OGL Fallout: 5E's Problems

I hear this on many post-OGL videos about people exploring other systems, taking an objective look at 5E, and asking themself the question, "Could I walk away from this?"

And many people finally see the broken parts and weaknesses of the 5E design.

The required level dips and multiclassing to make classes viable are huge problems. A straight class without a dip here and there just doesn't work, and it does not even feel like a viable option. You feel you are holding yourself back. The base classes are boring without mix-and-match multiclassing.

And that is just one issue. The difficulty in playing a DM is another big issue and critical to the game's ecosystem. The amount of telling people to "just make it up" in a crowd that wants answers to basic questions. The ambiguity of spells and powers. The difficulty in creating and balancing encounters. The helpless feeling some weapons have. It takes little time to find these problems with a few play sessions.

Now that people have walked away, going back highlights a lot of problems with the system. These need to be addressed in 6E, but the backward compatibility claim and the few playtest releases don't seem like the "big solutions" the game needs.

The game is 10 years old, and there are better systems out. Patches and minor fixes will not last you another 10 years, not in this market with so much innovation going on. At best, I feel One D&D will last a few years, five at best, before the company realizes they are trying to support a 15-year old game that has fallen far behind in terms of ease-of-use, features, and fun factor.

I know, contrast this with a lot of OSR games which have emulated systems four to five times older, and those are still fun. You can't change what earlier games got right, and every edition Wizards has put out has eventually broke under its own weight and complexity, and the best support for their games comes from outside of Wizards.

Pathfinder 2E manages to build a system that keeps single classes viable, allows for incredible levels of customization within a class, and allows dips into other classes' powers as options without requiring multiclassing. The design is a hundred times better, balanced, and easy to understand.

Even Pathfinder 1E feels like a step up in a few areas compared to 5E, just in terms of system depth and options.

My problem with One D&D is if they keep it backward-compatible, they are grandfathering in a broken system. They need a complete rebuild and refresh of the rules. The door to other systems has been opened, and a good percentage of the hobby is off playing other things. They can look back and have perspective, and returning to a system with systemic problems will be difficult after people have seen and tried new things.

Playing other games is good for the hobby, and I welcome this.

But with One D&D, the bar needs to be raised, and the game's design becomes more critical with the SRD 5.1 in the Creative Commons. We need a revolution in rules, play, character builds, and how the game is played and thought about.

Without that creative refresh, you will be asking players to return to a 10+-year-old game that seriously needs a lot of rebuilding and cleaning up. That will be a massive ask for many after playing other systems and experiencing new things.

And in five years, they will really start to feel the problems of skipping this moment to rebuild the game for fun and ease-of-play.

Goodman Games PDFs Now Available for Sale on Paizo.com

https://goodman-games.com/blog/2023/01/29/goodman-games-pdfs-now-available-for-sale-on-paizo-com/

It is good to see companies working together like this and giving alternate stores and ways to buy PDFs, rather than just one source.

Good Video: DTRPG Was Prepared to Remove OGL 1.0(a) Titles

 

So Wizards are "good stewards" of the hobby? We can trust them again, right?

Their actions almost removed hundreds, if not thousands, of indie games from online PoD and PDF stores, and those stores would go along with it? Paizo and everyone else would have been hit.

And you know this would have sparked a massive increase in "illegal online sharing" as a result? And not just the books people couldn't get would be shared illegally - but everyone's, including Wizards? I do not condone or support piracy, but what do you think will happen if you take these books down?

Everyone dodged a bullet here. Indie creators and market leaders. Wizards almost destroyed the PoD and PDF fantasy gaming market and hurt their sales.

This entire situation keeps getting worse, not better. The more we learn, the worse it gets. This also looks horrible for the companies that went along with this and did not fight for us as a community.

Anyone involved needs to be replaced from the top down.

And this gives me more reasons not to trust companies who put greed ahead of customers.

Nope, not going back.

Good Video: The Aftermath of Wizard's OGL Decision

Got a good one today; why doesn't the victory over greed feel good? Please head over and subscribe; I greatly like this creator and their conversational and thoughtful style.

Because greed will never go away. Evil exists in the world. Part of having a nice place to call home is the sacrifice of those in the community willing to stand up and fight for what is good.

It is precisely why people gather together in civilizations and agree on the common good. Why do we have soldiers who defend our people? Why do we have rules we all agree upon that hopefully help everyone and make our lives better, and also, in a larger sense, make the place we call home a better place too? The tabletop community is just like any other civilization that developed through history, it has a "language" and a "culture" of its own, and we were hurt by this move.

The same greedy people who started this are still at Wizards.

There is a feeling they are changing tactics, and they may try something else, so we need to stay vigilant. The sense of trust is broken, and at this point, the only thing that can change this feeling is a change of leadership - or ownership. I hate to see people get fired over this, but this also happens in a just and civil society to restore trust in the system.

The people in charge that everyone disliked are removed, and we get someone else in there and give them a chance. We don't trash the system we built and believe in for one person or a small group of troublemakers.

The greater good is a thing, and we support and believe in it.

But this is why we have diverse opinions and seats at the table for many views since diversity is a strength. And diversity also does not mean "one viewpoint, all the same." Diversity is the conversation, not the people having it. It is a huge tent full of different people and opinions, and the greater whole is all of us discussing things and coming to agreements and compromises to make us all happy.

That "common ground" thing seems so impossible these days.

The community is diversifying its interests and looking at new games - this is good. When one company has too much power, this stuff inevitably happens. This is not "the D&D" community anymore; this is the "tabletop gaming community." D&D is still a part of this community, but they have a long road to walk if they want to rebuild trust, and it will be up to them and their future actions.

I don't control that.

But the community can let them know, and it should.

But until then, I welcome the expansion of our community of gamers and commentators and all of the new groups we suddenly find ourselves in a larger group with. The tribe over the hill that plays GURPS is now a part of our community, along with those who play Pathfinder. The tribe that lives on the coast and plays Savage Worlds is also part of this community. Wargamers, like World War II, Car Wars, Warhammer, and Battletech, are invited to be a part. CCG players too! Those who enjoy OSR. People who play C&C, Swords & Wizardry, ACKS, and other games are also part of our community.

The tent is open.

Did we have tribal feelings about some of these groups before? Yes, we did. But we also grew up a little inside and realized that our personal feelings should be tempered by the needs and belief in something greater than just "us" and our divided and factional tribalism that we grew up with. We must put aside petty tribal differences because what we see now is more significant.

We have the chance to build a truly great civilization that brings many peoples of diverse beliefs and lifestyles and brings them together.

The D&D tribe is no longer the D&D tribe. We realize we are a part of something larger and have the freedom to choose what place we choose to inhabit, and having choices makes our lives so much better.

