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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8932181" data-attributes="member: 58197">So... my take after watching:TL;DR: I think Brink's heart is in the right place. I'm not convinced his read on the overall culture at Wizards is accurate. The top executives seem to be generally hands-off, open to arguments from both the pro- and anti-OGL factions, but the pro-OGL faction has gained significant cred after this debacle. It sounds as if we can expect the 3E and 3.5E SRDs to be released to Creative Commons once they've plucked out all the references to product identity. A 1D&D SRD is less certain, and significant expansion of 5E open content is unlikely.1. I think Brink is giving us (mostly) his honest assessment of what happened. He is trying to present Wizards in the best possible light under the circumstances -- that's his job -- but I don't think he's trying to be deliberately deceitful.2. HOWEVER, remember this is just Kyle Brink's point of view. He does not and cannot know everything that goes on at Wizards, particularly given his short tenure in his current role. When he describes other people's motivations, it's got to be mostly based on what those people told him their motivations were, not on full knowledge of what those people were doing and saying over years.3. In a similar vein, his answers on leadership style and culture felt rather glib. Not that he's lying -- I think he's accurately describing his own leadership style -- but it's very easy for an executive to miss toxic dynamics playing out in their organization unless they actively look for them. I didn't get the sense that Brink actively looks for them. I'm reminded of one of the employee quotes from DND_Shorts: "[Kyle] is a good guy, but largely is motivated to keep his head down and not make waves."(I'm not going to get into whether DND_Shorts is a credible source here; just saying that that particular quote rings true to me based on this interview.)4. There has clearly been an anti-OGL faction inside Wizards for a long time. (The GSL was back in 2008, long before any of the concerns Brink brought up. Even the 5E SRD, released in 2016, is much less comprehensive than the 3E/3.5E ones.) There is also a pro-OGL faction. The top brass doesn't appear to have strong feelings either way.5. My guess (and this is just me speculating now) is that the anti-OGL faction found they could get the top brass's attention with the "Tech giants and hatemongers are going to use the OGL to ruin D&D!" argument, and that's where the impetus for all this came from. I do believe things played out more or less as Brink described -- I just don't think it was as organic as he implied.6. Brink did note that the design team now has much more credibility with executive leadership than it did before all this. I entirely believe this statement, and it's very good news. He also made it clear that he at least regards the D&D community as an asset; that was a theme he came back to repeatedly.7. As regards the future: He was rather evasive on exactly what the plan is for 1D&D and SRD updates. Which may just mean the plan hasn't been nailed down yet. But he carefully avoided committing to a real 1D&D SRD. He totally ignored the question about whether artificers would be added.8. He was much more definite on the 3E/3.5E SRDs: They do intend to put those in Creative Commons, they're just doing their due diligence first to make sure they don't weaken their copyrights and trademarks. (Translation: "We would like to avoid any more situations where we accidentally toss 'Strahd von Zarovich' into CC because we were in too much of a rush to carefully review what was in there.") So that's also good news.</blockquote>

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