An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Dropout's Dungeons & Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20, is getting pretty close to selling out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after ticket sales opened to the general public. To the uninitiated, it may seem absurd to go to a massive sports arena and watch people play D&D. As one Redditor commented, "This boggles my mind. When I was playing D&D in the early eighties, I would have never believed that there was a future where people would watch live D&D at Madison Square Garden. It's incomprehensible to me." It is indeed bizarre, albeit fun. But in this monumental moment for the actual play genre, the triumph is eclipsed by the biggest frustration that links sports, music and now D&D fans: Ticketmaster. As Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said amid the Taylor Swift-Ticketmaster scandal, the company's failures "ended up converting more Gen Zers into anti-monopolists overnight than anything [she] could have done."

In the case of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, fans were upset because demand was so high that Ticketmaster's system couldn't handle the traffic. For Dimension 20, the culprit is Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing. As more people try to buy tickets, the price of the tickets increase. About an hour after the Madison Square Garden tickets went on sale, the few dozen upper bowl tickets left were $800. Three hours after, these tickets are around $330, which is still very inflated. "Went onto the presale, tickets were $500+ for the worst ones, we assumed they were scalpers and that the actual sale today would have normal priced tickets $2000 for the lower bowl!? I know it's not dropout setting the price but wow is that a LOT of cash," a Redditor posted. And as a commenter astutely pointed out, thanks to dynamic pricing, Ticketmaster itself is actually the scalper. Of course, Dimension 20 fans are frustrated, especially since the show's content is overtly anti-capitalist. Despite the pricing debacle, the demand for the show is a great sign for both actual play shows and the creator economy at large.

The New Yorker looks at 41-year-old Amabel Holland, an autistic board-game designer who "thinks about the world in terms of systems," and realized you could make a board game about almost anything, "and, when you did, its rules could both mirror and analyze the subject on which it was based."

They've since designed more than 60 games, and the article notes that Holland's work, "which is part of a larger turn toward complexity in the industry, often tackles historical and social subjects — death, religion, misinformation — using surprising 'mechanics,' or building blocks of game play, to immerse players in an experience." "With every game, you build a certain model of the world," Reiner Knizia, a former mathematician who's designed more than eight hundred games, told me. Several of his games illustrate market forces: in Modern Art, for instance, you play as auctioneers and buyers, hoping to buy low and sell high. Knizia is a traditional game designer inasmuch as he aims to "bring enjoyment to the people." But Amabel sometimes aims for the opposite of enjoyment... This Guilty Land, from 2018, is about the struggle to end slavery."
Holland says their games are "meant to evoke frustration" — specifically to communicate how difficult it can be to actually achieve political progress.

Thanks to Slashdot reader silverjacket for sharing the article.

Today saw the end of IFComp.org's 29th annual text adventure competition (now administered by the charitable non-profit IF Technology Foundation). 74 new and original text adventures competed for a share of the $7,523 prize pool, with the winners announced in a special online ceremony on Twitch this afternoon.

After all the votes were tabulated, the winning game was Dr Ludwig and the Devil, a 90-minute epic in which an esteemed mad scientist tries to double-cross Beelzebub himself — along with "the world's least effective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob!" Coming in second was LAKE Adventure. (Its premise? That it's a 13-year-old's 1993 game being revisited by its author 28 years later — complete with some gloriously retro artwork.) And finishing third was The Little Match Girl 4 (described as "a touching epic time travel fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.")

But also this week, the owner of the web site 80sNostalgia.com has created a text adventure using nothing but inter-linked posts on Threads.

"Think you can get under The Bridge?" its first post challenges. "Test your gaming skills with this Threads exclusive text-based game!

"And then try to get your head around got much work it took to make it..."

Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: Back in 2019, digital archivist Jason Scott released the source code to Infocom's classic text adventures. Now the other piece of the puzzle is available: the source code (mostly in assembly, with some C and Pascal) to their microcomputer interpreters.

