankly, even that may be a bit fast; it'll be interesting to see how far they can ride this train. Conventional wisdom says that they'll need a reboot via a new edition in the next two years, but Paizo's made their money by bucking the conventional wisdom.)

Letting third party publishers generate extra character classes and feats and all of that would allow WotC to keep the core of the game simple and approachable, but still have the variety people will start to desire once the new has worn off.

That said, I do agree with Mythmere that sooner is probably better than later. After all, part of the appeal of 5e is that it's back to being the sort of game we all know and love. So some of us are going to want some sexy newness or oddness right out of the gate.

Which is why I disagree with Matt Finch. The whole purpose of “open sourcing” is to invite variety and adaptability. If the goal is to get as many people as possible playing D&D, then they want a 5e version of Carcosa and they want Zak's nephilidian vampires and Aos' sci-fantasy Metal Earth and Jeff's rule-of-cool Saturday-morning-cartoon fueled insanities.

Because that sort of stuff is where enthusiasm and excitement come from. Because that makes D&D more than just Middle Earth with the serial numbers filed off. WotC can handle Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance just fine. But while they want a 5e Death Frost Doom, the last thing they want is to actually publish it themselves. Letting others do that via an OGL gives them the best of both worlds: edgy and exciting content AND plausible deniability. D&D can be “dangerous” and cool (and weird and silly and steampunky and sci-fi and...) without WotC needing to actually dilute their core product by publishing it.

More importantly, it would allow for a plethora of splat books with variant character classes, spells and magic systems, skills, and whatnot. Again, WotC gets the best of both worlds: the 3rd party splatbooks give D&D the variety experienced players crave, but since they are 3rd party, the game doesn't get buried under a mountain of official material that makes it increasingly harder for new players to join in on the fun.

This would free up WotC to focus on setting material and adventure “storylines,” and the supplemental material players want to make the most of playing in them. It also allows them to focus more heavily on profitable “side projects” like Lords of Waterdeep and novels which grow and strengthen the IP.

The No-news on the 5e OGL

Mr. Mearls' Legends & Lore blog continues to be the place for breaking news about 5e. Only, in this case, the news is nothing will break before autumn, and nothing will actually be happening until 2015 sometime.

The official reason given is quality control; they want folks to have the DMG in hand and time “to absorb the rules and how they all interact.” That seems a bit odd to me, considering the open beta testing period and online discussions about the rules organized by Mearls & Co.

So, being the suspicious git that I am, I suspect that WotC really doesn't know what they want from an OGL at this point. On the one hand, everyone expects them to have something, and they may actually feel they could benefit from one. On the other hand, they want to take the time to do it right because doing it wrong last time allowed the worst thing possible to happen: Paizo's Pathfinder RPG.

Make no mistake, WotC's fumbling about with an OGL for 4th edition is entirely responsible for the creation of the Pathfinder game. They should have been bending over backwards to get Paizo on-board with 4e. Instead, WotC left them dangling in the wind and forced them to remain with the 3.x OGL. It could have been, and should have been, handled differently.

So the big question is, does WotC understand this? It'd be easy enough to blame the whole situation on the mere existence of the 3.x OGL. After all, without that, Paizo wouldn't have been able to scoop up all those players who didn't want to migrate to 4e.

I think that's missing the point, however. After all, nobody's talking about True20, or Hackmaster, or Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Castles & Crusades, or even all of them combined threatening D&D's dominance of the market. The real threat is Paizo. And that's because Paizo has something that WotC lacks: an effective marketing juggernaut.

People know about Pathfinder, people are excited about Pathfinder, people love showing off their Pathfinder stuff. Pathfinder is bright and shiny. Paizo is seen as friendly and excited about gaming and eager to promote new talent and neat ideas. Paizo oozes cool; people may doubt whether or not they'll like Paizo's next adventure path, or think that Golarion is too generic or mish-mashy, or worry they're putting out too many hardcover rulebooks, but nobody doubts that the next things coming from Paizo will resonate. They will look cool, they will feel cool, and lots of people will be interested in reading them.

Paizo's tapped the same lightning that Games Workshop has held bottled for so long now. Sure, there are other games out there, but Warhammer and Warhammer 40k are the ones that fire imaginations and induce passionate obsessions (both pro and anti, as we also see with Pathfinder). In both cases, the rules barely factor into things. In both cases, the aesthetics created by the companies are gripping and inspiring and enticing.

And that's what WotC needs to worry about. They should fear looking like also-rans, which is why the discussion of their covers does matter. They wallowed for six years in the New Coke debacle that was 4e marketing and trade dress.

5e is a chance for WotC to start over with D&D and it certainly looks like they're taking. A strong and focused OGL would be another potent arrow in their quiver, so I can absolutely understand them taking their time in crafting one.