We are the tabletop gaming community and support choice and diversity in gaming.

And we raise a big tent, welcoming all.

The Community Won

Over the past few weeks you, the community, have made your voices heard. And we’ve listened. OGL 1.0a will remain untouched AND the entire SRD 5.1 is now available under a Creative Commons license.🧵 https://t.co/hJTm2Rgruo pic.twitter.com/qiBODaB7oj

— D&D Beyond (@DnDBeyond) January 27, 2023

I am happy about this.

I still believe a healthier gaming hobby is one that is diverse and plays many games.

Pathfinder, GURPS, C&C, OSE, Palladium, Savage Worlds, and every other game under the sun needs to be represented. Diversity includes all games and creators.

Still, I would like an addendum to 1.0a stating irrevocable. This should never happen again. That is a small price and would build that bridge. ORC should still go on. We need a variety of licences for creators to use. This creates a healthy ecosystem and creator community.

The SRD 5.1 as CC is a great step too, thank you.

There is still an open question on OGL 2.0, and I would like to see those terms. They need to be equitable and fair to the creator community, just having 5E is not enough, the creators need certainty going forward.

It is going to take a long time for me to trust them again. They have done a lot of hurt to this community.  Projects, artists, and creators have uncertain futures in these hard times. But these are good first steps on the road back. Wizards is not the company that controls the community, they are a member of one. They should act to grow, help, and nourish our community, and seek to be a valuable participant.

Creating and playing with us.

Not telling us how we should.

How quickly they return to our community depends on them. Also, let this also be a lesson to us, to be able to forgive and invite people back into gaming so we can all play together.

United and together is better than angry and apart.

After the Fall

These days feel strange.

This is like those moments you learn something terrible about a beloved icon of film and television, and all of a sudden, the things you love make you feel horrible inside.

It felt strange having grown up and enjoyed 20 years of OGL content and embraced worlds and characters from great creators, only to see those creations slowly milked for all they are worth, rolled out for nostalgia addicts, cut-and-paste books slapped together, and very little new coming from a team that should have been the world's best writers and creators of fantasy worlds.

Instead, they turn out to be another nostalgia-milking machine, and after they realize they have sucked out all they could, they turn to greed, and the world sees them for who they really are.

I hold my memories dear, the characters I loved from creators who have nothing to do with this current crowd of empty, show up at work and do what they are told husks, and hope for better days. Hoping they fail so those who come after can pick up the pieces. So we walk away and leave them behind.

And seek better games.

The milking machine was a standard set of rules everyone could use and play with, but it held us back in many ways. Dozens of people tried to make the same game, competing with each other on feeling alone. They were all great, but one idol felt like the only one worth chasing.

After the terrible revelations, games outside the bubble thrived, and the brave ones that broke from the mold shined, such as Pathfinder 2. The Year Zero Engine. Forbidden Lands. And so many others and even older games got looked at again, such as GURPS and Runequest. They aren't beholden to using multiclassing to fix fundamental class design problems. They are also designed to be superheroic cake-walks where you can say your character is in danger but never really be anywhere close, like staying fifty feet away from the railing on the canyon's edge and panicking about falling off.

We have forgotten the danger.

We need to remember what it means to live.

We need to feel the thrill of being right on the canyon's edge, without a railing and trusting ourselves.

We need to learn new things and be challenged again.

And I see thousands walking away and exploring new games, and I am happy. But let's look back every once and a while and realize what we were all hooked to, and this is the same game Hollywood and TV use to hook us in. The nostalgia addiction. An opiate of the past built on lies that things can still be the same.

That broken, jagged, rusted milking machine sitting in the farmyard we all used to be connected to.

One which built a temple of lies built upon the mists of the past, with the echo of the siren's call begging us to return.

GURPS: The Best Rule

"Make up the skill."

One of the best pieces of GURPS refereeing advice I know of are these:

• Make up the skill!
• Make up the power!

No character designer, point-buy, or calculators are needed. The game is even easier than most d20 systems once you figure this out, especially 3.5 or even 5E. Do you have a ghoul you want to give paralysis power to? I could open up the book and design the power, or say, Paralysis 12 or less!

You are done.

No monster manual is needed. No need to open GURPS Powers or Basic Set Characters.

Pick a number, make it up, and you are done.

If you know how the underlying power system in GURPS works (see Affliction, B35), you know paralysis is an affliction, with an HT+1 roll per second to resist (minus the affliction level, whatever you set that at). So roll a 12 or less to inflict paralysis, and then allow HT saves (each turn) to resist.

You can get creative with these "make it up" abilities and mix them with skills and powers. Let's say you are trying to run a classic "Friday the 13th" style monster and give the evil creature a "do something stupid 13-" area effect ability. So, when the monster is close, the camp guests and counselors can be "forced" to do something stupid on a successful ability roll, "I will go down in the basement alone and check!". Characters can resist with the appropriate ability score check.

You are done.

No need to design that power; it is what it is and does what it does.

Any d20-style monster ability can be simulated this way. Want to create fire breathing? Find a weapon like that in the rules and use that, or pick several dice as an Innate Attack if you want to get fancy. So you can pick a range and number of dice for damage, and you are done - no need to design anything.

Knowing the advantage system and how resistance rolls work helps since you can loosely base abilities on things in the game - but it is optional.

Feel free to "say what it does" and "make it do what it says," and you are done.

A monster that eats metal and rusts it into dust? Would that take hours to create using the game's power design system? No!

Rust iron and steel objects, roll an 11 or less!

GURPS is a lot easier than a lot of people make it out to be. A lot of it is old-school sensibilities and make-it-up-as-you-go rulings.

Pathfinder 1e: The End of an Era

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announces-SystemNeutral-Open-RPG-License

So I get the feeling from the ORC license announcement that Pathfinder 1e development is at an official end. Since the language "1.0a products are fine" is the way Wizards wants to put it, I feel the door is closed on further game development. I hope the books are left in print at a minimum, but that status may be doubtful.

The company is pushing forward with its own Pathfinder 2e game, and 1e is being left to history.

Despite all its flaws and messy design, I still play 1e and love the game, and I know it is broken at the higher levels in many ways. The feat taxes of class builds and imbalances are notorious, and a part of me just wants to move onto 2e and look forward. Pathfinder 1e is a great game, but it shares all the deep flaws of the original OGL and SRD implementation.

I can see why Paizo loves their original 1e game, but I can also see why it is time to move on. This entire OGL mess is creating a new golden age for Paizo and breaking people out of their "5E or nothing" mental bear trap.

Thank you, Wizards, for forcing the world to walk away. In a way, they can have their small group of loyal mobile-game customers and create their "billion-dollar brand" from cellphone gaming. The rest of the world can have something "not D&D" and support the traditional tabletop experience. Both sides will come out on top here.

