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Perception of growth is as important as revenue to Hasbro where the D&D brand is concerned. Maybe moreso. The whole reason they got themselves into this pickle is because they decided that the D&D brand was "undermonetized" and sought to correct that "problem". The reason they thought it was...

I mean, the old Moldvay/Cook B/X books were looseleaf if you pulled them apart and put them in a binder like the three holes on the side and the organization encouraged you to do. I knew a guy who did exactly that. Also TSR put out the Marvel character profiles in a looseleaf format when they...

My very casual players have brought it up in our text chain when we haven't played since before Thanksgiving. My wife keeps showing me things on her Facebook feed from friends of hers talking about it and she doesn't even play D&D herself nor does she talk about D&D at all. They're almost all...

FTA: Now that's comedy!

That's the thing though - Facebook isn't actually happy being Facebook. Because even though it's bigger it's not growing as fast as it was and everyone has been parroting the "growth is the only thing that matters" line for so long that investors penalize companies that are big and stable just...

I didn't say everyone would - I said that some of them will. There's a chance. If people leave D&D entirely for something like Forbidden Lands, there's less chance they'll come back to D&D. But I mostly play 13th age and for the first 5 years of 5e I didn't touch 5e. And yet I was willing to...

So it's complicated. I think it's unpredictable in a lot of ways. But overall I think it's bad for the industry in the short term because it creates a lot of chaos and unpredictability. Even if that chaos ultimately is to your benefit as a business, in the short term unpredictability is usually...

I think this is largely correct, but I also think that many more folks are more flexible about learning new games than we often hear about on these boards. IME so long as there is a patient teacher willing to walk them through the process, the rules in the range between complexity and...

I think the initial release was a huge boost to Wizards rep back in the day. I think the continued support for it allowed them to coast on residual goodwill. And I think that the OGL created a market where even when you're not buying Wizards' supplemental products because they aren't speaking to...

This is correct. Any license can be challenged because American courts pretty much allow anyone to sue anyone. It doesn't mean they'll win the challenge, it just means that the threat of a lawsuit is always there. And Wizards is a company that has been provably acting in bad faith when it comes...

I mean, I'm of two minds in the sense that the OGL needs to be preserved and also nobody should trust Wizards and a new license and community SRD should be created for the next time they decide to go nuclear. I think both of these can hold simultaneously. It's absolutely the case IMO that...

I don't think it will fall from the #1 position. The size difference between it and its nearest competitor is huge so it would have to drop a lot and all of that drop would have to go to one competitor instead of spreading among a few different ones to see its position actually change. The...

The fact that Call of Cthulhu appears to be getting a boost from this is interesting interesting to me. If it were Runequest I'd think we were just looking at folks looking for fantasy alternatives. Man if Wizards threatening the OGL leads to people trying different genres as well as other...

Ownership vs rental. They're apples and oranges. My subscriptions to Dragon and Dungeon back in the day are still accessible whenever I want to use them. My subscription to the 4e D&D tools, on the other hand, is lost to the distant past at this point.

If you mean the vtt that's a safe bet. It's always a safe bet to take the under when betting on giant companies undertaking massive software projects and having their vision pan out. (They did it the right/safe way with ddb - let Fandom develop it and take the risk, and once they proved it...

Oh no - I must have phrased something wrong. That's exactly what I mean. The competent people end up having their jobs eliminated while the idiots in the corner offices who caused the problems either change job titles or at worst get hired to break things at another company.

Hasbro's problems are in the corner offices. Job performance rarely corresponds to who gets fired under those conditions IME.

People want a lot of things. Doesn't mean we have to care whether they get them or not. If Wizards wants a bigger slice of the VTT market they could start by making an actual VTT product. If they had a product out there they might discover that the OGL doesn't matter for their VTT product...

I'm still in wait-and-see mode on this. Their reaction to the DDB survey less than a week in suggests that they might have finally realized how big the hornet's nest they kicked is. Whether that leads to them backing down entirely or not we'll have to see. But it's still a good idea for the...

I don't know that this is necessarily true. He has his own gaming company now, and much like Monte Cook did when he started his own company, it might be that Baker has enough of a following to bring people over to a new system to make a good business for himself. A core following of folks...