Paizo's license changes

Dyslexic Character Sheets is in danger. In fact, all of Pathfinder is.

I realise that sounds clickbaity, but I promise I’ll explain. This will be quite a long article, in fact, explaining in detail. There’s a lot to cover.

A few days ago, Paizo announced some big changes to their licensing terms. The previous Community Use Policy is gone, replaced with a new Fan Content Policy that's quite different; and OGL content cannot be posted to the Infinite storefront any more. Here's their blog post on the subject:

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6vh12

It took me a while to get my head around the changes, and I'm still not sure I fully do. But the more I think about it, the worse it gets. At worst, if nothing changes, it could potentially spell the end of this project, and the beginning of the end for Pathfinder. Let me explain why.

First though, the standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. I'm not your lawyer. None of this is legal advice. In fact, most of it is more questions than answers.

History and context

For as long as men have walked the earth, Paizo had their Community Use Policy. This was an incredibly generous licence that allowed creators to use a surprisingly large amount of Paizo's property, provided they weren't doing so commercially.

Community Use Policy. It's still on their site for now, even though it's no longer valid.

It let creators use names and setting details from Golarion, a selection of artwork including iconic character art, game logos, book covers, and ANY artwork that's ever appeared on their blog (excluding photos etc). The CUP could be used either independently for non-game products, or in combination with the OGL.

There were some conditions creators had to follow: you had to include a legal notice in your product (you can see it on every page of my character sheets, excluding the D&D 3.5 ones which have similar text from Wizards). You had to make it clear your product wasn't an official Paizo product or showing them in a bad light. And you couldn't be commercial.

Those two character pictures on the site, and the Kingmaker logo, are artwork owned by Paizo and used on my site under the CUP.

The CUP wasn't the only game in town. The commercial Compatibility License is a much, MUCH lighter licence that basically just grants you permission to say "compatible with Pathfinder" and include one specific "compatible with Pathfinder" image. Partners of Paizo, like Archives of Nethys and Demiplane, had their own private contracts.

Not everyone can negotiate a commercial contract. From 2021 small publishers could publish their works on Pathfinder Infinite or Starfinder Infinite, which was a deal Paizo made with Wolves of Freeport (the merger of Roll20 and DriveThruRPG; you may also know them as OneBookshelf) to offer a branded store exactly like DM's Guild for D&D. It also takes a big fat 50% cut of your revenue, just like DM's Guild, but in return you get access to a market of customers you wouldn't have if you were just publishing alone.

OGL, ORC and the Remaster

I won't recap the entire OGL disaster - I've written about it before. Paizo's response to it was to create a new licence, the ORC. It took some time, but the Pathfinder Remaster books all use ORC (while pre-remaster Pathfinder 2 books up to and including Howl of the Wild were still OGL). Paizo clearly decided that having anything to do with the OGL was an existential danger to their survival, and they needed to get rid of it ASAP.

The ORC is quite similar to the OGL. They're both "copyleft" or "viral" licences, in that in return for building on another creator's open material you need to also open up your own material. The primary difference is that the ORC requires you to open up ALL the game rules and methods, while the OGL let you choose which parts to withhold.

The ORC cannot easily be combined with the OGL, as both of them have a clause to prevent you relicensing somebody else's material under new terms. In theory Paizo could have released any of their products under both licences, enabling third-parties to choose which licence to follow, but they had no reason to do that when their entire motivation was to get rid of the OGL. And doing so would only have split the market, making life harder for third-parties.

Paizo's changes

The changes announced recently shook up the status quo substantially.

The Community Use Policy is gone. In its place is a Fan Content Policy, which grants many of the same rights but a very different set of conditions. You CAN now sell things based on Pathfinder IP and Golarion lore, under certain conditions (basically, don't pretend it's official Paizo stuff). But you cannot combine the Fan Content Policy with the OGL or ORC. They explicitly call out that any "game products", meaning things that directly interact with the rules in ways the OGL and ORC allow, are not suitable.

Game products are instead left with the revamped Compatibility License, which grants almost nothing. Crucially, it doesn't grant access to enough of their properties to even use the names of things.

There are also changes to Pathfinder Infinite and Starfinder Infinite, which I'll get to in a minute.

What projects could this affect?

Anything the uses the game rules in creative ways, including but not limited to: character sheets, character builders, wikis, reference tools, VTTs, translations, audio helpers, and accessibility tools.

Since I don't often play Starfinder, I'd actually never heard of Hephaistos before (except as the god of blacksmiths, and the woman with the eyepatch in DanMachi), but apparently it's the best character builder for Starfinder. It certainly looks pretty good. Here's their own post on the subject.

