What the Dungeons & Dragons OGL row tells us about how online communities work

By using community power a small group of content creators were able to force the owners of Dungeons & Dragons to make a 180 degree change

As 2022 faded away and 2023 appeared on the horizon, you won’t have noticed the huge kerfuffle in the Dungeons & Dragons world about its open games licence (OGL). Why would you since it is an argument within the world of tabletop gaming having no relevance to your life. You would, however, be wrong. The explosion of rage and upset within the D&D world at the arrival of a new OGL informs a much wider and important debate about who owns what in our increasingly online world.

Wizards of the Coast (WotC), who own the D&D game, operated with an OGL first published in 2000. In essence this allowed people to create games, game systems, monsters and items using the game platform (collectively known as ‘homebrew’). It also allowed people to sell those creations as D&D although there were restrictions on the use of trademarked names and items owned by WotC such as the Baldur’s Gate brand. Of course since 2000 there has been quite a change in the online world meaning that the OGL, at least to WotC’s lawyers and management, was out-of-date. So the company sets about writing a new OGL.

What happened next is more of a Silicon Valley sort of story than a gamer story (although WotC are based in Seattle) since the new OGL, a ‘draft’ according to the company, was leaked to Gizmodo went big on the proposed changes:

“While the original open gaming license is a relatively short document, coming in at under 900 words, the new draft of the OGL 1.1, which was provided to io9 by a non-WotC developer, is over 9,000 words long. It addresses new technologies like blockchain and NFTs, and takes a strong stance against bigoted content, explicitly stating the company may terminate the agreement if third-party creators publish material that is “blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, trans-phobic, bigoted or otherwise discriminatory.”

One of the biggest changes to the document is that it updates the previously available OGL 1.0 to state it is “no longer an authorized license agreement.” 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.”

The D&D community, urged on by a group of people and companies running for-profit businesses off the back of the existing OGL, exploded at what they saw as a fundamental shift of power from the community to the company. On our weekend away with a bunch of Leeds players in January, much of the downtime was spent discussing (loudly and with limited knowledge or information) the iniquities of the proposed new OGL. Much of the debate centred around ideas about ownership, copyright and creative licensing which, frankly, none of us were even on the first rung of understanding. The discussion, unsurprisingly, then became more about how the game’s owners were simply exploiting the creativity of the people creating homebrew content so as to make more money and do down independent creators using the D&D platforms and systems (which strangely nobody questioned were the property of WotC).

These debates were taking place across the D&D community and featured incomprehensible rants on forums, petitions and several large content creators stomping out of D&D in a performative huff.

The new OGL provided for several changes:

Invalidated the original OGL, meaning it could no longer be used

Stated that D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast must be notified about and receive a report on the earnings of all monetised content

Said that products using the OGL which earn over $750,000 per year must pay Wizards a royalty fee of 25% (or 20% if funded through Kickstarter) for all income beyond that point

Claimed the right to use all OGL content in any way Wizards of the Coast saw fit

Stopped D&D-related NFTs and blockchain

Allowed termination of the license for content that is "blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, trans-phobic, bigoted or otherwise discriminatory"

From a players perspective none of this really affected our play. We can still homebrew our own worlds and adventures, create new monsters and even craft new spells of magic items. Nobody is stopping us tweaking the rules to suit how we want to play the game. But for a big and influential bunch of folk the proposals were toxic. People running online livestream, creating modules and other new content for sale, or otherwise profiting from the 2000 OGL saw this as an attack on their livelihoods.

After a week or two with everyone screaming at them, WotC backed down, withdrew the ‘draft’ new OGL and did something nobody expected, they proposed releasing the entire game mechanics under a creative commons licence. From a position where the company was seeking to tighten up the risks associated with allowing people to create content (the references to NFTs and blockchain plus policing the content seem reasonable if a little blunt) there has been a complete about face to where the core game systems are more openly available than was the case under the old licence.

None of this matters to most D&D players but it is important to how owners of platforms and systems relate to the communities using those systems. For D&D it indicated that, for want of a better word, community-based content creators are far more able to influence that community than the owners of the platform, despite those content creators being every bit as profit-focused as WotC. We can also see that relatively small groups within communities can change the direction of those communities and shape opinions. The petition calling for WotC to withdraw the new OGL had 60,000 signatures which sounds a lot until to remember that the game has at least 50 million players worldwide most of whom hadn’t noticed and didn’t care about the new OGL.

If we look elsewhere, we see the same debates around social media platforms, forums and other online communities. Are the owners of the systems or platforms able to structure those properties so as to improve profitability? The story of Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover illustrates this challenge. Musk clearly believes that powerful people and companies are getting huge value from the platform without coughing up a farthing. Part of the Twitter community is engaged in trying to prevent the company extracting a larger part of the value from those influential users. It is in the interests of large media companies, celebrities and those using Twitter to drive sales, donations or income to prevent the company securing part of this value, just as it was important to those profiting from the D&D systems to oppose the owner charging royalties. There are other broader issues with a bigger social media platform like Twitter but we don’t yet know the outcome - is the platform controlled by the company or by the community, a community (as we saw with D&D) easily influenced by the voices of those extracting the most value from a free platform.

Most social media (in its broadest sense) is co-production: people make use of the platform, its tools and its reach to create content. For most users this represents all the value they want - I use D&D systems to create characters, games and other content so I can play with my friends not so I can make money. But for another group the value they get extends beyond personal fair use and helps assist them in getting subscriptions, product sales, readers and donations. This applies on every platform regardless of how carefully the platform’s owners control their network. The experience of the D&D OGL suggests that, for many of these platform owners, the control de facto rests with powerful users and the media they influence rather than with the platform’s owners.

In one respect we can see this as consumer power but it is an oddly imbalanced consumer power. If a petition from 0.1% of users and an online survey of 5,000 self-selected respondents can make a big company do a complete about face from a tight licence to an open creative commons approach, mostly so as to protect commercial interests, then platform owners need to think more carefully about how they engage with and relate to their community. It also raises important questions about forum moderation, the control of speech and the disproportionate influence over policy exercised by a small but vocal part of every community.

Last year I wrote about public meetings and how demagogues like such meetings:

“This made me smile because, even as a mere local councillor, I knew that I wanted a public meeting about the library closure or the housing development because I could manipulate the public meeting in a somewhat similar manner to the stand-up comedian (albeit without anything resembling a joke). Sensible developers and councils want to do a consultation, to set up boards and spend a whole afternoon in the village hall responding directly to any member of the public who drops in. Sensible councillors want a public meeting because that way you can stir people up, announce the intention to march on the town hall with pitchforks and torches.

Public meetings - all the trappings of participatory democracy - are wonderful things but are also entirely open to manipulation by the loud, informed and organised. This is the milieu beloved of the far left (and where those rare beasts still exist, the far right), the land populated by Saul Alinsky's community organisers. It is a world just as reverential to sacred cows and filled with received wisdom as any staged debate. And it is a world where people like me can press the right buttons, get a cheer and walk off into the sunset with a well-slapped back knowing you've farmed a few more votes.”

Online communities have many of the same dynamics as I describe here, they are not in any realistic sense democratic but rather represent a sort of mob rule where the self-interested, the grifter and the loudmouth get a disproportionate amount of attention and, too often, power. Even in a community as huge as the D&D community, a small group could change the direction of that community without most of its members even knowing. To this day I’m guessing that nearly all D&D players neither know nor care about the Great OGL Debate of January 2023. But the few who did care made enough noise to get the system and platform owners to completely change direction.