Wizards of the Coast DnD debacle

Love to know people's thoughts.

gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-ogl-announc...the-coast-1849981365

www.polygon.com/23553389/dnd-ogl-paizo-o...license-announcement

I've never generated any publicly available content for DnD nor shall I so my opinion is a couch-sitting one. I will try to spew out some factoids as I see them.

You can download their entire game system for free for decades now.

There is already enough content to last the average player a lifetime.

There is no shortage of other systems waiting to take their place.

I look forward to the court battles, loopholes, and other peoples drama.

I'm predicting the fall of DnD. Because why not.

Nerd rage/tempest in a teapot.

There's been off market D&D material since the mid 70s. People make it work.

WOTC is behaving exactly like you'd expect a corporate entity to behave, when their primary concern is extracting as much profit per quarter from every possible avenue.

D&D won't fail; it's too big of a brand. If it starts losing rapid market share, then the current execs get axed and a new team gets brought in. They might get dragged kicking and screaming into doing the bare minimum to keep fans from writing them off entirely. But they'll do it if necessary.

If the debacle causes people to branch out and play other things, then I approve. There's a million great systems out there that fight for oxygen because of D&D. And no hate on D&D, it's a fun game. But it's not the only one.

I'm very curious if the big users of the OGL, presumably Critical Role and the like, will become "official" WOTC products (if they aren't already) or if they will jump ship to some sort of pseudo DnD game and just continue on. I feel like most of these streamers are barely using rules as it is, so it won't really matter what system they actually use.

Sounds like Paizo is ready and waiting in the wings.

Let them fight!

Legal Eagle posted a take on this, real opinion from a real lawyer. In short: nothing to get in a twist about. He mentions toward the end of the video that WotC climbed down a bit just before the weekend.

I'm old enough to remember when Judges Guild was publishing licensed materials for AD&D. They paid a small licensing fee to TSR, and eventually did similar licensed materials for other rpg systems. The OGL made it possible for companies to publish materials for D&D without paying royalties or fees, with the idea that the loss of revenue would be more than made up for with increased sales of the core books. Unfortunately, that makes for a powerful incentive to reboot the core system every few years.

I'm also old enough to remember when TSR nearly sued Wizards of the Coast out of existence. Wizards of the Coast was just beginning to transition from a retail shop to a small-time rpg publisher, and did an rpg that included conversion rules for a variety of popular rpgs, including D&D, BRP, GURPS, and the Palladium game system. Only TSR and Palladium got pissed enough to go legal, and both suits were eventually settled out of court. Five years later, WotC was swimming in cash from Magic: the Gathering, and purchased TSR. Two years later, Hasbro bought WotC, just to acquire the North American distribution rights to Pokemon. In the process, Hasbro found itself owning D&D as well.

I don't care much which corporate entity owns D&D anymore, but I would like to see the dramatic turnover in editions finally stop.

jason10mm wrote: I'm very curious if the big users of the OGL, presumably Critical Role and the like, will become "official" WOTC products (if they aren't already) or if they will jump ship to some sort of pseudo DnD game and just continue on. I feel like most of these streamers are barely using rules as it is, so it won't really matter what system they actually use.

Sounds like Paizo is ready and waiting in the wings.

Let them fight!

CR is already receiving money from WOTC. They put out an extremely lukewarm non-statement about supporting creators, but they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

Sagrilarus wrote: Nerd rage/tempest in a teapot.

There's been off market D&D material since the mid 70s. People make it work.

Think you may have called this a bit early - it seems that WotC have already backtracked after a massive user-base cancelling of subscriptions caused a not-so-small funding drop (and probably a similar shouting match in their boardroom after owner Hasbro saw a cash-cow drying up) plus Paizo and other publishers seeing a brilliant opportunity by this greedy/dumb move:
"One of WotC’s biggest competitors, the independent publisher Paizo, owner of the Pathfinder and Starfinder RPGs, is currently spearheading a campaign to create an Open RPG Creative License (ORC) that would be stewarded by a non-profit foundation. Other publishers, including Kobold Press, Chaosium, and Legendary Games, have already committed to the effort."
As someone said it appears the D&D community were not going to sit around and be stiffed like the GW fan community.

Brilliant behaviour - D&D is not the WotC board, it is the millions of players around the world and decades of history.

dysjunct wrote:

jason10mm wrote: I'm very curious if the big users of the OGL, presumably Critical Role and the like, will become "official" WOTC products (if they aren't already) or if they will jump ship to some sort of pseudo DnD game and just continue on. I feel like most of these streamers are barely using rules as it is, so it won't really matter what system they actually use.

Sounds like Paizo is ready and waiting in the wings.

Let them fight!

CR is already receiving money from WOTC. They put out an extremely lukewarm non-statement about supporting creators, but they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

I think you mean WotC gets $ from CR.

southernman wrote: Brilliant behaviour - D&D is not the WotC board, it is the millions of players around the world and decades of history.

Bully for them! WotC should have seen it coming.

But regardless, it's so doggone easy to snuggle up to RPG intellectual property without violating it that it just won't have that much of an effect on content. Any publisher can print material with different verbiage and a bit of hand-waving and do as they please.

I had a ton of material in the 70s and 80s that was aftermarket stuff that just said "Armor" for Armor Class and "Life" for Hit Points and the like. Some was junk, but some was gold. All of it was published when TSR had no open license.

Ultimately, most players shouldn't even care which company is getting paid, as long as they can still get decent gaming material.

Msample wrote:

dysjunct wrote:

jason10mm wrote: I'm very curious if the big users of the OGL, presumably Critical Role and the like, will become "official" WOTC products (if they aren't already)

CR is already receiving money from WOTC. They put out an extremely lukewarm non-statement about supporting creators, but they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

I think you mean WotC gets $ from CR.

I'm curious about the CR situation. My totally uninformed guess is that they (CR) are keeping all the merch and streaming $$$, when they do collabs with WOTC for those source books, that is where the profit sharing comes in. I think CR has a pretty good argument they are generating FAR more book sales to WOTC via capturing new players than they are "taking" from not licensing stuff. But the Netflix (or was it amazon?) show for example, did WOTC get a cut or was that all CR?

I can't help but wonder if this was partially driven by the pressure from activist investors on Hasbro/WotC. Recently the acivists were trying to get Wizards to spin off Magic into a separate entity to drive better financial results. So maybe this was an effort to appease investors by showing they are looking at ways to generate new revenue .