SRD + OGL = D&D Platform Lock-In

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

The OGL was great; it allowed many creators to share content and ideas freely in a Linux-like spirit of cooperation.

But the license was fatally flawed.

This should teach everyone a lesson on software licensing and ensure that your work is covered by something that guarantees its continued existence. The GPL and Creative Commons people are laughing; they learned these lessons long ago.

The OSR community was too trusting of Wall Street's goodwill, which was its failure.

But you combine the OGL with the SRD, and you have a one-two punch that enables nostalgia editions of the game to exist and flourish (Labyrinth Lord, OSE, and many other greats). I am a fan of those, too - but from Wizard's pre-2023 perspective, nostalgia editions only exist to feed players into the current versions of the monetized game.

Without the SRD and OGL?

I feel Wizards is now in a far worse position. The nostalgia and feeder games will now diverge, innovate, and need reasons other than nostalgia to exist. They are free to change the rules and improve them. Every OSR game has the potential to become the Pathfinder 1e to One D&D's 4th Edition.

The OSR community is now free to innovate, and it must, so it can survive. Fallout, dead games, and many communities will be lost along the way. Pain is coming. But there will be a true light of hope that shall emerge from the ashes because the opportunity now is more incredible than ever.

Wizards do not own much, just a few "toy monsters," derivative settings, and silly spell names. Their IP is mostly an illusion of concepts stolen from mythology, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Harry Potter, and other sources. They do not own anything other than mindshare. They do not own dungeon crawling, finding treasure, or other significant concepts the genre depends on.

I feel D&D is to fantasy what Disney is to mythology - something that subverts shared myth and legend and claims ownership by adding product identity additions to the mix. Wizards adds beholders, and Disney puts talking cartoon animals in public domain concepts we all own. These "idea theft" companies are cultural polluters who own the toxic additions they put in things familiar to us. Our stories. Our myths and legends. Our shared experience as humans.

They insert themselves into our minds and expect us to pay for ideas we already own.

The OGL plus SRD cemented Wizards' ownership as the de-facto fantasy gaming standard for 20+ years. The SRD existed without the product identity, so it was always "less." The unspoken word was there; the SRD felt somehow "broken."

The old SRD was also derivative and full of borrowed content from myth, legend, and fantasy authors. It is a subset of what fantasy should be and limits you to a tiny box of "approved toys" that Wizards established as a fake "fantasy baseline." Orcs are always 1 HD weaklings! Goblins are less than that! The way the old SRD painted entire species and races like this could have been better, and it severely limited your imagination. Orcs in my worlds were 5+ HD beasts and terrifying; just a few could ravage an area like a boss monster. Is my interpretation correct, or is the SRD?

It doesn't matter; the old SRD is gone now.

Without it, I feel they are just another mobile game wannabe. Don't fool yourself, books and VTTs are nothing compared to BILLIONS of mobile game revenue. If they are chasing books and pipe-dream VTTs, they are in the wrong market to pull these sorts of games with their licensing and hurt themselves more than helping. At least with the old SRD and OGL, they could feed people into their mobile game platform; now, they can't even do that.

And without the SRD and OGL, the nostalgia games need to find themselves. They need to create unique and fun mechanics. These hangers-on to the opium of the past need to let go, find better ways to do things and make themselves different. The past isn't ideal anymore; it threatens the ability to move forward.

I love my nostalgia games, but too often, these games suck the energy and creativity out of the indie market because of the appeal and fallacy of perfectly replicating past editions. A few games have done incredible things remixing the past, like Dungeon Crawl Classics, but the OGL and SRD even held these games back from being an authentic standalone experience. That appeal of "ha-ha, look at what magic missile can do" should have been, "this attack spell is awesome" - cut that derivative SRD content out of the equation.

The OGL was a fatally flawed license.

The SRD chained us to the past.

Without those, we are free.