Maybe it’s pointless writing this article. By now, the controversy over the leak of OGL 1.1 – a planned update to the Open Gaming Licence which Wizards has acknowledged the reality of, but has promised to rethink – is all over the RPG discussion space. Everyone’s weighed in on it. Most people have probably either made their minds up one way on the subject or are simply not interested. What can me writing one more article about it on here accomplish?
Well, for one thing, I think I can add a useful perspective based on my legal knowledge. This article shouldn’t be taken as legal advice – and to be honest, nor should anything which is not being given to you by an attorney whose services you have engaged who you have briefed on the particular specifics of your situation, because specifics matter in this sort of thing. But I have studied intellectual property law – I don’t work primarily in the world of trademark or copyright, but my training did involve learning about both of those, and at least know enough contract law to be able to not be intimidated by a contract, and to recognise when it’s doing something unusual from the perspective of IP law.
Bear in mind too that my studies have not focused on US law, so there may well be specifics of that which pass me by. That said, I think that could be an asset in looking at this. A lot of the commentary I have seen on the situation has been very US-centric, which misunderstands how the current RPG market works. With PDF sales on internationally-available storefronts like DriveThruRPG being so important to publishers in the field, and virtual tabletop platforms also available more or less globally, it can be dangerous to give people a clean bill of health when it comes to copyright infringement risks if that is based on exemptions or rulings based solely on US law.
US-style “fair use” is not the standard worldwide – in the UK, for instance, we have “fair dealing”, which has a different scope – and different jurisdictions will have different case law to deal with. No RPG publisher wants to be in a situation where they are limited to selling a product in only one country. This is particularly of concern if the gorilla in the room – the dominant player in the market whose legal department would cause the biggest panic if they came after your product – is a multinational corporation, who has the capacity to come after your product from the jurisdiction of their choice if they can find standing to do so (for instance, bringing copyright infringement cases against your product in the UK if you or your distribution partners sell it there instead of – or as well as – bringing infringement claims for activities in the US).
I’d add on a personal note that being conversant with copyright law is not the same thing as liking copyright law. In its present state, it is a mess. I believe it is a necessity, and will remain a necessity absent fundamental change to the way society is arranged, because if you strip it away completely you give big corporations carte blanche to plunder everyone else’s ideas wholesale – and they’ll have the funds and infrastructure available to do that much more quickly and effectively than smaller business and individuals can. But copyright durations are absurdly long at the moment, international harmonisation on matters of coverage and infringement would be a boon, and in general it feels like a field ripe for root and branch reform.
As such, if in this article I talk about something Wizards or any other party might be able to do – or at least, might argue that they are able to do – please don’t take that as any form of endorsement of that position, or suggesting that it is a good or appropriate thing that the law permits this.
Oh, and obviously a lot of the stuff I say in these two articles may end up stale in the future because of new developments. Honestly, I made a start on writing this a couple of times when the controversy was still live only to give up and wait a bit because something new and silly had happened, and I wanted to give things time to settle down a bit before giving a settled opinion on the matter rather than shooting from the hip and coming out with a bunch of speculation which would be rendered redundant in short order.
After all those caveats about the legal situation, I will lead off by pointing out that a lot of this is not about law at all.
What Do You Mean “Not About Law”? It’s A Licence!
Well, yes, law is definitely a factor. However, I would also say that psychology, social expectations, and soft power all have a role to play here. It is often tempting for lawyers to look at the dry text of a licence and regard the legal questions around the licence to be the whole of the story – and certainly it accounts for almost the entirety of the story when it comes to actually enforcing the licence terms. At the same time, licences are also tools of diplomacy between businesses. When two or more businesses negotiate a licence privately, it’s often as much about getting a sense of each other and assessing whether it will be possible to work together as it is about reaching the specific terms of the licence themselves.
Let’s say Business A and Business B are negotiating a private contract between the two – a licence for Business B to distribute Business A’s product in Business B’s homeland. We can imagine a situation where Business B’s leadership look at the licence terms that Business A have proposed, and note that in principle, it’s a totally unobjectionable licence – it has all the clauses they would want, framed in the terms they would hope to see, and the overall arrangement is basically along the lines of what they want. Nonetheless, Business B doesn’t sign. They write back to Business A, they thank them for their interest, they inform them that they have decided not to press ahead with this matter, they wish them well and cut off contact.
Now, why would they do that? Well, in this little parable, something has happened which has made Business B deeply unhappy about the prospect of working with Business A, in between their initial contact and Business A sending that proposed licence along. Maybe Business B did their research on Business A and its key personnel and discovered stories about shady, untrustworthy behaviour on their part. Maybe Business A’s negotiators were staggeringly rude in their meeting with Business B, or there was otherwise some sort of mismatch of personalities which made Business B feel grumpy and uncomfortable, even though the meeting went fine on the surface. Maybe Business B have reached out to contacts in the industry who relayed horror stories about Business A offering contracts which seemed good on the surface, only to badly let down the other party when it came to deliver. You can imagine all sorts of plausible ways this can happen, I’m sure.
None of that has anything directly to do with the text of the licence itself – but it has everything to do with how Business B looks at the licence. If Business A had a reputation for trustworthiness, if their personnel had been kind and polite in meeting with Business B, or if Business B’s extended contacts gave Business A the thumbs-up, Business B might look at that nice, generous contract that Business A is offered and be inclined to sign, taking Business A at their word. In our hypothetical, though, that’s not the case – something has prompted Business B to look at the licence with much more scepticism. What seems like a fair and generous offer coming from someone you have goodwill towards may look simply too good to be true coming from a party who comes across as untrustworthy.
It’s like bluffing in poker. You can express the entire rules of a particular poker variant without mentioning bluffing once – just explain how dealing works, how bidding works, the order of preference of poker hands, and you’ve got it. Nonetheless, the bluffing is a crucial dimension of the game. Similarly, the mere wording of a licence only tells part of the story. To get the whole picture, you need to look at the context that licence was offered in, and it’s only then you can make sense of how that licence is received by other parties, and can get a handle on why people bought into the licence in the first place. All of this is stuff which won’t necessarily carry water in a court case, but it’s significant to the commercial atmosphere of the field the licence exists in, and often that atmosphere can be as significant as – or even more important than – anything which actually happens in a courtroom.
