Same. So far at my table, it's myself and another person who DM and this whole thing has gotten us to give PF2e a serious look and we're both excited about the prospect of switching systems by now. The rest of the table will pretty much play whatever we're willing to run since a good time will be had regardless of system so this is completely on WotC to turn around and completely walk back to keep our business.
Why We Should Work With WotC
mamba
Legend
I am no longer sure they haven’t already, at least with me
no, nothing they do matters to me, apart from the OGL, not the least bit interested. If they manage to produce an acceptable 1.2, then I will see if that restored my interest / trust enough to give them my business again and only then is there a point in me checking whether they have anything worth buying
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robconley
Hero
A bully walks into your home and trashes and mangles your stuff. You gather your friends and say "Hey!". Seeing the number of people there, the bully says "fine, fine, you can have some of your stuff back, the rest I am taking with me.".
What you are proposing is to compromise with a bully. Me, I want the bully to drop my naughty word and get the hell out of my house. Then if I can pay restitution.
Hasbro and Wizards' overreach inept handling of the situation has caused ongoing damage to people's livelihood within the industry. There was a reasonable expectation that the OGL 1.0a was irrevocable and the open content availability unchanged. Especially after what happened with Pathfinder, and 4e in the early 2010s. Wizard earned their way back to #1 with how they handled the development of 5e. For OneD&D they decide to play the bully. As a result, sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.
No there is no point for the community to work with Hasbro/Wizards until the following conditions are met.
- Wizards acknowledge OGL 1.0a as an authorized irrevocable license.
- That all past open content remains open content under the OGL 1.0a and free to be used as they have been for the past 23 years. Works like the D20 3.0 and 3.5 SRD. The 5e 5.1 SRD as well remains under the OGL 1a.
- The plan to release various sections of the 5.1 SRD under the CC-BY 4.0 license is followed through.
- That Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro, and Cynthia William, CEO of Wizards of the Coast, each write and sign individual formal apologies to all the publishers impacted by their overreach and inept handling of the situation such as Paizo, Kobold Press, Troll Lord Games, Green Ronin, Gaming Ballistic, Frog God Games, and many others.
Remathilis
Legend
Indeed. I've been advocating this very thing. A designer will have several choices, depending on the needs of their product. CC for just the skeleton of d20 RPG which they can use to make whole new systems. OGL for making D&D adjacent material, with the added benefit of additional resources (the SRD) and trade off of WotC gets to say no if your content would be controversial to their image. DMs Guild has even more options, but you pay royalties and agree to even more oversight. ORC will be an option for community shared systems each policed the way the OGL was.
WotC wants greater control over how it's toys are used. It thought it could do so in a system of vassalage, but WotC quickly realized a man who says he is the king is no king. So they are giving back much with the hope that they can keep their central concern: the ability to do something against a product that could harm their brand image by association. Especially with the brand poised to be far larger than it's niche market previously. Just because their were few bad actors before doesn't mean the future will remain like that.
in the light that WotC is willing to give away lots just to regain control of the licensing of it's toys, I am willing to work with them to make sure that such powers have limits. I don't think it's a nonstarter. What used to be the OGL community will be divided across several licenses, and probably several systems. That will probably be healthier in the long term. Yes it means that things will change, eggs will be broken, and some things lost to time (in a quick comparison: how many things did we lose when Flash finally died? That's the cost of progress). But I think we may emerge stronger if we focus on checking WotC's power rather than demanding they change nothing.
Princessmaker
Explorer
No, thank you.
LuisCarlos17f
Legend
I can try to understand Hasbro wants to avoid some 3PP with wrong content could cause some damage in the prestige of the family-friendly brand, but I have suffered injustly the censorship in Facebook, banned by fault of false causes, and then I don't trust who says censorship is necessary to stop disinformation and hate speech. I have seen a double standards, to use two different sticks to measure, and I can't trust blindy.
The guidelines about what is "hate speech" could change in the future. Maybe something allowed today could be wrong in the eyes of a new generation.
Hasbro can hire the best lawyers and win in the trials, but then the loss of prestige and trust by the customers could be worse.
Here, some players have learnt to avoid innecessary conflicts by means of diplomacy and social skills, but Hasbro has to understand we are geeks, but not stupid. We don't want to feel tricked paying more really necessary. The sharks within Hasbro have to understand the D&D players aren't so easy to be manipulated or tricked. After several games the players have to smarten up for the survival of their PC against a mercyless DM. Their jobs is about to sell the products we want to buy, not about trying to change our minds about we want to buy.
