Open Gaming Licenses and Alternatives: How Roleplaying Games are Protecting Their Copyrights

From a legal standpoint, Creative Commons licenses present a stark trade-off for commercial tabletop ecosystems: enabling privatization of community-built derivatives, or effectively foreclosing creators’ ability to reserve proprietary storylines or monetizable supplements. Publishers have adopted bespoke open-gaming frameworks that calibrate grants, attribution, irrevocability, and registration mechanics to preserve downstream creativity while managing litigation risk and market incentives. The real question is whether these companies should be responsible for balancing these values without any guidance from a federal government that is constitutionally empowered to strike that balance fairly.  

Creative Commons Licenses (“CCLs”) serve as a mechanism for copyright holders to allow the general public to use their copyrighted work under specific restrictions. However, for roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons (“D&D”) and the companies that own them, CCLs pose some challenges. See Paizo Inc., Open RPG Creative License: Answers & Explanations (AxE) (2023), https://downloads.paizo.com/ORC_AxEFINAL.pdf. CCLs have two versions that companies can use to allow licensing of their work for commercial use. See id.  Unfortunately, one of the licenses allows downstream licensors to refuse to relicense their content, which limits the flow of creativity in a space that relies on open availability. See id.  While the other license requires all future licensors to relicense their content, it also requires any derivative material to be relicensed, including their own personal characters, story arcs, and lore. See id.  Ultimately, these licenses present challenges for roleplaying game companies, but they still lay out a standard that companies can follow for protecting certain content related to their games.  

While CCLs present problems related to the content surrounding these games, the core of roleplaying games are their rulesets. Copyright law does not protect the rules of games, despite these rules being the indispensable engine of the community’s creative output. Hence, many roleplaying games have needed other means of protection for their rulesets.  See Rules in Practice, Part 2 Modern Mythology (2025) https://www.modernmythology.net/articles/rules-in-practice-part-2-rulebooks-roleplay; 17 U.S.C. §102(b) (1976); See DaVinci Editrice S.R.L. v. ZiKo Games, LLC, 183 F. Supp. 3d 820, 834 (S.D. Tex. 2016).  

Thus, these companies have turned to Open Gaming Licenses (“OGLs”), used by roleplaying game owners to allow creators to take credit for their rulesets while ensuring that the cycle of creativity in these spaces can continue. In August of 2022, Wizards of the Coast released a statement that they were releasing a new version of D&D called OneD&D, and with it would come a new version of their OGL. See Linda Codega, Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition, Gizmodo (January 5, 2023), https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634. A few months later, a document containing a draft of the new OGL was leaked, with severe backlash from the community following. See Linda Codega, Wizards of the Coast Cancels OGL Announcement After Online Ire, Gizmodo (January 12, 2023), https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-ogl-announcement-wizards-of-the-coast-1849981365. Dungeons and Dragons released their first version of an OGL in 2000, which allowed content creators to use content that was owned by Wizards of the Coast to create their own products. See Linda Codega, Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition. Although these products sometimes competed with official Wizards of the Coast material, they also brought growth and popularity to the D&D community as a whole. See Linda Codega, Wizards of the Coast Cancels OGL Announcement After Online Ire. While the OGL has seen some changes over the years, the announcement that Wizards of the Coast was releasing a new OGL was an unprecedented move. See id.  

The leaked version of the OGL contained two major changes that the community was unhappy about. Firstly, the new version of the OGL invalidated the previous version which meant that any individuals or organizations who had licensed content under the old OGL either had to republish their content under the new OGL or be at risk of suit from Wizards of the Coast. See id. The other major change in the OGL was the royalty system change. Under the new OGL, regardless of the amount of money that a licensee makes, they have to register their product with Wizards of the Coast and report information like the price and where the product is intended to be sold. See Linda Codega, Wizards of the Coast Cancels OGL Announcement After Online Ire. Although this change seems minute, creators for D&D related material work across multiple different platforms and smaller creators may struggle to track the places where their licensed product is being resold. See id. 

Copyright law is predicated on a utilitarian premise of balancing, “the tradeoff between the social benefits of increased production. . . and the social costs imposed by raising the marginal cost of using copyrighted works.” Xerox Corp. v. Apple Comput., Inc., 734 F. Supp. 1542, 1544-45 (N.D. Cal. 1990). Keeping this balance is an enumerated power of Congress, but the lack of ruleset protectability under current copyright law forced companies to try and strike this balance themselves. See Golan v. Holder, 565 U.S. 302 (2012).  

Ultimately, the backlash from the community related to the difficulties that smaller content creators would face under the new OGL, which led Wizards of the Coast to cancel their new OGL and return to the original version. See Linda Codega, Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition. However, the ramifications of the proposed switch had already sent waves through the roleplaying game community.   

Paizo-owned roleplaying giant Pathfinder had been watching the drama unfold with Wizards of the Coast and decided to take its OGL in a different direction. Rebranding its OGL as an Open RPG Creative License (“ORC”), Paizo rewrote its license to disclaim all royalties and even included a clause preventing any future versions or amendments to it by anyone, including themselves. See Linda Codega, Paizo Announces a New Gaming License Amid Dungeons & Dragons’ OGL Controversy, Gizmodo (January 12, 2023) https://gizmodo.com/paizo-wizards-of-the-coast-dnd-open-rpg-ogl-1-1-1849982443; The ORC AxE Paizo (2023) https://downloads.paizo.com/ORC_AxEFINAL.pdf.  In essence, the ORC License is Paizo taking a step in the opposite direction from Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to take greater control of their licensed material by instead trying to give as much control of the license to the community. See id.   

At the end of the day, private licensing mechanisms such as the OGL and ORCs serve as methods for private companies to strike the balance between protecting their creations and allowing the public to use them. While these attempts have been varying in success in terms of their public reception, the striking of this balance should be done by Congress and not private entities seeking to further their own interests. The gaming community has taken one major point from this discussion: leaving the protection of game rules to the whims of private licenses ultimately leads creators and the gaming community to broken trust, which chills the innovation the licenses mean to induce. Congress must preserve the balance between proprietary interests and communal creativity by creating a durable legislative path to protect creator investments and tabletop roleplaying’s generative culture. Whether this means creating a copyright exception for the rules of roleplaying games specifically because of their centrality to the game’s identity, or repealing the copyright restriction on game rules entirely, it is clear that Congress needs to step in to ensure that these principles are balanced fairly.