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The OGL Fiasco (part 3)
🕑 Added 2023-03-10 01:57:14 +0000 UTCMy first post in this series was a history of D&D and the OGL, and my second was some of the thoughts and conclusions I've come to.
Here, finally, is how this all affects Dyslexic Character Sheets.
Me, personally
Without the OGL, I wouldn't be able to do any of this. Not legally.
I do try to be legal, because this project is something I'm proud of. I put it on my CV, and happily talk about it at length to people who made the mistake of asking. So the threat to the OGL was, among everything else, a threat to my pride.
I wasn't personally afraid of being sued. I'm a very long way down the ladder - there are many hundreds more attractive targets. And living in the UK means a US company suing me would be a lot more complicated. Our legal system here is far from perfect, but it's a damned sight fairer than the US one.
But I was very afraid that corporate greed may destroy something I love.
A brief history of Dyslexic Character Sheets and the law
I've been making character sheets for more than a decade (I don't actually know the exact day I started, because I never expected it to be a big thing).
When I first played D&D 3.5, I knew almost straight away that the character sheet wasn't the best. The barbarian didn't need the spellbook, while the wizard needed a lot more spellbook than they had. As I played with design ideas, it quickly morphed into a page for each class, along with a couple of common pages, one for combat and one for non-combat stuff like skills.
A lot of fan projects don't care about legality. A fan might draw a cute picture of some Disney characters, or write a steamy Sherlock fanfic, or even write a D&D adventure, and not even wonder whether it's in violation of anybody's intellectual property. The first character sheets I made were the same.
Over time, as this grew into a much bigger and more complicated project, I realised that I would need to care about legality. And as you may have noticed, once I've decided I need to do something, I tend to go all the way.
So I did my research and worked very hard to make this project 100% legal, including the artwork, fonts and everything else. Everything I do operates under the OGL, because the games I make character sheets for were published under the OGL. I also use Paizo's Community Use Policy, Wizards' Fan Content Policy, and others. My own work is open source, released under the Artistic License 2.0, which is a very permissive license not far removed from Creative Commons Attribution. I'm not a lawyer, but as fan projects go I think I'm on pretty solid legal footing.
The future of Dyslexic Character Sheets
I never did make character sheets for 5th edition. Honestly, that was less a conscious decision and more a result of what the people around me were playing - which after the 4e mess, wasn't D&D. It took years for 5e to climb to its current dominant position, and by the time it did I'd missed the boat. Other people had made interesting character sheets for 5e, including class-specific ones. I'm certainly not making them now.
I have no plans to make character sheets for One D&D either. Partly because I haven't forgiven WotC, and partly because they have all the money and the digital platform and they can do it for themselves. They don't need my help.
I'm obviously keeping all the existing games on the website. I'm not making new content for them any more, but I have no reason to get rid of them, and I know a lot of you still play them.
Starfinder is in maintenance mode. I haven't added anything new to Starfinder for a while, and if I'm being honest, I'm not going to. My sheets for Starfinder are in the old PDF process, which is a lot more work for me than the new HTML process.
Paizo say that Pathfinder 2e will be republished under the ORC license. That means I'll need to do the same, adding ORC to my website. This will be largely invisible to most people - I suspect most of you never noticed I have the OGL on my site. Of course, nobody's actually seen ORC yet.
Other games
There's probably a new edition of Starfinder on the way. The upcoming Starfinder Enhanced book is a deep modification very similar to Pathfinder Unchained, which was a precursor to Pathfinder 2e. I can't be certain about that, of course, but it seems likely. If there is a new edition of Starfinder, it's very likely I'll make character sheets for it in the new HTML process.
I want to support the 5e disapora, the new trend for existing D&D players to try other games. Tooling matters, and if my character sheets can make even a small different to an alternative game system's success, then it's a power for me to wield carefully.
As I said in the last post, I worry that the explosion of alternative games will mean no single game reaches the critical mass needed to stand in the same ring as D&D. As great as it is that people are exploring other games, the ability to walk into a gaming store and find other people who want to play the same thing is necessary for a game to gain and keep players. At the moment only D&D 5e and maybe Pathfinder have that. If the 5e diaspora doesn't have a banner to rally around, it'll evaporate. People will go back to D&D, or leave the hobby.
So I'm looking very closely at Project Black Flag as the playtest drips out. I can't say a lot about that for now, as the game doesn't exist yet. There's at least a chance I'll try making character sheets for it. It depends where they strike the balance between continuity with 5e and fixing things that have needed fixing for a long time. The same is true of C7d20 from Cubicle 7, though they're not making the same noise.
I'll have to see the games for real before I can ultimately decide.
Full disclosure
I like to be transparent about the amount I earn here.
I've had an influx of patrons in the last two months, and I'm grateful for that. Earnings have jumped from $217 to $307 per month. Now that's obviously not a salary, but it's a very welcome addition.
Given the rollercoaster state of the British pound, I'm leaving those dollars safely where they are for now, ready for a rainy day. Last time I pulled down my Patreon income it saved from a crisis. (I ordered some Ikea furniture and they charged me five times. They sorted it out eventually, but that was a scary few weeks.)
The uptick in site traffic was more dramatic.
And that's fine. I don't require or expect everyone will be a patron.
I've also noticed an uptick in spam coming from the contact form on my website (I do try to read every message). Amusingly, quite a lot of that spam is trying to sell me something AI-related - as you might imagine, I have opinions on AI.
In conclusion
- Dyslexic Character Sheets aren't going anywhere.
- All four currently supported games are staying, forever as far as I'm concerned.
- Starfinder is officially in maintenance mode, just like Pathfinder 1e and D&D 3.5.
- I haven't decided whether I'll be making character sheets for other games yet, but I'm interested.
