D&D 5E Gamehole Con Live Tweeting Perkins Panel

[Nebulous]

Agreed. Taking off the rose-colored glasses of D&D tradition, drow as presented in D&D are pretty damn offensive. One more reason I think WotC and Hasbro ought to go with Dragonlance over Drizzt.

If they do make a Drizzt movie, my guess is that Drizzt will be the only drow in it, and his origins will be glossed over.

Huh. Honestly that had never occurred to me. An actor in blackface might be the way they would do it. Dragonlance would be a better series of films anyway, it has a more interesting, varied cast, love interests, humor, and it touches on every classic aspect of D&D. Plus it is a best selling series of books. So is Drizzt of course, but DL was first.

 

[Nebulous]

How do these outfits write these adventures up, playtest them and then print this stuff in such a short amount of time?

Some are being updated from older editions. Otherwise, they've already been working on it for months with a large number of authors. It's not last minute by any means. But they're waiting for the DMG i think so they can double check stuff.

 

[Keldryn]

Limiting the license in the hopes of preventing another Pathfinder* would be closing the barn door after the horses have already eaten all the children. There's a Pathfinder now; people can already stick to an older edition of D&D with broad, high-quality support. Limiting the license won't do anything to prevent hypothetical future competitors, it just means that when third party publishers make cool stuff in the future, they're more likely to make it for the current actual and very strong competitor, giving people one more reason to play Pathfinder and one less reason to play D&D. In the current environment, I can't see a return to the OGL as anything but a positive.

I agree. The OGL exists and other publishers have been using it for 14 years; any other considerations are pretty much irrelevant. There is nothing to be gained on the part of WotC to continue operating as if the OGL doesn't exist. Might as well embrace it and use it to their advantage, instead of sitting back and letting competitors use it against them.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I suspect that any such movie would run aground due to issues regarding the skin color of drow. It would be a combination of "Wait, are they saying that a society that's entirely populated with black-skinned people is evil and violent?" and "Are those actors wearing blackface?!"

Makes me think that Drizz't is better suited for animation. That could be an animated movie, but more likely it would be an animated series -- possibly a serial. I could totally imagine a Drizz't series a la Clone Wars or somesuch.

Animation would avoid the blackface issues (a lot of voice actors are considered pretty much race-neutral), and the clearly fictional world would more readily be compared to other fictional fantasy worlds, evoking more cartoon symbolism (black = evil), and removing real people from the equation.

The problem animation would have is the stupid sexy sexiness of Drow society. You could tone down some of the BDSM-fantasy aspects of it, but some of them are pretty integral to the plot of Drizz't's story, and the twin cultural bugaboos of "cartoons are for kids!" and "no sexuality allowed!" might produce some friction. That said, D&D tries to be PG-13 most of the time, so this is probably something they're interested in sanitizing a little bit anyway.

But at least then the problems with the work would just be the same as the problems with the actual stories, and not new problems based on painting actors to look like dark elves.

 

[Nebulous]

Makes me think that Drizz't is better suited for animation. That could be an animated movie, but more likely it would be an animated series -- possibly a serial. I could totally imagine a Drizz't series a la Clone Wars or somesuch.

Animation would avoid the blackface issues (a lot of voice actors are considered pretty much race-neutral), and the clearly fictional world would more readily be compared to other fictional fantasy worlds, evoking more cartoon symbolism (black = evil), and removing real people from the equation.

.

\

Brilliant. Yes, Drizzt as a serial cartoon would be great. Leave the two Dragonlance trilogies for a six film extravaganza.

 

[Sadras]

I suspect that any such movie would run aground due to issues regarding the skin color of drow. It would be a combination of "Wait, are they saying that a society that's entirely populated with black-skinned people is evil and violent?" and "Are those actors wearing blackface?!"

Agreed. Taking off the rose-colored glasses of D&D tradition, drow as presented in D&D are pretty damn offensive.

I think we are making a salad out of one tomato. Honestly before the two of you mentioned the colour thing, I had no awareness about it. This over PC attitude we seem to have inherited is not much help. It is not like we view Klingons as just a violent and easily angered black race with unattractive foreheads and a penchant for rough sex.

Let the Drow be and let us not read too much into everything for heaven's sakes.

 

[Dausuul]

I agree. The OGL exists and other publishers have been using it for 14 years; any other considerations are pretty much irrelevant. There is nothing to be gained on the part of WotC to continue operating as if the OGL doesn't exist. Might as well embrace it and use it to their advantage, instead of sitting back and letting competitors use it against them.

It does make a difference to have 5E explicitly under the OGL, though.

If I'm writing an adventure that involves a slightly customized lich, say, it'd be really handy if I could copy the lich statblock out of the Monster Manual and then tweak it to my needs, rather than having to rewrite the text of its abilities (to avoid WotC's copyright) and re-do the layout (to avoid WotC's trade dress). It'd also be nice if I didn't have to pre-emptively lawyer up, as most of the companies making "unauthorized" 5E content have done.

I think we are making a salad out of one tomato. Honestly before the two of you mentioned the colour thing, I had no awareness about it.

That doesn't mean there wasn't anything to be aware of. When you've got two races (in the real-world sense, not the D&D sense; "elf" is a species, "drow" and "high elf" are races), and one is light-skinned and the other is dark-skinned, and the light-skinned race is gentle and civilized while the dark-skinned race is violent and depraved... at that point, the bar to show this is not a problem is extremely high. Try to pitch something like that as a new concept today, and no publisher will touch it. Drow only survive because they have a couple decades of tradition behind them, and that counts for a lot in the D&D community. But if Hasbro and Wizards want to expand that community, drow are going to be an issue.

