#the bde from paizo was strong today

[pip-n-flinx]

First, let me be clear, I’m not a subscriber to The Rules Lawyer on Youtube. With that out of the way, I have no idea about the rest of the content on this channel I’m posting this because the Paizo website is down and in addition to reading their full statement from 1/12/23 he also provides some context on who some of the people involved are.

Paizo, the company that publishes Pathfinder and Starfinder, has just thrown down the gauntlet with Wizards of the Coast over their leaked intentions to revoke the Open Gaming License. For those unfamiliar, the OGL (1.0a as it stands at time of posting) underpins a truly startling number of works. Mechanics and expressions like ‘Lich’ in its modern incarnation, Magic Missile, as well as all D&D rules largely labeled Systems Reference Document (SRD.) SRD rules underpin the 2003 Game-of-the-Year Knights of the Old Republic, Bethesda’s Fall Out to name a few games outside the Table Top banner that many picture when talking about D&D. Notably, the OGL as it has stood for two decades or so is actually more restrictive in some ways than Fair Usage doctrine might be. Notably, if you publish using their intellectual and creative rights as many authors have done, not only does you forfeit your story IP, but Wizards could take half of your publishing profits. Third party stories set in Faerun or Eberron, naming cities like Waterdeep or Greyhawk, published under the OGL are ultimately Wizards property, at least as I understand the original document. Publishers could use and adapt the rules for D&D, create their own classes or monsters, and write their own stories and settings referencing other OGL works without fear. The license stipulated that it would last in perpetuity, and that you could publish under any OGL document.

The legal loopholes that Wizards is trying to exploit now, are that perpetuity =/= irrevocable and that you can publish under any ‘authorized’ OGL, meaning that they can simply remove the authorization they granted the original OGL. Or, at the very least, that’s what Wizards has claimed.

For those curious, D&D Fourth Edition was not published under the OGL. Wizards of the Coast has been hard at work building their own Virtual Table Top or VTT to host their games online, which likely spun into D&D Beyond and later One D&D.

The concern is that not only will Wizards begin locking content behind paywalls in their app, but also that they can have complete control over what content appears in their VTT for players, cutting Third Party Publishers out entirely from the Wizards endorsed D&D experience.

I might make a post about this later, but fans of Critical Roll and Darrington Press may be surprised to find how much of Matt Mercer’s world was built on Pathfinder and not D&D IP. I don’t have an exhaustive list, but from the names of the gods to the continents and nations their are very thinly veiled pieces of Paizo IP in the Darrington Press printings of Critical Roll lore. The point being that the OGL had grown well beyond Wizards of the Coast, and largely protected smaller publishers as they helped grow the reach and player base for Wizards of the Coast. No one could deny - at least not in good faith - the importance of streams and online personalities in growing the D&D brand and the importance of table top games.

Understand while Paizo may be the second largest publisher of OGL tabletop content, this is still a David versus Goliath story. Wizards of the Coast is the most profitable arm of Hasbro, and Paizo pales in terms of sales numbers. That being said, I made the switch back in 2017 to first edition Pathfinder and haven’t looked back since.

Full disclosure, I have a friend who works in the accounting department at Paizo, so while I don’t directly have a monetary stake in this race I am biased. This wasn’t true when we made the leap to the new system in 2017 as a playgroup, but Will moved out to Seattle about a year later. I believe @theplaneswalk actual had made the switch before me, but a number of my old school friends and I are playing in a modified Pathfinder 1e campaign this Sunday.