Explain the Drama.

Imagine making a living writing adventures for Dungeons & Dragons. Then the company behind the game proposes changing the license you’ve built your business around. In January 2023, Wizards of the Coast asked creators what they thought of its revised plan. Eighty-eight percent of survey respondents said they did not want to publish under it. Days later, Wizards backed down. How did a dispute over a license become a tabletop rebellion?

First, the cast. Wizards publishes Dungeons & Dragons. Independent creators publish their own compatible adventures, settings, and games. For more than twenty years, many have used Wizards’ Open Game License—OGL for short—to work with rules text in a document called the System Reference Document. One of those publishers is Paizo, maker of Pathfinder. This wasn’t just an argument about fine print: it was about the ground other people had built on.

In December 2022, Wizards said a new OGL was coming. Its announced terms would require commercial creators to accept the new license and identify what they were selling; those earning more than fifty thousand dollars in OGL-related revenue would report it annually. Wizards also proposed royalties, starting in 2024, on revenue above seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. The company said fewer than twenty creators worldwide would reach that threshold. But as draft terms circulated, the argument grew beyond who would pay. Creators questioned what rights they might have to give up.

On January 12, Paizo publicly rejected the idea that the old license could be ‘deauthorized.’ That was Paizo’s legal position, not a court ruling. It announced work on an independent, system-neutral license instead. The next day, Wizards apologized and said it would drop both the royalty and a provision that critics feared could let Wizards use creators’ work. Wizards said that provision had a different purpose: protecting itself against claims that similar ideas had been copied. Then, on January 19, it put forward another draft—OGL 1.2. That draft still proposed deauthorizing the old license for future publishing.

Here’s the other side. Wizards said it wanted tools to address hateful material, stop uses involving NFTs, and keep large corporations from exploiting a license intended for creators. Its January 19 draft had no royalties or financial reporting. But for opponents, the sticking point was choice. Wizards said previously published work would remain under the old license; publishers worried about what would govern the work they made next. In Wizards’ own survey, eighty-nine percent of respondents were dissatisfied with deauthorizing OGL 1.0a.

On January 27, Wizards reversed course: OGL 1.0a would stay untouched, and the entire fifth-edition System Reference Document would also be released under Creative Commons. Paizo didn’t abandon its alternative; it released the final Open RPG Creative license in June 2023. On a Wizards reference page last updated March 2, 2026, the old OGL remains an option for the earlier rules document, while newer versions are offered under Creative Commons. The immediate fight ended with more publishing choices, not fewer. But here’s the question for a follow-up: after building an alternative, how many creators will choose to trust Wizards with their next game?