That’s the case with licences worked out as private negotiations between two parties, where the intention is that unless there’s a falling-out and the matter ends up in court or in some other form of arbitration, only the two parties involved will ever actually see the licence. It is especially the case with public licences like the OGL, offered up to the entire world. These sort of licences are as much a matter of public relations as they are a matter of law.
Yes, if people buy into the licence and there is then a dispute, it’s in a court of law that the fight will likely take place – but it’s the PR around the licence which will play a key role, perhaps even a bigger role than the strict legal terms of the thing, when it comes to whether other parties take up the offer represented by the licence to any significant extent. If you are trusted and respected by other businesses within your field as square dealers who will deal honestly and fairly with others, and whose promise can be relied on, a licence you offer for general use is going be that much more tempting to others. This is may even be the case if your offering is less generous than that of less trustworthy competitors, because if you have a reputation for promising little, but being ironclad about what you do promise, your word means much more than that of someone who makes big promises but who can’t be held to them.
Conversely, if your peers and competitors regard you as a snake in the grass, prone to sharp practice and dirty tricks, whose promises as expressed in the licence should be regarded as being written on sand, then people are going to be much more reluctant to do business with you. This is the case even if the licence you offer seems generous – indeed, you get can get into a vicious cycle where the more you promise, the more it sounds like bullshit.
I will leave it to the reader to decide where between those two extremes Wizards’ reputation lies right now.
Historical Problem One: They Sued Regularly
Various well-trained legal persons have looked at the OGL 1.0a and said that it looks fairly useless to them from the perspective of an IP licence, and expressed the view that publishers shouldn’t really need to use the OGL at all for some of the activities they have been doing. I can see why they would come to that conclusion looking at it in isolation, or comparing it to such licences in other markets. However, I think they miss the point of the OGL, which is that it’s not so much an IP licence as it is a peace treaty between Wizards and the rest of the industry – or at least a unilateral ceasefire, establishing a clearly-delineated demilitarised area for the sake of putting to an end a brushfire war initiated by a previous regime.
Once upon a time, it was the height of Internet hilarity to refer to TSR as “They Sue Regularly”. As Shannon Appelcline has documented, the company was not afraid to throw its legal weight around, especially in the later periods of its lifespan, to go after anyone it felt was horning in on their turf. This included publishers putting out products which could very well be argued to be entirely permissible within the scope of IP law, Internet fans putting out entirely original homebrew material online, and infamously Gary Gygax’s Dangerous Journeys (originally entitled Dangerous Dimensions), which they gunned after in terms so broad that they could have gone after the entire industry on the same basis (but didn’t because their aim was transparently to shut down Gygax specifically).
In many instances, these people would likely have won had they dug their feet in and fought – indeed, for a while Mayfair did, getting a licence out of TSR for their products and then coming a cropper when they deviated from the terms of the licence. The difficulty – as Mayfair and GDW discovered – is that digging in your feet and fighting these things is an exhausting, time-consuming, and expensive process. An ugly truth of the world of civil law is that a large litigant with a big budget and a willingness to be obstinate can get away with enforcing their will, even if their case is weak, simply by wearing down the other party. As for those Internet fans reposting those old AD&D netbooks on FTP sites, Usenet groups, and Gopher sites (forgive me, this stuff makes me nostalgic), the odds of any of them wanting to spend significant money responding to a cease and desist letter over a free text file was always remote.
Moreover, TSR had spent a good while establishing this reputation. Jon Peterson in Game Wizards has documented how in the late 1970s Tim Kask was going to game conventions and making sweeping statements about the rights TSR could exert against the rest of the industry, should they have a mind to.
So when Wizards took over TSR, they were coming into a situation where the RPG industry was very, very used to the biggest player in the game being a litigious outfit who could conceivably come after you even if what you were doing was absolutely fine within the letter and spirit of the law, provided that they decided you were coming too close to their turf. Even passingly mentioning your product was compatible with AD&D – something which the various legal analyses of this situation have said should be fine – could be subject to this. So that’s one important bit of context.
Historical Problem Two: After the Flood
Wizards, from their end, had a problem. As Ben Riggs has chronicled in Slaying the Dragon, when they took control of TSR and took a good hard look at the accounts, they realised that TSR was producing a whole slew of products which were simply underperforming.
These days, it’s tempting to look at the second edition AD&D era as a time when, for all the game line’s other faults, the setting material was great. You had all those awesome boxed sets, both for existing settings like Dragonlance and exciting new ones like Dark Sun and Ravenloft and Planescape, and a slew of monster supplements and books and modules and additional boxed set for each of those settings. TSR’s designers went all-out in terms of dreaming up all the different flavours of fantasy that the baseline system could be stretched to support, and doing their best to ensure each flavour had a setting and a support line.
The problem is, as Riggs recounts, that this didn’t really move the needle when it came to expanding the customer base. The setting diversification was meant to serve what was called the “fish-bait” strategy, named for the idea that you catch different fish with different base. The assumption underlying it was that each setting would bring in different customers to the D&D ecosystem – so whilst early TSR products and settings had largely snagged fans of vanilla fantasy, Ravenloft would appeal to horror fans, Dark Sun to fans of grittier sword and sorcery material and so on.
The problem was that it just didn’t seem to work that way. Call of Cthulhu or Vampire: the Masquerade may have been well-placed to bring in horror fans who might have been interested in roleplaying but didn’t find D&D appealing – Vampire, in particular, is celebrated for bringing in a range of people who hadn’t otherwise given the hobby a chance. But Ravenloft was, at the end of the day, tied to AD&D. If you were already aware of the game and had decided you weren’t interested, Ravenloft wasn’t going to change your mind; if you weren’t already aware and your interest was piqued, I suspect it would be quickly squashed by the need to get three core books and a boxed set to play Ravenloft.
What TSR was doing wasn’t growing the D&D audience – they were splitting it. Each new setting wasn’t bringing in a bunch of new people, it was just further fragmenting the fanbase. More or less nobody kept up with all the settings at once – it would be simply impossible to do so unless you both had a healthy budget for buying RPG products, were willing to buy much more D&D material than you could viably use, and had tastes which were very broad and undiscerning.
