Is WotC playing 4d Chess with the 5.1 SRD CC?

[Parmandur]

Honestly it seems less like Chess and more like Dodgeball.

Ah, il bel giaco.

 

[Malmuria]

There are a lot of little anecdotes among the leaks that make Hasbro look extremely incompetent. One, for example, was that executives did not have a meeting or communication with the creative and Beyond teams until early January, after OGL 1.1 had leaked and was trending. Probably difficult to coordinate a response when there's such a lack of basic communication.

Then they laid off 1000 people.

They are playing checkers by committee with themselves and losing.

 

[Parmandur]

There are a lot of little anecdotes among the leaks that make Hasbro look extremely incompetent. One, for example, was that executives did not have a meeting or communication with the creative and Beyond teams until early January, after OGL 1.1 had leaked and was trending. Probably difficult to coordinate a response when there's such a lack of basic communication.

Then they laid off 1000 people.

They are playing checkers by committee with themselves and losing.

The layoffs have to do with toys not selling on the market last year as expected, pretty unrelated to this.

It seems that this OGL maneuver was a bit of a power grab that blew up in somebody's face: not briefing people sounds like an intentional strategy to make it a fait accompli before anyone could object. A failed strategy, as it turns out.

 

[Umbran]

This. Has anything about the past month given any indication that they know what they're doing, never mind that they're geniuses?

You say this as if there's a singular "They" in WotC. The externally observed behavior is consistent with there being multiple people/groups with different levels of understanding, and it took some time and strife for those with understanding to get it through the heads of those who lacked it.

 

[MGibster]

Ever since New Coke, there's always a theory that a company is playing 4D Chess when the reality of the situation is they screwed up big time. Sometimes big companies like Coca-Cola read the room wrong and screw up. WotC is just trying to fix a public relations bomb they accidentally created and detonated.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The 5E CC release pretty well shuts down any chance of accomplishing that.

Absolutely. Someone at wotc won an internal struggle and made damn sure it wouldn’t be invalidated later.

I do think there was a little bit of regular chess-playing involved... but it was the pro-OGL faction within Wizards doing it. They saw an opportunity to put 5E out of reach of the anti-OGL crowd for good, and seized it. That's why they made a point of putting the Creative Commons-licensed PDF right there in the announcement, so the anti-OGL folks would have no way to walk things back or undercut them.

When you attain a victory, act quickly to ensure that it lasts. Otherwise, it certainly will not.

Or to quote Zombieland, “Always double tap.”

 

[Jer]

It seems that this OGL maneuver was a bit of a power grab that blew up in somebody's face: not briefing people sounds like an intentional strategy to make it a fait accompli before anyone could object. A failed strategy, as it turns out.

Yeah - I think that's exactly what happened. I told my wife that some of the leaks that Linda Codega and others (like the D&D shorts guy) were reporting on had the scent of an internal power battle being played out in public because someone needed to be smacked back.

That may not be what it was, but something about the leaks sure reminded me of some of the big orgs I've worked for when folks at VP levels are fighting each other. I can't even really point at what it was, just a feeling. So I may very well be reading too much into it.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah - I think that's exactly what happened. I told my wife that some of the leaks that Linda Codega and others (like the D&D shorts guy) were reporting on had the scent of an internal power battle being played out in public because someone needed to be smacked back.

That may not be what it was, but something about the leaks sure reminded me of some of the big orgs I've worked for when folks at VP levels are fighting each other. I can't even really point at what it was, just a feeling. So I may very well be reading too much into it.

Well, the fact that the alleged leaks all pointed to a particular VP who only came into thr D&D part of the busienss recently as the "bad guy" gives that vibe.

I so hope we get a complete history Ben Riggs style on this, some day.

 

[Haplo781]

You say this as if there's a singular "They" in WotC. The externally observed behavior is consistent with there being multiple people/groups with different levels of understanding, and it took some time and strife for those with understanding to get it through the heads of those who lacked it.

