Paizo Announces System-Neutral Open RPG License

Is White White meant to be White Wolf?

They're basically defunct after the nazi scandal after Paradox bought them, Paradox licensed out their material for a few years and now has a new in-house team for World of Darkness.

I think you mean Google vs Oracle for the Java API copyright lawsuit.

> [...] game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D (or any other system) in the first place.

This is something that I've been seen written over and over again.

While the mechanisms themselves are not subject to copyright, the rules, as authored by Wizards of the Coast, are. That is the specific implementation of those mechanisms (e.g. the definition of a feat, skill, or spell) is subject to copyright.

The OGL and D&D SRD allowed limited republishing of copyrighted material by third party publishers.

If you aren't using the words from the D&D rulebook you can publish a game that's 100% compatible with D&D. You would also have to spend a lot of time reimplementing the spell, skill, feat, and weapon boilerplate.. Which is why the D&D SRD and OGL were created.

It's like a hash table. While you can't implicitly[0] protect the concept of a hash table you can copyright and implicitly protect your hash table. Someone else can create a hash table but they can't copy and paste the code from your proprietary implementation. It's yours.. Unless you give them a license to use and/or distribute it.

The death of/community moving away from the OGL and D&D SRD is a good thing.

The RPG world is a victim of the OGL and D&D SRD's success. How many games are based on the six attribute format? I've been playing games like that for 30 years and I've had enough. When I pick up a book and see dex/str/con/wis/int/cha my eyes glass over. I want D&D to fade, I want publishers to create new, entirely novel, systems, and I don't care what it means the status quo. The ideas haven't been there for many years now.

What's great about the OGL and D&D SRD is that it brought an open source mentality to game publishing. It created a framework for companies can collaborate on a system and made that the default way of thinking about the creation of RPG material. That isn't going to go away. We're just going to be getting more and, possibly, better systems.

It's going to cause fragmentation, turmoil, consumer confusion, and it's going to be great. We'll get a burst of creativity, followed by a plateau, and finally everyone will congregate around a new system in a decade or so.

[0]: Copyright is implicit, patents and trademarks are not.

My guess is they want to keep the overall structure of the OGL while tearing out the parts that can make the license change at the whims of WotC. The ability to carve out portions of a product as trademark/non-reproducible while releasing he rest isn't something covered by creative commons. Without it I'd imagine many publishers would try to hack together similar language and you'd end up with a proliferation of different new licenses.