I am for royalties to be paid just like in almost every other aspect of business/creation. If you make tech, you get a patent and people pay you royalties. WotC hasn't for over 20 years and people just assume that's what it should be. Even Unreal and Unity do this. So does Steam, Epic, Apple, and any other online entity including Amazon. DnD was the last bastion but if I created something even small royalty on people making millions of dollars of it would be appreciated. MonkeyDM seems to be making his Steinhardt guide by himself and got over a million dollars his take away will be high.
How many of you own actual physical copies of all the music you consume? Or have at least purchased any digital copies from the artists themselves directly through sites like bandcamp?
Because I can think of little more hypocritical than not caring that artists are not being paid accordingly—showing you've actually very little regard for people's intellectual property—and then invoking the rhetoric of intellectual property just to defend a conglomerate the size of Hasbro pulling the livelihoods of writers, illustrators, and other creatives responsible for other games right out from under them.
Your statement makes no sense whatsoever and really it's a gatekeeping question a lot of hobby people use. Also my post clearly said that every other part (them owning everything, not paying royalties to content creators, etc I was against).
I've bought songs of Bandcamp, not even the best way to support an artist (going to concerts is as artist make s lot of money touring, which I've done and bought merch).
I support artists by donating money to them directly.
I've bought art off artists at cons.
None of that matters in this context. So stop gatekeeping.
Not that it matters and inb4 shill, WotC Q3 revenue is down $60 million since last year. Do you not care about all the people they will lay off because of it or do only smaller publishers matter? So Paizo will have to lay people off. That's the world. Maybe they get hired by WotC? Or any other non DnD company.
They have a right to be paid royalties (my thought was 5-10% seems fair over $500k). This will still allow small people like DnDShorts and others to make a living. While DnD creators get to continue evolving the hobby. The lore is rich and a new system will have none.
Edit: Also just class action Hasbro then?? If they break the OGL and act in bad faith make a class action. It saves everyone, forces them into a lawsuit that usually favours the people and they'll want to settle.
Sorry but this is just a terrible take; Don't be upset about creators being chased out of your community, it's okay because that's just business! It's not only short sighted, it's stupid; you really think Wizards is going to be able to churn out as much content as the myriand of content creators that they're trying to hobble with this new OGL? No. You're basically handwaving away something that is going to hugely change the D&D gaming landscape and insisting it's not a big deal becuase 'that's business'.
Selling slaves was once 'just business' too; just because something is business, or legal, doesn't make it morally or ethically right. There's a reason that man's law and morals are two different words with different definitions, my dude.
The new OGL is not even remotely workable for 3rd party content creators because it literally legally gives away their content to Wizards, and NO ONE WHO MAKES CONTENT IS GOING TO WANT TO JUST GIVE AWAY THEIR LEGAL RIGHTS TO IT FOR FREE! I literally make content for companies that rhyme with shmarvel and I can promise you that if they said they owned in perpetuity my work forever I'd have never signed up to do work for them in the first place. Ergo, the content will no longer be created.
I am for royalties to be paid just like in almost every other aspect of business/creation. If you make tech, you get a patent and people pay you royalties. WotC hasn't for over 20 years and people just assume that's what it should be. Even Unreal and Unity do this. So does Steam, Epic, Apple, and any other online entity including Amazon. DnD was the last bastion but if I created something even small royalty on people making millions of dollars of it would be appreciated. MonkeyDM seems to be making his Steinhardt guide by himself and got over a million dollars his take away will be high.
How many of you own actual physical copies of all the music you consume? Or have at least purchased any digital copies from the artists themselves directly through sites like bandcamp?
Because I can think of little more hypocritical than not caring that artists are not being paid accordingly—showing you've actually very little regard for people's intellectual property—and then invoking the rhetoric of intellectual property just to defend a conglomerate the size of Hasbro pulling the livelihoods of writers, illustrators, and other creatives responsible for other games right out from under them.
Your statement makes no sense whatsoever and really it's a gatekeeping question a lot of hobby people use. Also my post clearly said that every other part (them owning everything, not paying royalties to content creators, etc I was against).
I've bought songs of Bandcamp, not even the best way to support an artist (going to concerts is as artist make s lot of money touring, which I've done and bought merch).
I support artists by donating money to them directly.
I've bought art off artists at cons.