 

[Alzrius]

I think we are making a salad out of one tomato. Honestly before the two of you mentioned the colour thing, I had no awareness about it. This over PC attitude we seem to have inherited is not much help. It is not like we view Klingons as just a violent and easily angered black race with unattractive foreheads and a penchant for rough sex.

Let the Drow be and let us not read too much into everything for heaven's sakes.

To be clear, there are plenty of gamers who find drow problematic (and they even talk about Klingons), while others do not.

The thing is that most who don't have any issues with drow tend to see them as a part of the D&D tradition, unconnected to issues of real-world racial politics. But insofar as a hypothetical feature film is concerned, most movie-goers won't be aware of that tradition; all they'll see is a parallel to contemporary racial politics, and a controversy on that scale isn't something anyone involved in the production of such a film would want.

 

[Keldryn]

It does make a difference to have 5E explicitly under the OGL, though.

If I'm writing an adventure that involves a slightly customized lich, say, it'd be really handy if I could copy the lich statblock out of the Monster Manual and then tweak it to my needs, rather than having to rewrite the text of its abilities (to avoid WotC's copyright) and re-do the layout (to avoid WotC's trade dress). It'd also be nice if I didn't have to pre-emptively lawyer up, as most of the companies making "unauthorized" 5E content have done.

It does make a difference to have 5E explicitly under the OGL, though.

If I'm writing an adventure that involves a slightly customized lich, say, it'd be really handy if I could copy the lich statblock out of the Monster Manual and then tweak it to my needs, rather than having to rewrite the text of its abilities (to avoid WotC's copyright) and re-do the layout (to avoid WotC's trade dress). It'd also be nice if I didn't have to pre-emptively lawyer up, as most of the companies making "unauthorized" 5E content have done.

That's what I was saying. The OGL exists, so at this point they might as well embrace it and work with it to their advantage. The key to not creating another Pathfinder is to not give anyone a good reason to. And Pathfinder came about not only due to the players who wanted to stay with 3.5 instead of moving on to 4e, but because Paizo had built a business on creating D&D-compatible products and WotC was dragging their heels wih the 4e GSL. Putting out their own RPG line ensured that they wouldn't be dependent on WotC's business decisions.

One way to embrace the OGL is to really focus on creating products that players will feel compelled to buy. Everyone can print out the rules or look at them on a tablet, but a lavishly-illustrated, well-constructed book is difficult to produce on your own (or even for a smaller company) -- and they already seem to be doing this with 5e. Visual aids, maps, props, tokens, and the like make for an attractive product and are beyond the reach of companies working from smaller bugets and lower print runs.

It may not be a perfect analogy, but I think of it as being a bit like video game consoles. Bioware and Bethesda both make RPGs, and while one could think of them as competitors, a significant number of consumers buy games from both developers. Players who don't care much for action games but who enjoy RPGs and strategy games are unlikely to buy a new game console if only one company is making those types of games for it. When there are more RPG players buying game consoles, more developers will make RPGs for those platforms. Where there are more RPGs on those platforms, more RPG players will buy them. Nintendo has been struggling somewhat in this generation of home consoles in part because most of the support for the Wii U is in the form of first-party Nintendo games. They don't have the third-party ecosystem that Microsoft and Sony enjoy, which results in fewer games available, which in turn discourages consumers from buying the system, which discourages third-parties from developing for the system, and you get a continuous negative feedback loop.

Of course any time you have a relatively open platform, you end up with a few true gems amidst a massive pile of unadulterated crap (early 3e OGL products, Apple's App Store, etc). The lower the barrier of entry, the more low-quality products you are likely to see. Maybe WotC will have both commercial and non-commercial versions of the 5e OGL? So fans can freely distribute content that they create, but WotC could require an approval process for any commercial products. Every game that gets released on a video game console has to meet certain guideliness put forth by Nintendo, Sony, and/or Microsoft. The game cannot be published until the approval process has been completed. Perhaps WotC could have both free and premium versions of the commercial license, where the premium version has a faster turn-around and allows the use of the D&D name on the product.

I think that would be a reasonably fair arrangement. Fans could publish and distribute whatever they create, WotC could exercise some control over what gets released into the marketplace, individuals and smaller publishers wouldn't be locked out due to high licensing fees, and established publishers' track records would be more apparent by their use of the D&D name/logo (which would also increase the visibility of D&D products).

 

[pemerton]

WotC's early "anti-3E" campaign

On the front page of this site is a quote from Chris Perkins: "A great deal of my time and effort was spent to inject the fun that had been sucked out of D&D."

To me, that seems to carry an implication that 4e (and 3e?) sucked the fun out of D&D. That's pretty harsh! The difference in widespread public response to this, compared to the grapple video WotC produced at the time of 4e launch, is interesting, but I don't think the harshness of the criticism of the earlier edition has anything to do with it.

I suspect that any such movie would run aground due to issues regarding the skin color of drow. It would be a combination of "Wait, are they saying that a society that's entirely populated with black-skinned people is evil and violent?" and "Are those actors wearing blackface?!"

An actor in blackface might be the way they would do it.

The LotR fims had a society entirely populated with brown people (played largely by Maori, I think) presented as inherently evil and violent. I don't really see why a D&D film would be any more contentious in this respect than LotR.

As for blackface - why not just cast brown or black actors, and give them latex ears like Liv Tyler and Hugo Weaving had in LotR?