From gift to fight - the Open Game License

On January 5, 2023, a journalist named Linda Codega published an article that set the whole hobby in motion. She had a document that was not supposed to be public yet: a draft of a new license from Wizards of the Coast. Nine thousand words long. The old license that had made everything possible ran to fewer than nine hundred.

Within a week, thousands of people canceled their subscriptions. Publishers began drafting a license of their own. And a company that twenty years earlier had given the community a gift suddenly faced a revolt.

To understand why, we have to go back to the gift itself.

A radical idea

In the late 1990s, Wizards of the Coast had just bought the rights to Dungeons & Dragons. The third edition was in the works, and a brand manager named Ryan Dancey had an unusual idea.

Dancey looked at the world of software, where open source licenses let anyone build on someone else's work. What if you did the same with a roleplaying game? What if you released the core rules of D&D, so anyone could legally make and sell material for it?

It ran against everything Wizards' predecessor had done. TSR, the original publisher of D&D, was known for sending threatening letters to fans and rivals alike. Dancey wanted to turn that on its head.

His reasoning had two pillars. The first was what he called the Skaff Effect: all activity in a hobby eventually benefits the market leader. If more people made material for D&D, more people would play D&D, and that was good for Wizards. The second pillar was protection. D&D had nearly died in TSR's bankruptcy not long before. Under an open license, the game could never again vanish because of a single corporate decision.

How it worked

In 2000, the Open Game License appeared, alongside a document called the System Reference Document: the SRD. It held the bare rules, stripped of the stories and the names that Wizards kept for itself.

The heart of the license was one word: irrevocable. Anyone who released something under the OGL released it for good. The text spoke of a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license. There was no button to undo it. Not for a fan, not for a rival, not for Wizards itself.

The effect was enormous. In the years that followed, hundreds of third-party products appeared. New companies were founded. And when Wizards tried to impose a stricter license with the fourth edition in 2008, something unexpected happened: a publisher named Paizo took the old, released rules, built its own game called Pathfinder on top of them, and became a serious competitor. Exactly what Dancey had foreseen, and exactly what his successors would rather have avoided.

That same irrevocable license also made the Old School Renaissance possible, which we covered in the previous chapter. Without the OGL there are no retroclones, no OSRIC, no road back to the old rules.

The fight

For twenty years, the OGL simply sat there. Until late 2022, when Wizards hinted that changes were coming. On January 5, 2023, the draft leaked.

It was harsher than anyone had expected. Creators would have to register their products with Wizards and report their revenue. Above 750,000 dollars, Wizards would claim a quarter of the income. But the real flashpoint was a single word: the new version called the old license "deauthorized," no longer valid. An attempt to undo the thing that could not be undone.

The reaction was unprecedented. Tens of thousands of D&D Beyond subscriptions were canceled, so many that the management page briefly went offline. Paizo announced a license of its own that could not be revoked, the Open RPG Creative License, and within days drew support from Kobold Press, Chaosium, Goodman Games, and dozens of others. Even Ryan Dancey, the architect of the original, said publicly that he did not believe Hasbro could revoke the old license.

Wizards tried to limit the damage. First with an apology, then with a softened version called OGL 1.2. But it still held on to deauthorizing the original, and the community saw straight through it. A survey of fifteen thousand people left little room for doubt: nearly nine in ten wanted no change at all.

How it ended

On January 27, 2023, three weeks after the leak, Wizards gave in.

The old license stayed in place, untouched. More importantly, the company placed the complete System Reference Document for the fifth edition under a Creative Commons license. That was the real surrender. A Creative Commons license cannot be taken back, by anyone, not even by Wizards. The core rules of D&D now belonged to everyone, permanently.

It is fair to note that the gesture gave less than it seemed. Game rules themselves are hard to protect in law; you cannot own a mechanic the way you own a piece of text or a drawing. Some of what Wizards "gave away" may never truly have been theirs to give. But the message was clear, and that was the point.

Back to the document

That nine-thousand-word draft was meant to take back control. It achieved the opposite. It forced Wizards to give away more than ever, and it proved how deeply the OGL had taken root in the hobby.

In 2000, Ryan Dancey gave a gift with a promise inside it: this can never be taken away. Twenty-three years later, someone tried to break that promise, and the hobby showed that it took the promise literally.

The gift had an invisible lock. Only when someone pulled at it did it become clear how well it held.