What people actually did at the time – bourne out both by Wizards’ own research and my subjective memories of the era – was get selective. Instead of paying attention to all the different settings, you’d have a few favourite ones you focused on and gave the most consideration to new products for, whilst those which were less to your taste you would ignore entirely. For my part, I dipped into the novel range of a whole lot of settings, but only bought RPG products for a fraction of them – because you can check out a novel line for free at the library. If my local library hadn’t had a solid fantasy selection, I likely wouldn’t have gone that far.
One of the challenges Wizards were faced with when they acquired TSR was to break the groupthink among the game designers around how the settings actually sold. The former TSR management had carefully avoided letting the game designers know how well their products were selling – only further embedding the idea that the fish-bait strategy was working – and as Riggs recounts in Selling the Dragon, Wizards eventually had to do an experiment by putting out two fairly similar adventure modules, one in Forgotten Realms trade dress and one presented as a generic D&D module, in order to show that the latter sold more. Customers had trained themselves to ignore products for settings they weren’t following as not relevant to their interests – but would give their time to a product that was potentially applicable to any D&D campaign.
However, whilst the fish-bait strategy was ruinous financially, I would argue that putting out a tidal wave of product did have some ancillary strategic benefits. I recall lots of game shops of the era as dedicating a ton of space solely to AD&D, and then only secondarily carrying other RPGs – and part of that was because it was the market leader, but part of that was also because if you wanted to carry the whole product line, you needed to devote a ton of space to it, and that physical crowding out of the contribution may have helped to keep AD&D ahead. Its only major challenger in the English-language market in those days was the World of Darkness line – which also put out a big churn of material.
Wizards knew that they needed to scale back the pace of D&D releases; the slow schedule of first-party products for 5E takes this to an extreme, but 3.X still saw them be more selective and discerning about which products they’d actually develop and release than late-period TSR had been. At the same time, they presumably realised that a contraction of D&D‘s presence on game shop shelves could have negative consequences, and the fanbase had become used to feast and might not respond well to famine.
In discussions with friends online about the OGL controversy, we ended up devising an analogy about the situation. Imagine a big empire in a homebrewed D&D world. The core territory and the most productive principalities have a fair amount of earning potential, but there’s also these borderlands on the fringe which the empire has been trying to occupy too. These are lands which might be fertile enough to yield a living for those who settle them directly, but it’s very expensive for the empire itself to support them because it requires diverting resources which could be used on more fruitful projects, and the empire has been wasting a lot of time fighting brushfire wars against parties they even suspect of trying to enter the borderlands without permission.
In fact, the empire has been pushed to the point of economic collapse. In a desperate effort, Empress Lorraine and the Senate have abdicated power and gone into exile; now some thaumaturges from a seaside area have taken control, their magic being profitable enough to plug the gaps in the imperial finances for the time being, but they would rather have the empire be able to stand on its two feet.
The wizards look at the map of the empire. They nod approvingly at the core territories and immediately surrounding provinces. There’s potential there, and the empire is more than capable of holding these. But then they look to the borderlands and grown with frustration. The lands are vast, their rewards uncertain. It really isn’t worth sending in the imperial armies to keep hold of them, and diplomacy with smaller nations is made tense as a result of strife there. The empire doesn’t really want them, but it would be humiliating to have no presence there whatsoever – and there’s tons of mercenaries not loyal to the empire who all think they can make a go of it in that terrain.
The sorcerers retire to their studies and ponder their orbs.
And eventually, a plan occurs to them.
The Pax Arcana
If you look at the OGL 1.0a not as an IP licence but as a peace treaty, a lot of it makes much more sense.
There is always a gap between the rights the law gives you and which you can reliably enforce in court, and what you can persuade people to concede by raising the prospect of a legal battle which, at the end of the day, they might well win but which it isn’t worth them spending the time and money and effort to fight. One of the reasons we have a structure of competition law in the UK and Europe (and comparable antitrust law in the US) is because in a market where one participant is in a dominant position over the others, that sort of gap tends to favour the dominant player – they can afford the legal battle far more than smaller market entities can, so smaller entities will tend to roll over if they are legally threatened and they don’t have a very good defence, because they just can’t afford to fight it out.
The RPG market, in particular, operates on incredibly tight margins. I would be surprised if the English-language market had more than a handful of companies who are even in the position to budget for getting legal advice on responding to a cease and desist – let alone the sort of warchest which may be necessary to fight a case to its conclusion. It’s an ugly truth that enough money can buy you an awful lot of legal sway – not (necessarily) because of judges taking bribes, but because if you can avoid the court process and the other party can’t, most of the time they are going to surrender before the matter even needs to be decided by the judge in the first place.
At the end of the 1990s, TSR had created an environment where all their competitors were justifiably cautious. Those who had been paying attention had seen what happened to Mayfair Games, GDW, and entirely commercially irrelevant fan sites, and wanted no part of that. They wanted to stay well out of the blast radius of TSR’s legal department, and the safest way to do that was to simply stay well clear of anything which looked like an attempt to produce a D&D-compatible product.
Was this more caution than the letter of the law said was necessary? Yes – but if you went right up to the legal boundary, TSR would fire warning shots. Safest to give them a comfortable buffer zone.
This created a potential headache for Wizards when they wanted to specifically encourage third party publishers to roll into the buffer zone and set up shop. They were trying to encourage publishers to actively do something which TSR had previously punished them for doing, and without a lot of legal certainty, those who remembered their industry history would be reluctant to do that. At the same time, they also wanted to maintain a certain level of dominance in the market and a level of control over their intellectual property – and if that control extended beyond the rights they were already entitled to under the law, so much the better.
Ryan Dancey has talked a lot during the recent controversy around the OGL about his personal motivations and intentions in writing the OGL, which he says included noble aims like making sure that the rules were available to the community in the event that Wizards (or some successor company) ever went bust, leaving the rights to the game in limbo, or acted as sufficiently bad custodians of the game that the fans became disgusted and walked away from them altogether. That’s cool, but ultimately the original OGL was not an agreement offered to prospective licensees by Ryan Dancey as an individual – it was one offered by Wizards of the Coast as a corporate entity. Ryan may well have had all of these personal motivations for offering it, but it wouldn’t have happened without the right people at Wizards saying “yes” to Ryan’s plan, and their reasons for agreeing to his plan don’t necessarily map to his reasons for proposing it.
