In the Brief History of the Open Gaming License, we discussed how the Open Gaming License (OGL) works and how it has impacted the RPG industry and hobby since its introduction in 2000. If you’re unfamiliar with the OGL, you may want to check that essay out first.

One thing I didn’t touch on in that essay is a meme which has grown particularly more popular over the last few weeks as it’s become clear that Hasbro is, once again, planning to abandon the OGL. It goes something like this:

You can’t copyright game mechanics, therefore you don’t need to use the OGL to publish D&D-compatible supplements or games based on D&D.

In its most vituperative forms, this meme will even go so far as to claim the OGL offers absolutely nothing of value to creators and that the whole thing is just a huge scam cooked up by Wizards of the Coast.

Is this true?

First things first: I am not a lawyer and nothing in this essay should be construed as legal advice. But I do have a couple decades worth of experience working with the OGL, so take what I say here with however much value you put in that.

As for the claim, it is… somewhat true. (And we’ll talk about why it’s true.)

But most of the time when I see it online, I think it is usually misleading and, more often than not, completely wrong.

So, right up front, let me be clear: If you’re planning to dance this dance, get an IP lawyer to review literally everything you publish.

One last thing: I’m going to be discussing things primarily from the view point of U.S. copyright and trademark laws. If you’re not in the U.S., some of this might still apply. More likely it won’t. So, again: Get an IP lawyer.

WHAT YOU GIVE UP: CLAIMING COMPATIBILITY

Let’s start by talking about what legal rights you give up if you choose to publish a book with the OGL: The ability to claim compatibility with D&D.

It’s a long-established tenet of U.S. law, supported by Supreme Court decisions, that you have the right to indicate compatibility with a third-party product in your advertising and product labeling. (For example, if you produced a replacement carburetor compatible with Ford Mustangs, you could use Ford’s trademarks to indicate that.)

So, insofar as you have the right to publish D&D-compatible books (which is, of course, the question we’ll be looking at in more detail below), trademark law would allow you to say, “This book is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons®.”

If you use the OGL, however, you specifically agree to NOT do that:

7. Use of Product Identity: You agree not to Use any Product Identity, including as an indication of compatibility, except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of each element of Product Identity. You agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of such Trademark or Registered Trademark.

It’s also possible that if you use Open Game Content from other publishers, that their declarations of Product Identity could also prohibit you from using other material you would otherwise have a legal right to use.

A couple things to keep in mind, though.

First, claiming compatibility with third-party trademarks is more legally fraught than this simple summary might suggest. There are very specific and very nuanced legal guidelines about exactly what you are and are not allowed to do, and if you step over those lines… well, say hello to Hasbro’s lawyers, because they’re legally mandated to protect their trademarks at risk of losing those trademarks.

(Although that, too, is a pithy legal aphorism which is more complicated than the simple statement would suggest. Honestly, “more complicated than a simple statement would suggest” is just the way the law works.)

Second, the inability to use Hasbro’s trademarks to indicate compatibility has historically been largely irrelevant. D&D is such an insane juggernaut in the RPG industry that all I need to say is “5^th Edition” and you instantly know that I’m talking about the 5^th Edition of D&D — not Call of Cthulhu or Shadowrun or Vampire: The Masquerade.

This means that publishers can just stick “Compatible with 5^th Edition” or even just a big ol’ “5E” on their cover, and everyone knows exactly what they’re talking about. Hasbro can’t (or, at least, doesn’t) own a trademark on something so generic as “5^th Edition” or “5E,” so there’s absolutely no reason for anyone to dip their toes into the sticky legal morass of claiming compatibility.

Now, with that being said, there are also some signs that Hasbro is looking to make this more difficult. For example, some variety of “For Use with the Oldest/Most Popular/Greatest Roleplaying Game!” has also been frequently used on OGL books. But with the release of Spelljammer earlier this year, Wizards of the Coast claimed THE WORLD’S GREATEST ROLEPLAYING GAME™ as a trademark for the first time.

Is that similar enough to THE WORLD’S OLDEST ROLEPLAYING GAME that Hasbro’s lawyers could claim trademark confusion? Maybe. I have no idea. Get an IP lawyer.

The title of “OneD&D” itself is, most likely, a development title just like “D&D Next” was during the playtesting period for 5^th Edition. But, notably, “OneD&D” is also highly resistant to any kind of generic “Compatible with 3.5” or “5E” labels. Yes, it’s likely that people will still refer to the new game as “6^th Edition” regardless, but if Wizards were to push hard on an alternative label (whether that’s OneD&D or something else) it could very possibly affect the perception of the average D&D consumer (who doesn’t actually know anything about the OGL).

THE BASICS

Okay, let’s talk about some basics.

Copyright is a form of intellectual property that gives the creator of a work the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, or perform it. It’s very, very complicated. In terms of RPGs, you can mostly think of it in terms of the publisher owning the words and pictures in the book. Under modern law, copyright does NOT have to be claimed; a creator has copyright in their work as soon as it is “fixed” in a tangible medium (i.e., written down), but registration offers legal benefits.

Copyright is given legal protection because it encourages the creation and sharing of new works. (Without copyright, those who invest time and money into creating new things would be less capable of marketing them competitively compared to someone who just xeroxes them.)

Trademarks are a different form of intellectual property right. They are signs, designs, or expressions that uniquely identify products or services from a particular source. In terms of RPGs, you can mostly think in terms of logos, brand names, corporate names, and, in some cases, the title for a series of books. (But not the titles of individual books.)

Trademarks exist in order to legally protect consumers from fraudulent claims. Trademarks can be either unregistered, in which case they’re indicated with the ™ symbol, or registered, in which case they appear with the ® symbol. Registration offers a number of legal benefits and advantages, but despite what you may have heard from dubious sources, both registered and unregistered trademarks can be legally enforced.

Public domain refers to creative works which are not protected by intellectual property laws. For our purposes, you can mostly think of this as “stuff that could be copyrighted if it was created today, but was created so long ago that it’s no longer protected by copyright.” (This is vastly simplified, but, as I say, it will suffice for our discussion here.)

Game mechanics cannot be copyrighted. (They can be patented, but, thankfully, we can ignore that because Hasbro has never claimed any patents for D&D’s mechanics.) You CAN have copyright in:

• The specific expression of those mechanics (i.e., the specific words used to explain them).
• The artwork, visuals, layout, etc. of the rulebook.

