Kyle Brink (D&D Exec Producer) On OGL Controversy & One D&D (Summary)

The YouTube channel 3 Black Halflings spoke to WotC's Kyle Brink (executive producer, D&D) about the recent Open Game License events, amongst other things. It's an hour-plus long interview (which you can watch below) but here are some of the highlights of what Brink said. Note these are my paraphrases, so I encourage you to listen to the actual interview for full context if you have time.

OGL v1.1 Events

• There was a concern that the OGL allowed Facebook to make a D&D Metaverse without WotC involvement.
• Re. the OGL decisions, WotC had gotten themselves into a 'terrible place' and are grateful for the feedback that allowed them to see that.
• The royalties in OGL v1.1 were there as a giant deterrent to mega corporations.
• Kyle Brink is not familiar with what happened in the private meetings with certain publishers in December, although was aware that meetings were taking place.
• When the OGL v1.1 document became public, WotC had already abandoned much of it.
• The response from WotC coinciding with D&D Beyond subscription cancellations was a coincidence as it takes longer than that to modify a legal document.
• The atmosphere in WotC during the delay before making an announcement after the OGL v1.1 went public was 'bad' -- fear of making it worse if they said anything. The feeling was that they should not talk, just deliver the new version.
• Brink does not know who wrote the unpopular 'you won but we won too' announcement and saw it the same time we did. He was not happy with it.
• 'Draft' contracts can have dates and boxes for signatures. Despite the leaked version going to some publishers, it was not final or published.
• There were dissenting voices within WotC regarding the OGL v1.1, but once the company had agreed how to proceed, everybody did the best they could to deliver.
• The dissenting voices were not given enough weight to effect change. Brinks' team is now involved in the process and can influence decisions.
• The SRD release into Creative Commmons is a one-way door; there can be no takeback.

One D&D

• The intention is that all of the new [One D&D] updates they are doing, "the SRD will be updated to remain compatible with all of that". This might be with updted rules or with bridging language like 'change the word race to species'.
• Anything built with the current SRD will be 100% compatible with the new rules.
• Brink does not think there is a plan to, and does not see the value, in creating a new OGL just for One D&D. When/if they put more stuff into the public space, they'd do it through Creative Commons.
• WotC doesn't think of One D&D as a new edition. He feels it's more like what happened with 3.5. They think 5E is great, but coud be better and play faster and easier with more room for roleplay, so there is stuff they can do to improve it but not replace it.

Inclusivity

• WotC is leaning on the community to discourage bad actors and hateful content, rather than counting on a legal document.
• They are working on an adaptable content policy describing what they consider to be hateful content which will apply to WotC's work (no legal structure to apply it to anybody else).
• They now have external inclusivity reviewers (as of last fall) who look over every word and report back. They are putting old content through the same process before reprints.
• Previously cultural consultances were used for spot reviews on things they thought might be problematic, but not everything (e.g. Hadozee).
• The problematic Hadozee content was written by a trusted senior person at WotC, and very few people saw it before publication.
• 'DnDShorts' video on the internal workings and management culture of WotC is not something Brinks can talk on, but it is not reflective of his team. Each team has its own culture.
• In the last couple of years the D&D team hiring process has made the team more inclusive.
• When asked about non white-CIS-men in leadership positions at WotC, Brinks referred to some designers and authors. He said 'guys like me, we're leaving the workforce, to be blunt' and 'I'm not the face of the hobby any more'. It is important that the creators at WotC look like the players. 'Guys like me can't leave soon enough'.

Virtual Tabletops (VTTs)/Digital Gaming

• Goal is to make more ways to play ('and' not 'instead') including a cool looking 3D space.
• Digital gaming is not meant to replace books etc., but to be additive.
• The strategy is to give players a choice, and WotC will go where the player interests lie.

​

 

[Jer]

I remember I read it in like, 1991 or 1992, and even as a child, in the very early '90s I was like "Oh my god what...". I missed some of the anti-Asian racism that's more obvious now, but there was plenty of other racism to go around!

The Native racist caricatures hit me at the time because I lived in the West so they were obvious to me. But like I said it was all worse than I remembered when I went back to read it.

I think part of it comes from the very design of the book which was "oh the humanoids aren't humans and so their cultures are comedic mockeries of the real human cultures that are around them". And then the cultures around them were the Ethengar (fantasy Asian sterotypes) and Atruaghin (fantasy Native American sterotypes) and so the humanoid cultures became parodies of those and ... yeah there's no way that's going to turn out well. Both of the supplements that were actually trying to treat those cultures respectfully have aged as well as any late 80s/early 90s American attempt to do that and so have their own issues. The one that parodies those cultures started out bad and has aged worse.

 

[Parmandur]

Yes, I read that.

So he wouldn't commit to a new SRD or CC conversion document, but did commit to 100% compatibility with 5.5e's new language which would require a new SRD or CC conversion document.

Well, for sure. What he committed to was two-fold:

- there would be some sort of "bridging" of the SRD, whether that means a wholly updated SRD or an errata document that is open, he was loath to commit to mechanical details on the form.

- Any SRD 5.1 content from third party's would work with OneD&D, by design. This fits with what we have seen in the playtest packets before this whole thing blew up.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Not that there's anything particularly toxic in Barrowmaze - though my female players did lament the absence of handsome male bar staff, or really any sexy male NPCs, when Helix's inn has three attractive barmaids.

I'm not trying to say there is. I'm pointing out how WotC is seeing these creators come out and say they will start creating stuff that's problematic just to "fight back against the woke mob" or whatever similar phrase they use. So it stands to reason why it would be on their radar to make the new OGL address that. By itself maybe no big deal, but in combination of LaNasa and others, it all adds up.

