D&D 5E Some thoughts on WotC's release schedule and the OGL

[Mark CMG]

As to the OGL, it matters to the brand. There is a lot of talk that Pathfinder beat 4E because of the unfair advantage created by the OGL. People will play the game they prefer. If they had a preference for D&D, they would play D&D, OGL or no OGL. But, the OGL did leverage a jumpstart of a new-name into a grey zone of D&D's dynasty. Regardless of where we swim in out teapot, Pathfinder can be perceived as connected to the history of D&D and part of that legacy in a way that GURPs certainly can not. That may not bring the brand down, but it does create a threat.

So they are not spending a lot of time worrying about how an OGL release of 5E would hurt their planned products for 2016. It would probably be great to have someone else supporting the core system and carrying all those printing costs. But they don't want yet another game hogging the claim to historic legacy, or possibly even worse, a Pathfinder second edition using parts of 5E to becoming even more recognized as a mainstream identity of "geek fantasy".

That's the best argument I have yet heard AGAINST using the OGL for 5E. If this is the main concern, I completely agree that using the OGL with 5E would not be in their best interest.

 

[Mercurius]

I feel like I see a lot of comments on this forum to the effect of WoTC "mishandling" 5th Edition, and I am curious, when I read them, how much of this is because the authors are not currently getting what they want out of their game at the table, and how much is a general perceived sense that the RPG as a whole is suffering?

First of all, for me note that I'm not presenting that as my view, but more a "fearful possibility" - when I look at it pessimistically. But to live into that a bit, I'd say the (possible) concern isn't as much about what has come out, but more of a feeling of uncertainty about the future which is exacerbated (or really, caused by) the "radio silence" of WotC, as well as the layoffs and the reduction to what is really a skeleton crew of eight people running the ship. In other words, it is unclear to me what their plan is because they simply haven't said a lot, at least not beyond the very sparse production they previously have mentioned. As I've said before, we know that there's an adventure coming out in April and then...nothing. Supposedly there is another story arc coming out later in the year, but what else? Again, I'm not opposed to a reduced product line but within reason.

Of course this could all change at any moment, this fear dispelled. My guess is that sometime within the next several months we'll hear about the OGL as well as the future of online support - Dragon, etc.

Another thought that came to me is maybe their original plan - as in 2-3 years ago - was to have a movie or series in production by now and hope that fuels interest in the RPG. Maybe that whole issue is taking much longer than originally anticipated, so they're in a holding pattern until the court case is resolved.

All speculation at this point.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I have no idea what is going on in the minds of WotC... this is the first edition of D&D where we aren't being swarmed by sourcebook after sourcebook after sourcebook on a monthly basis and it's actually pretty weird.

There aren't that many people working on material at WotC any more.

I think WotC expects third party publishers to produce the bulk of the adventures and unofficial "splat book" stuff that they themselves produced in the past--and they would, if there were a finished legal agreement on 5E.

 

[DongMaster]

The silence reminds me of Games Workshop and their law suit, and copying of models by other companies using different names, being released before the official models ever came out and hurt GW sales.

I do not see how this would be relevant to D&D however.

 

[delericho]

Of course this could all change at any moment, this fear dispelled. My guess is that sometime within the next several months we'll hear about the OGL as well as the future of online support - Dragon, etc.

With a staff of 8 people working on the D&D RPG, I don't think they can bring Dragon back.

 

[Morrus]

With a staff of 8 people working on the D&D RPG, I don't think they can bring Dragon back.

I think they can. The 8 doesn't include art/design/layout etc. or web staff. Freelancers can do the majority of the writing, with occasional staff articles. The main thing is someone commissioning/editing.

 

[Shemeska]

I think they can. The 8 doesn't include art/design/layout etc. or web staff. Freelancers can do the majority of the writing, with occasional staff articles. The main thing is someone commissioning/editing.

The more long-term people that WotC loses, they're eventually going to run into a problem with loss of institutional knowledge regarding older setting material, making it significantly harder to create material for those (even if the text is being written by freelancers, because you still need editors well enough versed in those settings to be able to fact check versus published material). When I've referenced prior edition material I've always added comments and page numbers from sources used, but there's always a risk in publishing DL/RL/Planescape/etc material that is out of print for an edition or two and no longer having anyone on staff that wrote for those settings or is as intimately familiar with them to know for when they're editing freelancer material when one freelancer is obsessive about the content versus another who isn't.

 

[Sunseeker]

I think WotC expects third party publishers to produce the bulk of the adventures and unofficial "splat book" stuff that they themselves produced in the past--and they would, if there were a finished legal agreement on 5E.

Even worse, 3rd party publishers aren't going to jump on a new ship that hasn't established that it's going to sail, regardless of the deal they might be offered to do so. OGL or no OGL.

 

[weldon]

The more long-term people that WotC loses, they're eventually going to run into a problem with loss of institutional knowledge regarding older setting material

This is a problem only if setting continuity is valuable to D&D. The game itself is pretty tolerant of letting the players change all that anyways, so I'm not convinced.

I'd be more concerned with the loss of institutional knowledge of how the RPG business works, and what ideas are worth revisiting and which were terrible mistakes that should never be repeated.

 

[Dausuul]

From this 2012 thread (emphasis mine):

Many Non-Core brands would simply be mothballed - allowed to go dormant for some number of years until the company was ready to take them down off the shelf and try to revive them for a new generation of kids. ... It would have been very easy for Goldner et al to tell Wizards "you're done with D&D, put it on a shelf and we'll bring it back 10 years from now as a multi-media property managed from Rhode Island". There's no way that the D&D business circa 2006 could have supported the kind of staff and overhead that it was used to. Best case would have been a very small staff dedicated to just managing the brand and maybe handling some freelance pool doing minimal adventure content.

Gee, that sounds... exactly like what's happening now.

IMO, what we are seeing is Dungeons and Dragons: The Mothball Edition. Hasbro brought down the axe; the budget has been cut to the bone and the tabletop game will receive minimal investment from here on out. Everything points that way--the drastically reduced staff levels, the outsourcing of everything from minis to adventures to e-tools to splatbooks, layoffs even after what has been by all accounts a smashingly successful launch, Mearls's comments that they don't expect to do 6E for a very long time if ever, the plans to take 5E OGL.

The thing about D&D is that it depends heavily on a living community of players. Whether or not Hasbro understands this, the guys at Wizards surely do: If you just shut the whole brand down, your chances of ever reviving it again are next to nil. The community will die out. (Pathfinder might prevent that, but what happens if there's another downturn and Paizo goes bust? Unlike Wizards, Paizo doesn't have a cardboard crack empire to fall back on.)

So if you're told to "put D&D on a shelf," what do you do? You plan out a strategy that will allow you to keep that community alive and support the game with as little Wizards money as possible. That means licensing, both traditional and OGL. It means a game designed to appeal to the broadest possible segment of the existing community. It means making old edition material available again. In short, it means giving the community everything you can, so they can help keep the flame alive.

Eventually, the legal fight over the D&D movie rights will be settled. Sometime after that, Hasbro will start gearing up to make a blockbuster. (The blockbuster will almost certainly suck, but it might still bring in a good haul on the basis of fight choreography, cleavage, and CGI.) At that point, they'll bring the TRPG brand out of hibernation. Till then, it's on us.