To my eyes, from a business strategy perspective the OGL 1.0a is an attempt to establish a Pax Arcana, comparable to the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire at its most powerful. Wizards, as the big hegemon within this particular sphere of influence, magnaminously says that they will not go after you for producing certain types of product, and even provides a fair amount of text you can simply copy-paste into products made under the licence. Some people have argued that the text of the SRD isn’t copyrightable for various reasons – but I would argue that whether or not it is actually copyrightable matters less than the promise that as a licensee you will never have to argue about its copyrightability, because Wizards gives you permission to use the text anyway. It’s one thing to know that, if you have enough money and time and lawyers to see a case to the end, you will probably be able to beat Wizards in a legal fight – but it’s another thing, and a much, much more valuable thing from a business perspective, to know you will never need to have that fight.
At the same time, the OGL makes certain demands of licensees, particularly in relation to Product Identity. If you want to be treated favourably by the empire, you have to bend the knee and concede to the empire certain things – you take on constraints above and beyond those which already exist under the law in return for having this safe harbour.
Is the safe harbour as attractive as it would be in an IP licence negotiated between parties who do not have a gulf of power and wealth between them as that which existed between Wizards and the vast majority of the other publishers in the RPG industry? No, not really. But that is not the sort of agreement the OGL 1.0a was – because that is more like terms of peace imposed by an empire which had the wealth and resources to be much harsher if it wanted to be, but was specifically choosing to be a benevolent neighbour for the sake of rehabilitating the market – at least to the extent that third party operators could provide the downstream products which Wizards themselves didn’t want to make.
When you look at it through that lens, rather than the lens of a conventional IP contract made between near-peers, a lot of it makes much more sense – and the consequences of Wizards threatening to unilaterally rip it up also make much more sense.
After all, when you break a peace treaty, you get war.
The Deal On the Table – OGL 1.0a
OGL 1.0a is the licence which Wizards originally offered, which third party publishers have been using for literal decades, and which Wizards have said they are going to leave in place, untouched… for now. It’s the deal they put on the table to establish the Pax Arcana, and it’s the deal which, by trying to deauthorise, they have shattered the Pax Arcana. They are trying to return to peacetime conditions by leaving it in place – but even a reversion to the status quo ante bellum and tribute sacrificed on the altar of Creative Commons won’t necessarily clean things up for Wizards, for by threatening deauthorisation they have destroyed the trust and goodwill built up over two decades of OGL 1.0a, and without explicitly disavowing the possibility of future deauthorisation (or, even better, updating 1.0a to clarify that deauthorisation is impossible), they’re never going to get that trust back. Everyone saw what they thought they could get away with; everyone will expect them to try and shift back towards that at some point in the future.
I will pick over the corpses of OGL 1.1. and 1.2 in a subsequent post, but to round out this one I’m going to provide a detailed commentary on OGL 1.0a, both to point out what it actually says, where to my eyes it seems ambiguous, and where it seems unusual. If you can, I suggest following along with a copy of the vanilla licence as it exists in isolation, and the SRD 5.1 including it, since the latter provides an example of how Wizards believes you should use it in practice.
What you will notice is that in the Legal Information section of the SRD there’s some material preceding the actual OGL text, but which does relate to it. Firstly, we’re told that permission to copy, modify, and distribute the SRD text is given solely through the OGL 1.0a; that’ll probably need to be tweaked sooner or later because it isn’t actually true, thanks to Wizards dumping the entire SRD 5.1 into Creative Commons, but it was true at the time SRD 5.1 was first released.
Then we get a warning that the OGL itself is not Open Game Content, that we should read the OGL to understand the OGL. The latter is generally good advice; the former is important because it emphasises that we don’t have the freedom to chop and change the OGL text which we’d have to muck about with Open Game Content (a restriction bourne out by provisions of the OGL itself).
Then we get a big block defining a set of terms as being Product Identity for the purposes of the OGL, and a statement that the rest of the contents of the SRD is Open Game Content. That’s going to be important to bear in mind going forwards, so stick a pin in that – we’ll come back to it later.
Now we get the actual licence text, and it opens with a statement that the copyright in the OGL belongs to Wizards. This poses a potential issue for the ORC licence which a coalition of publishers including Paizo and Chaosium are working on as a genuinely irrevocable alternative to the OGL, because if Wizards wanted to play hardball they could conceivably go after them for copyright infringement if clauses of the ORC seemed to lift sufficiently from OGL 1.0a. This shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid, especially since the terms of the ORC will likely differ from the OGL in some respects anyway, but the necessity of avoiding this pitfall may make it a little harder to frame the ORC in such a way that it uses terms familiar from the OGL in definitions closely analogous to the OGL – adding just a touch of extra friction when it comes to publishers figuring out how to use the ORC.
Then we get to paragraph 1, which is a fairly unwieldy block of definitions. Some thoughts on those which spring to mind as I glance at them:
- We are told that a “Contributor” is an IP owner who’s contributed Open Game Content. To my eyes, the licence is actually a little shaky when it comes to describing the mechanism of contributing Open Game Content in the first place; you can sort of infer some details as to how you can contribute stuff from it, but little is stated directly and if I were drafting this I would want to make the procedure for contributing Open Game Content explicitly spelled out in the licence itself.
- “Derivative Material” gives a definition of such which will be somewhat familiar to people schooled in copyright law, but setting down a specific definition here is sensible because it means that the definition for the purpose of the licence is set down and clarified here. If there were no definition given, there would be a risk of differing interpretations arising in different jurisdictions – take a note of that, I’ll get into it later.
- Similarly, “Distribute”, “Trademark”, “Use”, “Used”, “Using”, “You”, and “Your” are defined in ways which to my eyes seem useful and sensible. I note that “You” is defined as referring to the licensee, but the text does not explicitly and directly state who the licensor is in the context of the OGL; contextually, in light of paragraph 4 the licensor would seem to be the Contributors of the specific Open Game Content used, but my instinct would be to define this explicitly.
- “Open Game Content” is defined as “the game mechanic” in a way which looks ungrammatical to me, and there’s no other definition of “game mechanic” in there to my eyes, to a point where I wonder if it’s an artifact of an earlier draft which didn’t get caught in the final proof-read. The definition also pushes the scope of what can be Open Game Content beyond game mechanics anyway, because it can include “any additional content clearly identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor”. We’re also told that it “means any work covered by this License […] but specifically excludes Product Identity”.