The 5E rules? Probably the loser here and the children in the breakup.

The 6E rules? Wait until the mobile game developers get their hands on this and start simplifying the game because "that would be too expensive and user-unfriendly to handle on a phone as written." I know software development, and when they start building the VTT, you will likely see tons of 5E rules and content tossed out the window because "it doesn't work in VTTs too well" or "it would wreck the schedule to implement."

If VTT is the game's primary focus, I feel a lot of 5E is getting tossed in the bin for 6E, just out of cost and time concerns. Especially if they want to release a complete experience next year. Do they know software development? Do they know that games can slip years behind schedule? Do they understand that cut-down experiences will generate so much user anger that it is not even worth releasing? Ask any AAA game developer; they know.

Not to mention server bandwidth and launch issues. I sure hope their team is staffed and ready for this. They would be better off partnering with a company (Blizzard, Daybreak, etc) that can do massive launches with an experienced support team. No MMO-style company launches in a year with shoestring support from a bunch of game designers; that is a disaster waiting to happen.

Wizards will either succeed hugely or go down in flames. There won't be a middle ground.

This is a messy customer divorce, but we need this to make both sides happy.

And better, the tabletop community walks away in case it is a disaster.

My goal still playing 1e was to use it for a "dark fantasy" campaign, while Pathfinder 2e was more the traditional light-hearted "adventure fantasy" game. I may be better served by switching my dark fantasy game to GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and leaving Pathfinder 1e entirely.

Pathfinder 1e has many excellent dark fantasy elements, but at this point, everything D&D-aligned leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Part of me needs a fresh start and a non-d20 game to express myself. GURPS can do horror exceptionally well, and the game is relatively well-balanced, has lethal combat, and it has optional rules for just about everything.

I am still dealing with my feelings and the fallout of this mess, which has turned my gaming world upside-down. Part of me feels this is for the better.

I need to move on.

Pathfinder 2e: Going Forward

I still play Pathfinder 1e, and my copy of 2e is back on the shelf. I had a few issues wrapping my head around 2e, especially the tag system, but I am pushing through and learning this with the excellent Beginner Box game.

I can't deal with D&D anymore. I pick up the books, and I feel sadness and hurt towards the broken promises made to creators who weren't even on the same level as Wizards and Hasbro. Garage and basement operations, many orders of magnitude smaller, were crushed by the corporate doublespeak and threatened with contract law.

And it didn't even need to happen. They weren't even threats to the brand. They kept people in the hobby.

And Wall Street still can't see that.

It isn't surprising. Blindness is a symptom of greed.

Good and talented people still work there, and I feel bad for them too. All I can say is look for opportunities elsewhere, and I look forward to seeing your work with other creators - as my sales won't be happening with who you work for anymore, and I suspect many others feel the same way. It is not their fault, and they have to clean up the mess being handed to them by the higher-ups.

I have been there in companies where the stress and pressure come down from the top. Lots of tears, ruined health, deep sighs at random moments, and that feeling of pain inside you can't ignore. And you go Joan of Arc and try to improve the situation, taking it all upon yourself to make things right. The stress will likely ruin people's health and be too much for a few.

And it is a quixotic endeavor, a fool's errand, and you can't make the hurt done to so many any better.

I know.

Oh, do I know...

This is a disaster for everyone.

D&D and the worlds they built are dead to me. I no longer see the classic adventures as classics; at best, they are memories that fed a nostalgia addiction. 40 years of my life gaming are at an end, and I accept that. That is a lot of pain to process, and I am moving on, selling my books, and never looking back. I needed to move on anyway, as I felt that clinging onto the past was hurting me more than helping.

A New Beginning

So I am looking forward to new beginnings and new adventures.

I go back to Pathfinder 1e and play 2e to have fun and learn, and I have room for both in my life. I also have Starfinder and GURPS for anything else, and those are my games. I put C&C and ACKS to the side for a while just to avoid that feeling of clinging to things too similar to the past. I still support them and love them too.

Then why are you still playing Pathfinder 1e?

Well, 3.5 was a great system and abandoned; that game did not deserve the fate it was handed, and like a phoenix, it was reborn into something beautiful in Pathfinder 1e - the children of which became Pathfinder 2e. I don't consider Pathfinder 1e even 3.5-is anymore; it is the early 2000s roleplaying, and Paizo owns 3.5 because they earned it.

There is the concept of someone owning something just due to the amount of joy and happiness they create in the world, a sort of destiny created by the people of the world and the love they give back to creators and artists. This is like the love of music and your favorite songs and bands. There comes the point where the world owns something, and it is more than just money.

We love it so much. It is a part of who we are.

And then there is the concept of owning something because of law and money, and the power of governments and eventually armed force and violence to enforce the will of paper wealth. You can put all the nice words, friendly faces, and social media spin on that system and sweep violent enforcement under the rug, but it still is what it is.

You must decide which side your soul is on and what you are comfortable supporting.

To me, this is like the revelation of a truth I knew but could never really accept.

Until it hit home.

Pathfinder 1e: The 15-Point Default

There is a thought in the Pathfinder 1e community that the way to combat power creep at higher levels is to use the 15-point character point limit when designing characters. Honestly, I got so used to the 25-point limit and having epic characters I forgot the joy of having characters with a few flaws and a couple ability score bonuses in the negative range.

Honestly, they feel a lot more fun to play. I am challenged and trying to think of ways around those limitations. When you have +1 modifiers in almost everything, you don't need to think that much since you are pretty good at most everything.

And this makes items that provide temporary or permanent ability score bonuses worth getting your hands on later. A manual of bodily health that gives you a permanent +2 to CON means a lot more when your CON is 8 than it is 16. At a score of 16, I care a lot less about that book. And you get points as you level, plus hey, there are always GM fiat awards to abilities.

If you want characters to end up as 25-point epic heroes, take that 10-point difference between 15 and 25 and award an extra ability score improvement point at every even level. There! You feel like you are gaining something by not using the 25-point starting level, and it gives you more cool things to spend when you level. Remember that these are not "free ability score points" but point-buy "improvement points," so you will need to use the difference between the current score and the next level on the chart on page 16, so going from a 13 to a 14 costs 2 of these "improvement" points.

If you like only the math and tracking the points, just award an ability score point every two levels (instead of four), and you will make up the (on average) five points from the difference. Houserule away!

So you don't really have to worry about low starting scores anyways.

And the epic characters will be the level 20 ones and progress slowly.

The OGL: No Saving Throw

My D&D books are in storage, and I am likely selling them all. I don't care if I get pennies on the dollar, I am done with Wizards and their threats to the OGL 1.0a, and I am done with the OGL in any version entirely.

