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Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons and Dragons, have been in the news lately because their OGL 1.1 was leaked. The OGL was an open source-like license, originally from 2000, which allowed people to create D&D-related works and which was supposed to not be revocable, as confirmed by its drafters. WOTC is trying to revoke it by using a clause referring to "authorized" versions of the license and claiming to have de-authorized the earlier license. The new replacement license requires giving 25% of your revenue to WOTC, makes you send a copy of your content to WOTC which they can then publish for free, and they can revoke it at any time making all your products instantly unsalable.
After backlash from fans, WOTC officially released a 1.2 license instead, which has similar problems, but worded a bit more subtly.
The culture war element comes from this clause:
I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials. But every objection I've seen to this clause by fans has been a twenty Stalins objection: WOTC has produced discriminatory material in the past and can't be trusted to do this properly. There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal. Just, take it out because even people with unpopular opinions should be able to put them in games? No, nobody believes that.
(Links are trivial to google, but it's hard to find a site that has everything correct all at the same time, and is up to date as well, and also engages in trustworthy journalism in general. This EFF post at least covers part of the initial controversy, though you'll have to follow links to see what's in the license.)
I'm not clued in enough on TTRPGs to know, but was there ANYTHING that was either released or in the works that could have plausibly been covered by the "no hateful content or conduct"?
My impression is that they threw that in there as a boilerplate precaution but then when they got the vicious backlash about OGL they tried to use it as a figleaf defense in the form of "why's everyone mad? we just wanted to ban hateful conduct". That might be true, but I'm still intensely curious if there was any agitation over some RPG in the works with TERF goblins or something.
There are incidents around 5e that happened, like the Zak S playtesting kerfuffle. Long story short, Zak S is a male porn star, who runs a blog called Dnd With Porn Stars and has published a few products. He helped playtest 5e D&D, and was credited as one of many big name play testers. Then information about his abusive treatment of a romantic partner came out (along with sundry other shitty behavior), and he began to use dozens of sock puppet accounts to try and defend himself on Reddit and various RPG forums. In the end, he ended up removed from the 5e playtest credits, and several subreddits decided that any mention of Zak or his products was forbidden.
I think it's a shame nobody can talk about his products anymore on Reddit, because Zak was a genius in the OSR space, and Vornheim and A Red and Pleasant Land were without exaggeration, some of my favorite RPG products of all time. But I grudgingly understand why they did it - Zak is very thin-skinned, and anything that mentioned him in a less than positive light had a huge chance of breaking out into a flame war with a few Zak S sock puppets taking part.
I doubt this is the only thing that inspired WotC's new policy though. I think a few legacy RPG companies like Judges Guild and new TSR have ended up in the hands of purported racists, and there are always historical incidents like the third-party Book of Erotic Fantasy, which WotC prevented from being published with the d20 trademark after they realized the controversy it would probably glean.
Yeah, Zak S is a piece of work, though I dunno if anything he produced or was involved in would have triggered this directly. I guess banning from the field as a whole for unrelated unethical or unlawful behavior has been on the table for a while, now, though.
There have been more recent incidents than Book of Erotic Fantasy. Asian Spells Comp was probably more a failure of the marketing text than the actual focus (which from what I here was just normal supplement filler), but absolutely the sorta thing this would get used against. Even for mainstream bits, there's a few first-party works that have had big errata released to remove what's perceived as racially-insensitive metaphor
Cultural sensitivity towards mind flayers. I would have said you couldn't make this stuff up, but clearly somebody did.
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I read that clause way too fast and didn't realize this gives them a way to police offline conduct of OGL license holders. Obviously they can't go after everyone, so they probably added this "at our discretion" clause so they have a convenient out anytime a DnD person becomes too much of a PR problem for them.
This is I think the answer, especially as the new license means they have a financial tie to the license holder, which means they lost the plausible deniability from previous versions of not really being involved with each specific entity.
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