Infocom, publisher of the best-selling Zork series, ported their text adventures to most of the diverse microcomputer platforms of the 1980s by using an early virtual machine, known as the Z-machine or ZIP. This enabled them to sell games simultaneously for everything from the TI-99/4A to the Commodore 128. Hobbyists reverse-engineered the technology in the 1990s to create modern implementations, but now the original source code can be studied directly.

Amazon has revealed that Fallout -- a live-action adaptation of Bethesda's popular RPG video game franchise -- will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video. The Verge reports: The announcement was made on October 23rd, otherwise known to Fallout fans as "Fallout Day" -- the in-game date that marks the beginning of the Great War that turns the world into an irradiated nuclear wasteland. Bethesda's executive producer and game director Todd Howard is an executive producer on the series, which stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight), Aaron Moten (Emancipation), Moises Arias (The King of Staten Island), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), and Sarita Choudhury (Homeland).

Alongside the premiere announcement itself (which was amusingly presented as an interactive Pip-Boy interface graphic), Amazon said in a press release that the show will be an original story set in a future, post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles and will be considered a canonical addition to the existing game franchise. We do not currently know how many episodes will be in the series or what the release schedule will look like following the premiere.

Slashdot reader TranquilVoid writes: To better understand the battles between native and invasive ants, scientists at Australia's national science agency have turned to Microsoft's classic computer game to model ant warfare.

Across Australia, 50 different species of invasive ants have established themselves, including electric ants, fire ants and yellow crazy ants, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent attempting to eradicate them.

"Ants are one of the few groups of animal species in which warfare resembles human warfare, in terms of scale and mortality," researcher Samuel Lymbery said. The research found small armies of strong soldiers did better in complex terrain-based battlefields and large armies of weaker soldiers fared better in simple open battlefields. In the ant world, a simple battlefield would be a footpath or park while a complex battlefield would be bushland with undergrowth and woody debris.

Dr Lymbery said his work could help develop new approaches to habitat management, like adding undergrowth or more environmental complexity back into urbanised environments, to tip the competitive balance back in favour of native ants.

In 2019, CD Projekt Red unexpectedly announced Cyberpunk 2077's 2020 release, surprising some employees. Released in December 2020, it faced bugs and issues, symbolizing industry crunch. However, post-release updates, particularly in 2022, significantly improved the game, leading some to praise its transformation. A Kotaku critic wrote that the game "might finally be complete." But CD Projekt Red wasn't finished just yet. Now, in September 2023, the Cyberpunk 2077 saga is coming to an end with two final, major releases:
1. The 2.0 patch, which came out Sept. 21 and overhauls many of the game's core mechanics.
2. Phantom Liberty, an expansion starring Idris Elba that's out on Sept. 26.

Bloomberg adds: Both appear to be excellent. The expansion adds a new area to the game's dystopian Night City and tells a heist story in which you team up with the president and government spooks. It has received glowing reviews from critics, with IGN declaring that, "Phantom Liberty is Cyberpunk 2077 at its best." New content is great, but it's the 2.0 patch that makes the biggest impact on Cyberpunk 2077, with changes that are made immediately apparent when you open up the game. The menus are cleaner, the loot system is less convoluted and character building feels completely different thanks to a revamped skill system that allows for more distinct playstyles. You can now specialize, transforming your character into a stealthy ninja, a speedy assaulter or a cybernetic hacker.

Cyberpunk 2077's biggest problem, aside from the bugs, was its uncertainty over whether it wanted to be Deus Ex or Grand Theft Auto. It straddled the line between deep role-playing game and systemic open-world sandbox, ultimately feeling like an inferior version of both. Although the new patch doesn't pick a side in this divide, it does bolster them. The new level system allows for the type of build experimentation that RPG fans were hoping to see in Cyberpunk 2077.