The rules of the games aren't protected by copyright+trademark laws. Hasbro's lawyers can't forget this.
Hasbro needs good maners and fair play with the 3PPs because someones could be future acquisitions, if these aren't before by some Hollywood producer or videogame studio. Others could pay royalties to can use D&D-Beyond as a showcase for their titles.
The guidelines about what is "hate speech" could change in the future. Maybe something allowed today could be wrong in the eyes of a new generation.
Hasbro can hire the best lawyers and win in the trials, but then the loss of prestige and trust by the customers could be worse.
Here, some players have learnt to avoid innecessary conflicts by means of diplomacy and social skills, but Hasbro has to understand we are geeks, but not stupid. We don't want to feel tricked paying more really necessary. The sharks within Hasbro have to understand the D&D players aren't so easy to be manipulated or tricked. After several games the players have to smarten up for the survival of their PC against a mercyless DM. Their jobs is about to sell the products we want to buy, not about trying to change our minds about we want to buy.
The rules of the games aren't protected by copyright+trademark laws. Hasbro's lawyers can't forget this.
Hasbro needs good maners and fair play with the 3PPs because someones could be future acquisitions, if these aren't before by some Hollywood producer or videogame studio. Others could pay royalties to can use D&D-Beyond as a showcase for their titles.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
This.
So a bit of history for myself - back in the 1990s I discovered that TSR was a terrible company that treated the tabletop industry as if it were their own feudal kingdom and other companies as parasites who were stealing money that they rightfully deserved and fans who produced free content and put it on the internet as copyright thieves. I pretty much stopped playing D&D for most of the mid 90s because of how horrible they were online, focusing on other systems, bringing in new players to TTRPGs via games that weren't D&D, and mostly ignoring D&D's existence other than picking up some 2e supplements used here or there and porting them over to other games (mostly for Torg) up until TSR went bankrupt.
I came back to D&D largely only because Wizards said all of the right things and made all of the right moves to convince me that they weren't T$R. That they were a company that understood the tabletop community and their place in it and wanted to be good stewards for the game. The OGL and the associated SRD actually was the final nail that convinced me that it was worth investing my time and energy back into D&D again because the company behind it wasn't a bunch of aggressive idiots who only cared about their own profits.
So you can see, given that history, why I'm not that hyped to compromise on this right? Hasbro has laid down a marker showing that they're a deceptive business partner to work with, and that they don't care about the broader TTRPG community. Arguably they're worse than TSR because TSR didn't actually engage in the kind of deceptive business practice that Hasbro is with trying to revoke the OGL - if you were in the business, you knew what TSR was. They didn't try to hide it.
So I don't need to support D&D. My entertainment dollars can go elsewhere. I've bought dozens of D&D Starter Sets every year to give as gifts to pull people into the game - I can buy other starter sets for other games. Heck Hasbro has now convinced me that it's worth my time to convince all of the kids that I've introduced to the game over the past few years that it's time to try something new! Maybe it's time for me to gift them a Starfinder beginner box. Or when the WOIN starter set comes out maybe I'll stock up on those for gifts. I can promote games that actually want a community that plays them, rather than a game that wants me to subscribe to their streaming service for a monthly fee.
I actually don't care if Hasbro tanks D&D. I don't care if legally branded "Dungeons and Dragons (TM) (TM) (TM) (all rights reserved)(pat. pending)" gets put into the Hasbro vault next to Rom Spaceknight and the Micronauts and only gets rolled out when Hasbro thinks they might be able to reboot it. It doesn't matter to me. Because I know for a fact that I don't need to play D&D to be a happy gamer - I spent a good chunk of the 90s ignoring D&D and was just fine.
If I never DM another D&D session in my life I'll be fine. Wizards has lost some free advertising from me, but I'm sure they'll be fine too. I just don't care if they're successful or not anymore. Whereas before this all started I was always kind of happy to see D&D doing well in the market, I can go back to just not caring.
My only concern now is all of the folks whose businesses depend on the fact that Wizards deceitfully presented the OGL as a non-revokable license for 20 years, built their businesses on top of that deceit, and now are being told "we were lying". That's my concern at this point.
I came back to D&D largely only because Wizards said all of the right things and made all of the right moves to convince me that they weren't T$R. That they were a company that understood the tabletop community and their place in it and wanted to be good stewards for the game. The OGL and the associated SRD actually was the final nail that convinced me that it was worth investing my time and energy back into D&D again because the company behind it wasn't a bunch of aggressive idiots who only cared about their own profits.
So you can see, given that history, why I'm not that hyped to compromise on this right? Hasbro has laid down a marker showing that they're a deceptive business partner to work with, and that they don't care about the broader TTRPG community. Arguably they're worse than TSR because TSR didn't actually engage in the kind of deceptive business practice that Hasbro is with trying to revoke the OGL - if you were in the business, you knew what TSR was. They didn't try to hide it.
So I don't need to support D&D. My entertainment dollars can go elsewhere. I've bought dozens of D&D Starter Sets every year to give as gifts to pull people into the game - I can buy other starter sets for other games. Heck Hasbro has now convinced me that it's worth my time to convince all of the kids that I've introduced to the game over the past few years that it's time to try something new! Maybe it's time for me to gift them a Starfinder beginner box. Or when the WOIN starter set comes out maybe I'll stock up on those for gifts. I can promote games that actually want a community that plays them, rather than a game that wants me to subscribe to their streaming service for a monthly fee.
I actually don't care if Hasbro tanks D&D. I don't care if legally branded "Dungeons and Dragons (TM) (TM) (TM) (all rights reserved)(pat. pending)" gets put into the Hasbro vault next to Rom Spaceknight and the Micronauts and only gets rolled out when Hasbro thinks they might be able to reboot it. It doesn't matter to me. Because I know for a fact that I don't need to play D&D to be a happy gamer - I spent a good chunk of the 90s ignoring D&D and was just fine.
If I never DM another D&D session in my life I'll be fine. Wizards has lost some free advertising from me, but I'm sure they'll be fine too. I just don't care if they're successful or not anymore. Whereas before this all started I was always kind of happy to see D&D doing well in the market, I can go back to just not caring.
My only concern now is all of the folks whose businesses depend on the fact that Wizards deceitfully presented the OGL as a non-revokable license for 20 years, built their businesses on top of that deceit, and now are being told "we were lying". That's my concern at this point.
Level Up! is licensed under OGL 1.0a. I write Level Up! content.
If 1.0a goes away, I cannot write Level Up! content because I'm no longer covered under the OGL 1.0a's sublicensing. At least not without risking lawsuits from both WotC and EN Publishing (though I know the latter wouldn't start anything).
If OGL 1.2a is the law of the land, I still cannot write Level Up! content because it was produced under 1.0a.
It doesn't matter how favorable OGL 1.2a is, it still locks me out of writing Level Up! content unless EN Publishing is able to produce a Level Up! revised edition that removes the OGL 1.0a from it.
At which time I won't be writing under the OGL 1.0a or the OGL 1.2a, and any compromise the community makes for OGL 1.2a will be irrelevant to me.
There is no situation where WotC protects my designing career for Level Up! unless they somehow make an irrevocable and permanent provision that Sublicensing of 1.0a to create derivative works is enshrined in the OGL 1.2a -and- any following OGL Revisions.
They won't. Because they don't give a horse's tail flip about me or any other small 3pp.
If 1.0a goes away, I cannot write Level Up! content because I'm no longer covered under the OGL 1.0a's sublicensing. At least not without risking lawsuits from both WotC and EN Publishing (though I know the latter wouldn't start anything).
If OGL 1.2a is the law of the land, I still cannot write Level Up! content because it was produced under 1.0a.
It doesn't matter how favorable OGL 1.2a is, it still locks me out of writing Level Up! content unless EN Publishing is able to produce a Level Up! revised edition that removes the OGL 1.0a from it.
At which time I won't be writing under the OGL 1.0a or the OGL 1.2a, and any compromise the community makes for OGL 1.2a will be irrelevant to me.
There is no situation where WotC protects my designing career for Level Up! unless they somehow make an irrevocable and permanent provision that Sublicensing of 1.0a to create derivative works is enshrined in the OGL 1.2a -and- any following OGL Revisions.
They won't. Because they don't give a horse's tail flip about me or any other small 3pp.
delericho
Legend
You're right - it's better to work with them as far as possible, in the hope of reaching a mutually-agreeable conclusion.
That's fine. They can really want whatever they want.
But deauthorizing OGL 1.0a is every bit as much a deal-breaker for many of us as it is for them. It doesn't necessarily follow that we should be the ones to give way. (And that does leave the possibility that the gap simply cannot be bridged. Sometimes that happens.)
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