It is like someone borrowing and wrecking one of your cars and wanting to start a "discussion" on them borrowing the other.

Why should I participate in their silly OGL 1.1 discussion? To me, the OGL 1.0a is forever, but I have stopped caring about it - who cares what they do - because the community and the rest of the industry are moving on to better things. At this point, Wizards uses silly used-car salesman tactics to pull people back into D&D Beyond.

"If you don't return, we may cancel the OGL 1.0a! Please join the discussion!"

So what? Everyone is moving on. I am not interested in discussing what you will graciously allow me to do. I can already do it elsewhere, with people that want my business.

And I have renewed my full-court-press Pathfinder 2e and Starfinder subscriptions.

I support the good guys. The union shop there is run by the workers. Not Wall Street. Period.

D&D and the OGL are over to me; no saving throw allowed.

I have gaming and adventures to look forward to, not drama to chase.

Pathfinder 1e: Book of the Damned

There were some cool books back in the Pathfinder 1e days. The one thing I loved about the original Paizo creative team is they were not afraid to take on edgy and dark topics. We had some great books exploring evil, and the options and powers were there if you wanted to use them for enemies or play horror campaigns and have players slowly descending into madness and ending up with powers of the wicked and vile.

I hope the Pathfinder 2e team finds their stride and makes a few books exploring the darker side without fearing they would offend anyone. I am not going to be offended! This is like turning on a horror movie; I know what I am getting into when I press the remote. This is one of my feelings about Pathfinder 2e; it is a great game with better rules, but it needs to speak to myself and the types of games I play. The battles between good and evil. The downfall of pride and envy and the slow loss of humanity when one gives in to temptations.

The contrast between good and evil characters was really fantastic in 1e. Good was good and evil was evil.

It is early, and I understand the need to appeal to a broad audience. But given they stand behind and publish the above book, I want to see what the team can do with the darker side - and be unafraid to tackle the subject. I want the design team at Paizo to be a little more sure of themselves and their audience and start building books that speak to everyone - a little less safe and unafraid to cause a little discomfort. We need evil shown so we can fight it and, ultimately, learn more about ourselves and the failings of humanity.

If there is one thing that keeps me playing Pathfinder 1e, it is this lack of fear of tackling tough subjects and showing evil in the full light of day.

Pathfinder 1e: Still a Classic

Very little gets close to the original 3.5-like Pathfinder game. Castles & Crusades is a fantastic game, but I have less history with it than Pathfinder 1e. Even Pathfinder 2e, which I know is the hot sauce right now, appeals to me less than this classic. Even with the incredible class options and combinations that 2e has and the very tight and balanced rules all the way up to maximum level.

I know all that. Someday I will likely hop on board.

Pathfinder 1e has a lot of flaws, but the sheer amount of expansions and material for the game, both official and third-party, blows me away. The game plays like a 3.5-era game, so I do not need to learn anything. Once you know the system, you see the cheese, so it is easy enough "not to do" when you play solo.

And I have a library of books, three shelves with more than I could ever imagine using. I have all my options with Hero Lab, and building characters is a snap.

I hope Paizo revisits Pathfinder 1e and keeps all the hardcovers in print under their new license (more than the pocket editions); even PoD would be great. Game preservation in this era is too vital for us all.

GURPS: Disadvantage Limits

When designing GURPS characters for solo play, I limit the self-control checks to four total for either a character or 4-6 for the entire party. Too many self-control checks thrown around gets tiring to keep track of and make and slows down play.

I will combine and stack self-control checks, too. If you have a thief who hates the rich and likes stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it could be one "Robin Hood" obsession instead of two disadvantages. A more-specific disadvantage with a lot of story flavor is better than a bunch of generic disadvantages that cover many situations. It keeps your "party management" complexity down if you run multiple characters in a solo game.

Also, I limit the number of disadvantage rolls per scene to one or two of the "best ones that apply," and that also keeps the rolling down. You want to avoid rolling too much for minutia and letting the dice control the game. Take control! Decide what problems or opportunities a scene would contain, and only roll for the best ones that affect the story.

Also, don't ignore the ones where you don't need self-control rolls, like "sense of duty" which is just a referee yes or no toggle to actions given the situation, or "social stigma" which is just a modifier to interaction rolls. It is nice the book asterisks the disadvantages with self-control rolls since you can sort through them quickly.

Remember, you do not need to roll a self-control roll either! You can have the character give in, which is considered good roleplaying and worth a bonus character point award at the end of the session. Too many or frivolous uses of self-control rolls are also considered harmful and may penalize the character awards.

But given "giving in" could sidetrack the adventure, it is typically better for a party to reduce the number of them overall or, as a referee, take control and make them happen less often or only when the story depends on the outcome.

There's No Going Back...

Part of me thinks the contracts are already signed. Not between Wizards and 3rd party content creators, who got crushed, but between Wizards and Hollywood. The movies, the streaming services, the TV shows, the pop culture phenomenon they want to push...the OGL isn't something we can push back on at this point; it is already dead.

Even if they backslide, I feel it will only delay the terms, and we will be right back to where 1.1 wanted everything after a year or two when everyone forgets.

TSR tried going Hollywood with D&D in the 1980s, and it failed.

The D&D movies of the 1990s failed. And TSR was notorious then because, guess what they were trying to do? Same thing today, chase Hollywood.

And here we are again, trying to capture lightning in a bottle.

I do not feel any streaming service, or movie company will drop big money on the D&D brand without a highly restrictive OGL to "keep the brand safe." Hollywood wants to avoid risk, and if a 3rd party supplement comes out that "tarnishes the brand," it not only screws D&D but hundreds or thousands of million-dollar investors into entertainment properties out of their money.

Imagine if a 3rd party supplement comes out that is a humorous "Kill all the Orcs!" adventure. And the module has you deciding if you should slaughter everyone in an orc village - and old-school players will know this since this sort of topic of "adventurous barbarism" was in many old-school modules. Now imagine if that hit the media and the stink a few people could cause...

...and the damage it would do to every movie released, in development, and every show on a streaming service. That is a lot of potential harm Wizards wanted control over.

In that scenario, I can't blame Wizards for doing what they did.

I don't condone or excuse it, and it really sucks, but we live in a crappy world where "it is what it is." I am also on the side of the small publishers and people working out their bedrooms, trying to side-hustle and make a dream become a reality. I can't play D&D anymore because of all the shattered dreams; if you can, go have fun, and I can't take that away from you. It is your personal choice and right.

What Wizards did was wrong but inevitable. But this is what "selling out" means and does to a community. And this is a community that put far too many eggs in one basket. Yes, we bear part of the blame, and this could have happened to any game that gets "too big" for the hobby. Let's say any TTRPG became a huge thing, a billion-dollar enterprise. I don't think it really would be much different.