Hephaistos character builder for Starfinder

Another group that's affected by the changes is translators. Paizo publish a handful of official translations of some of their books, but there's a lot they don't do. There's no translated Archives of Nethys. There's no translations of many of the other books. Instead, volunteers have filled in the gap. With the CUP gone, there's no way for that to work.

Volunteers also did a lot of the work in the Foundry VTT module for Pathfinder. While Foundry themselves have an agreement with Paizo, that doesn't cover the massive amount of work done on that project by volunteers.

I don't know where the Pathfinder Wiki or their associated map stand. Either they have a custom agreement with Paizo, or they'll have to become strictly FCP only, without any OGL or ORC, so no game rules at all. That means they'd need to remove alignments from pages about deities, because alignment is a game rule. So is level, CR, the "huge" tag, the "mindless" tag, and so on.

Rules details on the Pathfinder wiki

It should be noted that some projects were already not using the CUP. Pathbuilder, for example, uses the OGL/ORC only. The way it does that is to change the names of any properties owned by Paizo to neutral or meaningless ones. That's not a route easily taken though; quite aside from all the work, and the risk of getting it wrong (I've seen at least one that they forgot to change), it also makes the tool fundamentally less useful. If a player is searching for a Skittermander species to play, they're going to want it to be called Skittermander, not some other random word.

Lastly, it affects all the future projects that people might be thinking of doing but won't bother making now they're officially unwelcome.

Pathfinder is a complicated game. It's the crunchier, more detailed version of D&D. That's basically its selling point: more detail, more options, more precision, more tactics, more depth. And that all means more mental load on those playing it. Without all these game tools, the game will be a LOT harder to play, in ways that will affect a lot of players. Many of them don't even realise it yet, but they will when they try to look up something and the info isn't there, or the tool they wanted doesn't work.

The main reason I've spent all this time making character sheets is that I felt the game NEEDS a good character sheet to play. I look at the text of a Kineticist or Solarian, and think, "How in all the hells could you ever play this without a really good character sheet to help you?" Mine is not the only game tool out there, there are other good options, but we're all in the same bucket right now.

Changes to Infinite

There was another change made at the same time: OGL products are no longer allowed on Pathfinder Infinite or Starfinder Infinite. However, ORC products aren't allowed on there either, because the Infinite agreement is used instead of the other licence, not as well. That means content for any of the OGL games can't be published there - Pathfinder 1, Pathfinder 2 pre-Remaster, and the entirety of Starfinder. Starfinder 2 next year will be allowed back on Infinite. If you look at the rules for DM's Guild, you'll see the same thing: there are no OGL products allowed on there either.

There's an important difference here between the OGL and the ORC. Pathfinder 1 was built on top of D&D 3.5, and Starfinder 1 on top of that, both using existing D&D properties extensively. You can see this by checking the OGL section 15 in any of the books - it's long.

Pathfinder 2 was more of a clean design, with just one base: the original D&D 3.0 SRD from 2000. Sadly that's still more than nothing, meaning that all three of those games are not 100% Paizo's to licence as they wish; and as I said above, the OGL explicitly prevents you relicensing somebody's content under new conditions. That means it isn't possible for Paizo to release those three games as either ORC, or Infinite, or anything else. They have to be OGL.

The Remaster is different. Having cut the SRD parts out, it’s a Paizo-made game entirely, with no inheritance at all - at least, Paizo is insisting it is, and daring WotC to take them to court over it - so they can licence it as they wish. And they have done: you can either use the rules under ORC or you can use them under the Infinite agreement. Not both, though! Infinite is its own private thing.

You can, of course, still publish OGL content outside of Infinite; but without the CUP that option is suddenly a lot more limited. If you tried to publish Starfinder content now, it would be threading a legal needle to do so without stepping on unlicensed material at all.

If all that's confusing, at least the culprit here is clear: Wolves of Freeport (DTRPG) want product lock-in. They don't want it to be possible for publishers to take content from their stores and publish it elsewhere. The OGL and ORC do exactly that, and allowing OGL content on Pathfinder Infinite was an anomaly. Removing  it was clearly a term that Wolves of Freeport demanded, and Paizo accepted.

Personally I think it was a big mistake for Piazo to agree to it. The cost to them directly may be acceptable, but the cost to their community is massive.

Timing of the changes

While the CUP being replaced by the FCP was immediate, the Infinite change takes effect on 1 September.

So in theory a publisher who's working on something for Starfinder Infinite could get it finished and published in the next few weeks. In practice, a book has a lead time measured in months, and rushing to publish it risks making mistakes - that they won't then be allowed to fix.

