I remember they said they'd release it with the same license as 5E when they had time. Then they fired a bunch of people and I never heard anything about it again. Did they change their mind or are they just silent on the matter hoping we all forget or what?

Also, if they did release 3.5 as CC what does that do to everything downstream? I would think they could would have the option to also go CC (if) they had no other content from other sources that had not gone CC, otherwise they'd have to stay with the OGL. Of course most other products have probably moved on and wouldn't bother to update a 3.5 product.

wotc and promises are like like snake oil salesmen and cure-alls.

Any congruency with the truth is purely accidental.

Quote from: Ruprecht on March 04, 2025, 07:43:14 PMI remember they said they'd release it with the same license as 5E when they had time. Then they fired a bunch of people and I never heard anything about it again. Did they change their mind or are they just silent on the matter hoping we all forget or what?

Also, if they did release 3.5 as CC what does that do to everything downstream? I would think they could would have the option to also go CC (if) they had no other content from other sources that had not gone CC, otherwise they'd have to stay with the OGL. Of course most other products have probably moved on and wouldn't bother to update a 3.5 product.

I want to say that they claimed they would release all prior editions eventually but obviously 5.5e would be the priority and they explicitly said that would come out a few weeks after the MM 2025 edition.   That still hasn't happened either and I'm guessing that would be on the top of their list as the active license that might actually benefit them indirectly.   To be honest, I expect them to draw out the other edition CC releases ad infinitum now that the hubbub of the OGL debacle has mostly blown over and the permanent damage is done.

Quote from: Ruprecht on March 04, 2025, 07:43:14 PMDid they change their mind or are they just silent on the matter hoping we all forget or what?

My money's on: 'or what?'...

Given all the recent turnover at the top of WotC, they have likely have completely forgotten about it themselves.

Hasbro and wotc are notorious for forgetting they actually own a whole library of games and have in the past let several slip through their butter fingers.

Pathfinder 1E actually does have all the core text freely available.  I don't think WOTC ever full reconciled that whole license revoke incident. They just let it die once they realized they had no idea what they were doing.

WotC said that they would be releasing the OGL once the three books were out.  The monster manual is out for like a week or two now?  So it's probably too early to assume that they forgot about this- we'd expect the text to be released, under creative commons, sometime in the next 1-4 months.  After that they would be pretty delinquent with their own statements.

When Hasbro stepped away from trying to burn the industry down by claiming the OGL was able to be updated with a neutered form of itself, they never actually issued an updated OGL that could be upgraded to and that was not revocable by them, nor did they ever release everything under creative commons (only the 5ed SRD stuff).  This means that older SRD stuff, which were used as a reason to assume you could print a spell named magic missile without worries, is still covered by a license that Hasbro believes can be revoked at any time.

This is why there's been a flurry of OSR products renaming core stats and concepts to silly names, most of which aren't ever explicitly entered into public domain or creative commons.  The most open response, the ORC, replaces a lot of what everyone thought the OGL was supposed to be up to all this time.

Now obviously Hasbro's reckless claims were never proven in court; but their behavior still has a bunch of lasting negative consequences even if they release the SRD containing the core 5.5 rules into creative commons.

I MISREAD OP

I thought it was about the promise to release the 5.5 stuff into creative commons (that window has just opened).  Instead, he's referring to a non-existent promise to release the OLDER stuff into creative commons (such as the 3.5 SRD, the main one that needs to happen). 

But here's the release:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1717-2024-core-rulebooks-to-expand-the-srd

And here's the quote from WotC:

QuoteWhat about the SRDs for previous editions?

Because we still need to complete reviews on those materials before they're released into Creative Commons, we made the decision to wait until after the 2024 rules revisions were released to begin reviews of those documents.]

THEY NEVER EVEN PROMISED IT

They could simply say tomorrow "we reviewed the documents and determined releasing them would be problematic", no promises broken.

On the other hand, the point I made above- that they are just entering the window to release the 5.5 documents (the "2024 rules revisions" aren't released into creative commons yet)- also means that since their implied timeline was to not even START reviewing older stuff until the 5.5 game's SRD is under creative commons, they are definitely not in any manner of window of violation of even an implied promise.

Quote from: Omega on March 05, 2025, 02:01:39 AMHasbro and wotc are notorious for forgetting they actually own a whole library of games and have in the past let several slip through their butter fingers.

They never lost the copyrights to anything they own. Trademarks, sure, but those trademarks are worthless without the copyrighted IPs. The only people who get hurt are the lingering fans.