Hollywood comes in, and we are all screwed.

Welcome to nerd-dom, where what we love and do lives in a fleeting moment, and we seek the unpopular and out-there games and subjects - just because we know the vultures of Hollywood will have reservations about ruining things for everyone.

And I also feel D&D is dead for most little people. You will no longer make a living off this game, and the dreams and concepts you can explore through roleplaying will be heavily corporatized and sanitized. I feel D&D is now the Simpsons, which used to be cool and fun, and now just drags on and on in an undead state to support the profit margins of Wall Street.

And the movies are already done, and the streaming service shows are ink-drying on paper.

The OGL changes were probably a precondition to these deals.

If they change the OGL, I feel all those deals will be in jeopardy. The best Wizards can do is delay the inevitable and "push the message" with a smile on their faces, and I think, at this point, the entire Wizards organization is powerless to change anything. And I feel if you are streaming D&D games professionally, watch out and get out early before they bring it all in-house. Personally, I am done with D&D, 5E, and things in that orbit.

You know who wins when it is a choice between the little people and the rich.

Everything is Playing

The Geek Gamers book Solo Game Master's Guide is one of the best solo play books ever written. They understand the number one enemy of solo play is "not caring" and "losing interest." The book solves those issues nicely and gets you excited to play by redefining solo play as...

Everything is playing!

Generating characters, reading the books, and even thinking about stories you might tell  - are playing too!  Moving the books around on a shelf so you can get to them easier and cleaning your game table? Playing! One of the enormous problems in solo play is the "not playing" and "feeling bad about it" cycle, which is sort of like the "stopped working out" and "feeling bad about not working out, so you don't work out" cycle.

The book breaks the negative feedback cycle.

If all I have time for today is messing around with my character designer, guess what? You found time to play today; feel happy! Is this character better than the last? Can you tell more stories with them? I was doing that last night and laughed at the concept of the character I made, which is why I love GURPS, and it is leading me down a new path of discovery and imagination. I am on the chase, and I have energy and momentum. This feels so good!

By setting that "what is playing?" bar very low, every little thing you do progresses to eventually actually, for real, playing the game! The method creates one of those gears in a clock that can tick forward a short distance but can not go back. Ten or twenty clicks and you have a revolution. You have movement. You create preservation of momentum.

You are not going back to a place farther away from your dream.

This is not only great advice on how to run solo play, but it is also great advice for life.

Don't try to have something all at once - if you want something. You will only get frustrated and fail. Instead, establish a system where "everything moves you towards the goal" and be like that gear in the clock. Move forward a tiny tick and never fall back. Even if your day was trash and you can't do one more thing, do something tiny and almost trivial to keep moving forward.

I do this with my gaming shelves. I do this bonsai tree activity where I clean and create the most attractive gaming setups for my shelves. The books I do not use get put in my sealed plastic storage boxes. The games I want to play get displayed in beautiful layouts like you would see in a store or on a streaming show devoted to the game. Is that "playing?" Well, yes.

Move a book to a game table where you will read it, then drop yourself on your bed and fall asleep. You are keeping the habit going, one of the most critical patterns of behavior to fall into if you want something. The following day, when you see the book, what could happen? If it was on the shelf, you might have done something else that day because you forgot. By moving that book, you may have set up a butterfly effect of discovering a "timeline" you may have never explored nor would have ever ventured onto because that book was still on that shelf.

Even the most minor and nothing things can later on lead you to wonderous discoveries and possibilities. You need to help yourself by being that "critical character" to your plot that leaves something out or keeps a pattern of incremental success going.

So keep making campaign notes, creating characters, thinking about stories, and building your worlds. Keep reading the books! Keep creating character sheets and playing with the software. Keep reorganizing and cleaning your shelves. Set up a map and pawns. Keep imagining. Keep dreaming of your game.

You will get there.

Just take a series of small steps and keep moving forward toward your goal.

More OGL 1.1? The "Statement"

The video above is the fastest way to keep up on the daily insanity that is Wizards and the OGL 1.1 or 2.0. The "statement" came out today.

All I can say is LOL. What a mess.

You mean to tell me the "draft" agreements were sent out - with NDAs and contracts?

A "draft" agreement with a "signed" contract? You're kidding me? It raises the question if this is true, does Wizards even know what it is doing? And the defensive ameateur tone of, "we win too!" Who wrote this? Tumblr?

I see some D&D players wanting all this to be over, but please, do not put your heads in the sand. And do not let them slow roll this and hope we "forget." The OGL 1.0a is still revoked for new products, they backed off a few parts, but the language they can "update" the deal is still in there. A year from now, I feel all the stuff they removed will likely be right back in there, and those who signed on will have been taken for a ride.

And the current Wizards president used to work for big tobacco? I get turning over a new leaf and all, but those leaves caused so much death and sickness it makes me wonder.

When I roll that d20 I want to know I am not causing harm or taking away choice.

What a disaster.

Implosion.

GURPS Character Assistant: Getting Started

If you are just starting with GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the GURPS Character Assistant (GCA) is a great way to quickly create game characters without many book references. There are a few tips for setting it up and a few pointers I can give you to make the entire process easier to manage.

The Delvers to Grow book is excellent and gives you lower-level starting templates to begin with, so you can have a complete "zero to hero" experience. I find Dungeon Fantasy's starting 250-point characters to be too powerful, with too many options for a new player to pick up, and a simple 62-point template from Delvers to Grow gives you that "level one" adventurer experience with a lot less to grasp when you are starting the game.

Also, a 62-point character is not terribly survivable, so be careful out there!

Delvers to Grow needs a few package files in GCA, so find those under the help menu, check for updates, and choose optional packages.

In Manage Your Library, create a Dungeon Fantasy library and include the "Delvers to Grow" book, plus Companion 3, if you would like to use that too. You do not need any GURPS books, as DF is a standalone game.

From here, you are creating characters, and the flow is listed above. Find a section you want to add items to your character with, choose a subsection, and filter. Then add what you want and move on to the next section. I recommend starting with the templates section first, as those have excellent guided scripts that will take you through the character design process easy and with zero mistakes. You will get a series of dialog prompts asking you to make a choice or a few choices, and then you move to the next.

Keep an eye on the character points spent on the bottom bar, and when you are done, add some equipment to your character, print it, and begin playing! The GURPS Combat Examples page has a bunch of great example combats to get you used to how the game flows. You can play the game as simple or complex as you want! If all you want to do is roll "hit and damage," just do that! Add in the more detailed rules as you like them. Many people play GURPS just like a d20 game, "hit and damage," and forgo many extra rules - so feel free to play how you want.