None of that matters in this context. So stop gatekeeping.
Not that it matters and inb4 shill, WotC Q3 revenue is down $60 million since last year. Do you not care about all the people they will lay off because of it or do only smaller publishers matter? So Paizo will have to lay people off. That's the world. Maybe they get hired by WotC? Or any other non DnD company.
They have a right to be paid royalties (my thought was 5-10% seems fair over $500k). This will still allow small people like DnDShorts and others to make a living. While DnD creators get to continue evolving the hobby. The lore is rich and a new system will have none.
Edit: Also just class action Hasbro then?? If they break the OGL and act in bad faith make a class action. It saves everyone, forces them into a lawsuit that usually favours the people and they'll want to settle.
This isn't just about losing jobs. WotC will attempt to kill all other VTTs to get everyone to use DDB. Unless other VTTs can negotiate a contract that doesn't bankrupt them, other VTTs will not be allowed to let players run D&D games, because WotC will threaten them with lawsuits. All those other VTTs will not be able to stay in business on non-D&D RPGs alone.
So, yeah, this is about more than jobs, this is about our ability to play D&D wherever we want online, or to be able to find VTTs to play other RPGs.
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing) You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
not a sub, never was and never will be. but i have some books on beyond. with what wotc doing im not planing to buy any more official books(no matter hardcover or on beyond) as i baked few kickstarters and i love 3rd party content.
Steam, Epic, Apple, and Amazon don't take content generated by users and then turn around and sell it back to the users, creating more content for those users of the content in the first place.
There's nothing on Amazon that I create and then Amazon uses to make more stuff for me.
Comparing Wizards to these companies and saying that we should pay royalties because other people pay royalties in DIFFERENT SITUATIONS with DIFFERENT REASONS is not a great argument, in my opinion. You're trying to say that this square object is the same as these rectangles, but really it's just not; sure, on paper you can kinda say they're the same because business business business, but like really? Come on.
D&D is a COMMUNITY GAME that is largely in existence because the players like to get together and make stuff, and then other companies find ways to make money on that stuff and ideas, and they all come together in a communal hodgepodge of a space that really NO ONE has any right to say they 'own' or deserve rights for becuase it's literally the culmination of hundreds of thousands of people's geeky minds all working together to slowly whittle something into existence in a communal space. Like, sure, some guy made the rules a long time ago; but those rules have changed many times over the years, with many iterations, and many players have made their own homebrew rules; so are they really owing royalties for something that isn't even the original game and is more something they made? Like, what your'e asking for or saying is 'reasonable' to pay royalties for is like a communal song that everyone made together and now you're trying to turn around and say 'No actually it was just that one dude and he owns it'. Like, no, that's not how any of this came into existence, and it's not how it works.
They can own the license and name and all but the players are going to utterly abandon them for this betrayal, and that's what it is, a betrayal. I can't believe there's people on here trying to insist that they should be allowed to do it, too- gross.
They're trying to complete what they failed to do with 4e. Turn the game into a digital vtt and exclude 3rd parties from the game. It failed then for a host of reasons. Will it fail this time too?
What's clear is one of the big lessons they learned from 4e seems to be that if people don't like their exclusionary practices and made-for-vtt video-game-lite mechanics... they'll just stick to whatever is being published under the OGL.
So that's why they're attacking the OGL, trying to revoke the unrevokable. Because if they don't, they know people won't opt into something as insane as the 1.1 version for 6e.
That's not the lesson they should have learned from 4e's failures, but here we are.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
That's not the lesson they should have learned from 4e's failures, but here we are.
If the last 10 years or so at the movies has taught us anything, it's that corporate executives are very, very prone to learning exactly the wrong lessons. Just look at the continued flailing and misfiring that WB/DC has done since 2013 in a desperate, ill-planned attempt to grab some of that sweet, sweet MCU bank.
I won't buy anything on DNDBeyond.com unless I have a physical copy. Therefore DNDBeyond is nice and has some convenient features for character creation and management, but is not necessary. I have subscribed out of convenience, OGL 1.1 and the WOTC TOS has made me consider DNDBeyond more of a liability than it is worth.
