Is the OGL Era Over? (Two Years Later)

It’s been more than two years since Wizards of the Coast attempted to revoke the OGL using contractual reinterpretations that were of questionable legality and even more questionable morality. Their attempt failed, hard, because fandom offered a unfied front and hit Wizards where it hurt, in the pocketbook, by boycotting D&D Beyond.

A PDF of my four articles chronicling Wizards’ attack on the OGL live in 2023 is available for free at the Designers & Dragons Patreon.

The extreme discontent that Wizards of the Coast ignited in early 2023 has faded, with most returning to the game. However, Wizards has continued to make corporatocratic decisions that likely keep the fires of rage burning in those most offended by Wizards’ profit-driven turn. Their greatest hits since January 2023 include: setting the Pinkertons on a Magic: The Gathering fan (April 2023); publishing AI art in Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants (August 2023); using AI art in a Magic: The Gathering ad (November 2023); laying off people at Christmas yet again (December 2023); using AI art in another Magic: The Gathering ad after they said they wouldn’t (January 2024); removing à la carte items from D&D Beyond (May 2024); threatening to delete D&D 2014 content from D&D Beyond in favor of the 2024 rules (August 2024), filing copyright claims against YouTubers showing off the new 50th anniversary rules (August 2024); admitting that they were planning to use generative AI for “emergent storytelling” (September 2024); and (maybe) dropping the ball on the 50th anniversary celebration itself (December 2024).

The fact that Wizards of the Coast has ridden this wave of constantly bad publicity over the last two years demonstrates how powerful their place is in the industry. (And honestly, they’ve been happily enduring bad publicity a bit longer than that, as it was only 2020 when Wizards appeared to be purposefully breaching contracts with licensees such as Gale Force 9 and the Dragonlance authors to try and grab better control of their IPs.) The only gap in their armor appeared when their profit-making machines were endangered, as occurred with the D&D Beyond boycott.

During the OGL fiasco, the entire industry was thrown into chaos, because so many people depended on the D&D SRDs that were gatekept by the OGL, or on the OGL itself as a licensing tool. This resulted in a chaotic mishmash of plans for new games and new licenses. Though Wizards quickly stepped back from the abyss, many of those plans continued. Two years on, the question is: what are the continuing effects of the attack on the OGL, both on Wizards itself and on the rest of the industry?

Wizards Aftereffects

Obviously, the OGL fiasco has had some lasting effects on Wizards of the Coast itself.

Kyle Brink. For better or for worse, Kyle Brink bore the brunt of the OGL crisis at Wizards of the Coast. He came on at Wizards in 2021 and became the executive producer of D&D sometime around Ray Winninger’s rather abrupt departure from that role in 2022. Most fans had never heard of Brink before the crisis. When he became the public face of the attack on the OGL, it wasn’t necessarily because he agreed with the decision to try and revoke the OGL (in fact, he said the creative D&D team had too little input), but simply because he was the D&D guy. One of Brink’s interviews about the OGL, where he talked about wanting more diversity in the company’s leadership, also led to the misinterpretation that he’d said white men weren’t welcome at Wizards. Brink quietly left Wizards in May 2024, and fandom was still angry about both these issues.

D&D Licenses. The Wizards-created crisis largely ended on January 27, 2023 when they released the D&D 5.1 SRD into the Creative Commons. At the time, many speculated that Wizards would do their best to immediately obsolete that release by making D&D 2024 different enough that the free license for the older rules would become irrelevent for any would-be producers of D&D 5e supplements. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Even though there are differences between the two D&D 5e rulesets, most thing could still be retrofitted from the older rules, just like the OSR did with any number of retroclones. Meanwhile, Wizards has continued to make a number of good faith gestures regarding the openness of their rules.

