Maybe you don't agree, and you love the Rick and Morty adventure or the Strange Things materials, but please give me a moment to explain my feelings. D&D is deeply a creative outlet in first place with endless ways for you to simply homebrewor house rulewhatever you need/want. After all, who doesn’t love tossing out a catchphrase from pop culture every once and a while for a lighthearted laugh at the table or even making a goofy representation of Rambo, Cobra Commander, or even Santa Clause? In addition, there are already so many options available that if you simply spend a little time poking around you can usually find an optional way of doing things to get something done. I implore you to consider handing over exactly $0 for anything that remotely resembles cross promotion before we end of with Netflix presents a Call of DutyD(oritos)&D(ew) adventure for level 5-10. I understand the absurdity of that statement, but think for just a moment about whether or not that statement isn’t a marketing dream for a CEO at Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards?
Consider that in the past several years, Wizards has taken Magic the Gathering, another fantasy property with close ties to D&D (especially given it was created to pass the time between players who were not currently interacting with the DM in a session), and begone to shamelessly cross brand in the name of the almighty dollar. If it had simply kept itself to crossing into the realm of D&D, I probably never would have batted an eye, however, that’s not even CLOSE to where they started. Initially, the first reference that I’m aware of offhand was to Transformers, but it was as a promotional card that wasn’t playable anywhere and really couldn’t be used by and large. In October of 2020, they printed Walking Dead branded MtG cards, followed soon by Godzilla branded cards. Eventually even using their own Nerf branding under Hasbro within and unglued set to advertise. So ultimately, my worry is that if we – as consumers – begin to eat this up, we’ll continue to see a steady decline in actually creative D&D™ content.
Just something to consider and I’d appreciate the thoughts of the general community on it, especially as we look on as corporations continue to gobble up intellectual property rights only to shovel it into the short-term profit furnace.
This actually is not new. The d20 system was used in all kinds of things like the Star Wars Roleplaying game (2000), etc. back when Wizards licensed out the system to other products. Even the idea of having non-D&D IP in D&D proper is pretty old--there was a 1984 official D&D product based on Conan the Barbarian, complete with Arnold on the cover. Wizards/Hasbro have not done this with D&D for a while, but it is likely going to happen again.
At recent investor meetings, Hasbro has floated the idea of using the "D&D System" on other IPs, just like they have done with Magic. However, what is notable--they have been pretty clear to refer to the D&D "system" not D&D itself. Unlike Magic, where you need other cards to play with and would thus need to create hundreds of branded cards if you wanted to make a "Magic System, but not actual Magic" game, D&D only needs one product to play. They can easily release "Transformers, the tabletop game" which uses the d20 system from D&D and might even be able to be substituted into D&D (likely with some minor adjustments), but is still not technically D&D branded. Unlike with Magic, where they really need all the thousands of other cards to push the product, D&D does not have that same issue, so I would be surprised if they really got into adding these outside D&D IPs to D&D proper.
(Also, just a note, the Godzilla cards were before TWD and the different way the Ikoria cards and TWD cards were handled contributed greatly to the controversy surrounding the TWD release.)
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I'm in no need of cross branded D&D materials.
Maybe you don't agree, and you love the Rick and Morty adventure or the Strange Things materials, but please give me a moment to explain my feelings. D&D is deeply a creative outlet in first place with endless ways for you to simply homebrew or house rule whatever you need/want. After all, who doesn’t love tossing out a catchphrase from pop culture every once and a while for a lighthearted laugh at the table or even making a goofy representation of Rambo, Cobra Commander, or even Santa Clause? In addition, there are already so many options available that if you simply spend a little time poking around you can usually find an optional way of doing things to get something done. I implore you to consider handing over exactly $0 for anything that remotely resembles cross promotion before we end of with Netflix presents a Call of Duty D(oritos)&D(ew) adventure for level 5-10. I understand the absurdity of that statement, but think for just a moment about whether or not that statement isn’t a marketing dream for a CEO at Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards?
Consider that in the past several years, Wizards has taken Magic the Gathering, another fantasy property with close ties to D&D (especially given it was created to pass the time between players who were not currently interacting with the DM in a session), and begone to shamelessly cross brand in the name of the almighty dollar. If it had simply kept itself to crossing into the realm of D&D, I probably never would have batted an eye, however, that’s not even CLOSE to where they started. Initially, the first reference that I’m aware of offhand was to Transformers, but it was as a promotional card that wasn’t playable anywhere and really couldn’t be used by and large. In October of 2020, they printed Walking Dead branded MtG cards, followed soon by Godzilla branded cards. Eventually even using their own Nerf branding under Hasbro within and unglued set to advertise. So ultimately, my worry is that if we – as consumers – begin to eat this up, we’ll continue to see a steady decline in actually creative D&D™ content.
Just something to consider and I’d appreciate the thoughts of the general community on it, especially as we look on as corporations continue to gobble up intellectual property rights only to shovel it into the short-term profit furnace.
This actually is not new. The d20 system was used in all kinds of things like the Star Wars Roleplaying game (2000), etc. back when Wizards licensed out the system to other products. Even the idea of having non-D&D IP in D&D proper is pretty old--there was a 1984 official D&D product based on Conan the Barbarian, complete with Arnold on the cover. Wizards/Hasbro have not done this with D&D for a while, but it is likely going to happen again.
At recent investor meetings, Hasbro has floated the idea of using the "D&D System" on other IPs, just like they have done with Magic. However, what is notable--they have been pretty clear to refer to the D&D "system" not D&D itself. Unlike Magic, where you need other cards to play with and would thus need to create hundreds of branded cards if you wanted to make a "Magic System, but not actual Magic" game, D&D only needs one product to play. They can easily release "Transformers, the tabletop game" which uses the d20 system from D&D and might even be able to be substituted into D&D (likely with some minor adjustments), but is still not technically D&D branded. Unlike with Magic, where they really need all the thousands of other cards to push the product, D&D does not have that same issue, so I would be surprised if they really got into adding these outside D&D IPs to D&D proper.
(Also, just a note, the Godzilla cards were before TWD and the different way the Ikoria cards and TWD cards were handled contributed greatly to the controversy surrounding the TWD release.)