TTRPGS, Blockchains, and NFTs

When Kickstarter announced recently that it would be investing in blockchain-based infrastructure, there was widespread backlash. Blockchain technology is environmentally damaging and is of limited use. Creators such as Possum Creek Games (Wanderhome) announced their intentions to move off Kickstarter, while companies such as Chaosium and Wizards of the Coast continue to express interested in non-fungible tokens, digital items which exist on a blockchain.

While I'm writing this article, I do need to point out that I'm not a great person to do so; my understanding of blockchains, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and related technologies is very, very limited and my attempts to get a handle on the subject have not been entirely successful. I'm sure more informed people will post in the comments.

What the heck is an NFT (& what does it mean for digital artists)

What is a non-fungible token (NFT)? In this graphic designer's guide to NFTs, we explore how Non-Fungible Tokens work in the context of digital art and how you can start turning your digital creations into sought-after NFTs.

dribbble.com

Kickstarter is not the only tabletop roleplaying game adjacent company delving into such technologies. Call of Cthulhu publisher Chaosium announced in July 2021 that it was working with an NFT company to bring their Mythos content to a digitally collectible market, with specific plans to sell two different models -- the Necromonicon and a bust of Cthulhu -- from the Cthulhu Mythos; and while things went quiet for a while, last week the company tweeted that 'We have more - lots more -- to drop... when the Stars are Right." A Facebook statement from Chaosium's CEO appeared on Twitter talking more about the decision.

D&D producer Wizards of the Coast said in April 2021 that it was considering NFTs for Magic: The Gathering. More recently, an email from WotC's legal representatives to a company planning to use NFT technology in conjunction with M:tG cards, alleging unlawful infringement of its IP, indicated that WotC was "currently evaluating its future plans regarding NFTs and the MAGIC: THE GATHERING cards" but that "no decision has been made at this time."

On Twitter, ErikTheBearik compiled Hasbro/WotC's involvement with NFTs so far.

Gripnr is a '5e based TTRPG NFT protocol' with Stephen Radney-MacFarland (D&D, Star Wars Saga Edition, Pathfinder) as its lead game designer. OK, so that's about as much of that as I understand!

Some company in the TTRPG sphere have taken a stand. DriveThruRPG stated that "In regard to NFTs – We see no use for this technology in our business ever." Itch.io was a bit more emphatic:

A few have asked about our stance on NFTs: NFTs are a scam. If you think they are legitimately useful for anything other than the exploitation of creators, financial scams, and the destruction of the planet the [sic] we ask that [you] please reevaluate your life choices. Peace. [an emoji of a hand making the “Peace” symbol]

Also [expletive deleted] any company that says they support creators and also endorses NFTs in any way. They only care about their own profit and the opportunity for wealth above anyone else. Especially given the now easily available discourse concerning the problems of NFTs.

How can you be so dense?

NFTs -- non-fungible tokens -- and blockchains have been dominating the news recently, and with individuals and companies taking strong stances against them, it's fair to ask why. The environmental impact of the technology has been widely documented - it's inefficient, and the need for blockchains -- a sort of decentralized ledger -- to have multiple users validate and record transactions makes it very energy intensive. In an era when climate change is having more and more devastating effects around the world, use of such technologies attracts considerable backlash.

Other ethical concerns regarding NFTs specifically is that the purchaser of an NFT is not actually purchasing anything, and the value for the digital 'token' they've purchased is speculative. When you buy the NFT of a piece of art (for example) you don't own the art itself; you only own a digital token associated with the art. The whole concept is likened to a 'house of cards' or a 'scam' by its critics.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Driving up the prices of entertainment and energy to the point where they are priced out of reach? Yes, I'll call that immoral. Not illegal (currently), but certainly immoral.

Interesting.

And we've already established that NFTs are a scam and that cryptocurrency is evil. This is just another bad side effect of them.

Evil?

 

[Staffan]

Evil?

Yes, evil. You're using up a lot of energy and processing power (thereby polluting the environment to a very high degree) to produce a completely virtual commodity whose only value is that some day you hope to find a bigger sucker to pay you more money than you spent for it.

If that was the plan of a Captain Planet villain, we'd tell the writer to dial it down a couple of notches because it's too on the nose.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes, evil. You're using up a lot of energy and processing power (thereby polluting the environment to a very high degree) to produce a completely virtual commodity whose only value is that some day you hope to find a bigger sucker to pay you more money than you spent for it.

If that was the plan of a Captain Planet villain, we'd tell the writer to dial it down a couple of notches because it's too on the nose.

This is the kind of over the top rhetoric that makes it hard to have anything resembling a discussion on these things. Again, I don't support crypto or NFTs in their current form, so dispense with thinking I'm just a shill. Crypto currency, at least the early ones, wasn't at all the edifice of evil you're constructing here. There were a legitimate attempt to free currency from ownership by nations and instead have a useful currency that's decentralized (unowned by a single entity, nation or corporate) and have a more secure and transparent accounting for transaction with that currency. These aren't evil goals, even if their persuasiveness is going to be contingent on whatever political ideology you might favor. It's entirely fair to look at cryptocurrencies and note that they don't live up to the ideal they espouse (they're not at all useful for day to day use due to how they work) and you can absolutely criticize them for their energy consumption impacts and the follow-ons from that (although, it occurs to me that if we did go fully renewable, this argument disappears, so it's really not about crypto being bad but rather a failure in how we generate electricity and that it applies to any use of energy). Cryptos certainly aren't immune to criticism. But categorizing them as pure evil because people have decided to speculate with them (and your arguments for speculation go to anything that ever get involved in speculation, which, if you hold to that, is another of those political thingies, not an absolute fact)? No, way overboard. You might get closer with some of the more recent cryptocurrencies, but a lot of those have attempted to make improvements to how bitcoin operated and have addressed or attempted to address at least some of the criticisms. However, at no point is the creation of a speculative market innately evil (unless you're making a political argument).

