WotC D&D Historian Ben Riggs says the OGL fiasco was Chris Cocks idea.

[bedir than]

I think it's not unreasonable to have multiple perspectives on the issue that come away with different conclusions based on what they observe.

Sure, but in general historians don't work in real time. They certainly don't work in future tense.

I'd trust actual business people to understand the state of the business more than a good historian.

 

[Scribe]

So I hear Amazon has a sale on pitchforks, I can order some if you bring the torches. Or do you favor an old fashioned tar and feathering?

I'm good.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, not that shocking. Explains a lot about how it went down, includingvhow radical the about-face was. Honestly kind of impressive that Cocks was willing to kill and burn the corpse of his own initiative, since he was already the CEO of all Hasbro at that point.

More interesting to me, and somewhat befuddling, is Riggs "End of the Golden Age of RPGs" thesis. I don't even think we've seen the end of the "Golden Age" for D&D, but TTRPGs as a whole are doing great.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So I hear Amazon has a sale on pitchforks, I can order some if you bring the torches. Or do you favor an old fashioned tar and feathering?

I mean, honestly most CEOs could use a good tarring and feathering now and then, so I'm not sure this is as convincing an argument as you seem to think!

As for "anyone can make a bad decision", well sure, but that's not how society nor the human mind nor justice work. I mean, anyone could captain a cruise ship on to the rocks because they were drunk and entertaining sex workers, but it's poor old Captain Schettino we all kick around!

What you're really illustrating here is the a CEO of HASBRO (not WotC, note) can make an obviously stupid decision for a company which isn't even his, just one the portfolio he is in charge of, but is so surrounded by yes-men and sycophants that instead of throwing the brakes secretly and killing it without anyone knowing, as happens to 90% of corporate bad ideas (as both you and me know, having worked in corporate environments), it went all the way through and was about to go live, and only some poor dumb leakers, who probably paid with their jobs for their love of D&D and for helping to avoid disaster (instead of being rewarded for saving WotC from a bigger problem)

Even by corporate standards, that's a bad look. It's not common. It's not normal. It's not typical. You don't typically get decisions of this kind of granularity made by someone as senior as Cocks - and even if technically someone like Rawson brought it to him and Cocks merely then sent it down the chain, it's weird. That's not typical corporate idiocy. That's special and unusual corporate idiocy.

So that is in fact important, I would say. If this was a run-of-the-mill middle-management decision, like I said, I don't think it would be worth too much though (also it would probably never have got as far as it did). But when the CEO of Hasbro is coming up with terrible and quite granular ideas he is having WotC implement (seemingly with some resistance from WotC, but they couldn't stop it), that's pretty interestingly weird and worth noting and remembering, especially if we see any more bizarre nonsense coming down the line.

 

[darjr]

I also agree that WotC, Kyle Brink, and others, including Chris Cocks should be given credit for rolling this back, and going the extra mile with the CCBY.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Don't see why we'd be sad about the 'Golden Age' being over. Silver Ages are always way more fun.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Don't see why we'd be sad about the 'Golden Age' being over. Sivler Ages are always way more fun.

Yeah that is actually true in my experience also. Silver Age comics are obviously way more fun than the Golden Age ones (there's a reason it was Silver Age Sentinels), and if we regard the '80s as the first golden age of RPGs, when they went huge and D&D was a cultural phenom and stuff (albeit a joke compared to how it is now), then the '90s are presumably the silver age, and wow, they absolutely trounced the '80s in terms of how cool and varied and interesting and frankly, zeitgeist-y, the RPGs were. If we get that again, burn baby burn I say to the golden age!

 

[Oofta]

I mean, honestly most CEOs could use a good tarring and feathering now and then, so I'm not sure this is as convincing an argument as you seem to think!

As for "anyone can make a bad decision", well sure, but that's not how society nor the human mind nor justice work. I mean, anyone could captain a cruise ship on to the rocks because they were drunk and entertaining sex workers, but it's poor old Captain Schettino we all kick around!

What you're really illustrating here is the a CEO of HASBRO (not WotC, note) can make an obviously stupid decision for a company which isn't even his, just one the portfolio he is in charge of, but is so surrounded by yes-men and sycophants that instead of throwing the brakes secretly and killing it without anyone knowing, as happens to 90% of corporate bad ideas (as both you and me know, having worked in corporate environments), it went all the way through and was about to go live, and only some poor dumb leakers, who probably paid with their jobs for their love of D&D and for helping to avoid disaster (instead of being rewarded for saving WotC from a bigger problem)

Even by corporate standards, that's a bad look. It's not common. It's not normal. It's not typical. You don't typically get decisions of this kind of granularity made by someone as senior as Cocks - and even if technically someone like Rawson brought it to him and Cocks merely then sent it down the chain, it's weird. That's not typical corporate idiocy. That's special and unusual corporate idiocy.

So that is in fact important, I would say. If this was a run-of-the-mill middle-management decision, like I said, I don't think it would be worth too much though (also it would probably never have got as far as it did). But when the CEO of Hasbro is coming up with terrible and quite granular ideas he is having WotC implement (seemingly with some resistance from WotC, but they couldn't stop it), that's pretty interestingly weird and worth noting and remembering, especially if we see any more bizarre nonsense coming down the line.

Caring about who the individual that made the decision was just doesn't matter much to me. I can't personally do anything about it. If something they thought about doing over a year ago were to change my purchasing decisions going forward, I don't see how it matters who proposed the change. For that matter, unless you were in the conference room with the people that made the decision we don't really know who's idea it was even if Cocks did run with it.

As far as I know we still don't know how much he consulted with the WotC team beforehand or who leaked the proposed contracts. In a way, it's encouraging that it was management at the HASBRO that level made the decision for a couple of reasons. First, he wasn't directly responsible for the product line that he tried to f*** up. Second he did eventually listen to the people at the WotC level who knew better. Hopefully he learned to listen to the people that understand how things work and will listen to their objections in the future.

Of course I don't trust Cox to make the right decision for me or the industry. I never did, so this information doesn't change anything.

 

[Retreater]

Golden Age? I think we're in the Astral Diamond Age.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Second he did eventually listen to the people at the WotC level who knew better.

I personally doubt that is what happened.

Why? Because the brakes were thrown so late, only after it became not only gaming news, but started appearing in mainstream publications as a "Look, Hasbro messed up!" piece. If he just needed to listen to people at WotC, it'd have been stopped before it happened, or earlier on, when there was outcry from D&D players, but before it got to the wider press.

Of course I don't trust Cox to make the right decision for me or the industry. I never did, so this information doesn't change anything.

Sure, and I'm not suggesting you're being unreasonable - you pretty much never are - but for me it does somewhat change my calculus as to how much to invest into D&D. Because if bad decisions like this are being made by Hasbro (not WotC) and taking this much resistance to stop them, D&D is a bit more likely to "randomly explode" than I thought it was. It's not going to stop me buying the 2024 books say, but it going to factor in as a consideration as to whether to buy stuff that isn't the core three, stuff I might not use or not use much. It's only one part of the calculus. The fact that they haven't either publicly cancelled or revealed a working or near-working product for the 3D VTT is another factor, for example. It also makes me feel like maybe Hasbro are a bit more actually-dysfunctional than I thought, which means WotC/D&D are a bit more likely to end up getting sold than I was calculating.