To take a fairly uncontroversial example relatively unladen with complications, imagine that you created a brand new card game using a standard 52-card deck and wrote down the rules for it in a plain text document. If I simply copy-pasted your rules and then distributed them to other people (whether for money or not), it’s extremely likely that I would have violated your copyright of the specific expression of those rules (i.e., the words you used). But if I instead rewrote your explanation of the rules, even if I didn’t actually change anything about how the game was played, I would almost certainly be just fine.

(I say “extremely likely” and “almost certainly” because it would still depend on the specific words used in both cases. Get an IP lawyer.)

DERIVATIVE WORKS

Now, here’s where it gets tricky, particularly in combination with the laws regarding game mechanics:

Copyright is not limited to the specific words on the page.

It also covers the creation of derivative works.

The specifics here are vast, complicated, nuanced, and explicitly uncertain in the annals of the law. (Get an IP lawyer.) But if you want to try to grok this, I find a couple of court cases useful.

First, in Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp. (1930), Judge Learned Hand ruled that it’s “essential to any protection of literary property [that] the right cannot be limited literally to the text, else a plagiarist would escape by immaterial variations.” In other words, if you could just take The Lord of the Rings, change the name “Frodo” to “Grodo,” and legally publish it, then copyright would be meaningless.

Notably, in this specific case, the plaintiff still lost, because the elements taken from their work were not specific enough to be protected (they “went into the public domain”). But even Judge Hand was uncertain where the line might actually lie: “But we do not doubt that two plays may correspond in plot closely enough for infringement. How far that correspondence must go is another matter. Nor need we hold that the same may not be true as to the characters, quite independently of the ‘plot’ proper, though, as far as we know, such a case has never arisen.”

The second case is Anderson v. Stallone (1989), in which Timothy Anderson wrote a treatment describing the plot of a hypothetical Rocky IV and showed it to film executives and Stallone himself. Anderson was ultimately not paid for his work, even though he claimed that the final version of the film was substantially similar.

Judge William D. Keller, in his decision, determined that the similarities were irrelevant because Anderson’s work had not been authorized by the copyright holders. Therefore, it was an unauthorized derivative work, and not protected by copyright.

There’s a bunch of stuff going on in this case, but the key thing for our purposes is why the work was derivative: It wasn’t because Anderon copied the words or plot of previous Rocky films. It was because he used the characters from those films, and Judge Keller ruled that those characters were, in and of themselves, protected by copyright.

(This is half of the reason why, for example, you’ll see authors and publishers often saying, “Do not send me unsolicited stuff, particularly if it features my characters or worlds.” It gives them legal protection from someone saying, “Hey! You copied my fan fiction!”)

At this point, I do feel the need to point out that my relatively simple presentation of Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp. and Anderson v. Stallone may have created an overly simplistic understanding of the legal issues involved here. The determination that Rocky Balboa, for example, was a protected character involved applying multiple legal tests, which I have not even begun to describe here. (And am almost certainly incapable of doing so accurately.) And that’s just characters: Jabba the Hutt is probably protected, but why is Pizza the Hut okay? Is Tatooine protected, or is it actually derivative of Arrakis? Can you use a Rancor monster in your fantasy setting? What if you call it a Bangkor monster from the planet Rathomir in a science fantasy story?

My point is that (a) copyright can absolutely protect fictional creations independent of their specific expression and (b) the determination of whether a specific fictional creation has ANY protection and whether a specific work is or is not derivative are both extremely non-trivial.

THE JEDI TEST

So let’s bring this back to D&D.

If D&D were like a basic card game with rules written in plain text, then it would be simple. You can’t copyright mechanics, only the text describing those mechanics. Therefore, as long as you don’t copy-paste text from a D&D book, you can publish D&D-compatible adventures.

But, unfortunately, it’s not that simple. To quote the Copyright Office’s fact sheet on game design:

Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.

Material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard may be registrable.

If your game includes any written element, such as instructions or directions, the Copyright Office recommends that you apply to register it as a literary work. Doing so will allow you to register all copyrightable parts of the game, including any pictorial elements.

Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. The “literary expression” of a game is protected. And, as we’ve just seen, the literary expression isn’t just the specific words on the page: It can include plot, characters, and even fictious settings.

To wrap your head around this, I find it useful to think about what I call the Jedi Test:

• A large number of Star Wars board games have been published.
• Some of these board games include Jedi.
• Does this mean that Jedi aren’t protected by copyright and you could, at the very least, publish a board game featuring Jedi?

Obviously not, right?

D&D AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

Okay, so you can’t publish an RPG with Jedi in it just because “game mechanics can’t be copyrighted.” But D&D has elves and dwarves and fairies and wizards. Those are in the public domain, right?

Probably. Well… depending on what you mean, exactly.

Sure, elves have been in fairy tales for centuries, and that means they’re in the public domain. But there’s definitely a point at which specific elves are no longer in the public domain.

Even Tolkienesque elves have percolated through the culture so widely that it would be difficult to imagine anyone successfully claiming copyright on them (assuming that they ever could have, which is uncertain). But if you write a story with Tolkienesque elves living in Rivendell and Lothlorien, then it’s quite plausible that the Tolkien Estate will come knocking. If your elves are named Elrond and Galadriel and Celeborn and Legolas, then even I (who am, I must insist, not a lawyer) feel pretty confident in declaring that you’ll lose that court case.

Somewhere between “elf” and “Galadriel of Lothlorien,” a line was crossed.

Where was it crossed? I don’t know. Arguably, no one does. There’s a clearly safe zone around “generic elf” and an almost certainly NOT safe zone around “Galadriel of Lothlorien, wife of Celeborn, daughter of Finarfin, bearer of Nenya,” but the exact point where you transitioned into copyright infringement could probably only be hashed out in an actual court case.

And this is further complicated by the fact that the protection afforded to a fictitious setting is, by its very nature, dependent on a combination of elements. So even if it were okay to use “Galadriel of Lothlorien” (and I must emphasize that this is a purely hypothetical scenario), it might not be okay to do so if you also had dwarves from Moria.

What probably goes without saying, of course, is that D&D elves (and dwarves and centaurs and harpies) likely exist on a similar scale: They’re based on a public domain root, but at some point their specific implementation within the lore of D&D becomes protected by Hasbro’s copyright. And if you cross that line in your D&D-compatible book, then you’ll be creating a derivative work and you will be in violation of the law.