- We then get a definition of Product Identity which is extremely expansive – to my eyes it looks like pretty much anything setting-related or describing a specific scenario which might go into a RPG book can viably be designated as Product Identity. There is no specific statement that game mechanics can be Product Identity, and I’ve heard that Green Ronin caused some ruffled feathers when they tried to claim their particular version of Hero Points as Product Identity.
That said, Product Identity can extend to “thematic elements” and “concepts”, and can extend to “descriptions of” a dizzying variety of things. As an attorney, I would not want to stand in a courtroom and have to argue that a particular RPG mechanic was not a thematic element, not a concept, and – here’s the killer – not a means of describing something in the game world – for what is a game mechanic if not a description of something happening within the fiction of the game? Sure, maybe very narrative-style mechanics which allow you to shape the action from an authorial stance aren’t descriptions of stuff happening in the fiction – but equally, once they get to that point, I think the opposing counsel could still plausibly argue for those being thematic elements or concepts.
The basic idea which is put across is this: if you corral stuff as Product Identity, it’s not Open Game Content. If you don’t make sure to do that, it’s Open Game Content. Whilst Wizards might have hoped to be able to define a limited set of things as viable to declare as Product Identity, their list ends up being so all-encompassing as to be near-meaningless. (In a game played primarily in the imagination, surely everything is a “concept”?)
This also seems to be the closest thing the licence comes to an explicit explanation of how you become a Contributor – you put out an OGL product which includes at least something new which hasn’t been ringfenced as Product Identity, and by default that becomes Open Game Content. Again, though, I think that’s something which could be done with being stated explicitly.
Looking at the above, I am again somewhat struck by the fact that Open Game Content – and “the game mechanic” – are not given a much clearer definition. Let’s bear in mind that game mechanics are a royal pain to protect through any other form of IP; copyright can protect their specific expression, but not necessarily protect a rephrasing, and the vast majority of game mechanics in tabletop RPGs wouldn’t be patentable in a wide range of jurisdictions. This is particularly the case because lots of RPG mechanics are derived from older games, which weren’t patented but were published and so are fair game when it comes to being cited as prior art. I would not want to be a patent attorney having to argue that the D&D 3.X system represents an inventive step over previous editions of D&D, to point to all of the legacy D&D stuff as clearly being old, and the major 3.X innovations as simply being implementations of ideas already found elsewhere in the field.
What Wizards were in effect trying to do here was to set up a sort of private IP system – one where those who bought into it could happily let each other directly copy material which was Open Game Content, but still protect Product Identity, and where they could get people to agree to certain constraints above and beyond those which exist in law in return for getting the right to directly copy SRD material and the like without worrying about rephrasing for the purposes of copyright. That’s not as nefarious as some people have made it sound – any licence or contract is going to entail one party agreeing to certain constraints and restrictions above and beyond those which exist by default in law. (If we sign a contract where I am buying your house, you are giving up your freedom to turn around and sell the house to someone else, and if you go ahead and do it I have more access to legal recourse against you than if you did that before we signed the contract.)
Paragraph 2 explains that the OGL applies to any Open Game Content that contains a notice stating that the Open Game Content may only be Used under the Licence, and you have to affix such a notice to any Open Game Content you Use, and you can’t add or subtract terms from the Licence or add additional terms and conditions to Open Game Content you distribute using the OGL. Similarly, paragraph 10 says you have to include a copy of the licence with every copy you distribute.
Now, does this mean that Wizards of the Coast may have breached the licence in this respect by putting the SRD 5.1 out under that Creative Commons licence? After all, to do so, they had to put it out with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The SRD 5.1 was originally put out as Open Game Content under OGL 1.0a, by redistributing it in a new version Wizards are Using the SRD 5.1 in the sense of OGL 1.0a, and the Creative Commons version doesn’t include such a notice.
Well, no, Wizards are absolutely free to do this. Paragraph 4 is key here – it specifies that the Contributors give you a non-exclusive licence to use the Open Game Content via the OGL. The non-exclusive bit is key – it means that the Contributors retain the right to make their own copyrighted material available via other licences as well, and that would include Creative Commons. Since Wizards wrote the SRD 5.1 themselves and are the sole Contributor to it, there’s no problem.
If other parties were Contributors to it – by virtue of having Open Game Content they produced and contributed being included in it – Wizards wouldn’t have been able to put the SRD 5.1 in Creative Commons without the permission of the other Contributors, so there’s definitely a legal hazard in anyone trying to follow Wizards example if they have been making extensive use of Open Game Content from other people who haven’t already gone the Creative Commons route. This could be particularly a risk if someone uses Wizards-originating content found in the 3.X SRDs, but didn’t get grandfathered in to the SRD 5.1.
Paragraphs 3 and 4, together, are there to make sure that the licence includes the classic parts of a contract required by many common law jurisdictions. There’s an offer (the licence), acceptance (you Using the Open Game Content indicates you accept the terms of the licence), and a consideration (in return for you agreeing to abide by OGL 1.0a, the Contributors give you the licence to use the Open Game Content).
The significant thing in Paragraph 4 is that it states that, in consideration for agreeing to use OGL 1.0a, the Contributors give the licensee a “perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license” with the exact terms of the OGL to use the Open Game Content those Contributors have provided. This is one of the major planks which Wizards’ argument for being able to “deauthorize” the OGL would have likely rested on: because this licence is not “irrevocable”, it can be revoked. (“Perpetual” just means that there is no time limit on the licence – it doesn’t go stale automatically.)
Wizards could have said “we hereby revoke all licences we have issued under Paragraph 4 of the OGL 1.0a to use the Open Game Content found in the following sources, anyone wishing to use this content must use our new version of the OGL”. It would be hard to justify doing this in a totally arbitrary way – in particular, Wizards would be nervous about creating a precedent that any Contributor could conceivably disrupt the OGL ecosystem by yanking their work in this manner. Nonetheless, the fact that the licence created by Paragraph 4 is not specifically irrevocable suggests that some version of revocation of the licence granted by Paragraph 4 is possible. The termination clause at paragraph 13 offers one means by which this could take place – Wizards’ position, had they tried to fight this deauthorisation thing to the end, would likely have been another mechanism is found at Paragraph 9 (of which more later).
