Gizmodo: Dungeons & Dragons Has Burned Up All the Goodwill

[Sacrosanct]

Who are all these people in 2023 who aren't online? Who doesn't look up their hobby online? Even my grandma used to look up knitting patterns, and that was over a decade ago.

Not to speak for Mallus, but I don't think that's what they were talking about. Beyond and Roll20 are both online and they mentioned those as tools the people who aren't talking about the OGL are using. That leads me to believe what they meant was people on social media getting caught on up on this. And I do think that is very much the minority of gamers. We all use the internet, sure, but we all don't all go to social media sites to talk about it.

 

[overgeeked]

I took them as saying that D&D was NEVER the ONLY game on the market. And that's simply not true. It was the first and it spent a good amount of time as the ONLY RPG.

Game ≠ RPG. War games. Board games. Card games. Free-form. Story games. Parlor games. Etc. Read a bit about the history of the hobby. Even when D&D was the only RPG on the market people were still playing all kinds of other games and even other kinds of RPGs. On the market ≠ exists.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Game ≠ RPG. War games. Board games. Card games. Free-form. Story games. Parlor games. Etc. Read a bit about the history of the hobby. Even when D&D was the only RPG on the market people were still playing all kinds of other games and even other kinds of RPGs. On the market ≠ exists.

Why would the writer even bring up other types of games? This whole mess isn't really going to effect 3rd party support for Hungry Hungry Hippos or Poker.

if i wanted to play a board game or war game I'd go play one. This is about current RPGs so mentioning "Other games exist" is sort of being an ass. "Well if you don't like what's happening to RPGs go play Monopoly."

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It felt like this article leaned heavily into righteous advocacy.

If you read their pre-OGL coverage, Linda definitely has a point of view on D&D.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't know about that. By 1978 there at least 8 other RPGs that did pretty well.

Tunnels & Trolls, RuneQuest, Traveller and the like are considered mere rumors by portions of the ENWorld community.

 

[J.Quondam]

It felt like this article leaned heavily into righteous advocacy.

Agreed, but maybe that's intentional? I noticed up in the tab on my browser, the headline is "OPINION:..." So I suspect it was written as an editorial piece, but didn't get labeled on the article itself for some reason.

 

[Jer]

I took them as saying that D&D was NEVER the ONLY game on the market. And that's simply not true. It was the first and it spent a good amount of time as the ONLY RPG.

If by "good amount of time" you mean "a year" then sure - IIRC Tunnels and Trolls came out within a year of TSR publishing their little books.

I think even if you call the initial self-publication of Ken St. Andre's game too narrowly distributed to count, it's less than 5 years between the publishing of the original books to when there were a number of different choices out there. Traveller was like 77 I think, Runequest was either 77 or 78. Villains and Vigilantes was out sometime in the 70s as well. I'm sure I'm probably missing some others. So we're talking at most 2-3 years, not a huge amount of time. Once the idea was out there lots of folks started seeing both the potential and the limits of what TSR was publishing and started making their own.

But also - she was probably writing to Gizmodo's target audience, who probably have always had a choice of games since the time they started in the hobby. There's been an entire generation of gamers who didn't know what the gaming world was like before the OGL, let alone who don't remember what life was like back in 1974. Heck as far as I'm concerned there has never been a time in my life when D&D was the only game in town and I'm as old as D&D is.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

But also - she was probably writing to Gizmodo's target audience, who probably have always had a choice of games since the time they started in the hobby. There's been an entire generation of gamers who didn't know what the gaming world was like before the OGL, let alone who don't remember what life was like back in 1974.

More than that, there are now D&D players who are parents who have never played an RPG without the OGL existing (assuming they didn't start 3E when they were four years old or something, which would be unusual, to put it mildly). So they're dressing their kids in "zero-level human" onesies and giving them stuffed owlbears and mimics to play with.

WotC is taking real aim at D&D as a lifestyle/identity, at the very time they should be bolstering that.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think even if you call the initial self-publication of Ken St. Andre's game too narrowly distributed to count, it's less than 5 years between the publishing of the original books to when there were a number of different choices out there. Traveller was like 77 I think, Runequest was either 77 or 78. Villains and Vigilantes was out sometime in the 70s as well. I'm sure I'm probably missing some others. So we're talking at most 2-3 years, not a huge amount of time. Once the idea was out there lots of folks started seeing both the potential and the limits of what TSR was publishing and started making their own.

I think you're right on V&V. That was my family's second RPG and the first edition booklet was carried from place to place as we moved alongside our D&D boxed sets and books. It was at least one more posting before we picked up the second edition boxed set while on leave the same summer as Return of the Jedi came out.

And V&V was also very early game design, with (IMO) pointless randomization and matrices instead of a unified resolution system. It was clearly based on the first iterations of D&D and little else -- not even Traveller or RuneQuest.

 

[Malmuria]

"wotc," "ogl" and related terms were trending on twitter for a week. It was enough that big videogaming youtubers picked up on it, and of course national media outlets. It's a bit of an arcane and technical topic, which probably prevented people from engaging too deeply. But neither do I think that kind of exposure can be written off entirely.