71-year-old Mark Evanier is a legendary comic book/TV writer. Today he posted on his personal blog that "Forty years ago, I spent about six days (cumulative) of my life writing the pilot script and small-b bible for a Saturday morning cartoon series called Dungeons & Dragons...

"I feel like I have now spent more than six days (cumulative) being interviewed about this series." It went on CBS on September 17, 1983 and lasted three seasons. Do not believe those who claim it was driven from the airwaves by pressure groups who saw satanic subtext in the series. It went off for the same reason most shows go off: Because the ratings were declining and — rightly or wrongly — the brass at the network didn't think it would have enough viewers to sustain another season. Yes, there were protests about its content but not many and CBS, at least in those days, was pretty good about ignoring such outcries if — and this is always a Big If — the viewers seem to want whatever is being outcried about.
From Wikipedia: The level of violence was controversial for American children's television at the time, and the script of one episode, "The Dragon's Graveyard", was almost canceled because the characters contemplated killing their nemesis, Venger. In 1985, the National Coalition on Television Violence demanded that the FTC run a warning during each broadcast stating that Dungeons & Dragons had been linked to real-life violent deaths.
The show ultimately ran for a total of 27 episodes. The blog post continues: It was a good show because of good writers, good producers, good artists, good voice talent, good everything...and I was mostly a spectator to all that goodness, having opted not to stick with it. Still, thanks to the gent who was my agent at the time, my name was seen for a micro-second in the credits each week so I get more kudos than I probably earned...

Quite recently, I sat for this video podcast with a fine interviewer and a major fan of the series, Heath Holland. It's almost an hour and we talked about some other things but it's mostly about Dungeons & Dragons...
The podcaster notes that the cartoon's six adventurers even made a cameo in 2022's live-action Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves — and several other companies are still celebrating the cartoon. Hasbro recently released a line of action figures based on the cartoon, while IDW has released a comic book mini-series called Dungeons & Dragons: Saturday Morning Adventures.

In the series six children are transported from an amusement park's Dungeon's & Dragons ride into the game's realm, where a kindly Dungeon Master helps them battle various villains and monsters as they search for a way home. More lore about the series from Wikipedia: A final unproduced episode would have served as both a conclusion to the story and as a re-imagining of the show, had it been picked up for a fourth season. However, it was canceled before the episode was made. The script has since been published online and was performed as an audio drama as a special feature for the BCI Eclipse DVD edition of the series... A fan-made animated version of the finale appeared online in 2020 [according to TheGamer.com].

tlhIngan writes: Starfield, a Bethesda space-based RPG that was recently released, was criticized for not having Nvidia DLSS support -- instead the game was primarily written to feature AMD's FSR support. This isn't too surprising since the major consoles all use AMD processors and GPUs. However, an enterprising modder created a mod that enables players with Nvidia cards to enable DLSS. This isn't the unusual bit -- the mod makes DLSS2 (ca. 2020) available for free, while the version enabling DLSS3 (which adds the ability to use AI to generate frames in-between) is behind a Patreon paywall. This has lead to several other people to crack the DRM protecting the mod itself (note: this is not the DRM on the game itself -- the game's Steam page doesn't seem to imply use of 3rd party DRM beyond Steam). Imagine that -- DRM on a game mod because it requires payment.

Kotaku reports that last week 29-year old Darin Harris "allegedly stole dozens of copies of the game from a warehouse and started selling them online," prompting lots of pre-release leaks for the game.

"One Reddit user immediately reported the leaks to Bethesda and Memphis police," adds Kotaku. "And he's now been banned from the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit after posting about it." I know this because the commenter in question, Jasper Adkins, emailed Kotaku to inform us it had happened. "It seems to me that the subreddit is running on 'bread and circuses' mode mixed with bystander syndrome," he wrote in his initial email. "They're perfectly willing to ignore a crime that hurts a developer they claim to support, in exchange for a few minutes of shaky gameplay filmed from a phone...."