Yeah. The narrative I'm seeing from the outside, as a somewhat-engaged observer, is "Alta Fox attempts spinoff, fails; Hasbro board realizes Wizards is the golden goose and starts paying way more attention to it, promoting Chris Cocks to CEO and installing a bunch of ex-Microsoft execs to key positions; new execs fundamentally don't understand D&D and bungle things while shouting down underlings who point out why their ambitious plans won't work; underlings concerned for future of D&D leak plans in desperate Hail Mary."

 

[Sidhanei]

Umm, I think you are mistaking cause and effect here. They intentionally slowed down the release schedule for 5e and it was much more profitable than the hardcover-a-month from 3.x & 4e days.

This wasn't in response to poor numbers, this was intentional.

I think you're misreading or at least missing the broad points I was making for some more specific points that I was not. They did slow down the release for 5e. I did not say this was in response to poor numbers. I pointed to it being the result of a smaller design team—and a smaller team would be hard-pressed to develop multiple books simultaneously. The argument I'm making is that Hasbro will scale D&D back because it is not going to meet its company-wide big IP goal of which brands will be further developed and which would go on the proverbial back-burner. If the D&D team can survive with fewer members, that's what the company will do until they see an opportunity to expand on it. Until then, they seem like they would prefer to spend the resources elsewhere.

One big complaint about 4e from players who liked 4e was the overly aggressive errata making print books obsolete quickly. Whole subsystems like flight got replaced. This was something the community wanted scaled back.

Please, if you are trying to use historical changes to justify your statements, you need to have an understanding of the actual causes of those changes, not just ascribe whatever narrative supports your statements.

No need to be snarky or condescending.
When it comes to publishing errata, I meant in terms of balancing and fixing issues. Large sections of 5e are unbalanced with the math at higher levels and encounter building outright falling apart in places and other books not even hosting relevant mechanics (which, to me, always felt like a placeholder they never got back around to). The game system would have been better served with more design hours refining it and/or more errata fixing what problems showed up after books went live. The errata we got for 5e was disappointing, at least for me, because it fixed so few issues, and those it did fix often felt like edge cases at best. Again, I believe this comes back to needing more design hours. And if Hasbro, under its company-wide policy, decides not to develop the D&D brand, we will see more of those symptoms of insufficient design hours surface in 6e. How often the errata comes out is irrelevant. How impactful that errata is to a system's health is a better metric (and I think we agree on that). 5e errata didn't do much to help 5e—too little, too late, and often not targeting pressing issues. It's one of the reasons the homebrew community really stepped up (not the only reason, but a big one) in 5e because everyone found something to fix. That is not a symptom of aggressive errata; that's a lack of design hours put into refining the system and a failure to fix the problems people were encountering after the content went live. This is a symptom I believe we will keep seeing with 6e for the reasons already stated. Hence the inclusion of less [effective] errata on the list. My apologies if that wasn't clear the first time.

 

[Umbran]

Ever since New Coke, there's always a theory that a company is playing 4D Chess when the reality of the situation is they screwed up big time. Sometimes big companies like Coca-Cola read the room wrong and screw up. WotC is just trying to fix a public relations bomb they accidentally created and detonated.

This isn't much like the New Coke fiasco. For New Coke, the company did taste tests and surveys first. They had good data that, generally speaking, the new flavor was preferable to the target markets.

What Coca-Cola failed to do was proper Change Management. They had largely assumed that since the new flavor was preferable in the market, they didn't have to help people accept and adjust to the change. And, in some areas of the country, that went over like a lead balloon.

While it is true that in this case, Hasbro/WotC didn't engage in proper change management, that's less important than the fact that the thing they wanted to change to was not what we'd call a good offering.

 

[Dausuul]

I think you're misreading or at least missing the broad points I was making for some more specific points that I was not. They did slow down the release for 5e. I did not say this was in response to poor numbers. I pointed to it being the result of a smaller design team—and a smaller team would be hard-pressed to develop multiple books simultaneously.

I agree with this part. Originally, the slow release schedule of 5E was making a virtue of necessity. The D&D staff was cut to the bone over the course of 4E, and they simply didn't have enough people to crank out material at the pace of previous editions.