There’s no such lead time on the CUP, it was revoked immediately. The accepted legal doctrine (that's been confirmed in a comment by Mark Moreland) is that any project which is no longer getting updates is as valid as it was at the time it was last updated; but as soon as an update is posted, it can be in violation.

The change was announced right before Gen Con, at which they released the Player Core 2, effectively putting a big tick over the Remaster being a complete game.

Don't Paizo have the right to do this?

Legally? Sure. It's their property, they can take it and go home if they want to. There was nothing in the CUP about it being perpetual and irrevocable. I'm not sure it ever even counted as a licence, just a general policy.

But doing so is absolutely stupid. The entire community of game tools have been thrown into a black hole by this.

Why did Paizo do this? Why now?

Several reasons. Paizo's primary motivation is clear: separate as fully from the OGL as they can to ensure their company isn't stuck at the whim of Hasbro. And for that I can't fault them. Hasbro is a terrible company, and the OGL has proven to be shaky ground, so Paizo's survival was at risk for as long as they used the OGL in any way. In a way, all these issues today are echoes of the OGL crisis, the result of the greedy and stupid execs at Hasbro.

Second, they needed to adhere to whatever terms Wolves of Freeport set. If they didn't, it's possible that entire marketplace would disappear, affecting not just Paizo but anyone who's published on it. It sucks, but that's business. The decision to demand that is entirely Wolves of Freeport’s fault, and while I don't like that Paizo agreed to those terms, they probably didn't have much choice. They don't have the resources to do what DTRPG / Wolves of Freeport can do, and even if they did they'd lose all the content already published there.

There's a third motivation that I'm less forgiving of, though. Comments indicate that they intend to drive content into Pathfinder/Starfinder Infinite and their partners like Demiplane, and away from the open market.

As you mention, Archives of Nethys has a commercial licence to operate and maintain a rules reference for the community, and part of this change is to ensure that that licence (and those of other partners) actually means something, because someone else can't end-around that licence by combining the OGL/ORC with the Community Use Policy and do the exact same thing.

This may have sounded reasonable in their head, but it reads terribly. It means that only their chosen partners are able to do anything with the game. The community is no longer allowed to innovate or compete.

And fourth, we have simple ignorance. Mark Moreland's comments reveal that Paizo don't really understand what third-party game tools are out there or how big a role those tools play in making their games work. This isn't a particularly good look either.

None of that answers the other question: why now? Why did they put this notice out two weeks before Gen Con? Is it just because they wanted to talk about it at the show and didn't realise what a problem it would be? Is it to coincide with the Starfinder 2 playtest? Was the timing forced on them by their deal with Wolves of Freeport?

I don't have an answer to this one. One theory is that the terms of the Infinite deal with Wolves of Freeport required them to close the OGL loophole before Starfinder 2 Infinite could be switched on, and now the Playtest is on its way that has to happen. Another possibility is that they plan to announce something new at Gen Con, which would be affected by these licence terms. Right now, we just don't know.

What could Paizo do to fix it?

That may depend on legal details we cannot see.

There needs to be a licence of some sort that covers games tools. Not just specific carve-outs for existing products, but an open space for innovation. This could be the Fan Content Policy, but I suspect it won't because that would open the door to third-party adventures and sourcebooks directly using Golarion outside of Infinite. It could be an expansion of the Compatibility License, but again I expect it probably won't be because they want to keep that minimal. So it would probably need to be something new.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that this new thing needs to be an actual licence, not just a policy. One that cannot simply be revoked at random. It doesn't need to be nearly as permissive as the FCP, or as broadly applicable as the Compatibility License; it just needs to cover those parts of the game adjacent to the ORC but not actually covered by the Licensed Materials clause, in order to allow game tools.

Having had the rug pulled out from us once, this licence needs to have some assurance that the same won't happen again. If they don't do that, every third party is going to be nervously looking over their shoulder, wondering if they should put all this work into something that could be taken away from them.

They've indicated a willingness to fix the gap for translations specifically, but this statement by Mark Moreland is particularly worrying.

I guess the situation is more in the "failed our Diplomacy check" realm than the alternative, since we never intended this to be an attack on anyone. I appreciate your understanding and for laying out the specific ways this will impact your efforts.

First, the intent was never to cut off all translation efforts, and we are looking at the various iterations of the license to see when that particular portion the CUP was removed and why. It may take a bit of time, what with needing to go back and forth with our attorneys and most of our team leaving for Gen Con early next week, but we are looking at getting provisions to allow for translation put into the license as soon as possible. They may not be exactly what they were in the CUP, but it is not our intent to prohibit any translation of our material as the current license seems to do.