It’s even likely that all of this becomes even more complicated if you choose to actually invoke that compatibility (with or without a trademark). To return to our Jedi test, imagine publishing a game that says COMPATIBLE WITH STAR WARS on the cover. Even if everything within the book is generic enough to remain within the public domain (you don’t actually include “Jedi,” for example, just mystic space monks), does the fact that you put “STAR WARS” on the cover inherently make your literary expression derivative of Asmodee’s literary expression of the licensed Star Wars universe and IP?

Maybe.

As far as I know, there’s no court case that has decided anything remotely like that. So people can speculate, but there’s no way to actually know.

And the same logic could easily apply to saying COMPATIBLE WITH D&D, with the declaration pushing material that would otherwise not be derivative into a derivative status. Would it actually push the line? And, if so, how far would it push it? Again, nobody really knows. There’s no legal precedent.

MECHANICS DESCRIBING SETTING

It’s also quite possible that copyright around roleplaying games is even more complicated than that. Because unlike, say, Star Wars Monopoly, where labels from the Star Wars universe are hung over fairly generic mechanics (e.g., squares on a board or faux currency), the mechanics of a roleplaying game are explicitly designed to describe a fictitious setting.

Drizzt’s stat block, for example, is a set of mechanical elements that are designed to describe that specific character. (As opposed to a different set of mechanical elements which would describe a different dark elf character.)

The key question in terms of RPG copyright, which has never been answered, is the degree to which the mechanics actually describe the world and, therefore, ARE protected by copyright.

We know that they certainly are to at least some degree: You can’t make a game with a Jedi in it just because there are games that have mechanics labeled “Jedi.” Maybe you could just remove the word “Jedi” and put a different label on the mechanics? But the key word there is “maybe,” because even if we ignore the issue of game mechanics, there’s a point where your “generic Jedi” is generic enough (in film or book or RPG) to no longer be protected by copyright, but also a point where your not-Jedi definitely are NOT generic enough. Where on the scale do these specific game mechanics fall?

CONCLUSION

My point here is that this line between “protected” and “not protected” in D&D exists for every single race, every single class, every single stat block.

Take the Jedi test and repeat it for every single element in the game. And don’t get it wrong even once, because if you do, Hasbro wins the court case.

Which, ultimately, brings me full circle:

Yes, you can publish generic, D&D-compatible supplements without using the OGL.

But if you do: Get an IP lawyer to review literally everything you publish.

Now, it can certainly be argued that you should have an IP lawyer even if you’re relying on the OGL. But what the OGL does is largely sidestep most or all of the issues we’ve just been discussing: If it’s in the SRD, and has been declared open content by Wizards of the Coast, then you don’t have to guess where the line may or may not be. It’s very clearly defined, and the very existence of the license would likely give you a much broader benefit of the doubt in any court case.

Plus, there’s stuff in the SRD that you almost certainly couldn’t use without it. (Or, at the very least, would be taking a very large risk to do so.) Tieflings, for example.

So if someone tells you that you don’t need to use the OGL… well, maybe they’re right.

But if they’re telling you it’s simple, clear-cut, and settled law? Get a second opinion.

From an IP lawyer.

SPOILERS FOR JOURNEYS THROUGH THE RADIANT CITADEL

If you go way, way back to the earliest days of D&D, one of the coolest things is just how much of a kitchen sink it was: Read something cool in a fantasy book on Tuesday, get a crazy idea on Thursday, dump ‘em into your game on Sunday.

Over time, the lore of D&D has tended — as the lore of such things often does — to ossify. But the game is still at its best, in my opinion, when the taps are open and the sink is overflowing.

This, of course, brings us to Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, an anthology of thirteen adventures for 5^th Edition D&D, which foregoes the taps and opens the floodgates.

The concept here is that there’s a magical city floating within the Deep Ethereal. A set of giant gemstones-slash-transport vehicles orbit the city and connect it to fifteen civilizations across multiple realities. Each adventure in the anthology takes the PCs to one of these civilizations, effectively slamming open the doors, taking the wildest, most amazing fantasy visions available, and pouring them into a fantasy crossroads where they can all swirl and mix together into a beautiful smorgasbord of the fantastic.

AMONGST THE CONCORD JEWELS

The Radiant Citadel is a “fossil” that’s wrapped around a gargantuan gemstone called the Auroral Diamond. And the 15-page gazetteer describing the Citadel is, if you’ll pardon the pun, the jewel of this book.

Right off the bat, I’m immediately tantalized by the Citadel’s mysteries. (A fossil of what I’d love to have an answer to!) I also love the three-dimensional nature of the city’s spiral.

But here, unfortunately, we run into a bit of friction, because the spiral of the city means that Mike Schley’s map is rather flawed: Because the upper turns are blocking the lower turns, it appears that more than a third of the city is missing.

And, to be painfully honest, this will set something of a theme for the Citadel: What’s included in the gazetteer is fantastic. What’s missing, on the other hand, can undercut a lot of its strengths.

To start with, however, let’s focus on the positive.

Returning to the Auroral Diamond, this is the heart of the city, in more ways than one. It has life-giving powers which blanket the entire city, and it also glows with magical colors. Legend says that each color represents a civilization being born somewhere in the multiverse; and if the color repeats, that civilization has died.

Orbiting the Auroral Diamond are the Concord Jewels. Each jewel, as I mentioned above, is actually a magical transport vessel connected to a separate civilization on one of many worlds. There are twenty-seven jewels in total, each “capable of holding hundreds of people and tons of goods,” but at the moment only fifteen of them are active. At some point in the past, a catastrophe befell the Radiant Citadel and it was abandoned, severing its connection to the great civilizations which were once connected to it. Recently, however, the descendants of some of these civilizations have returned to the Citadel, and they hope that still others can be re-contacted.

The connection between the Citadel and these civilizations is more than just physical. Within the Auroral Diamond is the Preserve of the Ancestors, a liminal space that is one part civic center and one part mystic savannah. Notable here are the Incarnates, such as the obsidian eagle and the ruby pangolin.

Souls of those who die within civilizations linked to the Citadel have their spirits incarnated within gemstones, and these gemstones aggregate together into the Incarnates. Other entities from the civilizations, such as nature spirits, may also be incarnated within the gems. Each Incarnate, therefore, is a gestalt of a civilization’s souls, speaking with the wisdom of centuries, the insight of myriad points of view, and the authority of cultural hegemony.

The incarnates somehow manage to be simultaneously one of the most wholesome and one of the most metal-as-fuck things I’ve ever seen.

