Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition OGL and SRD Thoughts

This last week has been an important one for D&D 5^th edition. We have an OGL and SRD for this new edition of D&D. We didn't have one for all of 4^th edition but now have one fairly early for this edition. We also have the release of the Dungeon Master's Guild. Though it's early, I hope to give a few of my thoughts.

Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition OGL

I would have preferred something like this at launch (to help clear up the legalities of non-Wizards of the Coast content) but better late than never. As it is, it's quite impressive. Even if you have no intention of making any content at this moment, it provides rules for many classes that up until now were only available in the Player's Handbook (sorcerer, paladin, etc.). It also includes many more spells, monsters and races (if you wanted to play a tielfing without buying the Player's Handbook, now you can).

There are some limitations. It only provides one archetype per class and duplicates some content from the basic rules. However, if you intended to use this as a search-able PDF for 5^th edition, it mostly works. There is content such as backgrounds that are not fully replicated in the SRD. As a result, you will need to flip through multiple books. Not all of the spells are included either and based on twitter posts I've seen so far, it is largely limited to things that were previously published in a SRD but for the current edition. Monsters seem a bit odd to me. If you wanted to get as many monsters as you can for free, you would have to look through the basic rules, the SRD and the free supplements for the currently published adventures. I kind of wish all the content in the SRD was also included in the basic rules so that almost everything could be found in one place (I'm not sure if they could roll in the monsters and other material from the free adventure supplements).

Dungeon Master's Guild

It seems that the main difference between normal publication using the OGL and using the Dungeon Master's Guild is access to the special Dungeon Master's Guild store, possibly having material incorporated in the current edition as well as using Forgotten Realms properties. There has already been quite a good amount of images and map material provided on the website to be used by authors. I could be missing something, but that seems to be the main thing (the author gets 50% of revenue).

So far, there seems to be quite a lot of material already coming in. I'm really happy to see it, but I mostly love adventures and I haven't seen too much of that besides the Adventurer's League ones Wizards of the Coast has put online for sale (it's nice to see that normal people can buy these now, though be aware they are of the same quality as we have seen in Dungeon+). It's nice to be able to search in one place. I'm hoping we get a tag just for the new OGL soon as well to make searching the rest of DriveThruRPG easy.

Increase in Content

The above should help increase the amount of content published for this edition of D&D (now that the legality is handled) and make it more accessible. I'll also be doing my best to review and comment on material when there isn't officially published stuff to review. Hopefully it'll be a help to all of you who read this (if there are any).