To start with, they released French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations of the D&D 5.1 SRD in mid-2023. Then, in May 2024, Wizards went a step further and said they’d be releasing the D&D 2024 rules as a D&D 5.2 SRD, again under the Creative Commons. They also suggested that they were still planning on releasing older rules systems using Creative Commons, something that was demanded by fandom after Wizards put the OGL in danger back in 2023—because much of the OSR and any number of D&D 3e–based games depended on the D&D 3.0 or 3.5 SRD.

Neither of these new additions to the Creative Commons has happened, but they’re only slightly overdue: Wizards said that the D&D 5.2 SRD would be released in February 2025, after the 2024 Monster Manual came out, and that they’d then begin looking at the older rule systems afterward. So, it’s possible that at least the first of these publications will happen any day now.

D&D Beyond. The boycott of D&D Beyond seems to be what pulled Wizards back from the brink. At the time, it was floated that D&D Beyond had lost 40,000 subscribers. There was never any confirmation of that number, but obviously the boycott hit Wizards hard enough for them to turn around on a new profit-making scheme that had seemed to be set in stone. However, Hasbro’s Q2 2023 earnings call said that D&D Beyond generated 2 million new registered users in the first half of the year! If there was a loss during January, it quickly turned around. A year later, Hasbro said that D&D Beyond had topped 18 million registered users, and that digital revenues (primarily including D&D Beyond) accounted for about half of D&D’s success.

As noted above, D&D Beyond has been a continued tension point between Wizards of the Coast and their fans, as Wizards first removed à la carte sales options, then threatened to entirely drop D&D 2014 content. Both decisions were poorly received, but only the latter got a notable numbers of players upset enough to suggest a boycott again—though it never seems to have reached the extent of the early 2023 popular movement. It took less than a week for Wizards to back down on their abandonment of 2014 content, showing the strength of fandom once more—something that we might never have known without Wizards’ 2023 attack on the OGL.

New Licenses

Wizards never actually revoked the OGL, but it’s no longer considered reliable because of their claim that they could do so at any time. This has resulted in lots talk of using other licenses, a trend that has borne out in the two years since.

A New OGL. Some fans were hoping for a new OGL that corrected the flaws that Wizards claimed to have found. However, Wizards has shown zero interest in repairing the damage they did, and so the OGL remains a potentially flawed vessel.

Creative Commons. Instead, Wizards moved over to that Creative Commons license. Creative Commons has been in some use in the roleplaying industry for years. Eclipse Phase and Fate Core were likely the biggest RPGs to use Creative Commons licenses prior to Wizards of the Coast rather abruptly doing so in 2023. But, there’s a reason that Creative Commons hasn’t caught on further: you have to either be committed to releasing your entire content into the Creative Comments (that’s the Eclipse Phase model, albeit with a noncommercial license) or you have to carefully construct an SRD for each publication so that you only release certain content (that’s the D&D/Fate model, and it’s labor-intensive). The advantage of a license like the OGL is that it was written to allow the easy exclusion of “product identity” content, so that a publisher could slap the OGL on their game or supplement, but still know that what they saw as their core content was protected.

Given these issues, it’s no surprise that Wizards of the Coast’s use of the Creative Commons hasn’t suddenly led numerous other publishers to do so, though a few have moved in that direction, such as Basic Fantasy.

ORC. Instead, Paizo’s ORC license was meant to be the savior of the industry, resolving the problems revealed with the OGL while still retaining the good qualities of a gaming specific license. It focuses on allowing free use of game mechanics while still allowing publishers to protect “product identity.” Initially supported by 1,500 publishers, the final version of ORC was released on June 29, 2023. And since? There’s been some use of ORC. Obviously, Paizo is using it for Pathfinder and Starfinder Second Edition. Chaosium is using it for both Basic Roleplaying and QuestWorlds; and Design Mechanism is using it for Mythras Imperative, another BRP-related game. The support from a few other publishers is a bit more wobbly. Kobold Press was another major signatory, and their Black Flag Reference Document indeed released under ORC back in 2023, but by the time of their Final Alpha Release of the game that became Tales of the Valiant, later that year, ORC was gone. EN Publishing offered another take. Their Level Up RPG came out with every licensing option: Creative Commons, OGL, or ORC.

