Открытая лицензия на ролевые игры (OGL) и её эволюция

Public copyright license for tabletop role playing games
the UK government publication license also abbreviated OGL

The Open Game License (OGL) is a public copyright license by Wizards of the Coast that may be used by tabletop role playing game developers to grant permission to modify, copy, and redistribute some of the content designed for their games, notably game mechanics. However, they must share alike copies and derivative works.

The OGL (v1.0a) was originally published by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 to license the use of portions of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, via a System Reference Document (SRD), thus allowing third party publishers to produce compatible material. and it was "modeled on the various open source licenses used in the software industry". In 2004, Wizards of the Coast addressed what would occur if the license was changed – the OGL "already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway".

In June 2008, Wizards of the Coast transitioned to a new, more restrictive royalty free license called the Game System License (GSL), which is available for third party developers to publish products compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. The GSL is incompatible with the previous OGL. However, by its own terms the OGL is perpetual, and remained in widespread use. Greg Tito, for The Escapist in 2011, commented that the GSL "released in conjunction with 4th edition took away many of the freedoms that the industry had come to expect with the D&D rules, such as reprinting text for clarity in new products". Content creators can alternatively utilize a different licensing option by publishing through the Dungeon Masters Guild storefront; this license allows individuals and third party publishers to create and sell content based on specific Wizards of the Coast intellectual property such as the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Eberron, and the Magic: The Gathering planes. Content creators are allowed to set their own price, however, Wizards of the Coast and OneBookShelf take a 50% cut of the proceeds. In November 2022, there was reported speculation that the OGL would be discontinued for this new iteration of Dungeons & Dragons based on unconfirmed leaks. Following concerns raised by third party Dungeons & Dragons creators on the potential changes to the OGL, in December 2022, Wizards of the Coast released additional details on the proposed OGL 1.1 which would have gone into effect in 2023. Content creators using OGL 1.1 would have been required "to put an official OGL badge on their products". The document also states that the intention of the OGL was not "to fund major competitors and it wasn't intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming". Following an apology issued by Wizards of the Coast, the company released a new draft titled OGL 1.2 for public comment on January 19. It would have put some of the Dungeon & Dragons mechanics under a Creative Commons license, while other material would have been covered by OGL 1.2. For example, "specific classes, spells, and monsters" would have fallen under the proposed OGL 1.2 while "Alignment, Equipment, Feats, the use of Ability Scores, Combat Rules, how Spellcasting works, how monster stat blocks work, and Conditions will have been covered under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International". Unlike the leaked OGL 1.1, the proposed OGL 1.2 contained "no royalty payment, no financial reporting, no license back, no registration, no distinction between commercial and non commercial". The proposed OGL 1.2 would have de authorized the OGL1.0a;