The argument I'm making is that Hasbro will scale D&D back because it is not going to meet its company-wide big IP goal of which brands will be further developed and which would go on the proverbial back-burner. If the D&D team can survive with fewer members, that's what the company will do until they see an opportunity to expand on it. Until then, they seem like they would prefer to spend the resources elsewhere.

This part I don't agree with at all. This is viewing the situation through the lens of the 4E transition, when D&D was a modest product line making a desperate play for "core brand" status so they wouldn't have to lay off most of their staff.

This is no longer the case. D&D is a big moneymaker for Hasbro now -- not on par with Magic, of course, but nothing is on par with Magic. Very few of Hasbro's properties are doing anywhere near as well. They are in no danger of getting mothballed.

If you just look at the D&D business strategy, there are notable similarities to 4E: A new edition(ish), a big push to go digital and harvest tons of subscription revenue, and an attempt to pull back from the OGL. The reason this looks familiar is that, now as in 2008, Hasbro is trying to massively scale up the profits from D&D, and this is the most obvious way to try to do that.

But the reasons for the attempted scale-up are different. Back then, D&D was an underperformer trying a Hail Mary pass to justify its budget. Now, Hasbro itself is an underperformer, and it's looking to juice its most profitable brands to justify its stock price.

 

[Maxperson]

I think we have to understand that Hasbro is not a hivemind. What happened was (almost for sure) not some master strategy, but the result of one faction pushing a plan through, only to be met with ferocious push-back that enabled another faction to push its counterproposal through. Internecine warfare, not 4d chess.

Corporations are generally not run by multiple factions. It's generally just one small faction with the CEO at the head who make the corporate decisions. More than likely it was one faction that made the bad decision, and the same faction that did an about face when faced with an unexpected level of opposition.

 

[Parmandur]

Corporations are generally not run by multiple factions. It's generally just one small faction with the CEO at the head who make the corporate decisions. More than likely it was one faction that made the bad decision, and the same faction that did an about face when faced with an unexpected level of opposition.

You have a very different experience of working in corporations than I do. Like, every company I've ever been in has been factionalized.

 

[Maxperson]

You have a very different experience of working in corporations than I do. Like, every company I've ever been in has been factionalized.

What is the faction without the CEO going to do?

 

[Haplo781]

This isn't much like the New Coke fiasco. For New Coke, the company did taste tests and surveys first. They had good data that, generally speaking, the new flavor was preferable to the target markets.

What Coca-Cola failed to do was proper Change Management. They had largely assumed that since the new flavor was preferable in the market, they didn't have to help people accept and adjust to the change. And, in some areas of the country, that went over like a lead balloon.

While it is true that in this case, Hasbro/WotC didn't engage in proper change management, that's less important than the fact that the thing they wanted to change to was not what we'd call a good offering.

If anything, 4e was the New Coke of D&D. Kinda. If Coke had based their formula off of "here are the complaints people have about the flavor of Coke; let's fix them without doing any external taste testing or change management."

And 5e is the Coke Classic. Not sure what 1DD would be in this analogy, but I can tell you I'd love a Freestyle machine right about now.

 

[Parmandur]

What is the faction without the CEO going to do?

In a compartmentalized company with many semi-autonomous VPs, like WotC (their different units do their own thing, by and large), there is room for carrying fsvor with the CEO. Considering how totally the initial idea was backtracked suggests thet it wasn't the CEO's idea (as, indeed, the leaders claimed), but one VP's idea (again, per the leakers)leaders. If there were people who disagreed with thst VP, they could use data to convince the CEOnto disempower said VP. This isn't that abnormal in corporate politics...?

 

[halfling rogue]

Interestingly enough, releasing 5e SRD under CC not only served as an effort to regain any lost goodwill, but, intentional or not, also takes a lot of steam out of the ORC license.

The natural question now for the ORC folks is why not just release that under Creative Commons?

 

[darjr]

Well they weren’t playing D&D.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Literally ever person ever described as playing 4-D chess has turned out to be choking on a stack of checkers.