Despite the criminal charges against him, Harris has become something of a folk hero within the community of fans hungry for Starfield leaks. As the Commercial Appeal reported, memes hail him as "Lord Tyrone" (his middle name) and one player even vowed to name their Starfield ship "Memphian" in his honor...

[Adkins] was banned from r/GamingLeaksAndRumours on August 24 shortly after posting about how he tried to help get Harris arrested. "An officer at the station told me so himself when I called him about it," he wrote in the middle of a long comment thread. Adkins soon received a notification that he had violated the subreddit's rules. He protested, but the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours admins weren't having it. "Just not interested in having someone here who takes action against the community like that," they wrote back.

I reached out to one of the subreddit's admins to confirm what had happened and the thinking behind the ban. "If he just did it I wouldn't think badly of him but to come on the sub and brag about calling the cops on the dude just rubbed me the wrong way," one of them told Kotaku in a DM. "Might unban him at some point but for now he's behind the bars of the internet."

A Dungeons & Dragons expansion book included AI-generated artwork. Fans on Twitter spotted it before the book was even released (noting, among other things, a wolf with human feet). An embarrassed representative for Wizards of the Coast then tweeted out an announcement about new guidelines stating explicitly that "artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their creation process for developing D&D art." GeekWire reports: The artist in question, Ilya Shkipin, is a California-based painter, illustrator, and operator of an NFT marketplace, who has worked on projects for Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast since 2014. Shkipin took to Twitter himself on Friday, and acknowledged in several now-deleted tweets that he'd used AI tools to "polish" several original illustrations and concept sketches. As of Saturday morning, Shkipin had taken down his original tweets and announced that the illustrations for Glory of the Giants are "going to be reworked..."

While the physical book won't be out until August 15, the e-book is available now from Wizards' D&D Beyond digital storefront.
Wizards of the Coast emphasized this won't happen again. About this particular incident, they noted "We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he's put years of work into books we all love. While we weren't aware of the artist's choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards' work moving forward."

GeekWire adds that the latest D&D video game, Baldur's Gate 3, "went into its full launch period on Tuesday. Based on metrics such as its player population on Steam, BG3 has been an immediate success, with a high of over 709,000 people playing it concurrently on Saturday afternoon."

Open-world sci-fi RPG Cyberpunk 2077's biggest subreddit recently switched to NSFW (not safe for work,) with the explanation that the game it is focused on is a mature game filled with nudity and gore. However, Reddit allegedly demanded that mods of the subreddit quickly revert the change. From a report: The mods aren't complying and users are now posting nude images of in-game characters as part of a protest to show why the subreddit deserves to be NSFW. Since May, Reddit has been at war with its users and subreddits as the company clamps down on third-party apps and their ability to access the site's backend or API. It's not gone well for Reddit, leading to popular subreddits like r/bestof, r/sports, and r/music going dark. And as part of this ongoing backlash, some subreddits switched to NSFW. This designation is reserved mainly for porn-y subreddits and blocks ads from appearing, but also lets users freely post nudity and more adult content.

Some mods and subreddits have used this designation to punch back at Reddit and its despised CEO. Now the Cyberpunk 2077 subreddit has seemingly wandered into this mess. According to a post from July 5 by moderator Tabnam, the decision to make the Cyberpunk 2077 subreddit NSFW was made because the game is "an 18+ game" and happened now because the mods had "never thought to change it until recently." Tabnam added that this subreddit should have already been NSFW. This decision apparently didn't go over well with Reddit.

"A group of researchers at Stanford University and Google have created a miniature RPG-style virtual world similar to The Sims," writes Ars Technica, "where 25 characters, controlled by ChatGPT and custom code, live out their lives independently with a high degree of realistic behavior." "Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day," write the researchers in their paper... To pull this off, the researchers relied heavily on a large language model for social interaction, specifically the ChatGPT API. In addition, they created an architecture that simulates minds with memories and experiences, then let the agents loose in the world to interact.... To study the group of AI agents, the researchers set up a virtual town called "Smallville," which includes houses, a cafe, a park, and a grocery store.... Interestingly, when the characters in the sandbox world encounter each other, they often speak to each other using natural language provided by ChatGPT. In this way, they exchange information and form memories about their daily lives.