Those individuals, groups and publishing companies that license their works under the OGL and similar documents are sometimes collectively referred to as the "open gaming movement". The OGL led to the development of the stand alone Pathfinder Roleplaying Game which is a modified version of the 3.5 game. Academics Benoît Demil and Xavier Lecocq, in the economic journal Revue d'économie industrielle in 2014, stated that the OGL had an immediate impact on the tabletop role playing industry with an increase in new TTRP publications where the "majority of the new entrants adopted" the d20 license; d20 products sold at a higher rate than non d20 products until the mid 2000s. Tarantino attributed the OGL to part of the game's "tremendous audience growth" over the past twenty years. They commented that "the emergence of open source licensing for RPGs facilitates user creativity and innovation, as dozens of D&D compatible supplements have been created under the Open Game License". However, Walsh highlights the "primary benefit" is knowing the exact terms in order to not be sued by Wizards of the Coast and avoiding "having to prove your fair use rights or engage in an expensive legal battle over copyrightability in court". Orland stated that Section 9 coupled with statements made by Wizards of the Coast in the original 2001 FAQ, seem "to suggest that companies could continue using the old license to make products based on the old ruleset that was published under OGL v1.0a (even if upcoming rules changes are covered more directly by OGL v1.1)". Linda Codega, for Io9 on January 5, 2023, wrote that "by ending the original OGL, many licensed publishers will have to completely overhaul their products and distribution in order to comply with the updated rules. Large publishers who focus almost exclusively on products based on the original OGL, including Paizo, Kobold Press, and Green Ronin, will be under pressure to update their business model incredibly fast". Law stated that "the most concerning section of the legal document adds that Wizards of the Coast has full rights to any content created by the OGL. This would allow Dungeons and Dragons to take any homebrew content and publish it in official Dungeons and Dragons material without permission or compensation to the original creator". Christian Hoffer, for ComicBook. com in January 2023, stated that "if the OGL viewed by io9 is indeed the final OGL planned for One D&D, it would have seismic consequences for the thriving ecosystem that surrounds Dungeons & Dragons". Hoffer commented, "although it's debatable whether earlier versions of the OGL can actually be revoked or deauthorized [ ], the intent of the new OGL is to force publishers to comply with the new OGL, with its easily revocable status and its tiered royalty structure". Hall also highlighted that Kickstarter negotiated with Wizards of the Coast to lower the royalty amount for creators who use their platform. Hall wrote, "Kickstarter has recently seen increased competition from alternate crowdfunding outlets, including Gamefound and Backerkit. A partnership such as this, formally enshrined into the OGL 1.1, would encourage the largest D&D crowdfunding campaigns to use Kickstarter’s services. [ ] Kickstarter confirmed to Polygon that it has discussed a plan with Wizards, but denies its direct involvement in the OGL 1.1". Vice, The Guardian, Financial Times and many other industry focused outlets reported on negative reactions from both fans and professional content creators. ComicBook. com reported that it had "spoken with over 20 small to mid sized creators who have said that in progress projects set to be published under the OGL have been placed on hold due to" the terms in the leak. over 66,000 people have signed the "#OpenDND" internet petition within days of its launch. This included "several well known D&D community members" such as "Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus writer M. T. Black, prominent D&D streamer Mark Hulmes (who recently ran a streaming show for Wizards of the Coast on D&D's streaming channel), and Mike Shea, publisher of Sly Flourish". Io9 reported that per their sources at Wizards "the result of these cancellations and their impact on the bottom line of Wizards of the Coast is not negligible" and led to scrambling by upper management "to adjust their messaging around the situation". Starburst commented that "historically when the owners of Dungeons and Dragons attempt to restrict what people can do with the game, it leads to a boom in other tabletop roleplaying games. This is happening right now". Both Kobold Press and MCDM Productions announced upcoming new tabletop RPG systems with both stating their respective systems would be open games. Paizo then announced a new Open RPG Creative License (ORC), an open, perpetual, and irrevocable system agnostic license, as a direct response to the reported changes to the OGL. They stated that the license would not be owned by Paizo or any RPG publisher, to protect against future attempts to modify or rescind it. Another initiative is from Free League Publishing, which announced two licenses, for its Year Zero game system and another for its upcoming fantasy RPG Dragonbane. On January 13, 2023, Wizards issued a response via D&D Beyond; this response did not contain the updated OGL which will be released at a later date. The statement walked back several changes to the OGL such as removing the royalty structure and the license back language and indicated that other forms of expression, such as VTTs and livestreams, would not be impacted by the updated OGL. ComicBook. com commented that "the statement did not address whether the new OGL would attempt to 'de authorize' previous versions of the OGL". Polygon also pointed out that much remains unknown including "how a near final draft of the revised OGL got things so very, very wrong".

On January 27, 2023, Wizards of the Coast outlined the feedback received from over 15,000 survey submissions during the open comment for OGL1.2: "88% do not want to publish TTRPG content under OGL 1.2", "89% are dissatisfied with deauthorizing OGL 1.0a", "86% are dissatisfied with the draft VTT policy" and "62% are satisfied with including Systems Reference Document (SRD) content in Creative Commons, and the majority of those who were dissatisfied asked for more SRD content in Creative Commons". As a result, Wizards decided to release the SRD 5.1 under an irrevocable Creative Commons license; it would also no longer attempt to deauthorize the OGL 1.0a. Codega opined that "the Open Game License was genuinely a revolutionary contract—established two years before the Creative Commons license was developed—and tabletop games across the board, not just D&D, benefited from the free and unrestricted usage granted in the OGL. The OGL should have been the contract to stand the test of time as a testament to the power of open source licensing for intellectual property. But then, as with most good things that are given away in the spirit of joyous creativity and hope for community, capitalism happened. [ ] The commitment to putting the updated D&D rules into the Creative Commons rather than trying to re establish the OGL or even establish another GSL alike is, in my opinion, a good decision".