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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8888394" data-attributes="member: 18">Before this, I'd have said 1D&D was guaranteed to do pretty great, probably not as well as 5E, but that's kind of inevitable, growth of D&D no doubt peaked in the pandemic as people tried out new ways to stay amused, but well.Now though, WotC have managed to piss off almost every part of D&D fandom. Not just those who actually use 3PPs, but people who just like the idea, as well as absolutely radicalizing a bunch of people who were vaguely not keen on D&D, and keen to say "Try other games, don't feed the monopoly", but many of whom did actually play D&D, into absolute "WotC DIAF!" full-on implacable haters.With videogames when you piss off only a small part of the audience, that's often fine, no matter how noisy they are.Except when it isn't.And when it isn't is when those people are de facto actually important to the community. And I think WotC's issue here is that, if you're DM, the chances that you have an opinion on this, and particularly that it's negative one, are hugely greater than if you're primarily a player. That's when pissing off even a "vocal minority" is extremely dangerous.I expect WotC tonight or early Pacific tomorrow will come out with some kind of half-arsed apology combined with an attempt to blame "leakers" for leaking an "early draft", because they know they have a bully pulpit here, in that anything they say will be a thousand times louder in terms of reporting and transmission than the 3PPs. Every 3PP could say "WotC is lying about it being a draft", and still loads of people who were pretty mad about this will use WotC's obvious bollocks as an excuse to say "Oh well it was all just terrible misunderstanding". They'll probably change the wording to clarify that they're not deauthorizing OGL 1.0a or previous SRDs for everyone, and it's opt-in, though I suspect they'll retain the poison pill.And think that'll be enough to calm down people who actively wanted to it to be all a misunderstanding (even though it definitely isn't), but will it change the attitudes of the community generally enough to bring 1D&D back to where it would have been? I don't think so. They've waited too long. If they'd managed to get a statement like that out before the actual OGL leaked, particularly before the io9 article, that might have worked. But now? Nah.I don't think 1D&D will do 4E badly at all. I think it'll do okay. And if anything rescues it, it'll be merch fan whales blasting hundreds or even thousands on virtual minis on the 3D VTT. So WotC really better not mess that up. If they get enough lifestyle merch fans to just throw cash at them, that'll make up for losing a huge number of more casual players. Does anyone really care if you lost 10 normal DMs who spend $60-90/year on WotC books, when you gained 1 guy who spends $600-1500/year on virtual minis and other merch?That's not even a question. They said so.D&D is under-monetized.</blockquote>

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