D&D 5E Something to consider about Grognards and the OGL...

[Retreater]

Speaking for yourself, you mean. And that's fine. Please don't pretend to speak for me, because I don't agree with you, and my Grognard credentials are pretty impeccable. Don't "no true Scotsman" me!

Every edition of D&D has been a different edition of D&D, ergo different than what preceeded it. I guess you can try to argue that the game has never changed.

 

[SkidAce]

Dude, it if you're a grognard it hasn't been D&D since 2000 when it was purchased by a mega corp.
What was D&D died with 3rd edition. Then that died again with 4e.
5e is a simulacrum of the old way. Twenty years ago, someone spent millions of dollars to use the trademarked brand name, but all of us who were there know that it hasn't been the same D&D for decades.
All this is fine. It's just not the same.

Disagree, there are certain D&D truisms, and style of play that has continued to exist thru the editions.

 

[Steel_Wind]

This isn't going to be how everyone feels - but some of us are feeling a real pain over this situation. I'm just asking people to consider that when they write about the situation.

I started with OD&D even before that, in 1977. Admittedly, not as hard core as it became in the summer of 1980.
But I left 1st ed in 1984 for Rolemaster. I skipped 2nd ed in its entirety. Came back with 3.0 in 2000 - jumped to PF1 in 2009, to PF2 when that came out, and just to 5e last March.

It's ALL D&D. The people who make it are incestuously employed across these companies. Monte Cook was with ICE for several years in the 90s writing Rolemaster Companions - before he moved on to TSR and later WotC - and wrote 3.0.

The 3.x I fell in love with had nothing to do with those hardcover books -- it was Dungeon Magazine under Paizo that gained my deep attachment. And at the time? Erik Mona and James Jacobs spoke for the D&D brand in the magazines.

Pathfinder was always D&D. PF1 was just 3.5 in an altered and improved form. The people who made it - and who wrote those Adv Paths were the same people who had written Red Hand of Doom and Age of Worms.

Am I attached to a trademark? No. No I'm not. And I suggest to you that if you are, that's a problem you need to get by. I would never suggest you shouldn't be attached the rules, the style of play, the subject matter of the game, or the creative talent who did all of these things. You can and you should be attached to those things.

But let's get real here: most of those people cycle through company to company : from Wotc to Paizo and back to WotC -- and maybe back to Paizo or Kobold Press or wherever -- the people who are making D&D and near clones of it are the same.

At its core? It's a small hobby.

 

[Charlaquin]

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I absolutely empathize with this. I mean, there’s a reason I describe myself as a DM rather than the more system-neutral GM, even when running games in other systems. There is a certain emotional attachment to D&D in particular, over RPGs broadly.

On the other hand, D&D is a brand, and corporations work really hard to manipulate us into forming these attachments to their brands, precisely so that we will be more charitable towards them, more inclined to favor their product over others, simply because it bears that brand name. It’s something we’re all vulnerable to, and it’s important to be critical of.

For me, the thing is to remember that while I have all these positive associations with D&D, those associations don’t really come from the brand. There’s a certain ephemeral quality of “D&D-ness,” and that je ne sais quoi doesn’t actually come from the brand. I can be playing or running D&D, even if the actual system I’m using to do it is Pathfinder, or OSE, or DCC, or Dungeon World, or whatever else. WotC may own the brand name and the ampersand logo, but they don’t own D&D. We do.

 

[Clint_L]

Every edition of D&D has been a different edition of D&D, ergo different than what preceeded it. I guess you can try to argue that the game has never changed.

What? Why would I argue that? That would be silly. And irrelevant. Straw man argument following a no true Scotsman argument - we are hitting all the classics tonight!

That claim has nothing to do with my point, which is simple: you don't get to speak for all of us, just as I won't try to speak for you. Obviously, we see the heart of the game very differently. And that's okay. We're both right. Because it's a subjective truth.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Dungeon Fantasy RPG is my favorite ruleset for playing Dungeons and Dragons.

AD&D 2nd edition (Spelljammer/Dark Sun era, pre-S&P) is my other favorite.

 

[Dausuul]

I have some of that feeling.

But it's mitigated, at least for me, by the fact that I don't really expect to be gone forever. Maybe I'll skip an edition (if you consider 1D&D an "edition"), the way a lot of folks did with 4E. But eventually all the chowderheads currently running WotC will have moved on, and the OGL will get sorted out one way or another. Someday I have no doubt I'll come back.

In the meantime, it's been a long time since I explored other games much. I'm looking forward to trying some new things.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, there's a difference between an actual grognard who still plays 1st or 2nd Edition AD&D (and won't be impacted by current events either way) and a longtime gamer who just plays whatever current iteration/reimagining that is released by the corporate IP holder.

The bolded is not true. Even we who still play 1e-adjacent will be* impacted by current events whether we like it or not; be it through less availability of new material (for any edition), or through being (or feeling) more restricted in what we can post on our home-game websites or produce as content, or through a general shrinking of the potential player-base as the game - yet again - fades from the public eye.

* - or are already being, says he who has already started going through his game's website to see what changes are needed to futureproof against whatever WotC/Hasbro do next.

 

[MGibster]

I wasn't there at the beginning, but I've been here for more than thirty years now. As Muhammad Ali said, "The man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 wasted thirty years of his life." I've said in other threads, I'm very aware that D&D will change to suit the current crop of customers. It changed in 1989, it changed in 2000, it changed in 2003, in 2008, in 2014, and it continues to change. It's possible that D&D will continue to change in ways that means I won't want to keep up with it. And that's okay, it really doesn't bother me. Things change. People change. D&D doesn't belong to me more than it does a twenty something who has only been playing for 2-3 years.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

I wasn't there at the beginning, but I've been here for more than thirty years now. As Muhammad Ali said, "The man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 wasted thirty years of his life." I've said in other threads, I'm very aware that D&D will change to suit the current crop of customers. It changed in 1989, it changed in 2000, it changed in 2003, in 2008, in 2014, and it continues to change. It's possible that D&D will continue to change in ways that means I won't want to keep up with it. And that's okay, it really doesn't bother me. Things change. People change. D&D doesn't belong to me more than it does a twenty something who has only been playing for 2-3 years.

Yeah but in this debacle, it's twentysomethings (such as the 20-something fella in my group) who are also in the lead of fighting Hasbro's destruction of what they came to love, even if they only played it a few years. The new generations are not down with corporate greed either, or even more so!