There are three major institutions in the Citadel:

• The House of Convalescence uses the Auroral Diamond’s healing properties to create a powerful center for magical healing.
• The Palace of Exiles takes advantage of the Citadel’s existence as a dimensional nexus to provide refuge to the desperate and downtrodden from multiple worlds.
• The Shieldbearers are a search-and-rescue organization that ventures from the Citadel into the many worlds on a wide variety of special ops.

The first two organizations serve as Great Attractors. You can use them to easily justify bringing PCs or adventure hooks to the Citadel. And once the PCs are there, you can hang a full campaign on the concept of being Shieldbearer agents without breaking a sweat.

This is phenomenally precise and insightful design, packing a ton of utility into minimal word count with laser-like precision. You can see similar design instincts being exercised with the NPCs included in the gazetteer. Space appears to be limited, so only a few are described, but they include:

Sholeh, the elder Speaker and brass dragon who’s such a nervous wreck that she neurotically “picks her scales in private as she tries to find relief.”

And also, Arayat, the leader of the shieldbearers. “He bristles against the rules of engagement imposed by the Speakers. He has cremated a hundred fallen comrades-in-arms and seen horrors few can comprehend. The toll has pushed him to his limits.”

This is really subtle worldbuilding and I love it.

Look at our utopia! Isn’t it beautiful and lovely and perfect?

Also, all of our leaders are nervous wrecks on the verge of cracking open like a rotten egg.

… interesting. Very interesting.

A PROMISE UNFULFILLED

In case I haven’t been clear, I really love the Radiant Citadel gazetteer. I love the concept of the setting. I love how much rich detail and flavor gets packed into its slim page count. This Gathering Place of Strangers and Stories is a pure delight. Stunningly evocative. Intensely creative. Packed with dynamic elements ready to explode across your campaign.

But, of course, it’s only a fraction of the content in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. The other 200+ pages are dedicated to the thirteen adventures that will take the PCs through a grand tour of the civilizations linked through the Citadel. Each of these adventures consists of the adventure itself, plus a short gazetteer (usually accompanied by a map) that describes the civilization itself, opening it up for further exploration in your campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s a missed connection here. Or, rather, thirteen missed connections.

The Radiant Citadel, as described in its gazetteer, is a collaborative society jointly ruled by its member civilizations. It’s a major hub of trade, linking these civilizations together in a pandimensional society. There are diplomats and embassies. On the darker side, there are references to revolutionary groups using the Citadel as a staging ground for “incursions against their home governments.”

But when you flip over to the setting gazetteers, none of this is true.

There are no embassies. No indication of trade or travel between the civilizations. No suggestion that there is, in fact, any connection between these settings and the Radiant Citadel.

For example, consider the Concord Jewels. These are the vital arteries connecting these civilizations; they are the links through which all trade and travel occur. But although each adventure includes a “Through the Radiant Citadel” section describing where the civilization’s Jewel arrives, this is clearly an afterthought. It’s never depicted on the maps, is almost always located in the middle of nowhere (in many cases there’s not even a road!), and frequently is not even given a specific location (instead just being described as, for example, “within a few miles”).

This would be like arriving at O’Hare International Airport and having the GM describe it as, “Your plane lands in the middle of a small forest clearing. There is no road, but your flight attendant tells you that if you walk south for a few hours you should see some signs of civilization.”

The metaphysics don’t link up any better. For example, I mentioned that the Incarnates are made up of constituent spirits, including the souls of the dead from the founding civilizations. That seems like a pretty big deal, but it’s not reflected in the religious beliefs or customs of any of the civilizations, many of which have completely different (and, in my opinion, incompatible) cosmologies for their afterlife.

Even on the structural level, I’m surprised by the disconnect between the Citadel gazetteer and the setting gazetteers. For example, the Shieldbearers are clearly set up to serve as a campaign frame: Join the Shieldbearers, travel to extradimensional civilizations, meet interesting and exciting people, and save them!

So where are the Shieldbearer scenario hooks? Each adventure includes three different hooks (more on those later), but only one of the thirteen adventures includes one for members of the Shieldbearers.

Obviously what happened here is that the whole book was written at the same time, and there either wasn’t time or a development process (or both) to harmonize everything into a coherent vision. It would be fascinating to see what the original spec sheet for the freelancers looked like: Did the concept of the Radiant Citadel already exist, and simply wasn’t detailed enough for the writers to sync their material to it? Or was the original pitch just focused on the mini-settings and the Radiant Citadel was added later as a bridging device, but without the ability to fully revamp the adventures accordingly?

Regardless, as much as I love the setting presented in the Radiant Citadel gazetteer, the “O’Hare in a forest” problem rather badly undercuts it in actual practice. The easiest solution (recharacterizing the Citadel as a motley assembly of refugees without strong political or economic ties to the individual civilizations) unfortunately moves the Citadel away from a lot of the stuff that, in my opinion, makes it so cool. Going the other direction and keeping the vision of the Citadel intact, on the other hand, would require rather extensive modifications to more than a dozen individual settings.

Go to Part 2

Go to Part 1

REBOOTING 3rd EDITION

As a result of the Open Gaming License (OGL), D&D was sitting at the top of, and benefiting from, a huge pyramid of support material. Wizards wanted to shut that down, but there was no way to do that because the license couldn’t be revoked.

What Wizards COULD do, though, was reboot the game. And that’s exactly what they did in 2003, releasing the revised 3.5 Edition of D&D.

The way in which they did this was significant. Before 3.5 was released, Wizards made a big deal in all of its marketing about how the game was going to be “backwards compatible.” It wasn’t going to make your existing 3.0 books obsolete, and players should have no qualms about continuing buy 3.0 books because they would still work with the new 3.5 rulebooks.

But when 3.5 was actually released, a switch was flipped in the marketing: The 3.0 books were now worthless. Those black-and-white softcovers we were selling? Get rid of ‘em. Time to buy the new full color hardcover splatbooks! The evergreen strategy was out, and the splatbook strategy was back, with Wizards using the 3.5 reboot to upgrade their splatbooks so that they could compete with the high quality third-party supplements.

But it wasn’t just the customers who had been caught flatfooted by this abrupt one-eighty in marketing. OGL publishers had taken Wizards at their word, and continued developing, writing, playtesting, and printing 3.0 supplements they had been told would be completely compatible with the new rulebooks, but which their customers were now being told were worthless.

And it wasn’t just the publishers. It was the local game stores, too, who had continued investing their capital in merchandise they thought they could sell, but which Wizards was now telling their customers should be left to rot on the shelves.

