The Open Game License

What happened

When Wizards of the Coast prepared the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000, designed by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook and Skip Williams, it also made an unusual business bet. Ryan Dancey, a Wizards vice president whose company had bought TSR and D&D in 1997, argued that the company should embrace ideas from the open-source software movement. The result was the Open Game License, released in 2000 (as v1.0, then v1.0a), together with a System Reference Document (SRD) containing the core rules: classes, spells, monsters and magic items.

The license granted anyone a "perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive" right to use Open Game Content, the mechanics, while protecting "Product Identity" such as trademarks, named characters and signature monsters like the beholder and mind flayer. A separate d20 System Trademark License let publishers print a compatibility logo. Dancey's reasoning was strategic: if every publisher used one rules system, players would learn it once and move freely between products, and the market leader would benefit most. The ambition, as academics later summarized it, was to make "d20" as recognizable as VHS or DVD.

Why it mattered

The effect was immediate. Dozens of companies rushed out d20 adventures and sourcebooks, and in the early 2000s d20 products outsold non-d20 ones; scholars later described the OGL as creating "a boom in the RPG industry." Quality varied wildly, but the principle stuck. The mechanics of the world's most popular roleplaying game had become a commons.

That commons outlived Wizards' enthusiasm. For fourth edition in 2008 the company switched to a narrower Game System License, but the OGL declared itself perpetual, and publishers kept using the 3.5 rules. Paizo, which had lost its license to publish Dragon and Dungeon, took the 3.5 SRD and, under lead designer Jason Bulmahn, built the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (2009), giving players who preferred the 3.5 rules a thriving, independent home. Fans on forums such as Dragonsfoot used the SRD to reverse-engineer out-of-print editions, producing the retro-clones that powered the Old-School Renaissance (OSR), a lineage that runs to games like Old-School Essentials. Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics (2012) was built on the same open rules. In January 2016 Wizards returned to the fold, releasing a fifth-edition SRD under OGL 1.0a.

Legacy

The crisis came in the winter of 2022–23. As Wizards prepared a revised fifth edition and a digital strategy built around D&D Beyond, reports spread that the OGL would change. On January 5, 2023, io9 published details of a leaked "OGL 1.1": it would require publishers to report revenue above $50,000 a year, charge royalties to the largest earners, claim broad rights to licensees' content, exclude video games and virtual tabletops, and "de-authorize" the old 1.0a license that thousands of products relied on. Ryan Dancey said publicly that the license he had designed could never be revoked.

The backlash was swift and broad. An #OpenDND petition gathered more than 66,000 signatures within days; creators paused projects; fans canceled D&D Beyond subscriptions in numbers io9's sources called "not negligible." Paizo announced the Open RPG Creative License (ORC), a system-neutral license owned by no publisher, and was joined by Chaosium, Kobold Press, Green Ronin and others; Kobold Press and MCDM announced new open games of their own, and Free League released its own licenses. The proposed terms even revealed a side arrangement: Kickstarter had negotiated a lower royalty for campaigns on its platform.

Wizards retreated in stages: a January 13 statement walking back royalties, a January 19 draft "OGL 1.2" with an apology, and a public survey of more than 15,000 respondents, 89 percent of whom were dissatisfied with de-authorizing the old license. On January 27, 2023, it abandoned the effort entirely, left OGL 1.0a untouched and placed SRD 5.1 under the irrevocable Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 license. SRD 5.2, reflecting the 2024 rules revision, followed under the same license in April 2025.

The episode rewrote the relationship between D&D and its community. A license written in 2000 as a business tactic had become, in players' eyes, a promise, and when the company tried to break it, the community forced it to keep its word.