I am starting this thread in an effort to leave poor @Marc Radle alone in his Black Flag SRD thread. I don't want to stymie discussion of that for folks that want to dig into it. My apologies for even starting this discussion there.
I feel very strongly about Open Gaming. I was, and still am, completely aghast at what WotC tried to pull in January 2023, and I was very glad to see much of the community and industry come out against it. I was even more happy to hear that a bunch of companies were making an effort to free themselves from the OGL and build systems to be released in a truly Open way, either in CC or what eventually became ORC.
I believe that if you have benefited professionally and economically from the Open Gaming movement, you are ethically bound to give back to it.
Unfortunately, not everyone does. Some publishers are more egregious than others. Malhavoc/Monte Cook is especially bad at trying to lock down everything while still benefiting from publishing under the OGL. Matt Coville is similar. I encourage anyone feeling skeptical to examine the Product Identity designations in eithers works.
The 5.1 SRD releasing under CC-BY was almost worse for Open gaming specifically. Because it was not released under the Share Alike license, the requirement or incentive for designers to pay Open Gaming forward for the benefits they themselves received was gone. No one had to also release their work, and few did.
Now we have ORC, and it is explicit that if you use ORC to publish, any and every game mechanic in that product released under ORC is also released. You must feed back into the reservoir of Open Game Content. That is the way it should be, and I applaud Paizo and all the other companies that helped build ORC to be that way. I think it is only fair to point out both Paizo and EN Publishing for being solid members of the Open Gaming community and making most, even nearly all, of their game mechanics Open. Those companies understand that the value is not in the mechanics themselves but in presentation, how they are used and the value of the products at the table.
I am going to pick on Kobold for a moment, but just because their choices inspired this post: Kobold released the Black Flag SRD under ORC. While that seems good at first blush, there is a problem: the Black Flag SRD is the same kind of trimmed down document as WotC's own 5.1 SRD. I won't get into a discussion here about the quality of the work or its place in the market, but I will say that I find it disappointing that a company that essentially exists because of Open Gaming decided to go this route, especially when publishing under ORC. And it was something of a shock considering things like the Heroes Handbook made everything mechanical in it Open Content, so Kobold has a history of being a strong supporter of Open Gaming.
I don't want this to be a discussion about Kobold Press, or any of the other companies I named. Nor do i want it to be a tedious discussion by armchair lawyers regarding copyright law. We've already had a thread closed for that. What i would rather talk about is how folks feel about Open Gaming and what responsibilities people and companies that publish under Open Gaming have to those that come after them.
I feel very strongly about Open Gaming. I was, and still am, completely aghast at what WotC tried to pull in January 2023, and I was very glad to see much of the community and industry come out against it. I was even more happy to hear that a bunch of companies were making an effort to free themselves from the OGL and build systems to be released in a truly Open way, either in CC or what eventually became ORC.
I believe that if you have benefited professionally and economically from the Open Gaming movement, you are ethically bound to give back to it.
Unfortunately, not everyone does. Some publishers are more egregious than others. Malhavoc/Monte Cook is especially bad at trying to lock down everything while still benefiting from publishing under the OGL. Matt Coville is similar. I encourage anyone feeling skeptical to examine the Product Identity designations in eithers works.
The 5.1 SRD releasing under CC-BY was almost worse for Open gaming specifically. Because it was not released under the Share Alike license, the requirement or incentive for designers to pay Open Gaming forward for the benefits they themselves received was gone. No one had to also release their work, and few did.
Now we have ORC, and it is explicit that if you use ORC to publish, any and every game mechanic in that product released under ORC is also released. You must feed back into the reservoir of Open Game Content. That is the way it should be, and I applaud Paizo and all the other companies that helped build ORC to be that way. I think it is only fair to point out both Paizo and EN Publishing for being solid members of the Open Gaming community and making most, even nearly all, of their game mechanics Open. Those companies understand that the value is not in the mechanics themselves but in presentation, how they are used and the value of the products at the table.
I am going to pick on Kobold for a moment, but just because their choices inspired this post: Kobold released the Black Flag SRD under ORC. While that seems good at first blush, there is a problem: the Black Flag SRD is the same kind of trimmed down document as WotC's own 5.1 SRD. I won't get into a discussion here about the quality of the work or its place in the market, but I will say that I find it disappointing that a company that essentially exists because of Open Gaming decided to go this route, especially when publishing under ORC. And it was something of a shock considering things like the Heroes Handbook made everything mechanical in it Open Content, so Kobold has a history of being a strong supporter of Open Gaming.
I don't want this to be a discussion about Kobold Press, or any of the other companies I named. Nor do i want it to be a tedious discussion by armchair lawyers regarding copyright law. We've already had a thread closed for that. What i would rather talk about is how folks feel about Open Gaming and what responsibilities people and companies that publish under Open Gaming have to those that come after them.
