Would D&D be better off in the public domain?

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Note: I'm not trying to start an edition war. This is intended to be a business discussion, not a comparison of edition to edition.

Since D&D is owned by a publicly-traded company, there is the inevitable pressure for it to continue to not only be profitable, but to grow its profits and provide return on investment for the corporate shareholders. That's all well and good for the company, but is it good for D&D?

Assumption: whatever the success of the version of D&D being published at the time, there will come a point of saturation at which business pressures will cause the owners of the property to "refresh" D&D to boost it's profitability again. That causes the edition cycle to begin again.

If D&D were completely in the public domain (one can argue that a significant portion of it is already due to the OGL), would D&D *the game* (as distinct from D&D *the revenue-generating intellectual property*) be healthier? If not the public domain, what if D&D were managed by a privately-owned company, or a non-profit?

 

[Morrus]

Public domain? It wouldn't get the resources it gets now. Who's gonna spend millions to produce tens of thousands of glossy full colour hard back books and novels if someone else can just copy it? It'd turn into a small press affair.

I'm not saying that might not result in someone doing something awesome with it; it probably would. But you wouldn't be likely to find that awesome thing at a decent price in local game stores spanning the globe with great production qualities, and consequently you'd find it increasingly difficult to find a D&D group. I have a hard time finding D&D stuff locally as it is, and that's with Hasbro's resources.

So yeah - it would likely result in the occasional awesome thing, lots of dreck, and highly reduced networks.

Private company? It has been before, it could be again. Plenty of things do perfectly well without being part of a publicly traded corporation.

 

[Greatwyrm]

The thing is, those same business pressures that force a new edition are going to exist regardless of the business formation. One guy as a private sole proprietor needs to be able to make money to stay in business, just like an LLC or a partnership or a corporation.

A non-profit has similar problems. Just because you're non-profit doesn't mean you don't have to make any money. Unless everything you have/do/produce is volunteered, you'll have expenses somewhere. If nothing else, just keeping up on your non-profit registration and I'm assuming a website. You have to sell enough to keep up or go to the PBS model and beg for money every couple of weeks.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

It already is public domain in a sense. That's what the OGL did, along with a push from OSRIC. The editions are now so different from the original game, that they are new games in themselves. When you pay for a DnD game now, you're paying either for the glossy work or for a new reimagined game design.

 

[Serendipity]

Personally? I think D&D (the hobby) does not need D&D (the product). Increasingly, I do think the hobby would be healthier (for some value of 'healthier' - here meaning 'more playing and enjoying' v. 'less bitching about nomenclature and preferred rules'), at least to some degree.

Would the hobby grow? Probably not. (Is it growing now? Not to any measurable degree IMO.) But in any competition my interest lay in the hobby not in the 'industry' so much. The industry needs the hobby but the hobby does not need the industry.

Keep in mind, I'm coming at this from the perspective that 'high production values' (glossy paged, hard covers filled with generic and recycled art) are not a desirable or useful thing. High production values to me are 'durable and will withstand lots of use.' Oh, and lots of game content. I think the games that I like to play and the types of game books produced for those games arise more often in small niche cottage industry formats - which do not have to create broadly appealing bland things to please thousands of people. Note that I am not saying that these things are bad, just that they are not to my taste.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Good question, I wish I knew the answer.

The problem here is, are some of the more popularly available avenues of non-commercial advertising still available if it goes private or pd?
Specifically, I'm referring to the almost weekly (and in some cases 2 or three times in an episode) mention of D&D on "Eureka" (a TV series on SyFy if you aren't familiar with it.).

In the last four episodes D&D is shown being played 5 times, mentioned 10 times and has camera on product placement over 20 times. Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day are to some extent responsible for this, but still, it's in the public eye, it's being shown as played by people from all walks of life, colors and creeds and by several different age groups. The fact that the town is a bunch of brainiacs means it's more of an intellectual pursuit so wanna-be brainchildren or those of the "chess is better than checkers because it means you're smart" circle pushes the sales to inspiring intellectuals or at least people who want to appear smarter.

So could that kind of exposure be possible if D&D were PD, I don't think so. Does that mean it's better....ummm, I'm not sure, but the one thing that WotC has always done was trying to get the SyFy watching crowd to play their games through on screen product placement, and if one person picks it up due to that, maybe, yes, publicly traded ownership is a good thing.

 

[DaveMage]

I wish it were with a private company where it could be special as opposed to just another brand that needs to produce for megacorp or else....

 

[CountPopeula]

I think the root of this question is "Is D&D a big enough brand for a company like Wizards of the Coast." The answer is no, D&D as a brand only made a profit one year since Wizards bought TSR. Both third and fourth edition were failures from a corporate standpoint. And even in the TSR days, the novel line brought in the majority of the profits.

And just being in the public domain doesn't mean that anyone can copy any derivative works wholesale. Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, but Sue Vertue is just champing at the bit to sue the producers of Elementary if it comes too close to Sherlock.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

D&D was run for a long time by a non-profit and it didn't work out: TSR, I'm looking at you. OK, there is a difference between a non-profit and not making a profit, but I digress....

Hasbro needs a big win with D&D. It's not going to get it from the tabletop RPG - tabletop RPGs are a largely niche hobby. It needs a Transformers-scale movie that is successful. That's the real value of the brand and it will be the eventual billion dollar payoff when they find the right screenwriter (John Rogers?) and director.

I mention that just to separate out the value of the brand against the value of D&D the tabletop RPG.

As a niche hobby, I think (IMO/YMMV, and all that) that D&D the game would be better off in a private company where it was the proverbial big fish, rather than something with less value that Tickle Me Elmo. If I was Hasbro I would be looking for the next Paizo and licence out the tabletop rights while retaining the rights to toys, movies and video/computer games (and any board games that could be tied into a movie). Of course, that next Paizo is going to need some capital plus enough cashflow and profit to pay Hasbro its licence fee.

I still think D&D has enormous big-ticket potential a la Transformers but the tabletop RPG does not seem to belong in a large organisation. It doesn't make a large amount of money and it requires a lot of people to constantly manage AND innovate; D&D is simply not an evergreen product. The nature of the game requires constant design and development.

I do believe that if D&D Next is not an enormous success then Hasbro will look for some sort of exit whether that means "parking" the entire brand or licensing the RPG while retaining the big-ticket rights.

And I also think it would be good for the D&D creative team to have a bit more job security. After all, WotC lays off staff twice a year and that's not good. To lose your job simply because of a particular school of thinking that demands twice yearly layoffs is offensive to fair-minded capitalist pigs like myself. A profitable private company is less likely to do this.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I'm content with the current situation. I play TSR D&D, so I'm just not terribly concerned with what WotC and Hasbro are doing. If Hasbro shut down WotC and mothballed the D&D brand it wouldn't affect my D&D gaming at all.

The OGL insures that as long as there are people interested in playing D&D, the rules will be available and supplementary products can be published and purchased*. Between the OGL, the Internet/Web, PDF, and print-on-demand, I'd say we're in something of a new golden age, as far as TSR D&D goes. Like I said, I'm content.


* - At least for those editions that can be easily re-created using the OGL, which are the ones I'm interested in, anyway.