Dungeons & Dragons will release its 2024 ruleset under a Creative Commons licence
Dungeons & Dragons plans to publish a new Systems Reference Document alongside its new 2024 rulebooks, hammering the final nail in the OGL's coffin.
Too little too late tbh
Yeah I'm not buying shit from wotc/hasbro
Exactly
Yeah, but if you make homebrew they don't like, they'll send the Pinkertons after you.
(I know that was about an MTG set. I'm just making a joke about how little faith I have in WOTC.)
This includes all class features, monsters, rules expressions and anything that isn’t trademarked as intellectual property. Essentially, you get mechanics for cover but not Beholders, martial archetypes but not the city and denizens of Baldur’s Gate.
Is this even necessary? Isn't all of that stuff already non-copyrightable?
You are correct. They do this because corporations in the past have sued over even though rules, etc. are fair use. When they first started the OGL they gained a lot of goodwill from the community.
Short answer, no. There is a lot of nitpicky fine print and "nuance" involved but while you cannot copyright rolling a twenty sided die you can copyright a bunch of distinct and organized thoughts and specific groups thereof, such as the collection of rules that make up a class or subclass. If that class, subclass, spell, made up monster with a specific name and abilities, etc is published in some work that is sold for profit then legal action can occur.
Anything under creative commons effectively becomes public domain. If it appears in a WotC book, digital content, etc and is not specifically under CC, like say spells and subclasses from any supplement not included in that (such as Xanathar or Tasha), it is copyrighted and WotC can and will sue you if you republish it.
Just finish dying already. I’m sick and tired of this drama. Everybody and their grandma has a better product and their shit keeps getting free exposure.
It's been so frustrating seeing people on YouTube and wherever who have spent the past 18 months "spotlighting" and "advocating for playing" other systems climb all over each other to praise this move. A move that does nothing but tell 3rd party publishers that they can safely go back to ignoring Shadowrun, Pathfinder, and OSR games.
Maybe if those games had more appealing rule systems, other publishers would make products using them.
It's good news for sure. But I still don't trust WotC.
And Pathfinder 2e is just plain better. In four decades of playing TTRPGs I've never played a ruleset so tactical, so clean, so enjoyable. It's a thing of beauty. So I could care less what happens with D&D.
I'm playing Pathfinder for the first time after never having played D&D (aside from bg3 I guess) and man.... Maybe it's because I'm new to it, using roll20, the DM/group, or the campaign is just confusing but I can't fathom thinking it's clean.
I'm finding a lot of it very complicated and confusing. Everything seems to have some underlying system that requires different rolls and numbers and every time I try to look up an answer instead of asking, I wind up with more questions..
Please don't take that as an insult to the game - I AM having fun 15+ sessions in...I'm just surprised to see you describe it that way. The group is all veteran players who are willing to help me out but it feels like they're so much stuff that you have to memorize to do anything. So many caveats I wouldn't know if one guy wasn't a rules lawyer (that's a compliment)
Pathfinder 2e is definitely more complicated than DND 5e, but in return you get a much more interesting, expressive game, in my opinion. When people say it's cleanly designed they are normally comparing it to pathfinder 1e, which is a labyrinth of bizarre rules, pointless edge cases and overly crunchy rolls.
I assume you are playing 2e.
I definitely get that. Pathfinder (like D&D and other rules-heavy TTRPGs) has a learning curve, and things can get confusing for newer players.
Imho any game is either rules-heavy, and as such closer to reality with more defined rules for various situations, or it is rules-light, where GM-Interpretation is other needed to determine what to role. (Or somewhere in between)
Any rules-heavy game is going to take time to learn, and sometimes it will be unclear what is correct. But I find that the PF2e rules are actually very clear, you just have to pay close attention to the wording.
For example, if you get an attack of opportunity(AoO), can you grapple instead of attacking? Can you trip?
The answer is in the descriptions of those actions. An attack of opportunity allows for a strike action. A grapple is a standard action. A trip is a strike action. So a trip is allowed, a grapple isn't.
The entire game is built like this. Can a barbarian use this action while raging? Well, does it have the rage trait? If not, then no. Spells no longer have levels, they have ranks, so that no one confuses them with character level. It's all in the wording.
But again, I'm approaching this as a TTRPG veteran who has GMed systems like shadowrun and world of darkness, that are basically the poster-children for needlessly complicated and/or conflicting rules. I totally understand that any rules-heavy game can be confusing.
WOTC could offer to come suck me off and still wouldn't give them a fuckin dime. Fuck you Hasbro, you lazy sacks of shit wanted to have intellectual rights to work you didn't create just because it's in a rule system you have some IP in. You forever burned the bridge for me.
2024 ruleset? Is that a 6e? A 5.5?
No, it is the 2024 version of the 5th edition rules. Supposedly fully compatible with existing adventures, and not breaking existing characters.
I expect people will refer to it as 5.5, or 5.2, or anything except '2024'. But we'lll see...
...it's as substantive a revision from fifth edition as the second edition was from AD+D: id est yeah, sixth edition, but the new SRD will be labelled 5.2...
(marketing calls it D+D 50; marketing called fifth edition dungeons & dragons, no version number)
They've already lost me to Kobold Press 5e materials as well as games like Wanderhome and Kids On Bikes 2
Now if only there were any chance it would be a good rules set and not the blandest thing on the menu
And now we start waiting for the other shoe to drop.
put everything under the orc license and we can talk.
Until the next time they try to revoke the license, you mean?
@wahming @HubertManne There's no revoking a Creative Commons.
They don't control the ORC. They can't even LARP revoking it, unlike the OGL.
Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license is so much more permissive and liberal than the ORC license. More people benefit from more rights because of it being in CC-BY 4.0 instead of the ORC.
well yeah as its on the most permissive ends of the creative commons licenses and if they were to use it they likely would user closer to the other end of the spectrum. these are companies though that are selling products but just want to allow folks to make their own derivations based around the ruleset without worrying about it and allowing folks to use the ruleset without buying it but not allow people to sell copies of their specific work.
This means that i can make a game with this rules and dont havent to pay?
@loboaureo @copacetic yeah. Until they decide to argue to revoke the license for reasons.
(Also you have to watch out what part is covered under the license, some stuff is gonna be product identity)
(Actually, the beneficial part of this is mostly that you can use their own expression of the rules to make games. Rules as such are not copyrightable, but if you are expressing the rules too similar to their own texts they still could sue you. Using such a license is supposed to take care of that)