 

[Jer]

Tbh I think block-chain’s security is overhyped. All it really has going is that every user bears a copy of the entire ledger, meaning it has a pretty reliable decentralized method of preserving records.

Blockchain's security is entirely based on the fact that all information shared on the blockchain is completely public. Most security breaches on the internet involve getting ahold of private information, so blockchain is "more secure" by just not being a technology that you would use to try to actually protect information.

Where the security of crypto becomes an issue is where you have secret information that you don't want shared. Like the password to your wallet that holds the information that proves you are the one who owns a particular token. A hacker gets ahold of that and now he owns all of your ape tokens, just as if he'd gotten ahold of your drivethru rpg password and now he's got access to all of your PDFs.

 

[Jer]

This is the kind of over the top rhetoric that makes it hard to have anything resembling a discussion on these things. Again, I don't support crypto or NFTs in their current form, so dispense with thinking I'm just a shill. Crypto currency, at least the early ones, wasn't at all the edifice of evil you're constructing here. There were a legitimate attempt to free currency from ownership by nations and instead have a useful currency that's decentralized (unowned by a single entity, nation or corporate) and have a more secure and transparent accounting for transaction with that currency.

I think this polishes the origin of crypto way too much. Crypto was designed to be an investment platform first - a currency that increased in value rather than depreciating. It was designed for speculators by speculators and there's a reason that sites like mtgox became the early adopters of the bitcoin trading realm - they were already playing around with speculative markets, it was just a short hop skip and a jump to speculating about digital tokens instead.

The entire structure of Bitcoin, for example, makes it a horrible currency. You want currency to be easy to spend, bitcoin is designed to be hard to spend. The "mining" structure around bitcoin was specifically to make it easy for early adopters to accumulate tokens and harder for later adopters - keeping the value of earlier tokens artificially high. It was attempting to replicate gold or silver except without the sudden shocks that would come to a metal-based economy when a new vein of ore is found so that the early adopters would never have to worry about a resource shock destabilizing their economy.

All the talk about having a government free currency is to attract noble-minded libertarian folks to buy into the idea. It's a terrible currency and it's not going to be a currency any more than gold is a currency. At best it's a commodity that someone could base a currency around, except that as a commodity it's the most ridiculous commodity anyone has ever dreamed up. Commodities are supposed to be raw materials, bitcoin and other crypto are literally the byproducts of burning commodities but are useless themselves.

 

[kenmarable]

The common refrain used to be, "The best way to become wealthy with RPGs is to start out wealthy."

The actual common refrain that has been told to me by multiple publishers over the past couple decades is "The best way to make a small fortune in RPGs is to start with a large fortune." which has a rather different meaning.

 

[Abstruse]

Blockchain's security is entirely based on the fact that all information shared on the blockchain is completely public. Most security breaches on the internet involve getting ahold of private information, so blockchain is "more secure" by just not being a technology that you would use to try to actually protect information.

Where the security of crypto becomes an issue is where you have secret information that you don't want shared. Like the password to your wallet that holds the information that proves you are the one who owns a particular token. A hacker gets ahold of that and now he owns all of your ape tokens, just as if he'd gotten ahold of your drivethru rpg password and now he's got access to all of your PDFs.

Side note: This is why people get VERY upset at the idea of putting various records "on the blockchain". Medical records, financial records, tax records, even something like Kickstarter (to bring this back on topic) has personal information that people would not want shared publicly - payment methods, shipping addresses, etc. Which means that identifying information is now attached to your wallet (your account to hold assets on the blockchain like cryptocurrency or NFTs). No more anonymous wallets if Kickstarter just attached your real name and address to it, which can then be cross-linked with every single transaction you've made using that wallet for anything else.

BTW, this is how there are records of all the wash trades (you can see Wallet A transfer Wallet B 100 Ethereum, then "sell" an NFT to Wallet B who pays Wallet A 100 Ethereum for it) and what celebrities are doing with their highly publicized NFT purchases (selling them almost immediately and cashing out the cryptocurrency for real-world money).

 

[Mortus]

From the great feedback on this post (thanks everyone) it seems to me that if WOTC or another RPG publisher wants to offer unique digital collectibles they could do it without NFTs. A combination of an online-only rule set (like Roll20’s Burn Bryte), an official VTT, and bring something like tournament play from back in the day back into vogue with big prizes and unique digital rewards. Having official sanctioned play where using all that is required to participate. They could also probably create shows and other cross-media out all that. NFTs seem pointless for TTRPGs when it can already be done with current technology. It would just take some effort over the course of a few years.

 

[The Myopic Sniper]

Unofficial Magic: The Gathering NFT project interrupted as WotC summon lawyers (PC Gamer Magazine)

"WotC said it's currently looking at Magic-based NFT options of its own."

 

[Abstruse]

Unofficial Magic: The Gathering NFT project interrupted as WotC summon lawyers (PC Gamer Magazine)

"WotC said it's currently looking at Magic-based NFT options of its own."

The statement says that Wizards of the Coast has not made a decision one way or the other in a cease and desist letter to a DAO that was minting NFTs of Magic cards. Said DAO is the one I talked about before who said their goal in the long run was to "buy the Magic brand from Wizards of the Coast". This happened the very same week that Hasbro announced that Wizards of the Coast (whose primary revenue source is still tabletop Magic: The Gathering) made up 72% of operating profit for 2021 making the company over $500 million.