Dungeons and Dragons Is Jeopardizing Its Greatest Strength: Its Ubiquity

Last week, Gizmodo reported on a leaked draft of Dungeons and Dragons’ Open Game License (OGL) 1.1, an updated version of the licensing agreement for creating content using D&D’s basic rules, also called the D20 system, regardless of Wizards of the Coast’s involvement. The new OGL heavily restricts the kind of content one can produce based on Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, colloquially referred to as “D&D 5e,” or just “5e”, and how you can go about profiting off of that content. This leaked draft represents not just a massive shift in policy for Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Dungeons and Dragons, but in the strategy underpinning the world’s most popular tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG). 

If Wizards of the Coast ends up going with this draft, it will essentially make it much harder if not impossible for other game creators who built their businesses on top of OGL to keep going.

“As someone who is part of the content creation community and knows how this would impact other creators, I think these changes would be the end of my journey in releasing products for the D&D system,” said independent developer Steven Williams, who wrote several Dungeon Master’s Toolkits published via the DM’s Guild, in a statement to Waypoint.

“The terms laid out in the leaked 1.1 update are a burden under which no enterprise can reasonably operate, and so I very much doubt I would continue to support D&D if the leaked license becomes the only way to do so,” HeavyArms Press, which publishes The Alchemy Almanac and The Armorer’s Handbook, told Waypoint. 

Wizards of the Coast did not respond to Waypoint’s request for comment. Gizmodo said that the company declined to comment about its initial story about the leaked OGL draft, and directed the publication to a post from December saying that the new OGL will not affect the majority of people in the industry. 

D&D 5e was released in 2014. It was met with a generally positive reception from legacy players upon release, however, it leaned further away from the roll-dense, tactical dungeon crawling that the series had become known and beloved for. It was less mechanically complex than previous editions, while at the same time struggling to replace that complexity with the expanded role playing mechanics pioneered by independent games like Apocalypse World. However, it was still Dungeons and Dragons—a name synonymous with tabletop roleplaying—and it was slightly more accessible than previous editions of the game.

Following the release of 5e, there was an increase in the popularity of “actual play”: videos and podcasts in which players would record their campaigns and produce them for an audience—the majority of which play D&D. Series like Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and Dimension 20, became some of the most popular podcasts on the internet, each with a young, devoted fanbase. The best actual play podcasts can convey TTRPGs at their best, as tools for telling engaging stories with your friends. This has always been the case, but for those who didn’t play TTRPGs, the medium was more closely associated with rolling dozens of dice than it was making your friends cry.

These shows, in conjunction with the increased accessibility of 5e, helped facilitate an explosion in popularity for 5e and other TTRPGs. This growth was furthered by advances in virtual tabletop software and websites, most notably, Roll20. These websites didn’t just facilitate online play, but helped to build the infrastructure for the medium to grow from. Websites like Roll20 were designed with 5e in mind—combined with the popularity brought on by actual play and its cultural significance, D&D 5e became the standard for online roleplaying.

This standardization has been Wizard of the Coast’s goal for a long time, and was the motivation behind OGL 1.0. In a 2002 interview with The Most Dangerous Column In Gaming, former Wizards of the Coast vice-president, Ryan Dancey, said: 

“We've got a theory that says that D&D is the most popular roleplaying game because it is the game more people know how to play than any other game. [...]If you accept (as I have finally come to do) that the theory is valid, then the logical conclusion is that the larger the number of people who play D&D, the harder it is for competitive games to succeed, and the longer people will stay active gamers, and the more value the network of D&D players will have to Wizards of the Coast.”

This was the theory underpinning the Open Game License. The OGL was introduced in Third Edition, and allowed for third parties to create content based on the game’s System Resource Document (SRD), which contained all of its basic rules. However, individuals could not produce content based on things inherent to the Dungeons and Dragons brand. You could make D&D compatible content as long as you didn’t brand it as such.

