D&D Beyond’s Community Update Foreshadows More Creative Commons (Minus Vecna)
D&D Beyond unveiled a new Community Update yesterday, outlining plans for the future, including older editions coming to Creative Commons.
D&D has had a rollercoaster of a year. After a disastrous OGL turned into a Creative Commons release, the way forward seems clearer. Though many in the community are mistrustful of WotC’s words and are looking for action, a new Community Update outlines potential future actions.
Even if it does minimize the absolute tornado of a month that January was for D&D. Let’s take a look.
D&D Beyond Community Update – More SRD Coming, Older Editions Under Review
As you can see from the graphic above, D&D Beyond is both celebrating its accomplishments and downplaying the major turmoil the billion-dollar company threw its player base into over the last couple of months. You’ll note January doesn’t say “revised OGL plans” but rather “released 5.1 SRD into Creative Commons.” Not to harp on that, but it’s important to remember what the D&D community was able to accomplish.
Your victory shouldn’t be taken from you in an infographic. And it would be dishonest, to say the least, for D&D to pretend that they had always intended for any material to be released into Creative Commons. But you, the D&D community, took action. And got results. Never forget that.
Now, as part of their most recent Community Update, a nod to the transparency that many in the community have demanded, we get a look at the future. And while most of it is the D&D team saying “we’re still doing what we said we were doing” there are two interesting pieces. Under the bullet points for in progress, we see:
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Review Previous Editions for Inclusion in Creative Commons: Before adding previous editions into Creative Commons, we need to review the materials for any potential exclusions to preserve the D&D brand. For example, we would not want to unintentionally release Tiamat- or Vecna-brand elements under Creative Commons.
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Previous editions going into Creative Commons could change a lot for people. Especially with both 3.5E and 4th Edition D&D. However, as they say, they don’t want to unintentionally release Tiamat or Vecna under Creative Commons. Even a little bit.
This is a nod to the fact that certain words, which were previously hailed as “brand elements” like mind flayers and Starhd von Zarovich, were included in the 5.1 SRD released into Creative Commons. And there’s no going back from that.
Though, as an interesting aside, WotC can’t copyright Tiamat. After all, Tiamat is the name of an ancient Mesopotamian goddess, along with Bahamut. While D&D might be able to lock down Tiamat as a five-headed chromatic dragon, there’s a lot you can do with a goddess who’s typically depicted as a dragon or sea serpent in mythology.
The other thing to take note of:
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Publish Our Internal Content Policy for D&D Products: Every adventurer should feel welcome at the table, and our internal Content Policy helps ensure D&D products reflect that mission. We are updating and publicly releasing this document so you can see our standards.
WotC is releasing its standards. Presumably to help the community hold them to them. So be on the lookout for these relatively soon. And hopefully, a 3rd and 4th Edition of Creative Commons release in the near future.
Happy Adventuring