Paragraph 5 boils down to “If you try to put someone else’s IP down as Open Game Content, it’s your ass”, paragraph 6 is a warning to keep the copyright notice relating to Open Game Content straight – fine. Paragraph 7 is where the restrictions on Product Identity come in – this is the bit which means that if you use OGL 1.0a, you cannot use the term Dungeons & Dragons or even explicitly say “This product is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons” unless you have a specific licence with Wizards to do that, and which more generally says that you can’t use Product Identity unless the owner of that stuff gave you permission to do so.
In other words, this is the paragraph which shows that a lot of the justifications Wizards are offering for their updated OGL absolute garbage nonsense. They have been claiming that they were worried about big corporations like Facebook using the OGL to make knock-off D&D Metaverse projects, crypto types making D&D NFTs, hate groups putting out racist D&D content and so on. The problem with this claim is that if people used the OGL 1.0a to do that, they were specifically disavowing the right to indicate that their stuff was compatible with D&D, or to use the term D&D in relation to it – so far from making it possible for them to contaminate the brand like that, OGL 1.0a actually makes it harder.
Indeed, by putting out SRD 5.1 under Creative Commons, Wizards have only gone and made it vastly easier for people to do the exact thing they were worried about people doing under OGL 1.0a; after all, now any of that Creative Commons material is free for someone to put into a metaverse, turn into an NFT, or work into hate literature without any of the restrictions that the OGL 1.0a imposed.
A lot of the commentary on OGL 1.0a and the arguments for it being faintly useless, incidentally, relies on the idea that by agreeing to abide by the Product Identity rules, you are giving up the right to do stuff like indicate compatibility which Wizards themselves conceded that you actually had the right to do under trademark law typically. From Wizards’ own 2004 FAQ:
Q: My understanding of Trademark law is that it is legal for me to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with a Trademark so long as I don’t dilute the mark, confuse consumers about the ownership of the mark, or attempt to claim ownership of the mark. How can the OGL stop me from using a Trademark in a way that is otherwise completely legal?
A: The terms of the Open Game License supercede the terms of general Trademark law. By agreeing to accept the Open Game License, gaining the benefit of the consideration of being able to use Open Game Content under the terms of the OGL, you limit certain other rights that you might otherwise have.
The argument that OGL 1.0a is worthless hinges on the idea that a good amount of SRD material would not be held to be copyrightable – though this overlooks the fact that a) people can absolutely put stuff into Open Game Content which actually is copyrightable, over and above the SRD itself, and b) actually, the SRD includes a lot of specific information which goes above and beyond a mere explanation of game mechanics.
For instance, the descriptions of how different races express alignment contain more or less no actual game-mechanical information and a lot of setting-based assumptions, the spell descriptions include a lot of special-effects stuff which doesn’t actually have any direct game mechanical impact, there’s the entire appendix on the planes of existence, and so on. There’s definitely material in there which, in that specific wording, is copyrightable – and whilst it’s all stuff you absolutely could rephrase if you wanted to, the effort saved in not having to rephrase it is certainly helpful, especially in a field with margins as tight as RPG publishing.
More importantly, if we look at the OGL through the lens of it being a peace treaty, the Product Identity stuff is a clear declaration of what Wizards consider to be their “red lines” – the stuff which third party publishers could expect to provoke a response from Wizards if they tried it. Wizards are signalling here that they are fine with you producing D&D-compatible stuff – they’ll even provide you with tools to help you do it in the form of SRDs you can mine for material – but they will ask you to surrender the right to say your stuff is compatible with D&D if you do it, and if you want to indicate compatibility, you will need to get some other licence with them – such as the D20 licence in the 3.X era, or the DM Vault setup currently.
Notably, back in the day the D20 licence didn’t give you the right to use the Dungeons & Dragons trademark – you had to use the “D20 System” trademarks instead – and it was a revocable licence, with Wizards exerting more quality and content control over material. (The Book of Erotic Fantasy infamously got the licence yanked from it.) The DM Vault gives you more ability to pitch your stuff as specifically D&D-compatible, but you have to sell it through Wizards’ specific section on DriveThruRPG, adhere to tighter requirements, and surrender a cut of the take. Neither case allows someone to just make a product, sell it through whichever avenue makes sense to them, and frame it as being D&D-compatible.
There’s a certain amount of signalling you can pick up on here. If Wizards is requiring that people using the OGL 1.0a disavow the ability to call their products compatible with D&D, wouldn’t let anyone using the D20 STL use the D&D trademark or indicate compatibility, and requires people using the trademark or otherwise indicating compatibility via the DM Vault to sell the product via Wizards’ walled garden only, then it’s not hard to infer that Wizards really, really don’t want you doing that. (Likewise, they don’t want you using the names of the core rulebooks, trademarks including the term “d20”, a swathe of setting stuff, and a rather bizarre cross-section of iconic monsters.)
Sure, you could go your own way, not use any of the licences, indicate compatibility with D&D, and simply rely on the existing provisions of trademark law to make sure you are not setting a toe over the line in that respect – as Wizards’ own FAQ implicitly concedes you could do by pointing out that trademark law lets you do this typically. However, given the signalling Wizards put out on the subject via the licences, it would not at all be unreasonable to infer that they really don’t want you to be doing that – and that if you try it, you should worry about pushback. This, in fact, is something of a point of continuity with the TSR days – TSR went after Mayfair for indicating compatibility with D&D despite Mayfair’s products being all their own homebrewed content.
Again, by putting out SRD 5.1 under Creative Commons, Wizards have actually made it somewhat easier for people do things which Wizards previously disapproved of – in that products relying on Creative Commons for access to SRD material have more freedom to indicate compatibility with D&D than products relying on OGL 1.0a do now, which in a way is a measure of the size of the concession Wizards have made here – not only has their aggressive move been rolled back (for now), but they’ve also dismanted part of their line of defensive forts, making forays by third parties into valued provinces the empire had previously jealously guarded more viable.
Paragraphs 8 and 11 are common sense provisions – requiring you to indicate which portions of your product have Open Game Content in makes sense, not letting people advertise their products using the names of Contributors makes a certain amount of sense. Without the latter, someone could piggyback on the reputation of a more famous game designer by using Open Game Content of theirs in a product and then promoting the product as including design work by them – technically true, but potentially misleading, especially if it’s only a trivial amount of design work like a single monster statblock or something.