GURPS is an old-school game; not all rules must be followed as written. This is probably one of the biggest hang-ups many new players have when they are trained to "play rules as written" by newer games. With old-school games, the rules are just suggestions, and you can play with as many or as few as you want. Same with Dungeon Fantasy! Go grab the 100% free GURPS Lite and use that as the task and combat resolution system, you are fine and the game will play great.

It took me a while to become proficient with GCA, but stick with it, and you will find a lot is possible with the program. Dungeon Fantasy is a subset of GURPS, and you may want custom advantages, disadvantages, skills, or gear - and those can all be added in as custom items in the program.

The characters I design with GCA are unique, and the program can be addictively fun. No other game out there does what GURPS does regarding ultimate character customization. If you write a short backstory, you can find mechanics for almost all of your character's unique quirks, traits, and personality choices. That is the beautiful thing about GURPS - backstory mechanics exist and are just not "notes on paper."

Give it a try if you are looking for other games, and you just may find you like this game better for grim and realistic fantasy with a hard edge.

Paizo: Open RPG Licence Announced

 From Paizo, they are announcing the Open RPG license and pressing forward. More good news: While Wizards have divorced us as customers in chasing the mainstream entertainment and streaming services market, the hobby is divorcing Wizards and their games as fast as possible.

I am amazed, and the hobby is one community again.

Thank you, everyone, for pulling together and supporting dreams and those trying to live one.

True diversity is the freedom of choice.

Goodman Games: We Will All Be Fine

https://goodman-games.com/blog/2023/01/12/a-comment-on-the-ogl/

From the above:

Goodman Games has supported tabletop role-playing games in all forms for 20 years, and we plan to continue supporting it for many years to come.

As you may be aware, Wizards of the Coast may consider amending the Open Game License which may include changes to how it manages licenses to third parties. 

We have reviewed the possible changes and determined that they will not impact our line of roleplaying games, including Dungeon Crawl Classics, Mutant Crawl Classics, Xcrawl Classics, and related products; Fifth Edition Fantasy, Original Adventures Reincarnated #7: Dark Tower, Original Adventures Reincarnated #8: Caverns of Thracia, and related products; and our other lines.

Fans, don’t worry. We think we will all be just fine.

Good to hear they are standing strong and keeping the game alive. I love this game, and DCC/MCC are some of the best RPGs out there.

My Bounce Back Games: GURPS

Some of the games of the 1990s were incredible, and being in the "OSR d20 haze" of D&D worship dulls your senses to how great we had it back then. Palladium and GURPS were two fantastic games that tore D&D apart in the 1990s, along with the White Wolf Vampire system.

With Wizards no longer cool and the company acting like it did in the 1990s, it is time to go back and relive those days when TSR went bankrupt because the leadership was morally so. Thirty years later, here we are again.

Where 2010 to 2020 was reliving the OSR 1980s, I need to move on. So it is time for 1990s throwback games! There were a bunch of greats back then:

• Palladium & Rifts
• Shadowrun & Earthdawn
• Vampire & Exalted
• Runequest
• The d6 Star Wars RPG
• Paranoia
• Call of Cthulhu
• GURPS

GURPS especially, this thing is a true gem among games. Even with the complex reputation, this game is like a Linux system. Complicated and arcane when you get started, easy to get lost in and screw up, but when you gain mastery - oh boy, are you having fun. You do not need to learn much; once you do, it all makes sense, and the mechanics are unified and sane.

This is a true "power user" RPG.

One book does what four shelves full of random games do.

The character creation is way better than anything d20 I have ever seen, and Savage Worlds comes close, but GURPS is a true beast of a character customization system. You do not do classes; you are 100% built from points. The only exception is the template system out of Dungeon Fantasy RPG, but even that game says you can break the template system if you want and "do what makes you happy."

And even if you do, the characters are still balanced, have legal designs, and don't break the game. I can design a character with any expansion book, put them in a "dungeon," and the game works the same.

No classes mean you create the character you want. Also, the advantage and disadvantage system means you can build stories into characters with mechanics, something you can't do in D&D. Do I want a thief with an obsession to steal shiny objects, even to my character's detriment? Do I want a tiefling cursed with an obsession to turn into a demon and constantly having to fight that compulsion? Do I want a Robin Hood-type character hunted by an evil sheriff and his goons but loved by the local population?

The game supports simulating these story elements through mechanics instead of a 10-page backstory nobody reads. Do you have something in a backstory? Use it to gain character points if it is a disadvantage, or buy it with points if it helps your character. All that is on your character sheet with mechanics on how it affects the game and story. You can gain new ones, or complete roleplaying objectives and overcome the drawbacks in your character's background.

In d20 games, all this is "soft" and handled "in roleplaying." It is fantastic if you want to handle it this way, but for solo play, it sucks and pushes you to oracles and eventual disinterest. If I have an 8- roll for my character to see if the Sheriff of Nottingham shows up with his men looking for my character, that is an "oracle" built into my character sheet that is very specific and flavorful.

In GURPS, the story is mechanics and central to character design.

Character design drives the narrative.

In most d20 games, you pick a character class, optimize it, and feel like cattle being guided through fences. Many games spend a lot of effort to allow you to customize generic classes, which leads to a lot of rules bloat and extra books needed to get a few options. The GURPS character book does more than my shelf full of 40 Pathfinder 1e books; it gives me more character design options, complete customization, and a greater degree of expression in my character designs.

With Pathfinder 1e, I constantly had to buy "another book" to get something I wanted, and 90% of the rest was mostly unused. I get the same feeling with 5E. The games feel like "90% filler," a massive problem today - predatory consumerism and environmental waste. Buy more books! Be good consumers! Subscribe! We will find more ways to keep you paying us money!

Yes, GURPS has a lot of books too, but they are all optional. This is different than selling you books filled with 90% filler just to get one or two class and species options per book. Many of these big-business d20 games are predatory and wasteful, relying on compulsive buying and power creep to force you to buy books. It ends in a broken game, a new edition, and rebuying everything in a wasteful orgy of consumerism and environmental damage.

So I am playing GURPS for a while to clear my head. I love this game, and this is a great time to dive in and experience gaming from a great retro lens and feel.

I am waiting for the "new OSR" games of the 2020s to arrive, and I will be checking those out as the "d20 curse" is finally broken, and imagination and creativity will build a new golden age of OSR gaming. Until then, we are doing 1990s throwbacks and watching the giant fall again.

Frog God Games, Fighting Back, and Grim News

https://www.facebook.com/frog.god.games/posts/pfbid022bh3NWfbMGk1aYgfwPJqmCB6EoriBp85SN6VuLzWCGHoYVB5GB7qMq45HWk3pb2Yl

From Facebook, a statement by Frog God Games...