Hasbro owns multiple scifi IPs, most notably the detailed Star Frontiers and Star*Drive settings. When they wanted to make their own Mass Effect ripoff, they hired Ohlen out of retirement and let him make his original setting Exodus instead of hiring someone to adapt their old scifi settings. SD is perfect for a Mass Effect competitor without feeling like a ripoff, but sure, let's just make another new IP that Hasbro will most likely kill off in short order like they do most of their IPs.

These settings are abandonware and it makes no economic sense for Hasbro to keep them under lock and key until the copyright expires a century after publication.

It's important to note that without trademarked names and image copyrights, there's very little (apart from flavor text) that is copyrightable at all concerning D&D in the first place. Recipes and game rules are explicitly not copyrightable, though the flavor text potentially can be. One of the more interesting cases showcasing this is Hasbro putting up half the Stranger Things box set for free in PDF due to their own policy of always making their tabletop game rules freely available.

https://instructions.hasbro.com/en-us/instruction/stranger-things-dungeons-and-dragons-roleplaying-game-starter-set

Quote from: D-ko on March 05, 2025, 02:47:58 PMIt's important to note that without trademarked names and image copyrights, there's very little (apart from flavor text) that is copyrightable at all concerning D&D in the first place.

^THIS^

Read the OGL - the list of proper names under copyright is quite short...

That is why D&D relies on its market position and overwhelming network effect to maintain its dominance.

I don't think the OGL was ever a gift; It was a Trojan horse of sorts.

Quote from: D-ko on March 05, 2025, 02:47:58 PMIt's important to note that without trademarked names and image copyrights, there's very little (apart from flavor text) that is copyrightable at all concerning D&D in the first place. Recipes and game rules are explicitly not copyrightable, though the flavor text potentially can be. One of the more interesting cases showcasing this is Hasbro putting up half the Stranger Things box set for free in PDF due to their own policy of always making their tabletop game rules freely available.

True but it has been helpful for a number of games to copy/paste the spell text (for example) instead of rewriting everything. It would be nice to have that text free of any claims of misdeeds. A game would certainly be better if the writer re-wrote everything and gave it their own flavor but still, some stuff is so painfully boring to rewrite I understand why folks dont' want to bother.

Quote from: Jaeger on March 05, 2025, 03:39:19 PM

Quote from: D-ko on March 05, 2025, 02:47:58 PMIt's important to note that without trademarked names and image copyrights, there's very little (apart from flavor text) that is copyrightable at all concerning D&D in the first place.

^THIS^

Read the OGL - the list of proper names under copyright is quite short...

That is why D&D relies on its market position and overwhelming network effect to maintain its dominance.

I wish more people realized this regarding all genres and all popular IPs.

So, there's two words being discussed here.

There's the world at the end of a long and expensive legal struggle, where some group that is the equivalent of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, supported by some big companies that are the equivalent of IBM, have won what was, in the end, a straightforward battle with Hasbro, who threw the most egregious curveball claims.  And in that world, everyone is happy to call their armor class, "armor class", and abbreviate it "AC", and they are willing to call a first level spell that never misses and does light damage, "magic missile", and so forth.  In other words, all the things that are already true, such as "you can't copyright rules", have been proven specifically about D&D.  This has nothing to do with the OGL, of course- it's true about ALL versions of D&D.  The flavor text, the proper nouns, the creative world described or referenced- those would, it is understood, be excluded. 

But while that world COULD be real, it isn't.  Not yet, and unlike in the software world where you would have groups like the EFF and companies like IBM pushing hard against copyright overreach, there's no equivalents of those for tabletop roleplaying games, no group willing to do the fight to bring us to that world.

So in THIS world, Paizo was freaked out by the possibility of being sued over the phrasing of things, so they renamed many of them.  Many of these renames are to avoid even the possibility of being in trouble, even to have the claim that the original pieces were from the OGL.
https://github.com/foundryvtt/pf2e/wiki/Remaster-Changes

Macris' ACKS game has a ton of renamed elements, and I'm fairly certain it was for similar fears (no not this one ).

So as long as these elements aren't truly open in a fully reliable way- as long as we are on the left side of "a court finally reaches the correct conclusion" on the timeline- many creators will continue to act with this as a serious, top tier concern.

Even if, legally, you can't copyright game rules.  Which you can't, but why leave yourself as a target for WotC?  Especially if you might be targeted as the #2 competitor (Paizo's concern) or as part of a political campaign (many others' concerns, possibly including Macris).