We All Won – The OGL Three Years Later

Scribe said:

For Wizards to diminish in terms of how the community perceives it, to fall from the Industry Assumption, to just another option.

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This would make me very happy.

cranberry said:

Yea, I'm so used to people responding "source?", that I automatically include something.

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I think the point is really to use a better, more reliable source

cranberry said:

Right, I was originally responding to someone who said everyone is trying to be number two. I think it's pretty clear who number two is, and just how far they'd have to go get to get there.

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For the record, I was fairly certain Pathfinder was #2. Anecdotally, it's the game I see played more often after D&D. For a number of years it's also taken up an impressive amount of shelf space compared to most other games.

Argyle King said:

For specifically the OGL, I don't know who "won: or "lost." In the end, WotC still did essentially what they wanted to do anyway, but the path the company took to get to the same location involved a lot of unnecessary turns that squandered what had previously been overwhelmingly positive brand visibility and momentum.

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In many ways I think we all lost. I think it's unhealthy for so many companies to be dependent on WotC.

Whether official D&D is in a better place than it was 3 years ago is an open question, but I think it is clear that the heroic fantasy TTRPG space is definitely better off with more games (and more gamers) than ever before.

MGibster said:

For the record, I was fairly certain Pathfinder was #2. Anecdotally, it's the game I see played more often after D&D. For a number of years it's also taken up an impressive amount of shelf space compared to most other games.

In many ways I think we all lost. I think it's unhealthy for so many companies to be dependent on WotC.

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Dependent how? I don’t think the future of Daggerheart, Dolmenwood, or Shadowdark depend on wotc.

I dunno if anyone has access to the ICv2 charts (I feel like just a few years ago we used to get articles with the rankings, but I guess given that those are under a paywall they don't like to see that stuff out there anymore), but I don't see how things have changed much for the top 2. It'd be what's just behind it that would really interest me.

MGibster said:

In many ways I think we all lost. I think it's unhealthy for so many companies to be dependent on WotC.

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SlyFlourish said:

Dependent how? I don’t think the future of Daggerheart, Dolmenwood, or Shadowdark depend on wotc.

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Yeah, if anything the OGL created a break point for a lot of companies when it came to hitching directly to WotC compared to what came before. The games that followed might still come out, but I'm not sure they would have gotten quite as many eyes if people hadn't actively been looking for alternatives. Like, I'm not fully sure we get a Draw Steel if not for Wizards giving MCDM the impetus to create their own system.

SlyFlourish said:

Dependent how? I don’t think the future of Daggerheart, Dolmenwood, or Shadowdark depend on wotc.

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Even more so, thanks to the Commons, D&D isn't really dependent on WotC. My table can play it from now until we don't, no matter what WotC does.

Using the full ecosystem if Hasbro/WotC go under or get bought by a vile party I will still get fresh content from publishers who have robust support for the system.

Add those systems you've mentioned plus so many more, the Golden Age of RPGs is here

SlyFlourish said:

I often worry that the current team isn’t the future team — which is exactly how we got the attempted OGL deauthorization. Thinking how we can protect our own hold on the hobby is something I think a lot about. Having so many great games in paper and pdf is a great way. Open licenses are another. What else?

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Business viable alternatives. Sure, we have tons of other RPGs we can play, but there have been more game systems than one could reasonable play fully in a lifetime for probably 3 decades if not 4. Sure, many of the newer ones are better than the old ones, but, very few are actually financially viable that they can be a well paid career.

SlyFlourish said:

I don’t think the future of Daggerheart, Dolmenwood, or Shadowdark depend on wotc.

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And see here where I get mad at myself. These are some of the few alternatives that are financially viable, yet why do have such an emotionally negative reaction to them? I know I shouldn't, but for some reason I do. Can't figure it out.

As for your original premise, did we win? Who wins a war or an argument? No one, we all end up with scars, even if we take that experience and become better people for it.

Me, I never got all caught up on the OGL debacle and probably had a better view of WotC then than I do now. I trust them less now than I did then, and to the point others have said, they had so many things going for them over the last couple years that they have failed to turn into something big. I don't know why, but D&D has not become the brand lifestyle they said they were going to try to build. Maybe WotC ran out of money or realized they couldn't do it. Or perhaps like their forays into software development, its' just something they can never do well.

For me, 2024 turned me off of D&D, I had no interest in buying the new core rules, and instead switched to alternate systems in totally new genres (sci-fi). Maybe in a decade I will be back, I suspect if/when I have grand kids old enough, I'll rekindle the love for D&D I once had.

IMO, we got something close to the least-worst possible outcome. That's not a 'win' for anybody. To hear it described as such frankly turns my stomach.

Recent analytical post which goes a bit beyond AI.