Open gaming

   

fr:Licence ludique libre Open gaming is the role-playing game movement, analagous to open source, where game-related content (rules, sourcebooks, etc) are published under a copyleft or open content license imparting the freedom to modify, copy, and redistribute them. Open gaming can also be used to refer to a type of role-playing game event where players free to join at any time. This essay deals primarily with the more common, former definition.

History

Open gaming is synonymous with the popular d20 System, but games have been published under open content licenses for a considerable period of time prior to the d20 phenomena.

First published in 1995, the FUDGE roleplaying game is probably one of the first systems to be published under an open content license. A legal notice accompanying the FUDGE rules permits redistribution and modification for non-commercial works. Other systems were published under various different terms which could all be considered "open", including the Dominion role-playing game, whose license permitted supplementary material to be written for it's rules, and the Circe roleplaying system, published by the Worldforge project under the GNU Free Documentation License.

OGL

The official start of the open gaming movement begins in 2000 when Wizards of the Coast's ('WotC) published their popular Dungeons and Dragons role-playing system as the d20 System under the Open Gaming License. Ryan Dancey, the driving force for the new policy at WotC, first used to term "open gaming" with respect to roleplaying games and formed the Open Gaming Foundation to promote open gaming within the role-playing industry.

Because its heritage is intertwined with the most successful RPG, "open gaming" often refers to the d20 System, but other open systems and licenses have been developed as well.

The initiative for an open license on rules resulted from the many unique sets of rules used by RPGs. To ease the designer's development process and the player's learning process, major RPG developers created generic role-playing game systems, such as Steve Jackson Games' GURPS, for use in the design of their own games. Wizards of the Coast took the idea a step further by making the core rules system free (as in speech and beer) so that game designers could produce games under the d20 umbrella of rules and so that players need not make any purchases in order to learn the core rules. Among other things, game developers believe that this drive will make their games more accessible and that it could further channel the popularity of the RPG industry towards Dungeons & Dragons.

Other Licenses

Several game designers criticized the Open Gaming License for not being as open as it could be and for being controlled by the RPG market leader Wizards of the Coast. In response, some of these critics sought alternative licenses or wrote their own open licenses. Examples of these include the October Open Game License and the EABA Open Supplement License.

Lately, drafting new open gaming licenses has waned slightly as it becomes apparent that numerous copyleft-style licenses that could be applied to game rules already exist, such as the GNU Free Documentation License.

Impact

A number of mostly small game developers have since hopped on board the open gaming initiative mostly through the d20 System. Open gaming has been most successful with amateur-designed RPG and RPG supplements. Several licenses have been used to facilitate open gaming. Despite this, the concept has yet to make a significant impact on games outside of pen-and-paper RPGs and still most major RPG developers continue to use their own, non-open systems.

External links

Retrieved from "http://www.centipedia.com/articles/Open_gaming"

This page has been accessed 103 times. This page was last modified 16:37, 13 Nov 2004. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).