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.
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.
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.
...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)
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.
@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)