Of the examples you mentioned, the YouTube videos are for sure Fair Use and always were. You can provide guidance on how people play the game or use the forum to discuss the games in any language you want without needing a license from us.

The rest likely to get caught up in the new division between non-RPG and RPG material and so we will need to look at that more closely. Would it be a deal-breaker to have those items distributed via Infinite (even for free)? Some of our localization partners sell their non-English books on the site (Ulisses Spiele, for example) and I wonder if that would be a means by which you could continue to produce the intro adventure and other material within the confines of the FCP.

As for Pathbuilder renaming content, that's how anyone not using Infinite should be using our Open Game Content (OGL) and Licensed Material (ORC). "Abadar" as well as other Paizo-owned proper nouns should not be there, but I assume it's an oversight.

Saying they "failed our Diplomacy check" suggests that they don't think the changes they've made are wrong at all, just presented badly. That means they don't understand why there's a problem. It sounds exactly like some of the bullshit WotC said last year.

The suggestion that translations should be covered by FCP reveals, again, that they don't seem to understand that translations, like other game tools, directly interact with the game’s rules. A translated wiki site in the vein of Archives of Nethys, for example, would be unable to include feat details or monster stats if it used FCP only.

Suggesting these products be sold via Infinite, a marketplace primarily for PDFs, shows that they don't really understand what these products even are. And for the record, the exclusivity clause in Infinite makes it a line I'd never cross.

I understand that Gen Con is a busy time for them, and a full solution is likely to take a lot of hashing out with lawyers, but they've left us all in a legal limbo. The minimum they could do right now is to indicate that they understand there's a gap and intend to do something about it.

What this means for Dyslexic Character Sheets

As it stands, this project is not legal.

The website remains legal as long as it’s not updated; but the project, all my work to keep improving it, is not. As noted above, the changes went into effect immediately, but anything not being updated remains valid. That means that if I ever publish ANYTHING new to the site, even just a tiny fix, I'd better be sure at that point that the whole site is compliant.

The new Fan Content Policy definitely does not cover a project like mine. There’s a threshold of game rules that the FCP allows access to in passing, and Mark's comments made it sound like he thought character sheets should be covered, but in the same breath he reiterated that it wouldn't:

A custom character sheet layout falls under the "some exceptions" in the Fan Content Policy. Since it's primarily art (the custom layout), it's not an RPG product in the sense that it'd need to reference the OGL or ORC. If it's an automated character sheet that's actively crunching numbers and referencing rules, then that would need to be released under the OGL/ORC and Compatibility License.

So any character sheet that did the calculations for you (which mine does) or directly refers to rules in a way that requires the ORC/OGL (which mine does, a lot) would definitely not be. The only character sheet I can imagine that would fit their definition would be no better than the basic one. I’ve been well over that line for as long as I’ve been making character sheets – the very first thing I did was class-specific pages for D&D 3.5 that directly used the class rules.

Removing the OGL / ORC reliance isn’t an option without completely gutting the project, so I no longer have legal access to the Community Use Package assets or the other rights granted by the Community Use Policy.

Could you make Dyslexic Character Sheets compliant?

To be compliant, I would need to remove all Paizo properties not granted under the OGL or ORC. The library of character images would definitely have to go, but you could still upload your own picture. The Pathfinder logo at the top of the sheet would have to go as well. I’m unsure of the class icons, since I redrew those to varying degrees. I’d need to make some changes to the website to get rid of their art as well.

But it isn't just about the artwork and logos - if that's all it was, I'd remove those from my site and character sheet builder, grumble a bit, and move on. The real problem is the boundary between Licensed Material and Reserved Material in the ORC (and the corresponding boundary in the OGL). Short version, the methods are licensed, but the names of things aren't. What's meant by methods is ways of rolling dice to determine success, keeping track of values etc.

This means if I made a character sheet for the Red Mantis Assassin archetype, it could embody all the rules of that archetype, but I couldn't call it "Red Mantis" because that's the name of an organisation in Golarion. Anybody who wanted to play a Red Mantis Assassin would then need to guess what new name I gave it instead.

Imagine if Archives of Nethys was split into two different sites. One site was allowed to have monster stats, and the other site was allowed to have the name of the monster. It would be significantly less useful. 

The names of any number of ancestries, backgrounds, archetypes, spells and other things aren't licensed content. Everything from Azarketi to Zon Kuthon. Every one of those would need a new name. Exactly which ones? I don't know!

This isn't impossible, but it's not a great option either. It would make the site significantly less useful for the players who are looking for a thing by name, and there's a very real risk of me missing one or more of them and still being in violation.