Hundreds of games stores went out of business. Dozens of publishers followed. The “D20 bubble” had burst, having been either accidentally — or, according to some — deliberately popped by Wizards.

But 3.5 was, in fact, pretty similar to 3.0. Even if WotC hadn’t released an updated SRD for the 3.5 rules, third-party publishers would have been able to continue producing compatible books using the existing OGL. For now, at least, Wizards decided it made more sense to stay on top of the pyramid.

That would change, however, five years later with the release of 4^th Edition.

LET’S KILL THE OGL

The story of the release and many, many failures of 4^th Edition is a saga in its own right, so I’m going to try to keep it as simple as possible and also stay focused on the OGL.

The short version is around 2005, Hasbro decided to split its brands into core brands, which had more than $50 million in annual sales, and non-core brands, which didn’t. Core brands would get investments in development, marketing, and licensing. Non-core brands would not, and in fact many of them would be mothballed, allowed to lie dormant for years before being potentially brought back for a fresh start.

D&D was not a $50 million brand. It was a $30 million brand.

So the D&D team had a big problem: At best, most of them were about to lose their jobs. At worst, D&D was once again on the corporate chopping block.

So they came up with a big plan for saving D&D by growing its annual revenues. This included a virtual tabletop, digital DLC, increased miniature and merch sales, and a subscription platform to get regular, monthly income from their fans just like an MMO. They also believed that they needed to kill all outside licensing, including the OGL, so that they could claw as much of that revenue back as they could.

But, of course, the OGL could not be revoked.

Do I know for an absolute fact that the design team of 4^th Edition D&D was given a corporate directive to design a game that required the use of either miniatures or a virtual tabletop, both of which Wizards would sell; strongly encourage the use the of a digital character creation subscription service; and so fundamentally alter the core gameplay of D&D that the OGL could no longer be used to create compatible supplements?

I don’t.

So you can make up your own mind about that.

What we do know is that Hasbro killed the OGL for 4^th Edition. And we also know that Wizards didn’t really want to publicly admit that, so they spent a lot of time before 4^th Edition came out hemming and hawing. They talked a lot about their commitment to open gaming and assured people that a license for “third-party and fan creations” would definitely be made available for 4^th Edition.

There was a lot of back-and-forth here, and the timeline is made a lot muddier because there were both public announcements being made and private meetings with third-party publishers shielded with NDAs. There are a few key milestones that are probably worth establishing, though.

First, Wizards eventually admitted that 4^th Edition would not use the OGL. Instead, they were creating a new Gaming System License, or GSL. But the details of this new license still weren’t being made public.

Wizards then announced that people could pay them $5,000 in order to get early access to the 4^th Edition SRD and GSL, but still didn’t tell anyone what the terms of the GSL were. This went over like a lead balloon and the program was cancelled.

When the GSL was finally released, it contained a poisoned pill: If you used the GSL, you could not publish anything in the same product line using the OGL.

It also contained a termination clause, just like the one used in the D20 System Trademark License: Hasbro could unilaterally cancel the GSL at any time, at which point you would need to immediately de-list your books and pulp your inventory.

After more public outcry and pressure, they eventually dropped the poisoned pill. But the termination clause stuck. That was, after all, more or less the whole point of the exercise.

(Ironically, as far as I know, that termination clause has never been activated.)

THE RISE OF PATHFINDER

At this point, Wizards had a few problems.

First, their GSL shenanigans were just one of several ways in which they’d alienated large chunks of their fanbase.

Second, even though they’d willfully abandoned their position on top of the vast pyramid of 3^rd Edition support material, that pyramid was still there. And people were still free to create more of it.

Third, they’d pushed a company called Paizo Publishing into a desperate situation.

When Wizards decided they didn’t want to keep publishing Dragon and Dungeon Magazine in 2002, they licensed those magazines to Paizo, a company which had been founded by former Wizards executives to specifically do that.

In preparation for 4^th Edition, Wizards announced that Paizo’s license would not be renewed and, in fact, that Dragon and Dungeon would no longer be published as physical magazines at all. Paizo, of course, still had the subscription lists, so they started publishing the Pathfinder Adventure Path as a new monthly periodical for their customers.

Paizo’s intention was to transition the Pathfinder Adventure Path to 4^th Edition when the new game came out, but Wizards’ lengthy delays in making the GSL available put Paizo in a bind, which only became worse when it became clear that, whatever the Top Secret terms of the new license were going to be, they certainly weren’t going to be particularly friendly.

The result was the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Published by Paizo, it was essentially a “3.75” edition of D&D that, because of the subscription lists, could be marketed directly to the most hardcore of D&D’s fans by a company that had already spent years selling them premiere adventures and support material. It also became a banner for all those disaffected by Wizards’ actions, the gameplay of 4^th Edition, or both.

Wizards had completely blown their dismount from the OGL and managed to create their single largest competitor. Furthermore, Pathfinder made it certain that the OGL — and the wealth of third-party support made possible by the OGL — would continue through the long winter of 4^th Edition.

THE RETURN OF THE OGL

Let’s fast forward now to 2015.

Whatever your personal opinion of 4^th Edition as a game, there’s little question that it was a failure for Wizards of the Coast. They attempted to relaunch the game in late 2011, and then cancelled it entirely in 2012. The leadership responsible for 4^th Edition was fired and development began on what would eventually become 5^th Edition, which was released in the fall of 2014.

A lot of the marketing around 5^th Edition took the form of mea culpas. As we’ve noted, Wizards had burnt a lot of bridges in 2008, and they were now working overtime to repair them. For example, whereas 4^th Edition had seen them cancel all their third-party licenses, they would now reach out to third-party companies to develop their first official campaigns for the new edition.

In the spirit of bridge-building, they similarly announced, in May 2014, that 5^th Edition would be returning to the OGL. Unlike in 2000, this wouldn’t happen on the day of the game’s release in September 2014, but would instead follow in the spring of 2015.

There would also be no trademark license this time, but the approach to the OGL itself would be similar: An SRD would be released under the license, containing all of the open game content required to make 5^th Edition-compatible adventures and supplements.

Behind the scenes, this détente had actually required a titanic struggle with Hasbro’s lawyers. The compromise that was made was that nothing would be included in the 5^th Edition SRD unless it had already been included in the 3^rd Edition SRD.

So, for example, the magic missile spell had appeared in 3^rd Edition, so it’s also in the 5^th Edition SRD. Arcane gate, on the other hand, wasn’t a spell in 3^rd Edition, so it doesn’t appear in the 5^th Edition SRD.

