Wednesday, February 22, 2023

On the OGL and OSR

I live! A bit salty that my regular diet of demonic cackling, cloud yelling, fist waving, and general resignation has to be interrupted to come back to the blog. Life is even better outside of the Matrix. And I rejoice at having morphed into a grumpy old cackling demon. So let me indulge here as well.

Oh wonder! A Fortune 500 corporation wants to encapsulate your imagination and put a price tag on it. Let's monetize and shoehorn micro transactions on your deepest desires and fantasies, on a private activity with accointances, friends and family. The eldritch tentacles of capitalism, oh my, find their way through your orifices to suck your brain.

Te amount of panic I'm seeing in some creators I follow on the sidelines is remarkable. If anything else, and with selfishness, this will serve to have an updated version of some of my favorite games, with a truly open source license. Because, never forget, OSR stands for Open Source Roleplaying. That is a long standing argument settled, right there. Since the birth of the OSR is unequivocally tied to the birth of the OGL license, this is irrefutable.

WotC has lost their little credibility and image over the last few years to become a pariah in the space. Ex-Micro$hoft execs taking over the C-level positions was already a screaming warning. But these shitshow already happened (to a lesser degree). Time is a flat circle yiddi yadda.

Human memory is damn short, and we tend to quickly forget and forgive via the limitations of our fruit-fly brains. This grumpy demon won't.

varguy

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