 

[Parmandur]

And, the NuTSR court case was likely the first exposure to hate-speech in D&D adjacent products that Hasbro's senior legal team had. It was also about a month before the OGL 1.1 was sent out to privileged partners that two of the senior legal team left the NuTSR court case to do something unannounced.

I remain convinced that much of the OGL debacle was driven by a court case involving Nazi and Nazi adjacent language using Wizards IP forcing lawyers unfamiliar with the OGL to read up on the legalese of intertwined IP, open gaming and the business disaster that was late era TSR.

It is really hard to imagine that Hasbro's moat high level lawyers being involved in a trademark dispute and this coming down the pipeline are not related.

Now, let's combine that with the apparently existing anxiety of the executive suite over a bigger company swooping intonthe market (and there are tons of companies bigger than Hasbro).

What if an Alt-Right troll billionaire with nerdy interests decided to bankroll an Alt-Right troll content creator using the OGL...? That's a family friendly brand selling executives nightmare.

Suddenly it's making a lot of sense why those high powered lawyers may have started picking the oGL apart...

 

[Sacrosanct]

I guess I'll just say this. For anyone who thinks there isn't a risk of problematic stuff being in the OGL, luckily the folks over at another site have compiled a list of publishers and put them in a category of green, yellow, and red. Green being publishers who won't bend the knee to woke activists and will focus on putting out games that still use racist and sexists tropes. So there you go. A nice convenient list for everyone who has been asking where this stuff is.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What if an Alt-Right troll billionaire with nerdy interests decided to bankroll an Alt-Right troll content creator using the OGL...? That's a family friendly brand selling executives nightmare.

Suddenly it's making a lot of sense why those high powered lawyers may have started picking the oGL apart..

I'm not saying that sort of thinking wasn't involved, but it's fundamentally irrational echo-chamber thinking, where a ridiculously unlikely threat becomes trumped up into a clear and present danger because of the internal culture and individuals working at a business. That's also a pretty common occurrence, and it happens the other way too, sometimes.

It's irrational because that trolling would have got precisely nowhere (as there's no real audience for it), and without the D&D brand being on the troll products, all WotC would have had to say to normie/mainstream journos would be "We don't endorse these products and condemn them in the strongest possible terms" and the story would be over for the mainstream media. But clearly that kind of thinking wasn't engaged.

 

[Jer]

I guess I'll just say this. For anyone who thinks there isn't a risk of problematic stuff being in the OGL, luckily the folks over at another site have compiled a list of publishers and put them in a category of green, yellow, and red. Green being publishers who won't bend the knee to woke activists and will focus on putting out games that still use racist and sexists tropes. So there you go. A nice convenient list for everyone who has been asking where this stuff is.

At one level this is true. But at the other level remember who put together that list. They're not that bright and IIRC not everyone who was tagged with "green" or "yellow" is actually someone who puts out games with sexist or racist tropes. It's just someone who they could put those colors on because they hadn't outright said or published something that they labelled "woke". (Though also some of those folks tagged "green" immediately started making statements to get themselves put onto the red list if they heard about the list. Still, I wouldn't trust the judgments of the folks making that list).

 

[Parmandur]

I'm not saying that sort of thinking wasn't involved, but it's fundamentally irrational echo-chamber thinking, where a ridiculously unlikely threat becomes trumped up into a clear and present danger because of the internal culture and individuals working at a business. That's also a pretty common occurrence, and it happens the other way too, sometimes.

It's irrational because that trolling would have got precisely nowhere (as there's no real audience for it), and without the D&D brand being on the troll products, all WotC would have had to say to normie/mainstream journos would be "We don't endorse these products and condemn them in the strongest possible terms" and the story would be over for the mainstream media. But clearly that kind of thinking wasn't engaged.

Oh, agreed 100% with what you say. It's just getting clearer why and how this happened, even if the answer is mostly "executive echo chambers and corporate mediocrity" the inputs and the outputs through that corporate process are starting to line up, whereas at first the whole thing seemed to come out of left field.

I think you are also right about the solution and lack of a real problem, and some at WotC seem to know that (at least apparently Kyle Brink, it seems to me), and that's the viewpoint that won the argument with the President, hence Creative Commons.

 

[Parmandur]

At one level this is true. But at the other level remember who put together that list. They're not that bright and IIRC not everyone who was tagged with "green" or "yellow" is actually someone who puts out games with sexist or racist tropes. It's just someone who they could put those colors on because they hadn't outright said or published something that they labelled "woke". (Though also some of those folks tagged "green" immediately started making statements to get themselves put onto the red list if they heard about the list. Still, I wouldn't trust the judgments of the folks making that list).

Yet it exists.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

At one level this is true. But at the other level remember who put together that list. They're not that bright and IIRC not everyone who was tagged with "green" or "yellow" is actually someone who puts out games with sexist or racist tropes. It's just someone who they could put those colors on because they hadn't outright said or published something that they labelled "woke". (Though also some of those folks tagged "green" immediately started making statements to get themselves put onto the red list if they heard about the list. Still, I wouldn't trust the judgments of the folks making that list).

List works both ways. There is a purple site that typing AKCS would earn a site ban.

Which is why I don't want the morality clause. Who knows who will be enforcing it?

Circling back to the interview, I think that you really have to go far to find scenarios where that clause makes sense to be a primary driver, WoTC is an offender, and it is still being cited as one of the reasons they wanted to replace the OGL with a new one. That seems false to me. At least they listened to the survey results.