If they proceed and succeed in deauthorizing the 1.0a OGL, we will have to stop production. We will lay off staff and quit hiring and paying 70 or so freelancers. We will have to cancel projects we have spent tens of thousands of dollars on already. This will put us, and several dozen other companies out of business. Putting 3rd party publishers out of business will create a monoculture of work in D&D that prevents diversity of thought and makes it so only one company has input into the hobby. This has a real effect on people, real people, not just companies.

We do not care about One D&D. What we do care about is our ability to use the perpetual 1.0a OGL granted to us in 2000 by WOTC, as they promised we could.

So, what does all this mean for Necromancer Games and Frog God Games?

First, it means we need to stand up to them, fight, and continue working under our existing license. In this case by “we” I mean everyone who is a creator in this industry. Second, we need to band together to create a non-OGL and non-WOTC version of a System Reference Document (SRD) that can forever be used by anyone. Why, you ask? WOTC has proven itself to be untrustworthy and we all need to wean ourselves off them as soon as we can. We will work with our friends in the industry and have been in conversation with many of them already about doing this. Go Black Flag!

Your goal, as a company and as a force for good in the world, should not be to hurt others. I don't see how progressives can get behind Wall Street companies when they have hurt so many in the name of greed. It is fun to be on a bandwagon, but not when the driver rolls the wheels over people's dreams.

When I roll that d20, I want to be sure my actions and support of a game have not caused harm. It is so easy to close your eyes and ignore, or laugh and point at people you think deserve to be crushed because you don't play those games. How can you deny choice and the expression of identity through the choice of a game?

Before you let the die go, stop and think.

When it lands, are you causing harm?

Castles & Crusades, 7th Edition PDFs, FREE!

The 7th Edition printing PDFs of Castles & Crusades are now FREE for a limited time, go grab them for a great game! If you are looking for other games than the ones Wall Street is trying to monetize on you like some sort of mobile game, this is one of the best.

Worth a download, and it is free.

https://www.trolllord.com/tlgstore/#!/Players-Handbook-7th-Pr-Digital/p/89198209/category=11639170

https://www.trolllord.com/tlgstore/#!/Castles-&-Crusades-Monsters-&-Treasure-3rd-Printing-Digital/p/195477571/category=11639170

Ummmm.....

Ummm....

I am not a legal guy, but if Wizards invalidated the OGL 1.0a - all backward agreements - does that invalidate Wizards' protection under the OGL for any content they may have borrowed and put into any 3e, 4e, or 5e books?

If they took anything from a past third-party OGL 1.0a product and printed it in an official book, did they invalidate THEIR protection as well? If they declare the past agreement no longer valid, they don't get to pick and choose. They were just as much a licensee in reverse as those who accepted it were.

Do they have to change books and pull content TOO?

This is potentially massive blowback.

Kobold Press: The Black Flag Rises

Okay, I am NOT selling my Kobold Press 5E books. Any I do not have are back on my buy lists!

https://koboldpress.com/raising-our-flag/

Kobold Press announces its intention to keep a version of the 5E rules in print.

As we look ahead, it becomes even more important for our actions to represent our values. While we wait to see what the future holds, we are moving forward with clear-eyed work on a new Core Fantasy tabletop ruleset: available, open, and subscription-free for those who love it—Code Name: Project Black Flag. 

All Kobolds look forward to the continued evolution of tabletop gaming. We aim to play our part in making the game better for everyone. Rest assured, Kobold Press intends to maintain a strong presence in the tabletop RPG community. We are not going anywhere. 

Their own version of 5E.

The next Paizo enters the room.

Kobold Press is an incredible company with the fantastic world of Midgard. This is exciting. If you ever thought the world of roleplaying was boring and we were stuck with low-quality Wizards releases, welcome to 2023, people.

Sign up at the site to keep notified!

Basic Fantasy: Fans Rebuilding the Game

https://basicfantasy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=776&start=910

The community around the Basic Fantasy RPG is going line-by-line through their game and getting rid of anything remotely resembling the SRD. This is a massive effort out of love and the spirit of open-source gaming. The work will then be shared under a new Creative Commons License and will likely serve as "DNA" for many other games as the SRD replacement.

What was that line from Star Wars again? The more you tighten your grip...?

Maybe Wizards doesn't want these players as "customers" anymore. This may be a customer divorce.

But many of the players in these affected communities are also DMs, and with a critical shortage of people to run the game, um, there isn't a "game" for many people. Do the people running the show understand the game and community, or are they outsiders who see this as "digital products and services?"

Because it isn't.

People have to show up and play together.

Perhaps Wizards just wants D&D to be streaming service shows and movies. A "franchise" that shows up every few years with a big budget passively watched "thing."

Either way, the communities hurt by this change are pulling together and making things better, and they will likely become stronger and more unified as a result. Hats off to the Basic Fantasy community.

Star Nomad: No OGL Sci-Fi Roleplaying

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1560107317619028/permalink/2963830590580020/

This is a beautiful thing. The wonderful people behind Cepheus Engine are making a clean-room sci-fi RPG called Star Nomad, just in case the OGL drama invalidates their game and gets Cepheus Engine pulled.

See how pointless pulling the OGL was?

You are talking about imaginative people who can write games in their sleep and have experience writing rules and publishing, with built-in groups of fans ready to dive in and support them. This game will be ready by mid-2023, in a few months. And the game will be even better once they feel free to come up with new ideas and what they want to see in a sci-fi game.

Present us with adversity, and we respond with innovation.

I feel Wizards only revealed their greed and created a massive dislike for their new games and platforms. People are abandoning D&D and seeking alternatives, which the indie community will happily build for them quickly. And the licenses will be something they have no control over, allowing 3rd parties to create things for free, and pull people farther away from D&D.

In a year, the OGL will likely be mostly forgotten and unused. A footnote in gaming.

This is like fighting water by punching it repeatedly. What were they thinking?

ACKS II: Open License, No More OGL

https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/the-perfidious-treachery-of-wotc

Good news from Autarch with ACKS II, from the above blog.

Therefore, the only choice is to abandon the OGL entirely. Going forward, Autarch will no longer produce material under the Open Game License. We will be launching our upcoming Adventurer Conqueror King System: Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) in May without any WOTC SRD material. We will put in place a new license - a truly open license — that will make the core rules of ACKS II available to every other OSR developer in the space. And all of our future products, on DriveThruRPG, Kickstarter, Patreon, and elsewhere, will be released to be compatible with ACKS II or Ascendant, not with anything owned or touched by WOTC.

A gutsy and incredible move. I am on board. It is time to come together under the banner of freedom, choice, and the support of diverse and inclusive gaming communities. Of all beliefs, ways of life, and choices of the game they play.

And let us build new worlds from the ashes of the old.