This also means that the 5^th Edition SRD contains enough material to allow for the creation of 5^th Edition-compatible supplements, but not so much that something like the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game could be easily created by another company.

MEANWHILE, IN THE GUILD…

In terms of community content, however, the SRD and the OGL aren’t the whole story for 5^th Edition. There’s also the Dungeon Masters Guild.

To understand the origins of the DMs Guild, we need to go back in time to the early days of 3^rd Edition. During this time, a company called RPGNow had signed an agreement with Wizards of the Coast to sell D&D PDFs. This included PDF versions of older books, too, going all the way back to the original 1974 game.

RPGnow would eventually merge with DriveThruRPG to form a company called OneBookShelf, which continued selling the D&D PDFs.

When Wizards started yanking all their external licenses with the release of 4^th Edition, however, this included OneBookShelf’s license. This was, rather infamously, done without any prior announcement and included preventing people who had previously purchased the books from downloading them. (Remember what I said about alienating large chunks of their fanbase?)

In 2012, with leadership changing in the wake of 4^th Edition’s failure and the corporate strategy switching from No One Shall Play With Our Toys to Y’All Come Back Now, Ya Hear?, OneBookShelf was able to negotiate a new license, launching D&D Classics in 2013 to once again offer PDFs from all previous editions of D&D.

In 2016, D&D Classics was rebranded the Dungeon Masters Guild, and a community content program was launched: Independent creators could now create and sell content based not only on the SRD, but on all official D&D 5^th Edition books. This included the Forgotten Realms, and has since expanded to include other official settings including Ravenloft, Eberron, Ravnica, Theros, and Dragonlance.

The license for the Dungeon Masters Guild has nothing to do with the OGL, and those using this license can ONLY sell their books through the Dungeon Masters Guild website. Furthermore, if you publish a book through the DMs Guild, you are prohibited from publishing any derivative work.

So, for example, you could not publish a book through the DMs Guild, then remove all the D&D-related material and publish it using a different set of rules. Nor could you publish a novel or comic book based on your DMs Guild book.

Finally, unlike the OGL, the DMs Guild license can once again be unilaterally terminated by Hasbro. This does not, crucially, end the exclusivity agreement, so you would still be unable to remove the D&D IP and publish your work somewhere else.

This means that there will come a day when Hasbro decides to shut down the DMs Guild and everything on the site will simply… vanish. Forever.

You’ll hear some people say that this would never happen, because Hasbro would never want to deal with the huge public backlash that would follow. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t really a hypothetical: Hasbro HAS cancelled licenses just like this one. It’s not a question of if they’ll do it again, just when.

Does this mean that no one should publish on the DMs Guild? Not necessarily. Being able to commercially access the entire lore of D&D’s official campaign settings and produce tie-ins and support products for their most recent adventure modules is an incredibly unique and creatively special privilege.

But unless you’re doing that, you may want to take that whole “some day you’ll never be able to show anyone your work ever again” thing into consideration.

Regardless, with the OGL and the DMs Guild, 5^th Edition ushered in a second golden age of third-party content for D&D. As with the OGL and D20 System Trademark License for 3^rd Edition, you can argue about exactly how much this openness has contributed to the success of the game, but there’s no question that the game has succeeded brilliantly, with 5^th Edition exceeding all expectations and finally achieving the lofty revenue goals that 4^th Edition tried so desperately to grasp.

THE NEXT CHAPTER

Now, in the waning days of 2022, preparations are being made for D&D’s next chapter. A new edition of the game, currently referred to as OneD&D, has entered public playtesting and is scheduled for release in 2024 during the game’s 50^th anniversary.

A few days ago, Wizards of the Coast announced that OneD&D, like 4^th Edition before it, would NOT be using the OGL. Instead, a new version of the license – currently referred to as the OGL v1.1 – will be used. We don’t know a lot about this license, but we do know that:

• Those using the license will need to file their documents with Hasbro.
• Those using the license who have at least $50,000 in OGL-related revenue will need to start reporting their income to Hasbro.
• Those who have $750,000 in revenue or more will need to start paying a royalty to Hasbro.
• There are other changes in the terms of the license which have not yet been announced.

Any or all of this, of course, might still change. And what the final form of this 1.1 license will be is something we can really only speculate about. Will it have one or more poison pills? Will it give Hasbro the right to make unilateral changes to the license or otherwise be revocable?

As we look back over the history of the Open Gaming License, it seems as if we’re in a period of time quite similar to 2008: New leadership has taken control of Wizards. They have a new edition coming out. Corporate leadership is calling for increased monetization of the D&D property. After hemming and hawing, Wizards has been forced to make a public statement about the future of the Open Gaming License.

And what we know for certain right now is that their intention is for OneD&D to be less open than 5^th Edition.

How MUCH less open it will be is the unanswered question.

FURTHER READING
Do I Need to Use the OGL?

What the heck is an Open Gaming License?

And why should you care?

The Open Gaming License, or OGL, is what lets people sell D&D-compatible adventures and supplements without getting Hasbro’s specific permission to do so.

So if you’re someone making D&D-compatible stuff, you should probably care about the OGL quite a bit, since it’s one of only two ways to do that. (The other being the Dungeon Masters Guild, which we’ll talk about later.)

But most of you watching this probably aren’t trying to sell D&D-compatible stuff. You’re probably just trying to run and play in your Saturday night sessions. So why should you care?

Well, probably because a lot of the stuff you love and use in your games has been produced using the OGL. And if it isn’t, then there’s a ton of really amazing stuff out there that you should really check out.

For example, maybe you’re a fan of Critical Role. If so, you may be familiar with the Tal’Dorei campaign setting book. They were only able to publish that because of the OGL.

Or maybe you’ve played Adventures in Middle Earth, the 5^th Edition compatible Lord of the Rings roleplaying game. Again, OGL.

Maybe you’re a fan of my work, in which case you might be familiar with the adventures I’ve published with Fantasy Flight Games, Atlas Games, and others. Again, none of these would exist without the OGL. There’s a lot of content on my website, the Alexandrian, that wouldn’t exist without the OGL.

Okay, so the OGL makes cool stuff possible. So where does it come from? How does it work? Why is everyone screaming and yelling about it?

WIZARDS AND D&D

Well, the OGL has been around for about twenty years now. It was first released in 2000. But to really understand its roots, we have to go back a few years before it existed.