There are likely other publishers using the ORC license, but that short list, especially when compared with Paizo’s original supporter count of 1,500, says the ORC hasn’t been very successful. Without a D&D SRD, it was obviously never going to get the attention of the OGL, and with a whole bunch of incompatible games all using the license, it couldn’t recreate the OGL ecosystem. But perhaps more importantly, some folks just weren’t happy with the final form of the license itself. It’s a complex new license, not a fixed version of the OGL; Matt Finch later explained it as having “usability” problems.

Some combination of these factors has led most publishers to shy away. Instead, they’ve gone the bespoke route …

Other Licenses. The biggest licensing result of the OGL fiasco isn’t a widespread use of the Creative Commons, and it isn’t a migration to ORC. Instead, it’s the advent of billions and billions of licenses. You have to give that to the OGL: 25 years on, it’s shown the industry the benefit of sharing, and lots of publishers want to recreate the experience (but to be fair, FUDGE was there first).

• Solarian Games was one of the first to announce they were going this direction. Their Lucky 13 system from Top Secret: New World Order has been released under the ELF license.
• The OSR has always been about creative collaboration, so the biggest OSR games of recent years have offered up a variety of licenses, resulting in Swords & Wizardry’s AELF license (which was written explicitly as a fixed OGL), the Shadowdark Third-Party License, and the Mothership Third-Party License. Notably, the Mothership license requires approval, showing one of the disadvantages, at least for licensees, as the industry moves away from the OGL.
• Fria Ligan released a Year Zero license based on the OGL prior to 2023. They were forced by Wizards’ actions to revise that, resulting in their own Free Tabletop License for Year Zero. They also released a separate third-party license for Dragonbane.
• Mongoose stepped back from the OGL when they released Traveller Second Edition, instead focusing at the time on community content. The OGL fiasco ironically got them back on track with their long history of open-source releases, resulting in a new Traveller Compatibility license.
• Even Paizo hasn’t been able to stick entirely with ORC. Because of differences between the game-rules focused ORC and their setting-focused community content program, Paizo forbade use of ORC for their Pathfinder Infinite and Starfinder Infinite programs.

Likely a number of other licenses were released after the OGL meltdown; these are just some of the earliest or most notable releases. The biggest lesson here is that Wizards’ actions in early 2023 not only drove many publishers away from the OGL, but also badly balkanized the licensing landscape of the RPG world. Granted, it always felt a little weird for random other games to be using the OGL, but that’s because it was so closely associated with Wizards of the Coast; their attempt to revoke the license ultimately revealed why that felt bad.

New FRPGs

During the month of chaos, two major supplemental publishers for D&D 5e, Kobold Press and MCDM, said that they were going to move away from D&D to a new game of their own because of the OGL fiasco. A few others have joined the exodus since, most notable among them Darrington Press.

Tales of the Valiant. Kobold Press had actually had been working on their own FRPG since some time in 2022, which gave them a leg up. Their “Black Flag” roleplaying announcement was one of the centers of the anti-Wizards rebellion during January 2023, and they were able to launch a Kickstarter in May that raised over a million dollars. Since then, several supplemental Kickstarters have raised $200,000-$500,000 each.

At one point, Tales of the Valiant looked like it might be to D&D 5e what Pathfinder was to D&D 3e, but that comparison has faltered as those follow-up Kickstarters dropped in value. The two biggest factors may be the name change and the rule system. The reaction to the name change is clearly visceral: people felt that “Project Black Flag” encapsulated the anti-Wizards sentiment of 2023 and that “Tales of the Valiant” does not. As for the rules, the biggest complaint is that Tales of the Valiant is just too similar to D&D 5e: it didn’t differentiate itself even as much as Pathfinder 1e did.

