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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.)
There are a pretty good number of open-source and closed-source-but-much-friendly options, and to an extent everyone thought the OGL here was an open-source alternative (to something like GURPs). That said: the big thing D&D brought to the table was a Schelling Point.
It was seldom -- if ever -- a particularly good option for any particular genre of game. For actual high-fidelity wargaming, for heist games, for stealth thievery, whatever, there's not only something better, but often something that's been better at it for multiple generations. Older versions of D&D had a strategy-game-like at the higher end of the power scale that, as far as I know, literally no one bothered with and only really existed to sell supplements/explain genre conventions; there are few competitors that aren't better at that.
But if you put down five nerds and try to get picks for the best RPG for a given genre, you'll get somewhere between six and twelve different answers. If you ask for a compromise that everyone's familiar with and no one actively hated (until this month), you get D&D. And given how much running a game overlaps with herding cats anyway, the average gamemaster will take what you can get.
Uh, and until the early 00s with the rise of Kindle/PoD, TSR/WotC was one of three big companies could handle the investment costs and quality control of bulk printing high-quality major rulebooks and supplements at scale, and that's for really marginal definitions of editing, lol WhiteWolf.
((I don't know that I'd fully condone vorpa_glavo's post here. There's a handful of small games that at least had some recognize fans and playerbase outside of the D&D/WhiteWolf/Paizo/Warhammer-sphere: Blue Rose, Don't Rest Your Head, GURPs (kinda), Mouse Guard, Palladium system (though this to the player's detriment), IronClaw, FATE Core/Accel, Eclipse Phase might have gotten into the thousands of actually-played games.
But outside of that, yes, absolutely. Hell, there's even stuff like Continuum which I'm pretty sure has never ever have a completed game including its authors. Hell of a read! But ohgod.))
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