Why We Should Work With WotC

[HammerMan]

I think you get rid of the chattel slavery of 2E Dark Sun and replace it with "crushed beneath the bootheel"-type serfdom, where people are de facto slaves, their lives constrained and managed by the Sorcerer Lords and their enforcers, but the term slave or "enslaved person" isn't used. Again, I think that would potentially make it more relevant, not less.

It also defies any attempt to say it's "appropriation" or the like, because there's no-one who didn't have some ancestors who weren't, in the last 500 years, in some form of forced labour/indentured servitude/serfdom.

That seems logical. However I’m not sure it would work. I would support it until shown a problem with it.

 

[Ashtagon]

Exactly or the "You're not a prisoner, you're a valued member of the community who isn't allowed to leave the community without written permission from the lord"-style (Japan had a particularly wild version of that in I think the 1500s).

You're an essential worker!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

You gotta know this is not remotely on the table. Like, this pretty much never happens, and it would be unprofessional to force them to do this.

You fire people if you have to, but you never throw them under the bus in the public eye. The apology comes from above that person if possible, from their replacement if necessary, and if you just cannot swing one of those and it has to come from the person themselves you have them write it specifically as a representative of the company, not as an individual. It's "we are sorry, we messed up in this way, here is what we are doing and going to do to make things right."

Reprimand in private, praise in public, is the standard, and for good reason.

After those conditions are met, Wizards is free to release OneD&D content under any license they want. Although their creative and legal choices may continue to be criticized. The community is also free to pursue their creative ideas without Wizard's interference.

I mean, this is all true regardless of what they do.

Your definition of "haven't budged" is strange to me. They went from OGL 1.0a is dead and nothing more can be done under it(original leak) to OGL 1.0a is going to die, but if you have something in the works you have 6 more months to okay, okay, if you're produced something under 1.0a you can keep using it forever. That's a hell of a lot of budging.

They aren't as rock solid on this as you are making them out to be.

Yeah, and honestly if they made the following changes, I think they'd have a good chance of "winning" this whole debacle in the end, for better or worse. Not guaranteed by any means, but a chance.

• explicit language that you can continue to make content for existing products licensed under the OGL1.0a, but not make fully new products using that license (ie works that do not reference or derive from works made before [date])
• A review process for flagged works under the morality clause, and wotc must provide very specific reason for flagging a work, and provide at least 30 days to remedy or pull the work, before flagging it. Flagged works are then reviewed by a third party
• fixed language for vtt, with that text being part of the OGL not a separate policy. I think a good way to make a clear line between video games and vtts is the animation of characters, and the automation of NPCs and enviroments.

However, I think they'd be better off providing a really good platform that any publisher can join (with wotc review, it's their platform), and on which users can sell eachother stuff, running it similarly to DMsGuild, where you can use actual protected IP as long as you follow the rules, and wotc gets a cut. The key thing would be to give publishers the ability to create their own "nexus" on the platform, so that a user can just view that publisher's stuff and use the platform as if it were just that publisher's platform. So, a publisher could set up their digital tools (with easy to use creator tools built in), compendiums, and marketplace, etc.

It might take a while for 3pp to get onboard, after this debacle, but it would happen eventually. The deal would be too good to not get on board.

But they won't, so probably our best hope at this point is to ditch them until such time as leadership changes and they put the whole SRD in CC as part of an attempt to pull people back to them, similar to the beginning of 5e.

Hopefully they go through with the CC plan, and we don't have to worry about wotsr sueing people for making fair use content.

 

[Imaculata]

I think the OP's comparison of the situation with pizza kind of misses some key points. I'd like to suggest a different comparison.

It is as if we found out that WotC would really like to blow up a bridge. People get upset, because they really like said bridge. So WotC is like:

"We're sorry, we truly are. We won't destroy the bridge now. We'll just use it to store our explosives. But we won't set them off. You can trust us!"

No, you've shown your intent. And besides, there are other bridges!

"No, no, you misunderstand. We'll let you keep part of the bridge. How about we let you have the left handrail?"

 

[RareBreed]

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.

Pretty much 10x this. I'm also old enough to remember those days, having first started AD&D back in the early 80s. However, I left D&D even before they became the They Sue Regularly evil empire. Why?

Because I learned there was a vast treasure trove of other deserving TTRPG's and gaming companies that also deserved my dollars. I posted a reply to someone who seemed very down about the fiasco, and that he felt like he could no longer trust WotC to be a good steward for the D&D community and game. Worse, he felt like stopping role playing altogether...not just D&D but all role playing.

My advice was that this is sort of like when you break up with your significant other in a relationship. You think you will never find anyone like that again, and there will be a huge void in your heart for the rest of your life...

...until you find someone else. I think a lot of folks here (including the OP possibly) are bemoaning that so many in the D&D community are mad enough that they are willing to burn everything down including Hasbro/WotC if need be. This feels like a betrayal not just from WotC, but from the community too, because if enough of the community burns their bridges with WotC, then those who are strongly emotionally (or maybe financially) invested in D&D and WotC will be devastated if WotC and/or the larger D&D community becomes just another player in the TTRPG universe, rather than the dominant one.