Ultimately the success that Tales of the Valiant is seeing is likely due to Kobold Press’ excellent (and justified) reputation for world and adventure building. It’ll probably be a strong evergreen product for them that they can use as a tentpole for their line. It’s just not the industry game changer that it looked like it might be two years ago.

Draw Steel. Matt Colville’s MCDM Productions had been more casually kicking around the idea of a new FRPG in 2022, but as soon as the OGL fiasco began to roil across the industry, Colville got serious, flying a design team headed by James Introcaso out to Southern California to begin work in earnest. The “MCDM RPG” was crowdfunded on Backerkit 11 months later, in December 2023, and it raised a jaw-dropping $4.6 million dollars.

That funding was particularly amazing because the game was still at a fairly early stage of development, not the text-complete state that’s been more common for crowdfunding in recent years. It didn’t even have its final name of “Draw Steel” yet. A content-complete version went out in December 2024, with final PDFs expected this summer and presumably print books before the end of the year.

Draw Steel is very much not going to be a D&D clone. It’s a 2d6 game system with mechanics designed to reverse the slog of some RPG play by instead increasing excitement as combats and adventures go on. Combined with Colville’s background in streaming and on Youtube, the very things that helped to make D&D so successful in the ’10s, Draw Steel is a pretty threatening game: something that might actually draw people away from D&D.

But the last major contender may have even more opportunity to do so.

Daggerheart. Back in January 2023, Critical Role Productions released a non-statement on the OGL, saying they supported diversity of games in the field and not much more. They didn’t expand on that position until April, when they finally announced that they’d indeed be working on an FRPG of their own, Daggerheart. They began an open playtest in March 2024 with release planned for May 20, 2025.

Like Draw Steel, Daggerheart is a brand-new game meant to embody FRPG tropes without being D&D. Its core die roll is 2d12, with the dice representing Fear and Hope, which are metacurrencies collected by the GM and players, respectively. The GM doesn’t actually get to do things until the players start failing! Overall, the game is much more narrative than D&D, which is a close match to the style of Critical Role’s own games. Ironically, that might be the main thing to hold Daggerheart back in a larger marketplace where GMs already quaver in fear of the Matt Mercer Effect—even when running D&D, a much more gamist RPG.

Critical Role campaign 4 is scheduled to begin in September. There’s no word yet if it will use Daggerheart, but if so, that’s likely to make Daggerheart the biggest threat of all the OGL-response games: Matt Colville isn’t streaming any more, and his Youtube videos have slowed down as he’s turned his success over to roleplaying publication, but Critical Role very much is, and that might offer the biggest opportunity to turn fans on to a new system.

OSR FRPGs

Wizards of the Coast probably doesn’t even care about OSR FRPGs. As of the ’20s, some of them are doing very well in the mass market, but it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to D&D revenues, and they’re also games that encourage a different style of gaming than even the somewhat retro-play of D&D 5e. But the OSR games nonetheless got caught up in Wizards’ attack on the OGL because most of them were built off of the D&D 3e SRD; if Wizards was trying to revoke the entire OGL, then that meant the right to use the D&D 3e SRD was also in jeopardy.

The OSR games also got the short end of the stick. After Wizards threw much of the FRPG industry into chaos, they at least offered a balm to D&D 5e creators by dumping the 5.1 SRD into Creative Commons. They didn’t do so with the D&D 3e SRD (though as discussed above, they may after they close out a 5.2 SRD). That means that two years on, much of the OSR is still in a state of Limbo. On the one hand, Wizards no longer has much incentive to try and revoke the OGL, because they’ve given away D&D 5e; on the other hand, because game mechanics are only protectable by patents, OSR publishers are likely legally OK if they stay away from specific terms and non-algorithmic mechanics that might be protected. But, that’s all built on shifting sands, and even if there’s no indication that Wizards will pull the rug out from under everyone, they could. In fact, they have before, even though that was exactly the situation the OGL was created to prevent.