The Remaster renamed quite a few ancestries, for example - Tieflings and Aasimar becoming Nephilim, for example - and many of those names would need a non-Paizo alternative. What's the alternative, non-copyrighted name for Nephilim? Can we still use the word 'Nephilim' because it's taken from myth? Not a clue! And there are hundreds of these things.

It's not impossible, but honestly, if that's what it comes to, I don't think I have the enthusiasm to put extra work into making the site worse.

Could you sell/distribute through the Infinite program?

No.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the Pathfinder / Starfinder Infinite program is a distribution platform for static files, mostly PDFs, not living software. I don’t see any realistic way of making that work for a dynamic character sheet generator like mine, nor for many of the other game tools out there. It’s just not the right shaped platform for my product.

Second, the Infinite program is a legal black hole. Once content has been published on Infinite, it cannot be legally published anywhere else, ever. I’d effectively be signing over control of all my work to them, and that’s not a step I’d be willing to take.

If you’re a book publisher this is probably less of a factor. You’d lose control of one book, but you can just write another book to sell elsewhere. In my case, everything I make goes through the same core code engine, that I’ve spent years building. If I sign that away, I have nothing left.

Could you make a licensing deal with Paizo, like other sites have?

I could try.

I don't know if Paizo will give me the time of day, or what the conditions would be. I've never had any special treatment or attention from Paizo before, not even an advance PDF (which would have been useful when their chosen partners get new content up on day one while I'm sat waiting on international shipping). And as seen from their comments, I don't think Paizo actually know what my product is.

Right now they're busy with post-Gen Con mess, and the outcome of these licence changes remains unclear, so I should wait until the dust has settled before even starting that conversation. I'd also probably need to set up a company for Dyslexic Character Sheets, which is a pile of legal work I've avoided doing so far.

At the same time, I don't really know if I'd want to have a commercial licence. I don't want to be a special exception to the rules. I want to be part of a vibrant community of creators, full of new ideas.

Without the freedom to innovate, the community will gradually hollow out and die. If nothing changes, this is the beginning of the end for Pathfinder. Why would I want to continue volunteering my work for that?

Do you really expect Paizo to enforce these rules? Can't you trust them?

It's true that Paizo have a solid track record of being generous and open with their properties, not litigious or malicious. I believe the current staff when they say they don't intend to shut down projects just because they can. But there's no reason to assume they couldn't have a change of leadership, or that the legal landscape around them couldn't change again like it did with the OGL. Time is long, and the unthinkable happens every few years.

We no longer live in the pre-2023 world where game rules are an open playing field and we can all trust each other to play fair. That golden era was killed by Hasbro.

The changes announced by Paizo, affecting multiple groups of people without warning or consultation, show just how fragile a company's policies can be. That's why creators need an actual licence that provides some legal guarantees.

Without that, it's hard to justify the massive effort of love involved in making a thing for their game. Creators don't want to build a house of straw that could be blown down at any moment.

The (lack of) plan

I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all this. Unless something changes, this project is dead in the water.

Mark Moreland has been active in the comments thread answering questions, and in a couple of places - like translations - he's acknowledged that they need to fix it. But no such word has been given for game tools. Paizo are, of course, too busy after Gen Con to change anything right now; and if they do it'll no doubt take months of back and forth with lawyers to get something concrete. So I guess I have to wait and see, but without even an acknowledgement of the problem, I don't know how long to give them.

If, heaven forbid, I do have to shut down the project, here's what I'll do:

1. Leave the site as it is. Short of fixing a broken server, I'll never make any changes to it again. That way it stays covered under the CUP that was valid when it was last published (and I can point to public git logs showing when that date is, if anybody questions it). I obviously can't release Remaster etc, but at least the work that's already there should be safe.

2. Shut down the Patreon. There's no point in you all paying me for work I'm not going to do.

3. Look long and hard at the licence terms offered by other games to decide if they're more legally solid than Paizo's, and if I have the energy to untangle my work and go through all this again.

Of course, I'd have to be damn certain before I go that far.

What you can do

In case it wasn't clear, this isn't a call for donations. Money will not solve this problem.

It also isn't a call for you to spam Paizo staff with angry messages. If you want to let them know how you feel, do so on the correct thread, and take the time to compose a thoughtful comment.

It's too soon to start cancelling all your subs in protest. It may come to that, but I still hold out hope of them seeing sense. Sadly, the only other thing we can really do right now is be patient.

I don't want to be Paizo's enemy. I've done what I can to convince them. If it comes to a fight, I'll just walk away. But I hold out hope that this can be resolved in a way that works for all of us.