Promises and restrictions
After having enjoyed 23 years of open gaming, fans were alarmed about having many of their rights taken away by a new OGL document. If WOTC de-authorized the original OGL, that went back on promises the people who created the OGL made during its creation, and for decades after its release.
More alarmingly, the new OGL’s sub-licensing language and reporting structure could have made it so that Wizards of the Coast would have direct access to all commercialized products that used the OGL, and would have control over the content that was produced under the OGL, regardless of whether or not they owned the content. The idea that Wizards would be able to use content made by third parties without recourse, royalties, or even asking permission angered fans.
The restrictions on commercial content allowed under the OGL 1.1 also left out Virtual Table Tops (VTTs) and digital toolsets—work covered under the OGL 1.0 was limited to “static” media, which could mean that VTT’s couldn’t exploit the license. While the largest VTTs, such as Roll20, have custom agreements with WOTC and would therefore “remain unaffected,” niche services that supported different kinds of gameplay would be left out of the contract.