Though every OSR game retrocloned from the D&D 3e SRD faces this level of jeopardy, the following are the ones who were most actively discussing the problem during January 2023 or afterward.

Basic Fantasy. Chris Gonnerman almost immediately put together a workgroup to scrub Basic Fantasy of text inherited directly from the D&D SRD. The OGL-free fourth edition was released in May 2023.

Labyrinth Lord. Dan Proctor had already begun work on a second edition of Labyrinth Lord and even released a preview in December 2022. In the process, he’d decided that Labyrinth Lord no longer needed to be a precise retroclone. When it became obvious that Labyrinth Lord needed to move away from the OGL, Proctor started considering moving even further away from B/X D&D as well, with new classes such as brownies and cyclops. A full draft, built on the D&D 5.1 SRD, was released in May 2024, but the project went suddenly quiet afterward.

Old-School Essentials. During the OGL fiasco, Gavin Norman announced he’d be revising Old-School Essentials and moving away from the OGL. After Wizards’ attack faltered, he decided a revision wasn’t necessary. However, his newer Dolmenwood game also refers to the D&D 5.1 SRD released under the Creative Commons license rather than the OGL that had been used for OSE.

OSRIC. Stuart Marshall started talking about releasing a Creative Commons version of OSRIC in 2023, but Matt Finch seems to be the driving force behind the revision now. He acknowledges that OSRIC could continue forward under the OGL, but with some risk, so he’s planning a 2025 Kickstarter that will release a new edition of the game under his AELF license. (Generally, AELF feels like it could be the industry-wide replacement for the OGL that ORC hasn’t been, especially since Finch is a lawyer, but to date it’s been mostly or entirely limited to Mythmere Games’ releases.)

Shadowdark. Kelsey Dionne may have been in the worst position when the Wizards hijinks started, because she was literally looking at a preprint copy of Shadowdark when she learned that she might lose the OGL. But, it may have been for the best. She consulted a legal team and rewrote three or four chapters, changing lots of terminology and some mechanics. After the danger receded, and she became able to use the Creative Commons version of the D&D 5.1 SRD, Dionne reversed some of her changes, but kept others because the whole crisis showed her she didn’t actually need to cleave quite so close to D&D—and that was likely to the game’s benefit.

Swords & Wizardry. Finally, in July 2023, Matt Finch produced the aforementioned AELF license as an alternative to the OGL, for use initially with Swords & Wizardry.

So, Is The OGL Era Over?

In a word: yes.

In the end, Wizards of the Coast limited the considerable reputational and financial damage that they were doing to themselves by not trying to revoke the OGL. But, they’d already destroyed the industry’s faith in the license.

There are certainly tens of thousands of classic projects that continue to use the OGL, but 99% of them are likely moribund products that are continuing to sell only due to the minimal costs of keeping electronic files available online. Active lines and current products are almost entirely moving toward new licenses.

And here’s the real shame. There’s no longer a consistent means of licensing in the roleplaying ecosystem, not even ORC. Everyone has their own methodology, so where there was once just one license to use and one license to share (and one license in the darkness bind them), now there are dozens. If the OGL fiasco offers another lesson, that means there’s also dozens of licenses that can each have their own mistakes.

And what has the end of the OGL era given us? We certainly are seeing an influx of new FRPGs that are wandering further from the mechanics of D&D. That’s kind of nice after the OGL started a 25-year cycle of FRPGs focusing on some version of D&D, new or old. The OSR was already stretching its wings as shown by games like Mothership and Mörk Borg, which both predated the OGL attack. But now more mass-market games like Daggerheart and Draw Steel are also offering new mechanics and new ways to look at old FRPG tropes. If either of the latter games see a high level of success, that’s what will be the biggest result of the OGL era ending.

Even two years on, the future is not entirely written.