So I think there are two especially vulnerable victims here; the financially invested 3PP who made a living on the assumption of an irrevocable OGL, and the emotionally invested players who don't want harm to come to WotC for fear that their favorite playground will be torn asunder. I do feel bad for those 3PP who have made their livelihoods by being able to find a living in this ecosystem, but I think there are ways for them to evolve. For those who are emotionally rather than financially invested in compromising with WotC, my advice is simply that there are a lot of other fish in the sea. Who knows, they might just find one that's better than D&D for them.

For the emotionally invested, I also wouldn't worry about D&D going away. Will it not be as dominant? Time will tell, but a lot of damage has already been done. I personally hope that gamers wake up and start supporting other game companies and game systems that are not D&D/5e. I said before that I love pizza, but if it's all I ever ate, I'd get sick and tired of it. It's frankly amazed me how many gaming groups only play D&D. I hope this betrayal spurs at least some of those groups to try something new.

But even if WotC is wounded, I doubt this will be its death knell. 5e rebounded after 4e, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people stopped being mad over time. I also believe that the casual gaming crowd simply won't care as long as they get products they enjoy. As others have mentioned, there's no reason OGL 2.0 and ORC can't live together, and let the industry and consumers let the chips fall where they may.

 

[HammerMan]

You're an essential worker!

My nurse Fiancé feels that way sometimes.

My buddy who works at Walmart is most likely in that group.

 

[Staffan]

I dunno. I feel like they could easily have hired a few talented people to put something together myself.

I think it's more about having someone in charge who has standards and a clear vision than stuff created across the course of an edition inherently being better.

I'm not saying they couldn't do an item book. I'm doubting their ability to make a good item book, because that would require them to come up with a lot of magic items in a fairly short amount of time.

If you look at the books that preceded the Magic Item Compendium, that was about 6½ years of a fairly aggressive publishing schedule. I don't know how many D&D books were published in that time, but there were a lot. And quite a few of them had magic items in them – but those items were generally not designed as space fillers, but as complements to the overall theme of the book. You do Frostburn, and put in some arctic-themed items in that book. You do Libris Mortis, and naturally you come up with some cool items both for undead to use and for those hunting them. And here's Races of Stone, which of course will have some dwarf- and gnome-themed items. And after six years of doing that sort of stuff, you take the top, say, 50% of those items and put them in one book along with some items specifically designed for that book in order to plug holes in the system and for neat new concepts like item sets.

In other words, building up ten items here and a dozen items there and five there and so on over the course of six years will lead to better results than trying to come up with a couple of hundred items in six months.

 

[Maxperson]

It's not that they are unprofitable, they are simply not profitable enough. It's why I used the phrase "corporate brainrot": at a certain level corporate leaders get obsessed with continual growth and gains, so even minor but stable reversion is looked at as the signal to change lanes.

So I doubt any 5E adventures are unprofitable. But the problem is that they may not be enough to reach the unrealistic targets set for them.

Okay. Not profitable enough is not the same as not profitable, though, and not profitable is what @Minigiant was claiming. 5e has done both profitable adventures and profitable core books.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I'm not saying they couldn't do an item book. I'm doubting their ability to make a good item book, because that would require them to come up with a lot of magic items in a fairly short amount of time.

If you look at the books that preceded the Magic Item Compendium, that was about 6½ years of a fairly aggressive publishing schedule. I don't know how many D&D books were published in that time, but there were a lot. And quite a few of them had magic items in them – but those items were generally not designed as space fillers, but as complements to the overall theme of the book. You do Frostburn, and put in some arctic-themed items in that book. You do Libris Mortis, and naturally you come up with some cool items both for undead to use and for those hunting them. And here's Races of Stone, which of course will have some dwarf- and gnome-themed items. And after six years of doing that sort of stuff, you take the top, say, 50% of those items and put them in one book along with some items specifically designed for that book in order to plug holes in the system and for neat new concepts like item sets.

In other words, building up ten items here and a dozen items there and five there and so on over the course of six years will lead to better results than trying to come up with a couple of hundred items in six months.

Yeah, one of the drawbacks of their publishing style is that they ceded a lot of this ground to 3PPs and such. The magic item and crafting space has been well-trod by people outside the company and would inevitably draw comparisons.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Okay. Not profitable enough is not the same as not profitable, though, and not profitable is what @Minigiant was claiming. 5e has done both profitable adventures and profitable core books.

I think they meant in the corporate sense of "We aren't reaching our targets". That's how I took it with their followup to me.

I mean, if we aren't operating on corporate brainrot logic here, sales were going to slow because we were largely out of the pandemic. 2020 and 2021 may have set too unrealistic a pace. Did Spelljammer do particularly bad or something?

According to rumors yes.

So with copro brainrot logic, books bad microcontractions good