Closed gaming

For many years, I was kind of caught up in the excitement of the OGL. Even as the excitement dimmed after many years, I still—through inertia and respect for the efforts of Ryan Dancey and Peter Adkison to create the thing in the first place—referred to the OGL for a lot of my own efforts.

It occurs to me that Dark Fantasy X no longer needs the OGL. Realistically, it never did, but because it started way back in a long bygone era as a more copycat fantasy heartbreaker utilizing heavily house-ruled D&D or d20 Modern, before taking on its current form, maybe it was a good idea at one point to refer to the OGL. Even when I jumped to Microlite20, it occurred to me that I'd essentially divorced myself from the OGL. The original m20 one-pager reads more like a house-rule document, and is pretty useless without the 3e D&D books, or at least the SRD. But Dark Heritage was always written to be completely self-contained, and every single thing was rewritten, and most were also relabeled and anything that bore an overly close resemblance to any D&D IP was completely and utterly removed. I still referred to the OGL, but again—by this time it was mostly just because of inertia and respect for the OGL founders and the Microlite pioneers. I no longer had any need to use it.

Dark Fantasy X no longer makes any reference whatsoever to the OGL. The OGL has been removed from the current version of the document and here from the blog. Anytime I talk about a D&D or Pathfinder product from now on out, I will not be using it in a manner that would require the OGL (I never actually did, honestly) and will be referring to it only in a fair use sense. Meanwhile, the mechanics and game system for Dark Fantasy X are no longer any more open than any other normal game.

Does this have to do with the most recent kerfluffle about the "Open" Gaming License 1.1, which appears if the "leaked" material is both genuine and correct, to attempt to close the old gaming license from back to 3e? Yes, of course. Do I believe that WotC can actually do that? I'm not sure. Why chance it when I have no need to anyway? Is that consistent with WotC's extremely mercenary "D&D is under-monetized" paradigm? Sure is.

Some may say that WotC can't win that battle in court. To that I say, don't count on it; our courts are horribly corrupt and therefore unpredictable. There's a reason that the label anarcho-tyranny exists to describe exactly this condition, after all. Also; they don't need to win the battle in court. They just need to intimidate anyone with the big stick of legal costs into doing what they want, even if they know that they would lose in court.

Some may say that Ryan Dancey and Peter Adkison deliberately crafted the OGL to protect D&D from exactly this type of bad actor behavior in the future (which has now arrived.) To this, the Founding Fathers look at them with a cynical, unamused grin, and say, "First time?"

I had no interest in 6e already, not having played 4e or 5e. But this is now worse than no interest. I actually have malicious, hostile interest in 6e now; I actively want to see it fail, and will gleefully dance around its corpse when it does. Not that I'm going to do anything to cause it to fail other than avoid it completely, but I hope that there is a burgeoning YouTube ecosystem of people who report on every failure of Hasbro's and WotC's the way that there is now an ecosystem of Hollywood and Disney bashers.

UPDATE: The more I think about and read about this, the more pissed off I'm getting, even though it doesn't even affect me. I've removed any OGL pages from any of my documents where I'd put it in to be polite, from my blogs, from my Google Sites, and anywhere else where I didn't need it, but I had it anyway. WOTC can burn in hell, and frankly, I hope they do. I hope to see Chris Cocks (that REALLY is his name, by the way) and Bob Iger having their faces melt Raiders of the Lost Ark style. And George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg with them, by the way.