The goal of the OGL was to standardize roleplaying in hopes of increasing popularity and accessibility for the entire medium, regardless of which company was making the actual content. At the time, according to Dancey, D&D’s most profitable product was its Player’s Handbook, and the basic rules therein. To use any of the modules created by competitors, you’d need that Player’s Handbook, driving sales even higher. It was a bold and wildly successful strategy—it also led directly to the emergence of D&D’s biggest competitor, Pathfinder, which was originally based on a modified version of D&D 3.5e. In fact, Paizo went on to use its own version of OGL 1.0 to encourage its own community to contribute to the system.

Pathfinder quickly became a popular choice among fans of TTRPGs, but has been unable to unseat D&D as the medium’s biggest name—nothing has. This is in spite of the fact that each edition of D&D manages to upset some portion of the player base. Pathfinder was designed to iterate upon D&D 3.5e, which was a famously messy system. 4e was met with a mixed reception from D&D’s community (in part because of its more restrictive licensing agreement, the GSL), and 5e has frequently been criticized as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none system.

5e’s reputation as the most popular, but least specialized, system has led to a large market of third party supplements, allowed by OGL 1.0. These resources range from expanded monster manuals and campaign and setting books, to wholly new game systems and massive revamps of central mechanics. For many players, these tools are essential to playing the game. So essential, that a small group of publishers have managed to find livelihoods in this secondary market.

All of this was intended by the original OGL, according to Dancey. 

“The great thing about Open Gaming is that it is interactive—someone figures out a way to make something work better, and everyone who uses that part of the rules is free to incorporate it into their products. Including us,” he told The Most Dangerous Column in Gaming.

There are gaps in 5e’s design, gaps that have been filled by the community. Are these modules as popular as 5e itself, or considered essential by the majority of players? No. However, they are an essential part of maintaining the game’s ecosystem. The leaked draft of OGL 1.1, first reported on by Gizmodo, jeopardizes all of this.

The leaked draft makes a few key changes: it separates creators into different tiers based on their financial success, applies a steep 20-25% royalty to those in the highest tier, allows Wizards of the Coast the right to use anything created under the agreement without royalties, and replaces OGL 1.0.

There are three tiers in the leaked OGL 1.1: Initiate Tier, under $50,000 of annual revenue, Intermediate Tier, between $50,000 and $750,000 of annual revenue, and at which point income reporting is mandatory, and Expert Tier, which includes any studio producing over $750,000 in revenue annually. At expert tier, there will be a 25 percent royalty on every dollar earned over $750,000. Expert tier only describes a handful of publishers, including Paizo and Kobold Press, but the tabletop RPG publishing industry runs on tight margins—and revenue does not account for expenses like salary, offices, or employee benefits. The risk to the livelihoods of the dozens of people working at these Expert tier studios is significant.

"For the fewer than 20 creators worldwide who make more than $750,000 in income in a year, we will add a royalty starting in 2024. So, even for the creators making significant money selling D&D supplements and games, no royalties will be due for 2023 and all revenue below $750,000 in future years will be royalty-free,” Wizards of the Coast said in a late 2022 blog post.

Section X is, arguably, the most worrying part of the leaked draft. It states:

This gives Wizards of the Coast the right to use any content produced under both the Commercial and Non-commercial OGLs, for free, forever. It also allows Wizards of the Coast to sublicense it to whomever they choose. So not only could it use independent content for first party releases, but it could also license that content to a different third party. 

Large portions of the game’s community have been up-in-arms over this leak. Discussion of the leaked OGL 1.1 has been banned in the official D&D Discords and Reddits, as well as the Reddit for popular actual play podcast, Critical Role. #OpenDnD began trending on twitter, highlighting community backlash against the new OGL. Major publishers like Paizo and Kobold Press have yet to release statements, and have not responded to Motherboard’s request for comment.

