OGL = TSR Lawfare Threat

As an indy RPG developer myself, I can tell you chances are I will not break even for how much labor and time I spend making a quality RPG product. When doing a cost-benefit analysis on weather or not to produce an RPG product, one consideration is ALWAYS: will this get me sued? Because if I have to get a lawyer to publish, that's a lot of money I have to raise that has nothing to do with making or distributing the product, before making any money from the product, and I already know odds are against me breaking even on what product is going to cost me in time.

Once upon a time there was a Game Company called TSR, who were really mad that anyone but them published table top RPGs, because they owned the original table top RPG, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D.) TSR decided to sue Palladium, who in turn decided to sue so many other new RPG system developers that in the 1980's and 1990's people were scared out of trying to get into the table top RPG market.

We (the team known as the Game Arts Guild, previously known as Galbraith Games,) were one of these groups in exile. Before 2000 our plan was to make a computer game version of our RPG first (the precursor to Squawk RPG and The Dark Woods,) and then make a computer game hand book that could coincidentally double as an RPG book, to try to avoid all that threat-of-lawfare we could not afford.

Then in 2000 the OGL came out. It ended the two decades old threat-of-lawfare preventing indy RPG development, and we entered the golden era of indy RPG publishing that we are in today, which has grown rapidly because of print-on-demand technologies and services. We at the Game Arts Guild never did embrace the OGL however, and instead relied on traditional open source licenses such as the LGPL and later Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike. As Quake 1 Total-Conversion developers we had started one of the world's first open game projects called "The Free Models Project" (the inheritor of which is Open Game Art who we endorse,) and as a result of that experience we realized at the time the OGL was suspect.

That's right, THE OGL WAS NO-DAMNED-GOOD ANYWAYS. The ONLY thing it did was end an age of lawfare-threat preventing indy RPG development. The problem then and now is the OGL grants Wizards of the Coast the ability to revoke your right to use the OGL at any time:

Hasbro (the now owners of Wizards of the Coast) has a parallel process going on with their most popular product, the board game Monopoly; they really think like that game, hate competition, lock down intellectual properties in ethically questionable ways, etc. What all of this "new proposed OGL 1.1" drama described in the above video has really signaled, is their intention to reengage in TSR style THREAT OF LAWFARE by way of OGL-license-revoking (remember it is only the THREAT that prevents indy game development as per my first paragraph of this post,) to shut down indy RPG development. The current OGL everyone seems to want to preserve will NOT prevent them from doing just that!

As a byproduct of working on Squawk 2nd Edition for the last 10 years we have produced a role playing game system we call "Resilience" (www.ResilienceRPG.com) licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license (which is set in the modern day but has been designed to adapt to other settings,) which I hope disgruntled indy developers will consider as they exodus D&D.