In 1997, a company called Tactical Studies Rules — TSR, Inc. — was going bankrupt. There were a lot of complicated reasons for this, and we’re not going to dive into it here. But this was significant because TSR was the original publisher and still owner of Dungeons & Dragons. The thing to understand is that D&D was in real jeopardy here: TSR’s assets were going to be hacked up and its parts divvied out among its many, many creditors.

It was very possible that someone would end up owning D&D who had no interest in publishing a tabletop roleplaying game: They’d exploit the IP for novels, video games, TV shows, or whatever, but they wouldn’t necessarily publish an RPG. D&D as we know it would be dead.

Fortunately, a company called Wizards of the Coast had published a little indie card game called Magic the Gathering a few years earlier. You may have heard of it. They used the money they’d gained from Magic to purchase TSR outright. D&D was now in the hands of people who loved the roleplaying game. D&D was saved.

Now at this point a couple things happen pretty fast: First, Wizards of the Coast begins developing the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Second, in 1999, just a couple years later, Wizards itself is bought out by Hasbro, a huge toy and game conglomerate.

A year later, in 2000, the 3^rd Edition of D&D is released. And a major pillar of its marketing campaign is the Open Gaming License: Anyone could publish third-party supplements that were compatible with the official version of D&D.

And they did: When the Player’s Handbook was released at Gen Con in the summer of 2000, two compatible modules were immediately available the same day. Atlas Games’ Three Days to Kill by John Tynes and Green Ronin’s Death in Freeport by Chris Pramas.

HOW THE OGL WORKS

The OGL can actually apply to a lot of different types of products, but to keep things simple we’re just going to talk in terms of RPG supplements published as books.

There are three key things to understand about the OGL.

First, not everything in a book published under the OGL is free to use with the license. Instead, the publisher must explicitly declare what content in the book is Open Game Content. This is material that other people can use in their own OGL books. The only requirement is that any open game content you use from someone else MUST be declared as open content and credited in the copyright section of the copy of the OGL you print in your book.

Second, the publisher of an OGL book can also choose to declare Product Identity. This might be trademarks or character names or artwork. There’s lots of stuff that can be Product Identity. The key thing is that Product Identity can never be open game content, even if the declaration of open game content would otherwise apply.

This provides a safety net that makes it easy for publishers to avoid accidentally opening their trademarks or other IP. For example, if they declare that “trugglewomps” are product identity and they declare that “everything in Chapter 2 is open content,” then trugglewomps won’t be open content even if they appear in Chapter 2.

This is good because it will encourage publishers to use the OGL, since they won’t have to worry about accidentally voiding their IP rights. It’s also good because it encourages liberal and clear declarations of open game content.

If product identity didn’t exist, for example, a publisher might only declare very small parts of Chapter 2 open content, to make sure they didn’t accidentally put trugglewomps on the open market.

The third thing to understand is that the D&D core rulebooks were NOT released under the OGL.

Instead, Wizards of the Coast copied SOME of the rules and lore from the core rulebooks into a digital file called the System Reference Document. It was this System Reference Document — or SRD — that was released under the OGL, and thus made available to other publishers using the OGL.

The final thing to know is that the OGL is unrevocable. Once you release open game content under the OGL, it will ALWAYS be open game content. There’s no Undo button. Not even for Hasbro.

So why did Wizards do this?

Well, they had two goals.

First, Ryan Dancey — who was in charge of D&D at the time and schemed up the OGL — believed that Wizards needed to be publishing a lot fewer supplements and adventures for D&D. He’d seen TSR’s books and he believed flooding the market with D&D books had been a major factor in the company’s failure.

There were certain core titles — including the core rulebooks — which were far and away the most profitable books TSR published. Dancey believed Wizards should focus on producing those books. The most profitable ones. He called them evergreen titles.

But he also knew that supplement support was important for an RPG to thrive. The Open Gaming License would get other publishers — publishers who didn’t have the huge overhead of Wizards and would be much more successful in turning profits on smaller print runs — to provide a constant flow of adventures and other support material for D&D.

That support material would make more people interested in buying and playing D&D. And this, in turn, would grow the network externality of D&D.

I’m not going to dive into network externality at length, but the short version is that the more people there are playing D&D, the more likely it is that someone looking to play a roleplaying game will find a group playing D&D. That will make it more likely that they become a D&D player, which increases the number of D&D players, and therefore increases the likelihood that the NEXT player will ALSO become a D&D player.

Dancey’s argument, in short, is that D&D’s biggest strength is that it’s the roleplaying game you’re most likely to find when you go looking for a roleplaying game, and the open gaming license was designed to make that even more true.

Second, the OGL meant that D&D would never again be at risk of being killed due to corporate malfeasance. Remember that just a couple years earlier D&D had almost died as a result of TSR’s bankruptcy, and now it was owned by Hasbro, who could decide at any time that they weren’t interested in publishing a tabletop roleplaying game.

But the OGL has no Undo button. Once the rules of D&D were placed under the OGL, it could never truly be taken out of print by the actions of a single corporation.

In addition to the OGL, Wizards also released the D20 System Trademark License. Basically, they wanted a method by which third-party publishers could indicate their compatibility with D&D, but they didn’t want to let them use the D&D trademark. So they created a new “D20 System” trademark, including logo, and let the publishers use that.

The D20 System Trademark License required publishers to use the OGL, but it added a number of restrictions. For example, books published under the D20 System Trademark License couldn’t include any rules for character creation.

The most notable of these restrictions, however, was the D20 System Trademark License could be unliterally canceled by Wizards of the Coast at any time, after which publishers would have to stop selling any books that used the D20 System trademark.

(Spoilers: This will be significant later.)

THE PROBLEM WITH SUCCESS

The OGL ended up being more successful than anyone could have imagined. Dozens of companies began publishing third-party support for D&D. Entirely new companies were founded, many of which have become major players in the RPG industry. And for players and DMs there was an unprecedented wealth of amazing material – new adventures, new classes, new settings.

All of this fueled a D&D renaissance.

But not everything was going according to plan.

First, Dancey’s evergreen books – like the Epic Level Handbook and the Psionics Handbook – weren’t selling the way he had hoped they would.

Second, the thing about a plan to design and publish fewer books is that you can downsize the design department. And the design department at Wizards of the Coast had some strong opinions about that.

Third, competition between third-party publishers was driving a radical improvement in production values. Wizards of the Coast was still making the softcover, black-and-white books they’d always been publishing. OGL publishers, on the other hand, were producing full color books in hardcover. Wizards’ books, which should have been premiere products, instead looked cheap and second rate.

