It is time to forgive WOTC and get back onboard.

[Aldarc]

Yea but Paizo didn’t plan on being crap to employees. They just were. They fooked up bad.

WotC suites planned this. It now seems apparently for years.

There is also a difference of scope. When Paizo "fooked up bad," it was mostly an internal matter regarding their employee/staff relations. What WotC planned threatened fairly large swaths of the hobby itself, even 3pp that were not making 5e products.

To repurpose another popular phrase, "When WotC sneezes, the entire TTRPG hobby catches a cold."

 

[ECMO3]

They never had the intention to do so. They did so after threatening a whole ecosystem and hobby leading into tens of thousands of people yelling at them. If people hadn't yelled, things would be very different.

They did have the intention to do it eventually since they did it. People yelled and they did it.

They may not have broken any promises (not that they didn't attempt to) but they did break the trust the brand had built with many people over the years.

They talked about breaking promises, planned to break promises, but they did not attempt to break promises or break any promises.

Anyway, saying they didn't break their promise as an argument is very weird to me. Here's a bad analogy to illustrate how I see it: "They held a gun at my head and were about to shoot, but something stopped them and they didn't. So we're good, they didn't kill anyone."

You can't charge someone who did that with murder, or attempted murder and I have actually had someone point a loaded Smith and Wesson 686 at my head.

Far more content? How do you measure it? In books? Pathfinder 2E has released more books in four years then 5E did in almost a decade. Paizo's entire rules are available for free online, and we're not even talking about Starfinder and Pathfinder 1E.

As open content in the OGL?

Making something available online is not the same as making something open and usable by other creators. WOTC has released a ton of product for free on DNDBeyond, well beyond what is in the SRD but you can't freely use that content in your own works, you can only use what is in the SRD.

My understanding is the only Paizo products that are open content are the PF1 and PF2 SRD and the PF1 SRD is mostly not Paizos creative work but it is a reprint of the 3.5 SRD.

If I am wrong about that I appologize for mispeaking, but what I am talking about here is content released under the OGL 1.0a and available for any party to use in their follow on work. Content that I can take and reprint and sell myself in print, online or in a video gamel.

 

[mamba]

They talked about breaking promises, planned to break promises, but they did not attempt to break promises or break any promises.

Sending out new contracts to sign very much sounds like an attempt to me.

 

[Jadeite]

As open content in the OGL?

Making something available online is not the same as making something open and usable by other creators. WOTC has released a ton of product for free on DNDBeyond, well beyond what is in the SRD but you can't freely use that content in your own works, you can only use what is in the SRD.

My understanding is the only Paizo products that are open content are the PF1 and PF2 SRD and the PF1 SRD is mostly not Paizos creative work but it is a reprint of the 3.5 SRD.

If I am wrong about that I appologize for mispeaking, but what I am talking about here is content released under the OGL 1.0a and available for any party to use in their follow on work. Content that I can take and reprint and sell myself in print, online or in a video gamel.

Paizo's amount of Open Content is on another level than WotC's. Check out the Archives of Nethys. It's also free to use for other publishers. Minus the PI, so some Feats had to be renamed for Pathbuilder. When Paizo releases a new class, others can build upon it. But there aren't many 3PPs for PF2 compared to 3.5, PF1 and 5E.

 

[EthanSental]

I’m more worried about @darjr not keeping many of us in the D&D news loop with his quick posting of game tweets and information he finds currently!

 

[Alzrius]

My understanding is the only Paizo products that are open content are the PF1 and PF2 SRD and the PF1 SRD is mostly not Paizos creative work but it is a reprint of the 3.5 SRD.

If I am wrong about that I appologize for mispeaking, but what I am talking about here is content released under the OGL 1.0a and available for any party to use in their follow on work. Content that I can take and reprint and sell myself in print, online or in a video gamel.

Almost everything Paizo has put out since 2007 has been Open Game Content under the OGL v1.0a.

They've used Product Identity to keep things like their campaign setting and its attendant elements (names of places, specific characters, the gods, the campaign world's history, etc.) to themselves, which is entirely understandable, but in terms of what they've released as Open Game Content, the sheer amount of material they've put out is staggering. I don't think they've released a single book for PF1/PF2/Starfinder that didn't have some new OGC in it. This website compiles all of that Open Game Content, and it has an incredible amount of material to show for it:

Home - Archives of Nethys: Pathfinder RPG Database

For an idea of just how many books' worth of stuff that is, click on the "Licenses" listing on the sidebar (and note which system you're looking at, as per the icons at the top of the page).

 

[EthanSental]

Paizo takes the award for putting out content, hands down. Most if it is quality stuff from my PF playing days as I had the AP subscription for the first couple of years. I always wondering if they went to bi-monthly if it would’ve better for players to play through that much content but if people are paying for a monthly, give ‘em what they want! Been a long while but wasn’t Dragon and Dungeon magazines a bimonthly with them staggered so you got an issue of one of the a month?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It was an ecosystem largely built on their land that they had opened up to the public themselves. - They weren't expecting people to build large commercial properties competing with them on their own land when they did so.
When they tried to reel back in some of the rights to their land, they obviously weren't expecting quite an upsurge in people asserting their squatters rights and giving them bad enough press that they would lose money if they were to reassert their rights to their land.

This is a vile misrepresentation of the facts.

 

[Imaro]

This is a vile misrepresentation of the facts.

In what way?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

this is the most charitable (to WotC) reading possible, let’s fix your analogy a bit, so it better reflects reality…

It was an ecosystem built on land who’s owner is unclear. WotC arrived there first, but it was by no means their land, arguably a little of it is, but much is not. As others arrived, WotC had the idea that instead of everyone competing with each other and arguing over who owned which part and whether the concept of land ownership even existed, they should instead all work together and benefit together from this land.

So they invited others onto the land because they realized that the improvements everyone would make would benefit all of them. They signed a contract with everyone, telling them that they could live there happily indefinitely and they all would prosper.

Then, many years later, when the initial vision has been achieved and the land had become valuable beyond their wildest dreams, WotC got greedy. They realized that they got richer than the others and thought that they could break their contract and claim all the land as theirs, and that them being so much richer meant the others would just have to accept it as they were too weak to fight back.

But WotC had not counted on the others having friends that would come to their aid and that together they could stand up to WotC and make them adhere to that contract they all had agreed to so long ago.

After a lot of huffing and puffing, WotC saw the value of their shared land drop and feared for the success of their big new projects, so they reneged and did not break the contract after all.

I like that analogy a lot. First that makes sense to me.