When the researchers combined these basic ingredients together and ran the simulation, interesting things began to happen. In the paper, the researchers list three emergent behaviors resulting from the simulation. None of these were pre-programmed but rather resulted from the interactions between the agents. These included "information diffusion" (agents telling each other information and having it spread socially among the town), "relationship memory" (memory of past interactions between agents and mentioning those earlier events later), and "coordination" (planning and attending a Valentine's Day party together with other agents).... "Starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party," the researchers write, "the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time...."

To get a look at Smallville, the researchers have posted an interactive demo online through a special website, but it's a "pre-computed replay of a simulation" described in the paper and not a real-time simulation. Still, it gives a good illustration of the richness of social interactions that can emerge from an apparently simple virtual world running in a computer sandbox.
Interstingly, the researchers hired human evaluators to gauge how well the AI agents produced believable responses — and discovered they were more believable than when supplied their own responses.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Sega parent company Sega Sammy Holdings is nearing a deal to purchase "Angry Birds" maker Rovio for $1 billion. Polygon reports: Rovio is best known for Angry Birds, the physics puzzle game that launched on iOS in 2009. Rovio has delivered multiple sequels, spinoffs, and tie-ins with other brands, including Star Wars, Transformers, and the animated movie Rio. Sega and Rovio also teamed up in 2015 to bring Sonic the Hedgehog characters to Angry Birds Epic, a turn-based RPG. An animated series and two feature films were also released using Angry Birds characters.

Angry Birds' global success hasn't translated to Rovio's other games, which include action-role-playing game Darkfire Heroes and colorful matching games Small Town Murders and Sugar Blast. Sega's current mobile game lineup includes a variety of Sonic the Hedgehog running games and retro games from the Sega Genesis era.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game. No one knows who leaked the Pentagon documents or how. They appeared online as photographs of printed pages, implying someone printed them out and removed them from a secure location, similar to how NSA translator Reality Winner leaked documents. The earliest documents Motherboard has seen are dated February 23, though the New York Times and Bellingcat reported that some are dated as early as January. According to Bellingcat, the earliest known instances of the leaks appearing online can be traced back to a Discord server.

At some point, a Discord user uploaded a zip file of 32 images from the leak onto a Minecraft Discord server. Included in this pack alongside highly sensitive, Top Secret and other classified documents about the Pentagon's strategy and assessment of the war in Ukraine, was a handwritten piece of paper that appeared to be a character sheet for a roleplaying game. It's written on a standard piece of notebook paper, three holes punched out on the side, blue lines crisscrossing the page. The character's name is Doctor "Izmer Trotzky," his character class is "Professor Scientist." They've got a strength of 5, a charisma of 4, and 19 rubles to their name. Doctor Trotzky has 10 points in first aid and occult skills, and 24 in spot hidden. He's carrying a magnifying glass, a fountain pen, a sword cane, and a deringer. [...]

But what game is it from? Motherboard reached out to game designer Jacqueline Bryk to find out. Bryk is an award-winning designer of roleplaying games who has worked on Kult: Divinity Lost, Changeling: the Lost, Fading Suns: Pax Alexius, and Vampire: the Masquerade. "I strongly suspect this is Call Of Cthulhu," Bryk said when first looking at the sheet. Call of Cthulhu (COC) is an RPG based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft where players attempt to stave off madness while investigating eldritch horrors. "This is a pretty classic Professor build. The sword cane really clinches it for me. I notice he's currently carrying a derringer and a dagger but took no points in firearms or fighting. I'm not sure which edition this is but it seems like the most he could do with his weapons is throw them." "After some research, Bryk concluded that the game is a homebrewed combination of COC and the Fallout tabletop game based on the popular video game franchise," adds Motherboard. "My best guest here is Fallout: Cthulhu the Homebrew," Bryk said, giving the home designed game a name.

