D&D 5E Hypothetical: WotC goes under and Hasbro vaults D&D. Now What?

[Umbran]

The worst part of copyright law IMO.

This thread should not become an argument over the good and bad parts of copyright law, so I am not going to engage with your personal opinion on the matter.

 

[Remathilis]

Coeurls and Displacer Beasts ultimately have the same origin in a really old sci-fi story that might be public domain by now

The original (Black Destroyer) is Public Domain. Voyage of the Space Beagle (the redone and more popular version) is not. Paizo got the rights to use them in Legacy of Fire from the author's estate. You could probably use Coerurls but only in the context of what they were like in the original short story and not anything related to the later novel or any lore D&D or Square-Enix has added to them.

EDIT: Never Trust Google. Black Destroyer sounds like its still under copyright.

 

[DarkCrisis]

People either cling to their old D&D books which is fine or go to another popular system akin to D&D like Pathfinder or one of the popular OSR styles like Shadowdark.

Something would fill the gap.

Maybe some of the WotC people who left that have some name recognition form a studio with some other visible D&D people and they make Delvers and Dracos which is very similiar to D&D and people flock to it.

D&D isn't going anywhere though. At the end of the day Hasbro at the least can license it to a company(ies) to keep making adventures and supplements. I'm honestly shocked they haven't already.

 

[MGibster]

EDIT: Never Trust Google. Black Destroyer sounds like its still under copyright.

As crazy as it sounds, it can sometimes be very difficult to track down who owns a copyright or who has the rights to produce something. For one of their Grand Theft Auto games, Rock Star Games wanted to use a 1980 song called "Walk the Night" by a group called The Skatt Brothers. Rock Star had a heck of time tracking down who had the rights to the song so they could get permission to use it in their game. And copyright can get complicated because different company might have the rights to produce works based on it in different mediums. i.e. Someone might have the right to video games while another company has a right to books and games. Task Force Games has the rights to use Star Trek material just so long as they stick to material from the original series and the cartoon. It's just bizarre that they still have the rights to do this for almost 50 years now.

 

[MostlyHarmless42]

I mean, to be blunt, I'm more concerned about if the US will even continue to exist as a country by the end of the next decade, if I'll have to flee the country within the next year, or if I get carted off to some death camp in the middle of the night.

Though, relevant to the topic? Nothing. I have the books. There are multiple websites out there of varying legality that have all the information out there to use that are independent of Hazbro. I do not need hazbro to continue to play games with dice with my friends, and I have been vocally against DnD Beyond for multiple reasons long before it was even officially released. Hell, I outright refuse to even use any VTT outside of Maptools, and that's only because I've got one player who is out of state and a another who would otherwise have a 30min drive to join us in person.

While I am certainly concerned the insane tariffs are going to cause many of the smaller RPG companies to go under or switch completely to digital out of necessity, and I feel for those whose jobs will be effected by this, it is unlikely that literally every other game company will close.

Hell, I'm more concerned about systemic food scarcity and the US going into a fascist led second great depression than I am what hazbro does with their IP. It's frankly simply hard to care about a multi-billion dollar company, especially one with a proven track record of repeatedly mismanaging their brands.

 

[Larnievc]

ETA: Folks can respond how they want, of course. I'm not a cop. That said, the intent of the thread isn't really to give folks a venue to talk about how little they'd care. The intent was to attempt to imagine what it would actually look like.

One of the things that is said a lot with regards to the OGL and related discussions is that D&D being Open (and especially now that it is in CC) means it can never go away. There will always be "D&D" regardless of what happens to the company owning it.

So this thread is meant to be a discussion about what that might look like. What if by some series of unfortunate events D&D is no longer published or even licensed out? Let's even presume that Hasbro gets real litigious about any trademark violations, but doesn't bother doing anything about people using either SRD under CC.

Now what? What does "D&D never dying" look like under this scenario?

Nothing really changes for me. My books and PDFs are all I need.

 

[MNblockhead]

I have enough D&D stuff to ride out the rest of my life. But I'll probably not get to most of it because of all the other games I want to play. It just wouldn't make much of a difference in my personal life.

 

[Psyga315]

There's always the possibility that the IP could be bought out by someone else. It would depend greatly on how much Hasbro would be willing to get paid to have DnD be taken from them and potentially be used against them, but corporate greed is always stronger than intellect.