By 2003, leadership at Wizards of the Coast was also changing. Most of the designers of 3^rd Edition were gone, and Dancey had also left the company. The new leadership was, at best, skeptical of the OGL. According to many accounts, they were actively hostile to it.

But, of course, they had a problem: the OGL couldn’t be revoked.

Go to Part 2

C. writes:

Someone on Twitter posted a meme suggesting that players can’t do anything creative in D&D because the DM won’t allow it. What’s your reaction?

Okay, so the hypothetical GM in this meme is clearly a bad GM. Anyone who has had anything remotely resembling a positive experience playing an RPG can look at that dialogue and know instantly in their gut that there’s something deeply wrong about it.

The more interesting question, I think, is exactly why this GM is bad. Where did they go wrong? And what should they have done?

Player: Can I say “Hello” to the barmaid?

DM: No, that’s not a rule.

If you think a PC can’t do anything unless there’s an explicit rule allowing you to do it, then you have misunderstood the core identity of an RPG and also misapprehended the primary function of the GM, whose mechanical role at the table is at least 90% making rulings about stuff not explicitly covered by the rules.

That’s the first place they went wrong.

The second place is the most prima facie: Their first reaction to player creativity is shutting it down. If all you’re interested in are players interacting through rigid mechanical structures, play a boardgame or a wargame. RPGs literally exist for the sole purpose of NOT doing that. There’s a reason that Default to Yes is a fundamental principle of effective GMing.

And it’s not like this is some kind of big secret. The 5^th Edition Player’s Handbook explicitly tells the DM that this is what they should be doing:

IMPROVISING AN ACTION

Your character can do things not covered by the actions in this [Combat] chapter, such as breaking down doors, intimidating enemies, sensing weaknesses in magical defenses, or calling for a parley with a foe. The only limits to the actions you can attempt are your imagination and your character’s ability scores…

When you describe an action not detailed elsewhere in the rules, the DM tells you whether that action is possible and what kind of roll you need to make, if any, to determine success or failure.

(PHB, p. 193)

And, in addition to ability score checks, 5E gives the GM some very powerful tools for making rulings. Despite this, I am continually amazed at the number of people running the game who ignore:

1. Group checks (PHB, p. 175)
2. Contests in Combat (PHB, p. 195)
3. Improvised advantage/disadvantage (PHB, p. 173)
4. Improvised damage (DMG, p. 249)

With these tools in hand, let’s take a quick look at how our hypothetical GM could have easily resolved these proposed actions.

SHOVING BOOKCASES

Let’s start with the easiest one:

Player: Ok, so what if I try to knock over that bookcase over there, trapping the bandit underneath?

This is pretty obviously a contest in combat. It’s going to be some kind of Strength check for pushing over the bookcase (probably Athletics) opposed by some sort of Dexterity check by the bandit (probably Acrobatics or a Dexterity saving throw).

What effect would this have if successful? Well, the bandit would obviously be knocked prone and I’d probably rule that they need to succeed on some kind of Strength check to shove the bookcase off before they could get up.

Alternatively, if the PC was going to try to actively hold them down (perhaps standing on the bookcase), I might instead resolve the whole thing as a grappling attempt with the bookcase granting advantage on the check.

LIGHTING SWORDS ON FIRE

Player: Can I light my sword on fire?

This one is a bit trickier, but that’s mostly because we don’t have enough information. So I’d start by asking them exactly how they were planning to “light their sword on fire.”

For the sake of argument, let’s say that the player has some oil and they want to douse their sword with it and then light it on fire with their torch.

Our ruling will again boil down to resolution and effect.

I don’t think any kind of check is actually required here. So, in terms of resolution, the pertinent question is really: How long does it take? Well, this is an object interaction: Dousing the sword is one interaction. Lighting it is another. Your first object interaction on your turn is free; your second costs an action.

And then what’s the effect of lighting the sword on fire? Well, this seems to boil down to two questions:

• How long does it burn for?
• How much damage does it do?

In terms of duration, I’d say 1d6 rounds. Maybe you’d say 1d4 or 1d8 rounds. But it’s not like a sword is really designed to hold a lot of oil, right?

And how much damage does it do? Well, we could look at the Improvising Damage table (DMG, p. 249) and figure that this is pretty similar to “burned by coals,” in which case it would deal 1d10 fire damage. On the other hand, we might consider the fire to be equivalent to an improvised weapon, which would suggest 1d4 fire damage. Something in that range feels reasonable.

For more on burning oil, check out Running the Campaign: On the Efficacy of Burning Oil.

STABBING PEOPLE IN THE EYE

Player: Can I aim for the weak parts of the monster? Like stabbing it in the eye?

Adjudicating this one requires some subtlety. The player is requesting a called shot here, and I discuss these in more detail (and give a framework for resolving them) in Untested 5^th Edition: Called Shots, but here’s the short version.

First, if their primary goal is to “stab them where it will do the most damage,” then we have a mechanic for resolving that: It’s the attack roll. Literally any time you make an attack in D&D, you’re trying to hit your target in a vulnerable spot and deal the most damage possible.

Second, when making combat rulings like this, something you should double check is whether or not there’s a reason that the PC wouldn’t do it every single time.

• Our bookcase ruling passes this test, because you can only do it when there’s a bookcase.
• Lighting your sword in fire for some extra damage is nice, but you have to pay for the oil (in both gold and encumbrance), plus our ruling included an action cost to get the sword lit in the first place.

But “I stab ‘em in the eye for more damage” fails this test because there’s no reason you wouldn’t just say that every time you make an attack.

With all that being said, however, if the player has some other goal in mind than just dealing damage – e.g., they want to temporarily blind the monster — then there are ways to handle that (and you can check out the article linked above for more details on that).

DESCRIBING YOUR ATTACKS

Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

In fact, letting players describe their successes is a great technique that can be developed in a lot of different ways. You may find it profitable to set it as the expected outcome at your table, or you may find it most appropriate when applied as a spice for significant moments (e.g., “Describe how you finish off this bandit!”)

You can even take this a step further by decoupling 0 hit points from death and instead, when that threshold is met, prompting the player to tell you what the defeat of the NPC means. Do they

• Kill them?
• Take them prisoner?
• Knock them unconscious?
• Send them fleeing for their lives?

But at this point we’re probably drifting a bit off-topic. What are your favorite examples of players getting creative at the table, and how did you resolve them?

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #10