What's Past is Prologue: Understanding the OGL Licensing Controversy in Light of the 3e/4e Transition

[Ruin Explorer]

Mumblemumblemagicmissilemumble.

Great example yeah lol.

And honestly regardless of how anything else about this works out, the fact is a bunch of people are going to take "how the 3D VTT works" as if it were God's Own Holy Writ re: RAW/RAI, when I guarantee at least of the implementations on the VTT will be just some developer going "Oh this obviously works X way!" and no actual designer would have approved that decision. I mean, there's literally no way they're going to have, say, Crawford and Perkins personally approve the functionality of every or even any significant percentage of mechanics in the 3D VTT.

Yet that's not how people will see it. Looking forwards to the exciting day when we're all discussing how some rule works and some dude busts into the thread to say we're all nitwits and 3D VTT does it this way, so why don't we just shut up already lol.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'll also be interested to see if 1D&D changes from 5E DM-side and makes some stuff more prescriptive and less "may".

Also quoting myself like a total chump but I think this has already started, as some guidance is dragged out of the DMG and into the daylight of the player side of the equation in 1D&D and presented as rules in either the Cleric or previous packet.

 

[Umbran]

WotC/Hasbro have apparently got 350 people working on the 3D VTT. That's bonkers levels of investment. Tens of millions a year (I believe @Umbran estimated it at possibly $35m/pa). I dunno how much investment D&D has had in development, but I suspect it's a hell of a lot less than $35m/pa.

I don't find the money to be a compelling argument for this change.

In the 4e transition, 4e... was the only real source of D&D revenue. It was the kit and kaboodle, so of course having control of the kit and kaboodle seems attractive.

But, even at the high rates quoted, royalties from 3pp will be a pittance compared to the expenditure on the VTT, if those staffing numbers are a measure. If we look at, say, a million dollar kickstarter, under the terms we've seen it would yield only about $50K for WotC - maybe half the cost of one software engineer.

Royalties from 3pp will not be a significant source of funding for that effort. And it is naïve, at best, to think that limiting 3pp will increase TTRPG sales for WotC. So, I don't think the money argument holds water. Especially in comparison to the Hollywood blockbuster scale money they are expecting to start coming in March.

The other option that I think is more likely is that this is about control.

 

[billd91]

But I think they may have done critical PR damage already, just as early 4E decisions really smashed up 4E's PR. They've got a year and a half or so to "right the ship", but unless they do something pretty drastic and 1D&D starts seeming more like a "killer app" and less like 5E with a lot of house rules (some good, some shrug, some bah), this seems like it bodes ill for them.

PR damage is right. I honestly like the 5e system. But Hasbro/WotC has a lot of fences to mend... again... AND OneD&D has to really knock it out of the park for me to even want to support them by buying it.
And that bothers me. I wasn't completely satisfied with some of the OneD&D play test changes, but nothing was completely breaking my interest so there was plenty of room for optimism.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't find the money to be a compelling argument for this change.

In the 4e transition, 4e... was the only real source of D&D revenue. It was the kit and kaboodle, so of course having control of the kit and kaboodle seems attractive.

But, even at the high rates quoted, royalties from 3pp will be a pittance compared to the expenditure on the VTT, if those staffing numbers are a measure. If we look at, say, a million dollar kickstarter, under the terms we've seen it would yield only about $50K for WotC - maybe half the cost of one software engineer.

Royalties from 3pp will not be a significant source of funding for that effort. And it is naïve, at best, to think that limiting 3pp will increase TTRPG sales for WotC. So, I don't think the money argument holds water. Especially in comparison to the Hollywood blockbuster scale money they are expecting to start coming in March.

The other option that I think is more likely is that this is about control.