An anonymous reader shares a report from PC Gamer: In a blog post published Friday, Wizards of the Coast announced that it is fully putting the kibosh on the proposed Open Gaming License (OGL) 1.2 that threw the tabletop RPG community into disarray at the beginning of this month.

Instead, Wizards will leave the previously enshrined OGL 1.0 in place, while also putting the latest D&D Systems Reference Document (SRD 5.1) under a Creative Commons License (thanks to GamesRadar for the spot).

The original OGL was put in place with the third edition of D&D in 2000, and allowed other companies and creators to base their work off D&D and the d20 system without payment to or oversight from Wizards. A draft of a revised OGL 1.1 leaked early in January, which proposed royalty payments and creative control by Wizards over derivative works. This immediately incited a backlash from fans. Wizards backpedaled, introducing a softer OGL 1.2 that would still replace the original, and opened the community survey cited in today's announcement.

With 15,000 respondents in, the results of the survey were pretty damning. 88% didn't "want to publish TTRPG content under OGL 1.2," while 89% were "dissatisfied with deauthorizing OGL 1.0a." 62% were happy that Wizards would put prior SRD versions under Creative Commons, with most of the dissenters wanting more Creative Commons-protected content.

In response, Wizards of the Coast caved.
"We welcome today's news from Wizards of the Coast regarding their intention not to de-authorize OGL 1.0a," tweeted Pathfinder publisher Paizo, who'd launched an effort to move the industry away from WotC's OGL. But "We still believe there is a powerful need for an irrevocable, perpetual independent system-neutral open license that will serve the tabletop community via nonprofit stewardship.

"Work on the ORC license will continue, with an expected first draft to release for comment to participating publishers in February."

Blizzard will suspend games in China because it can't reach an agreement with its licensing and publishing partner NetEase, it said in a press release. World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch 2, Starcraft, Heroes of the Storm, Diablo III, and Warcraft III: Reforged won't be available in China after January 23, 2023. The Verge reports: Blizzard will suspend the sale of games and offer guidance to Chinese players "in the coming days," according to the press release, which did not offer a specific timeline. Development of Diablo Immortal is in a separate agreement and will continue, NetEase said in a statement. Upcoming releases, including the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Dragonflight, and the second season of Overwatch 2, "will proceed later this year," according to Blizzard. "We're immensely grateful for the passion our Chinese community has shown throughout the nearly 20 years we've been bringing our games to China," said Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra in the press release. "We are looking for alternatives to bring our games back to players in the future."

A new draft of the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License, dubbed OGL 1.2 by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is now available for download. Polygon reports: The announcement was made Thursday by Kyle Brink, executive producer of D&D, on the D&D Beyond website. According to Wizards, this draft could place the OGL outside of the publisher's control -- which should sound good to fans enraged by recent events. Time will tell, but public comment will be accepted beginning Jan. 20 and will continue through Feb. 3. [...] Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that, by its own description, "helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world's most pressing challenges." As such, a Creative Commons license once enacted could ultimately put the OGL 1.2 outside of Wizards' control in perpetuity.

"We're giving the core D&D mechanics to the community through a Creative Commons license, which means that they are fully in your hands," Brink said in the blog post. "If you want to use quintessentially D&D content from the SRD such as owlbears and magic missile, OGL 1.2 will provide you a perpetual, irrevocable license to do so." So much trust has been lost over the last several weeks that it will no doubt take a while for legal experts -- armchair and otherwise -- to pour over the details of the new OGL. These are the bullet points that Wizards is promoting in this official statement: - Protecting D&D's inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You'll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. We want an inclusive, safe play experience for everyone. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn't give us any ability to ensure it

- TTRPGs and VTTs. OGL 1.2 will only apply to TTRPG content, whether published as books, as electronic publications, or on virtual tabletops (VTTs). Nobody needs to wonder or worry if it applies to anything else. It doesn't.

- Deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. We know this is a big concern. The Creative Commons license and the open terms of 1.2 are intended to help with that. One key reason why we have to deauthorize: We can't use the protective options in 1.2 if someone can just choose to publish harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content under 1.0a. And again, any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a will still always be licensed under OGL 1.0a.

- Very limited license changes allowed. Only two sections can be changed once OGL 1.2 is live: how you cite Wizards in your work and how we can contact each other. We don't know what the future holds or what technologies we will use to communicate with each other, so we thought these two sections needed to be future-proofed. A revised version of this draft will be presented to the community again "on or before February 17."

"The process will extend as long as it needs to," Brink said. "We'll keep iterating and getting your feedback until we get it right."

Following controversial changes to Dungeons & Dragons' decades-old Open Gaming License (OGL), "many prominent third-party RPG publishers now say they're abandoning the OGL, regardless of what changes [publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC)] officially releases in a coming new version," reports Ars Technica. "What's more, many in the community have now lost faith in WotC's stewardship of the licensed rules system that has underpinned so much of the industry's last two decades." From the report: Pathfinder publisher Paizo Inc. is behind perhaps the biggest effort to move the industry away from WotC's OGL. The company announced last Thursday that it is creating a new Open RPG Creative License (ORC) designed to be "open, perpetual, and irrevocable." [...] Regardless of the legal fate of the OGL, Paizo says it wants to "irrevocably and unquestionably keep alive the spirit of the Open Game License" with its new ORC. The system-agnostic license, designed with the help of IP law firm Azora Law, will eventually be controlled and protected by a nonprofit akin to the Linux Foundation, the company says. Until that new license is ready, upcoming Paizo products will be printed without any explicit license, the company says.

Paizo's ORC effort has already drawn some significant support from the community. Call of Cthulhu and Runequest publisher Chaosium, which never used the WotC OGL for its products in the first place, nonetheless writes that it's "very happy to be working with the rest of the industry to come up with a system-wide OGL that anyone can use." Popular D&D module publisher Kobold Press has also lent its support to Paizo's ORC product but stopped just short of committing to use it for its just-announced Core Fantasy ruleset, codenamed Project Black Flag. Instead, Kobold says it is "wait[ing] to see exactly what shape the Open Gaming License might take in this new era" and "will review the terms and consider whether they fit the needs of our audience and our business goals" when the updated OGL is eventually released. Mutants & Masterminds publisher Green Ronin is also on board with the ORC, with founder and President Chris Pramas publicly comparing the current OGL fiasco to WotC's disastrous attempt to push a new Game System License for the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons back in 2008.

Apart from the companies backing Paizo's ORC -- including Legendary Games and Rogue Genius -- some tabletop publishers are creating their own licenses or finding other ways to extricate themselves from the WotC OGL. Blade Runner RPG and Mutant: Year Zero publisher Free League, for instance, says it's overhauling its unique Year Zero Engine to remove any WotC OGL content. At the same time, it's creating a new "irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free" license for anyone who wants to use that engine in their own games. [...] Old-School Essentials publisher Necrotic Gnome has similarly announced that it's "moving away from the OGL" for its future products. The company is leaving a bit of wiggle room, saying it will be "keeping an eye on developments" and that its next move "will depend on how the OGL topic develops over the coming months." But Necrotic Gnome adds that "the direction is clear," and that direction is toward "an alternative open license," which could end up being Paizo's ORC. Arcadia publisher MCDM and publisher Basic Fantasy also have plans to abandon the D&D 5th edition ruleset. "Troll Lord Games, meanwhile, publicly abandoned the OGL weeks ago and liquidated its existing stock of 5th-edition D&D products, 'never to be revisited again, in any edition,'" adds Ars.