Thread by @hexcrawl

The DMs Guild license gives WotC unlimited rights to use your material and prevents you from publishing anywhere else because they're giving you access to their settings.

There's reason to believe that without the protections of the DMs Guild license, people would be able to essentially stake out areas of, say, the Forgotten Realms and effectively prevent WotC from using them.

(This may or may not be true, but it's a legitimate risk and there's no way they're going to take it.)

The drawback, of course, is that the entire DMs Guild community -- with all its rich, amazing content -- continues to exist only as long as WotC chooses to let it exist.

And there will come a day when they shut it down. It's inevitable.

"They'd never do that because of the public backlash!"

I'm here to tell you they've already done it. Multiple times.

On that day there will be a lot of shocked Pikachu faces. And, frankly, a lot of creators will discover that their entire revenue stream has vanished overnight.

It will be a bad day.

But it will absolutely happen.

I'm not saying that no one should publish on the DMs Guild. Because there's almost nothing else like it. Being given wide open access to the Forgotten Realms; being able to play with and expand their published campaigns?

That's really cool.

I'm just saying that you should only do so if you understand what you're legally getting yourself into.

The actual problem, IMO, is that the DMs Guild license has become the model for community content licenses in the #TTRPG industry.

One factor here is DTRPG, which -- because DMs Guild came first -- used that license as the default for subsequent community content programs.

But we've seen it spread beyond DTRPG, too.

If it's a license that's giving you access to a specific setting, this still makes sense.

But where it gets REALLY BAD is when this type of license is applied to generic mechanics in a program that encourages you to create your own game settings.

Because now the license isn't saying "if you create new stuff in Waterdeep, WotC still owns Waterdeep and can still publish Waterdeep stuff similar to the Waterdeep stuff you made."

It's saying, "We own your completely original creations."

And even if you address that problem, the adjacent concept of "you're only allowed to sell this stuff through our Official Online Store" is also deeply problematic.

Because, again, those stores will go away. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow.

But it is inevitable.

(This also applies to anything else that allows the license to be unilaterally canceled.)

These are licenses which inherently say, "The Corporation wants to accrue all the benefits of an open license (e.g., your free labor in supporting and adding value to their ecosystem), but we want to give you NONE of those benefits in return."

It's predatory behavior.