Motherboard also reached out to several independent publishers across all three proposed revenue tiers, one of whom declined to comment, and three of whom said they planned to stop releasing Dungeons and Dragons content, and focus their attention elsewhere. One of those developers, Steven Williams, is currently partnered with the DMs Guild, a storefront which allows content creators to produce content under the official D&D license, in exchange for a 50 percent revenue cut—circumventing the rules of the OGL in exchange for a larger, more official storefront and access to branded content. 

Williams told Waypoint in an email “I am not sure where my creative journey would take me just yet, but I can’t support an organization that would open the door to - for all intents and purposes - steal the work of other creators[...]People have built companies and livelihoods off of the twenty-year-established idea that they would be able to continue creating in this way and retain rights to their content. This new OGL gives Wizards of the Coast the right to utilize their content for any means without any compensation for the original creator which is abhorrent in my eyes. This is a rug pull out from under the feet of those creators/companies and even if Wizards of the Coast never used this agreement for malicious intent, the language introduced opens some very dangerous doors that I would prefer to remain closed.”

Other publishers, including those who publish content under the OGL, responded with similar sentiments. 

HeavyArms went on to say that it would consider shifting its focus to Pathfinder content, or perhaps to the excellent indie RPG, LANCER. Although it noted that even Pathfinder was a risk: “Pathfinder would be a natural shift, but as that game is published under the 1.0(a) OGL there are serious questions surrounding the future of that system if the leak were to materialize in full.”

The OGL hasn’t just shaped the community of Dungeons and Dragons, either. Dozens of systems have been created based on the D20 system: Pathfinder 1e, The 13th Age, Mutants and Masterminds, the Dark Souls and Stargate RPGs, just to name a few. Not only have these games been created under the first OGL, but they’ve continued its legacy forward, and used the OGL for their own products. Pathfinder, for example, uses the language of OGL 1.0 to govern third party content, as does The 13th Age. The OGL didn’t just become the standard operating procedure for Dungeons and Dragons, but for the industry as a whole.

Modern indie RPGs are now routinely published alongside SRDs, spawning their own game design cottage industries. Apocalypse World spawned “Powered by the Apocalypse” games, Blades in the Dark, a Powered by the Apocalypse game, begot “Forged in the Dark”, which in turn led to the development of Spire, and its Resistance System. Tabletop roleplaying games are not only collaborative in play, but in production. 

When explaining his decision to institute OGL 1.0, Ryan Dancey talked about his utopian vision of an Open Gaming Movement. He imagined a world in which games would be developed collaboratively, and led to rapid iteration and creativity. He also imagined that Dungeons and Dragons would benefit greatly from the popularity of these other systems. Twenty years later, it looks like he was right.

Wizards of the Coast’s approach to Dungeon and Dragons has, even accounting for some missteps over the last two decades, generally worked. It successfully built the most recognizable brand in tabletop roleplaying—Dungeons and Dragons became synonymous with the medium itself in the minds of most outsiders. It did this while managing to turn a profit. As of 2021 financial reports from its parent company, Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast is still turning a profit. It is not, however, generating the most possible profit.

The OGL created a stable ecosystem for tabletop publishing. It's an industry that has been growing steadily for the last decade. However, steady growth does not lead to the geometric increases in profit demanded, year over year, by investors in modern capitalism. The dream of an infinitely monetizable platform, however, does—at least in theory.

The OGL 1.1 is just one part of a broader strategy by Wizards of the Coast to consolidate D&D into a closed ecosystem, one from which it can extract profit at every possible stage. Wizards of the Coast plans to increase support to their proprietary marketplace, D&D Beyond. The company also plans to release its own virtual tabletop software sometime in 2024, in conjunction with Dungeons and Dragons sixth edition, now called One D&D.

This strategy resembles that of dozens of failed startups, built on creating a massive user base that you find a way to infinitely monetize. Companies with this approach usually operate at a loss for years, while promising their investors geometric profit at some later date. Wizards of the Coast, however, managed to make a sustainable business model on the way to building a platform—a business model it is now at great risk of destroying, in an industry that has, in every metric but popularity, managed to surpass it.