Paragraph 10 I addressed above in conjunction with paragraph 2. Paragraphs 12-14 are all fairly standard stuff – 12 means that if the law of the land gets in the way of using a bit of Open Game Content, then the OGL doesn’t override that, and paragraph 14 is the sort of thing you include in any licence if you don’t want a situation where if one aspect of it is ruled unenforceable, the entire thing disintegrates. (An alternative approach which exists is “if this contract is held unenforceable, all parties will come together to renegotiate a new contract”, but that’s obviously not going to be appropriate to use for an open contract like this.)
Paragraph 13 is perhaps a little harsh – 30 days to cure a breach of the licence may verge of the unreasonable, depending on the nature of the breach and what would be deemed necessary to “cure” the breach. The licence also notably doesn’t give anyone specific responsibility for spotting breaches and acting – meaning that in effect everyone has to look out for breaches of the licence in respect of their own Open Game Content (so Wizards can spend their energy policing the OGL in respect of their own stuff, but don’t need to worry about policing it for anyone else). Notably any sublicence survives the termination, so if you put out Open Game Content but ended up breaching the OGL by breaching the Product Identity provisions when marketing your work, and someone else used your Open Game Content but didn’t repeat your mistake, they don’t get in trouble. Still, some form of termination clause is usual.
The last really potentially exciting paragraph in here is paragraph 9, which states that Wizards or designated Agents thereof can publish updated versions of the OGL, and states that you can use “any authorized version” to “copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License” – note that it doesn’t say “to Use any Open Game Content”, though it is hard to think of any act listed under the definition of “Use” at paragraph 1 which could not at least be argued to fall into the categories of copying, modifying, or distributing.
This is the other major plank by which Wizards would have likely tried to support the idea that they could “deauthorise” OGL 1.0a, should this have been challenged in court. Indeed, the fact that they used “deauthorisation” language inherently points to this paragraph, because it’s the only place in the licence where the idea of an “authorized version” appears. The problem for Wizards is that whilst it is clear that this paragraph gives them free reign to make new versions of the OGL, it is ambiguous as to whether doing so inherently deauthorises older versions.
Specifically, the term “you may use any authorized version” implies that it is possible to have multiple authorized versions extant – otherwise the party being addressed would not have a choice between versions to use and the term would be meaningless. The Paragraph does not, after all, say “you must use the currently-authorized version as most recently updated by Wizards” or language to a similar effect – which you would expect to be the language used if updating the OGL deauthorised old versions.
An even more awkward aspect of this “deauthorisation” theory is the knock-on effects on third parties who have contributed their own Open Game Content. The OGL 1.0a has an asymmetry to it – for the most part it sets up licences between the Contributors as licensors and licensees using the Open Game Content offered by the Contributors, but the updating provision is not in the hands of the Contributors in general, it’s in the hands of Wizards.
If Wizards can update the licence, but old licences can’t be deauthorised, all is fine – the other Contributors can keep using the old licence if they wish. But if the other Contributors can no longer use 1.0a once Wizards deauthorises it, then suddenly that licence between the non-Wizards Contributors who offered up Open Game Content and the licensees who have used that content gets severed, against the will of both the Contributors and the licensees. I am not an expert in the law of contractual interference, but it feels like you’d be skirting the line there; either way, I would argue that the mere fact that this is the case implies that deauthorisation is not a thing, because if it were it would create this sort of headache, whereas if it doesn’t these paradoxes are instantly resolved.
Furthermore, in the 2004 FAQ that Wizards put out, we read the following:
Q: Can’t Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn’t like?
A: Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there’s no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.
Now, the FAQ is not the OGL, and the written terms of the contract would be the first thing the courts look at in terms of figuring out the effect of the contract. However, it is possible to look at other evidence for intent when it comes to ambiguous terms in a contract – and since the OGL 1.0a does not give any explicit definition of what an “authorized” version is, I think you can argue that bringing in the FAQ is relevant at least for the purposes of anyone who took up the licence after the FAQ was published, because the FAQ was in essential put out to encourage and reassure people considering using the OGL for their material, and so forms part of the “course of dealing” between Wizards and anyone who used the OGL 1.0a in light of that FAQ.
By comparison, Ryan Dancey’s declarations decades after the fact about what the intent was will be rather weaksauce – though if he has correspondence from the period when the OGL was drafting he can produce, that might change things. On the other hand, Wizards’ statements to the community at the time the OGL came out, explaining how old versions would remain usable after updates, would seem to carry significantly more weight, because that’s specifically the party that drafted the OGL providing guidance to others on how it should be interpreted.
All someone would need to do to convince a court to consider this is to persuade them that there is ambiguity around either a) what constitutes an authorised version, or b) how the deauthorisation mechanism works – or whether there is one in the first place. Wizards would need to successfully argue that there is no ambiguity about any of that. I can imagine them arguing that it’s clear: an authorised version is one put out by Wizards, they can deauthorise versions through an update, the licence explicitly gives them (and them specifically) the right to update it so versions other people alter are not authorised.
Between this and the promissory estoppel issues raised by that FAQ, I think Wizards’ declared intent (later backed down on) to deauthorise OGL 1.0a was a deeply inadvisable move on their part. Although in principle it could be forced through if you were to persuade a court to ignore Wizards’ own prior statements in relation to the FAQ, as an attorney I would not want to gamble on being able to keep the FAQ out of consideration – and once it was before the court, I would struggle to reconcile what it says to the position that 1.0a is deauthorisable.
Furthermore, it’s the sort of thing where even if you win on this, you end up looking like a colossal asshole. Everyone in the industry would see that you’d made a bunch of reassurances in the FAQ which you didn’t in the end stand by; you might win in the court of law, but you would lose hard in the court of public opinion. As well as earning the opprobrium of customers, you’d outright kill any chance of anyone putting serious investment into taking up your new OGL – because they will have seen how you’d screwed over everyone using the old one.
Strange Developments In the Borderlands
So much for the terms of the Pax Arcana, as it has existed for the past couple of decades. What have been the consequences in those borderlands it was intended to encourage third parties to settle?
Firstly, settlers from hitherto-unrelated cultures have set up embassies in the region. RPGs entirely unconnected to D&D – like the Mongoose editions of Traveller and RuneQuest, the Delta Green RPG, and so on – ended up making use of the OGL 1.0a in order to provide a ready-baked third party content policy. This gives rise to two advantages for the publishers taking this route: it lets them get that third-party support going or authorise other people to use their game mechanical innovations without going to the effort and expense of drafting a licence system from scratch themselves, and it means that anyone who’s already learned how OGL 1.0a works and is comfortable publishing using it doesn’t need to get their head around a new licence when considering publishing stuff for your game.