Troll Lord Games: Removing the OGL

https://www.facebook.com/trolllordgamesllc/posts/pfbid0gF8SPChfzowvAKiogYWzaPZdRmeViNLU4DDEcqPgqvSkWHTuJHwkmaUpeAN4K5YGl

Troll Lord Games, of Castles & Crusades fame, is removing anything OGL from their games (the little of it there is). I love this game, and the core mechanics are very different than anything in the d20 world, and they are a great alternative to find a home with.

This is my game when I play fantasy games in the classic dungeon-crawl style. I also profoundly love ACKS and that 4X style of Middle Ages fantasy.

All my 5E books are being sold. May they find homes in players who want to stick with that system.

SRD + OGL = D&D Platform Lock-In

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.

Stellagama Publishing: Wait and See

 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1560107317619028/permalink/2963322697297476/

Another bit of news, the creator of Cepheus Engine, the Traveller-like 2d6 game, is in a wait-and-see mode and considering creating their own rules system.

Necrotic Gnome: OGL 1.1 Statement

https://necroticgnome.com/blogs/news/ogl-v1-1

At this point, it is becoming like a sobering list of reactions and statements by companies and games I love, like the news after a plane crash and lists of the dead.

The publisher of Old School Essentials is in a wait-and-see mode.

And still, there is an ominous and telling silence from Wizards.

Even if this is all for nothing, and if Wizards comes out and says, "we didn't mean that!" the damage is done. The OGL is dead. The trust is gone.

The world realized they could.

One ...and done.

The One Disaster

I have never seen a brand disaster like this one. I go through YouTube, and creators I have never even heard of are chiming in - they are hurt, scared, and upset. Many are walking away and switching games.

There are a few holdouts saying 1.0a can't be undone. But another issue is 1.1 claims everything, by the leaked wording, videos are covered under the license, and people's news and let's play channels are too.

Even if 1.0a is left alone, the disaster going forward is an entirely different issue for 1.1.

And there is no word from the companies involved, and it has been a few days. To let this sit and fester without releasing a statement is horrendous mismanagement and crisis response. The management team is MIA and silent.

Even if the leaks are false (but they come from journalists and a reputable gaming site), the silence is 100% unacceptable. I feel it is causing harm to the brand, game, and community.

This is a level of implosion and brand disaster I have not seen in quite a while. This is not some failed comeback like G4 was; this is a brand at the top of the market, beloved, completely imploding on itself.

I can't see a way forward from this other than:

• Releasing an OGL 1.0b and making that an irrevocable license with the same exact wording.
• Firing the top management teams involved, and those who approved of this.

If those are not done, I am not coming back.

Leaving the Dungeon: Dungeon Fantasy

Thinking about leaving d20? And let's say Wall Street "Thanos snapped" every OGL game out of existence, which isn't likely, but just to give them the benefit of intentions, let's say that happened. Now, there are plenty of great games removing the OGL license, and they are just as worthy, but let's say you wanted to get as far away from the OGL and Wall Street as humanly possible.

I don't blame players either; there are a lot of hurt feelings out here now and a sense of broken trust and betrayal. People want a drama-free home for fantasy gaming and can't take all these negative feelings. Even if they are still sticking with the big corporate games, they know people have been hurt by supporting those, and that is the wrong place to put a community with shared interests.

I feel it too. I look at my OGL games and will continue supporting them - since I know there are creators passionate about them and depending on our support. But I feel sad when I see them, the same feelings I have for a town hit by a natural disaster. These are just games, which is a stretch of comparison (and it can't compare to the loss), but I feel the same. And my 5E books are getting sold.

Sometimes I need to play something unrelated to the drama just to clear my mind and get away.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/E3237690-B636-4D5E-AAD3-ED146560D5DC

The game Dungeon Fantasy is one place to end up, with a community and many cool things to buy. If you don't like GURPS, stay far away, but I keep saving GURPS from my shelved games and boxing up, and it always comes back to my most-played shelf space. A good thing about this boxed set is that it is a complete game and does not need any GURPS books. You could never buy or touch a GURPS book, own this boxed set, and have more than enough to play for years.

They have expansion books in the Dungeon Fantasy line, and all of GURPS 4th Edition is compatible, so you could pull in monsters and other things from those books if you want to. There is really no reason to dive into GURPS 4th, and you could stick to DF books exclusively and still have more than enough. This is a more gritty and realistic combat system than d20 games, and it uses only d6 dice. It also uses hex maps, so another word of caution if you are square-based.

A fault is that it starts with 250-point characters,  like a level 5 or 8 d20 character, which is a lot for newer players to process in a new system. There is an excellent book called "Delvers to Grow" that starts characters at lower point levels, but that makes them a lot less survivable as well. If you hand-created 50-point characters (or used the ones in DTG), you would have a better zero-to-hero experience, but this is not for beginners.

Those starting 250-point characters are also very powerful, so they are more like "movie heroes" than your typical "level 1 character" in terms of what they can handle. You get a party of four, and you are talking about severe firepower being thrown around.

An electronic character creation tool called GURPS Character Assistant is great and comes with Dungeon Fantasy files. This is perfect if you need a character creation tool to help you figure things out.

Can I play this as a d20 alternative? Yes, honestly, and I was considering it at one time. This is a more "hard fantasy" experience than your typical d20 game, with deadly combat simulation, detailed character building, and a skill-based and survival-oriented fantasy game. Combat here is hard-fought and tough, and just one goblin is a challenge to a single player. A lucky roll could spell doom, but that increases the tension and makes you plan ahead.

The game uses a template system of character building, but if you wanted to, you could always break that and have any character buy anything they want - just like in GURPS. For that classic fantasy feeling, I would stick to the template recommendations. The builds are fun and go into detail, and you can craft specialist characters that feel worthwhile and useful. The skills and unified 3d6 resolution system shine here, and this is a game where skills and knowledge matter.

Is there a downside? The complexity, to be honest. Sectional armor, hit locations, the flow of combat, and many more detailed simulation rules can be very intimidating. When you combine that with a complex 250-point character, you get a game that is not new-player friendly, and you need to put a little time into learning the system. The rewards for system mastery are huge, and many players stay with DF or GURPS and never look back just because of the character design and flexibility of the system.

On the plus side? The system's complexity will distract you from the OGL drama and keep you busy. Don't underestimate this factor; some players need a "brain reset." I do at times! They need to learn a new system with many crunchy rules to help them overcome bad feelings and memories of hurting people by supporting a game they once loved.

Dungeon Fantasy is an excellent place to end up if you want more crunch, character design freedom, and gritty detailed combat. And don't forget, George Martin of Game of Thrones fame played GURPS, so much of his fantasy world-building feels inspired by this style of gritty game of fantasy survival and deadly combat.