D&D 5 Goes OGL Update

Check this out:

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2t8sr&page=1?DD-5th-Edition-OGL

This is a fascinating discussion of the D&D 5 OGL release, and I encourage you to check it out and participate. Some of the posters brought up some interesting facts about the 5E SRD, namely it is missing a bunch of feats, spells, backgrounds, and other content. Some of this was an oversight (and will be corrected, thank you Wizards again), and other parts are because the items in question are product identity.

It brings up an interesting question about usability and forking.

Without everything in an SRD, designers may clone the missing parts to make a functional game from the SRD. This happened with the 3.0 SRD, and we have a forked product (see any of the retro clones, Pathfinder, and so on). It reminds me of the current OpenOffice and LibreOffice relationship in a way if you are familiar with that, you have one that is controlled by an entity, and another that is controlled by a community.

Will Wizards find a way to license the missing pieces so they can be used in a convenient way? I am sure their new PDF sales site is a way around all this, while delivering a OGL version gives indie designers enough to work with to create games from the main rules. It is a good solution to open up the parts you want to make compatible and the generic systems without giving away the farm, so Wizards still deserves a heap of praise for being so open and bringing back the OGL for 5E.

You can still build a 5E-like game with this SRD. Getting an open-source "plays like D&D" version out of this with all the mechanical parts, but it feels a little less possible than the 3E SRD version. You can get there, but it is going to require a lot of new content that will be under the OGL. It won't exactly be D&D with all the cool powers though.

It is partly because 5E is a very tightly-tuned game, with lots of stuff in it that is custom to the Wizards settings. It's a good thing and a bad thing I suppose, since I like rules that are closer to the source material, but that makes the system a little less generic. An OGL "5E compatible" game will play like D&D, but it won't be D&D down to the spells, classes, feats, and other parts.

The forking issue is an interesting question. Will a fan-supported version of the game pop up with 100% open content? The forking question is interesting, because something supported by a community feels like it has more energy and community impetus behind it. I don't know. I would love to see a retro-clone based on 5E style play, or wait, isn't that 5E itself? Then again, any fork has to compete with the official game, so there is that issue. The 3.0 SRD is out there and also well-understood and used, so there is another angle here worth thinking about.

It is a problem which time may fix as Wizards revises the document and comes up with other ways of licensing things. I would love to have an additional "product identity" license and open-ish reference source for the missing material, but then again, I would like them under the OGL. But then again, I understand why they aren't there. Another part of me says, "why are they worrying about all this? They are D&D!" It is an interesting conflict and set of conundrums around this release, and I am sure it will all get worked out in some way.