The effect of deauthorising OGL 1.0a on these publishers would be inconvenient, but to my eyes not fatal. Since the licence given by the OGL is non-exclusive, nothing stops publishers being affected from knocking together their own licence to cover the gap – witness the current efforts around the ORC in this respect, which I will expect to see publishers use for this sort of purpose going forwards in future a defence against the possibility of Wizards deciding to kill OGL 1.0a after all.
Nonetheless, the deauthoriation of OGL 1.0a going ahead would be an inconvenience to publishers who have used it for this purpose – it would mean they would need to remove the OGL from future reprints of their material (to avoid legal flack from Wizards), and would mean they’d have to sort out an alternate licence arrangement with third parties working with their material.
More or less none of the statements I have seen from Wizards around the OGL over this entire controversy have given much thought to how the deauthorisation of the OGL 1.0a would have affected third parties who attempted to use the OGL to allow others to use their own content, rather than third parties using the OGL to get access to Wizards’ own content. It really seems like they don’t give this stuff much thought – either because the relevant responsible parties aren’t clued-in enough to the wider hobby to realise that this dimension exists, or because (as seems more likely) they simply do not give a shit, and regard third parties using the OGL to promote their own content rather than nudging people towards Wizards’ content as being an unwanted by-product of the licence they are happy to see go away.
The other unintended consequence would be the little pocket kingdoms of imperial dissidents, fond of the traditions espoused by past regimes in the empire and keen to keep them alive on the fringes after those ways have been driven out of the core. It has always been the case that anyone not sold on the latest updates to D&D has been free to keep making their old rulebooks; the retroclone movement allowed people to produce new presentations of the rules to old editions, making it easier to propagate those rules, and to provide a means by which people could produce support material for old editions just as the OGL was intended to do the same for the current edition.
To be honest, I don’t think Wizards are too bothered about clones of TSR-era editions. The OSR talks a big game but they are very much a niche of a niche, and arguably their activities actually benefit Wizards in the long run by stimulating sales of that long tail of old TSR-era products on DriveThruRPG, as well as providing groundswells of nostalgia which can help generate buzz for new updates of old settings like the recent Spelljammer and Dragonlance releases.
It does seem, however, like between issuing the OGL initially at the start of the 3.X era and the close of that period in their history that Wizards stopped being so happy about the scope for third parties to retroclone close-to-current versions of the game. 4E, remember, was never put out under OGL 1.0a – its third party licensing arrangement was the Game System Licence (GSL), as more restrictive arrangement which many third party publishers balked at.
How bad the GSL was is a matter of debate, and there’s an argument that the perceived “poison pill” which it included was overhyped. Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that Wizards was trying to do two things with it. The first thing was that they wanted to block off the opportunity for people to clone 4E outright, by not providing sufficient tools under the GSL to do so. The second thing was that they wanted to encourage publishers to migrate from supporting 3.X to 4E by including a provision where if you put out a product under the GSL, you couldn’t go back and put out a 3.X version under the OGL, and if you updated an old 3.X OGL product to a 4E GSL product you had to get rid of your old stock of the OGL version and not reprint it, because if you did you’d lose your GSL rights.
In a preview of the most resent snafu, Wizards would realise they overplayed their hand with the GSL somewhat and revised it partway through its lifetime, but it wasn’t sufficient to prompt publishers to go along with it in any great numbers – the pool of GSL products is a shallow puddle compared to the flood of OGL material out there.
It wasn’t as big of a controversy as the present one largely because Wizards didn’t threaten to take away OGL 1.0a when they brought out the GSL – to continue my analogy, the peace treaty was remaining in place and people were still free to access the territory the OGL opened up, the GSL was just setting up a new turf to which access would be more controlled. Nonetheless, it was an unforced error at a time when a fairly vicious edition was heating up. Many of the most widely-cited criticisms of 4E overstated the case or were repeating memes from forums rather than representing people’s direct experience of the game, but between this and other PR slips and some acknowledged botches (like the first wave of core books requiring extensive errata, and the Keep On the Shadowfell starter adventure bring regarded as a pretty miserable example of 4E adventure design by 4E fans) there were a lot of people – both customers and publishers – not too keen on this edition shift.
This meant that the thing which Wizards were afraid of ended up coming true. It’s evident from how they handled the GSL that Wizards wanted to retain tighter control over the D&D rules’ propagation going forwards, and they wanted third parties to move away from supporting 3.X. What actually happened was that Paizo created Pathfinder as a tidied-up version of 3.5 (3.75, if you will), Paizo used OGL 1.0a both to provide the legal basis to make Pathfinder and to encourage third parties to produce 3.X-compatible material for the Pathfinder audience, and 3.X ended up alive and well in the market – making it even easier than it otherwise would have been for a chunk of customers to simply keep playing 3.X rather than migrating to the currently-supported D&D edition.
In other words, Wizards became so afraid of a potential outcome that they ended up making that exact outcome happen, thanks to their making heavy-handed decisions which failed to read the mood of the market. In the context of the 3.5E to 4E edition changeover, this added fuel to a viciously ugly edition war which poisoned a lot of discussion in the online community and still ruffles feathers to this day.
As Marx said – first as tragedy, then as farce. When the GSL issue became a flashpoint, Wizards handled it comparatively smoothly, made some concessions, and in the long run were able to put out an edition of the game which some still enjoy, in the face of all the negative and division which blew up around it. With this latest blunder, Wizards have energised all of their competitors (both those producing D&D-like games and those making distinctly different RPGs), made themselves look like the bad guy, enabled the reclamation of Paizo’s recently-tarnished reputation in the community, killed customer and collaborator trust in them to keep their word in the long term, and generally made themselves look like a pack of utter clowns who have no idea what they are doing with the OGL, and have no idea why people are mad at them about it.
But I’ll get into that in the next half of this, where I’ll do an analysis of OGL 1.1, OGL 1.2, and pick over Wizards’ clumsy communications in the wake of all this.
Refereeing and Reflection 
Wow, this brings in a lot of context and puts together a bunch of things that I hadn’t thought of all together in this way. Awesome post, I am very much looking forward to part 2!
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