Yeah, sorry I should have been more clear. I don't think anyone at WotC believes that they're going to make enough money from all this to even dent the costs of the investment in the 3D VTT, what I was trying to say is that they are investing a very large amount, and when companies invest a large amount, they often increasingly seek to control the environment around that investment, even when it doesn't really make complete sense. There have been a lot of PR backfires through corporate history where attempts at increasing control that made sense politically inside the company - we have heard that apparently a lot of people at WotC are quite bitter about the OGL, despite the tiny amounts of money involved with 3PPs - but that didn't make actual financial sense when the reputational damage involved was assessed.

 

[bedir than]

Also quoting myself like a total chump but I think this has already started, as some guidance is dragged out of the DMG and into the daylight of the player side of the equation in 1D&D and presented as rules in either the Cleric or previous packet.

"Influence" and a couple other new actions that don't belong in the 6-second round, ugh

 

[Haplo781]

I see a lot of similarities to Apple's "walled garden" approach with the iOS app store. People can and will pay a premium for carefully curated content, which seems to be what the OneD&D approach is. Everything goes through D&D Beyond, and 3rd parties can participate only if they go through tightly controlled curated openings.

I mean, it might work! You can see in postings here, and also in a lot of online sources, that a lot of people only want to use WotC material in their games. There's a desire for a centralized game infrastructure. Look at electronic games. For every person who swears by playing games on PC and being able to use a nigh-infinite amount of mods, there's someone else who loves the "download and play" aspects of console gaming.

The central problem for me is that OneD&D isn't really new, it's essentially 5e with some detailing. If it had been a truly new edition that was kicking off with a subscription-based electronic model, that would make somewhat more amenable to checking it out. It's the fact that the new OGL is fracturing 8 years of productive 3pp infrastructure around 5e that bothers me.

Even Apple doesn't take 25%.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And that bothers me. I wasn't completely satisfied with some of the OneD&D play test changes, but nothing was completely breaking my interest so there was plenty of room for optimism.

Yeah that's the interesting thing here - I'll be honest, when I heard about 1D&D having a playtest and so on, I expected to see a bunch of "OH YEAH!" ideas and "Of course! Why didn't we think of that sooner! D'oh!" as well as of course some "HELL NO".

But it's mostly been "Huh, kinda cool I guess", "Well it's an improvement, technically" and "That just doesn't seem particularly good". It's hard to care strongly about it. Especially as the only solidly "kinda cool" stuff I've really seen are things like the race/species changes, which would be trivial to backport to 5E.

At least with 3E and 4E there was some exciting stuff, whether you hated it or loved it. 1D&D a lot of it looks like change for the sake of change, combined with some minor improvements and minor questionable choices. Especially as the most potentially controversial and exciting change of recent years was actually fully negotiated before 1D&D, the ditching of default racial attribute bonuses.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Yeah that's the interesting thing here - I'll be honest, when I heard about 1D&D having a playtest and so on, I expected to see a bunch of "OH YEAH!" ideas and "Of course! Why didn't we think of that sooner! D'oh!" as well as of course some "HELL NO".

But it's mostly been "Huh, kinda cool I guess", "Well it's an improvement, technically" and "That just doesn't seem particularly good". It's hard to care strongly about it. Especially as the only solidly "kinda cool" stuff I've really seen are things like the race/species changes, which would be trivial to backport to 5E.

At least with 3E and 4E there was some exciting stuff, whether you hated it or loved it. 1D&D a lot of it looks like change for the sake of change, combined with some minor improvements and minor questionable choices. Especially as the most potentially controversial and exciting change of recent years was actually fully negotiated before 1D&D, the ditching of default racial attribute bonuses.

In the context of moving away from an open license (OGL 1.1 certainly isn't open) it would make alot more sense if the changes were far more significant so that gating access to the new SRD would be a much stronger carrot.

 

[Haplo781]

In the context of moving away from an open license (OGL 1.1 certainly isn't open) it would make alot more sense if the changes were far more significant so that gating access to the new SRD would be a much stronger carrot.

Hey remember when D&D Next had a public playtest and then they threw like 85% of it out by the time it released as 5e?

Bringing this up for no particular reason.