Editing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (section)

===Near-Death of the OGL===
Remember how earlier we mentioned how WotC resurrecting the OGL led to 5E spearheading a D&D Renaissance where everyone who was anyone sprung forward to making supplements for this game by ensuring that their legions of lawyers wouldn't instantly slam them for using certain un-copyrightable terms? Well, while in the midst of playtesting their newfangled edition of "The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game", word got out that Wizards was planning on seriously revamping the OGL. On one hand, it made some measure of sense - When the OGL was originally made, social media, [[Kickstarter|crowdfunding]], Virtual Tabletops and a ton of modern-day content wasn't even a glint in the eye of any of the authors. Clarifying some of the more edge cases regarding any of these is something that might help protect their content.

Well, that wasn't what happened. What happened was Hasbro becoming so cartoonishly corrupt, so outlandishly greedy that they're now claiming that any content people make and sell now belongs to Wizards, which they can use at any point, any time they want, and without the consent of the original publisher. Everything also needs to be published through the DM's Guild with a fee, and likely will also need to be compatible with the eventual D&D Virtual Tabletop whenever that arrives. Even worse, they now demand the financial earnings of anyone who does make OGL content, regardless of whether or not they're even making D&D-compatible content, which now threatens any number of D20-based games, including [[Pathfinder Roleplaying Game|Pathfinder]] and the entire [[Old School Roleplaying|OSR]] space. Any content creators that make over $750,000 USD (of which Wizards notes there are only about 20 of) then have to pay 25% of their total gross earnings - Not profits, so publishers could at least break even on their material, their ''total gross earnings''. And to top this shit sundae all off, this all overwrites the original OGL and renders it obsolete immediately and replaces it, so nobody can just ignore it and continue publishing with the 1.0 version of the OGL. No matter which way you cut it, this was all a ploy for Wizards to set up a barbwire fence around their beloved brand to trap any content creators into making content for them, regardless of their consent, regardless of compatibility. All because some shareholders felt that D&D was ''under-monetized'' like the fucking greedy shits they are.

Of course, once a normie news outlet leaked this out before Wizards themselves intended to, the news led to [[RAGE|a neckbeardy shitstorm of unheard-of proportions]], the likes of which even caught the eye of [[Khorne]]. Every nobody with a YouTube channel or blog debated the legitimacy of such tomfuckery and how this was going to lead to the death of D&D. Even one of the architects of the original OGL weighed in on the topic, stating that this bullshit was never the intention of this agreement. Some were even concerned that this might have been the plan from the beginning and that with the abovementioned legions of laywers and billions of dollars could outlast any potential lawsuits contesting the legality of such a move, possibly before they even hit the court. Most damningly, the leaking of this new OGL has led to the ocean of major third-party publishers to begin consulting their legal teams to see how fucked they'd be if they signed that deal with the devil, and some, such as [[Kobold Press]], have decided [https://koboldpress.com/raising-our-flag/ to outright DROP any future support for D&D] and develop their own not-5Es, while unrelated RPGs that used the OGL just as a show of good faith, like [[Delta Green]], have opted to [https://arcdream.com/home/2023/01/delta-green-without-the-ogl/ drop the OGL from future content] since its original purpose was now null and void. Paizo themselves even banded together with a bunch of these publishers in creating their own open-source system-agnostic license that would be less prone to any corporate fuckery. Players similar began abandoning D&D in droves, latching onto other systems such as [[Pathfinder Second Edition]] and hitting Wizards where it hurt the most: Cancelling lucrative D&D Beyond subscriptions.

What followed was a round of half-assed backpedaling with a thinly veiled boast about how they won and how the above contract was a draft (ignoring the part where they'd attached contracts to force others to sign onto this), then a slightly less half-assed attempt with a revised OGL that pared back some of the sticking points. Neckbeards ridiculed this new draft with all the due ire and vitriol the moment WotC asked for feedback, venting their frustrations at this insult. In the end, the impossible happened: Not only did Wizards call off the whole new OGL bullshit, but they also released the SRD into Creative Commons. At this point, one could say that the trust Wizards built with 5E had been irreparably damaged and whatever golden age the game had was truly over well before its sequel even finished playtesting.