The whole oversimplification of the rules to make it easier to code for VTT had already had me questioning whether I wanted to keep using D&D Beyond or not (did they learn nothing from 4e?) but the new OGL has me probably going to abandon D&D altogether, and I'm the type of person who is nearly impossible to talk into playing a different TTRPG because I've been a fan of not only the game but the lore for decades now. I think this OGL was written by someone with no business sense, as D&D's popularity isn't just because of Critical Role and 5e's accessible ruleset, it's because at a time when everyone is buried in their gadgets 24/7 a lot of people found it refreshing to play a game that could be played without electricity if one so chooses. They're looking to make it just another video game and yeah it will attract more people but everyone will have less fun playing it and then those people will move away from the game just like they do with the latest MMOs rather than continue to play it for decades. On top of that, they are afraid that new Pathfinders will pop up and use their ruleset to create competing games. Nobody needs to do this right now, how many of the influencers that are out there freelancing for D&D content are also making their own settings and rulesets? What's going to happen, and it seems is already happening is one of the larger 3rd party publishers for 5e is going to create their own open platform that does not use the OGL or SRD at all, and the majority of people are going to go there and not look back, and it's not going to be like Pathfinder, because back then you didn't have the huge influence of social media to direct new players on which game to play. Congrats, Wizards, you played yourself.
What WOTC is doing is cutting off its nose to spite its face and they are hoping the ignorance of there player base to do so. This effects anyone from the Dm who streams his shitty little games to Critical Role. It effects every company who used the OGL because it makes it WOTC property
So many other publishers have relied on the OGL, and released their own work on it, sometimes publishing their own SRDs for unrelated systems. If Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast go through with this, I'm not going to pick up any more TSR books (was looking at old and new Dragonlance and converting to other game systems), I'm not going to pick up DM's Guild Books (again, Dragonlance, as well as disability-themed books), and I'm going to cancel my DnD Beyond subscription (I ran into too many accessibility problems to actually use it though).
Switching to a new system other than DND will be a pain. It's hard to get into new stuff for me and I'm hoping Wizards will come to their senses, or hell, give out any statement, but I'm willing to drop the sub depending on how things continue.
As a person who invested into dndbeyond my subscription helps my group play. DM Tier - so that would require me to abandon my investment which I won’t do until I find a suitable replacement.
What I am currently doing is no longer supporting new content on dndbeyond and books.
Spelljammer with no ship to ship combat. DragonLance porting w an optional board game, DNDBeyond losing its connection w the community w the loss of dev updates. Now this? Things are going downhill - and they are silent and deaf about it.
The sad part about it is in the end, it's not going to make them more money, they're essentially demonetizing D&D. It's like when a lot of manufacturers get popular and they decide to cut costs and drop prices so even more people will buy, and more people do until they start realizing the quality is crap and then a brand that has been around for decades is suddenly selling off their properties to a competitor that was once far smaller than them.
My renewal date is the end of the month. I also have purchased everything here on D&DBeyond, along with many hardcover books. I've canceled my subscription until they do the right thing.
As a member of both the DnD fandom and the Games Workshop/Warhammer fandom, I can tell you from experience that an outright fandom rebellion/boycott against the company does indeed have an impact.
Games Workshop substantially changed their policies and revamped their entire customer service/outreach team several years back when the fandom began to abandon them en masse.
Companies hear when you talk to them with your wallet.
I've spent over $700 on DnD content for 5E directly to WotC between DnD Beyond and the physical books. I've also spent probably another $200 or so with third party creators. Those third party creators increased my attachment to the game and helped me buy additional DnD Beyond content.
If WotC moves forward, WotC can expect:
- I'll explore a lot more gaming systems, my attachment to DnD will decrease as I seek out more open systems
- WotC will have the difficulty of competing with both the first and third-party content of more open systems
To start, I'll just cancel my DnD Beyond subscription as I'm not that reliant on it for my games.
Beyond that, it'll really be in WotC's court. Prove to me that One DnD with only first-party content can really be better than the other systems and their attached third-party ecosystems that I'll be evaluating. Tough place to be WotC. I was happily paying for my Netflix subscription. Now you've made me rethink that and I'm evaluating Hulu and Disney+.
I have the entire collection on DnDBeyond (plus most of the physical books) also, but the silence is so deafening that I think I'm done as a customer of WotC.
Will that stop me from playing D&D.? I have the books, so I can continue playing with what I have, but I won't purchase anymore D&D content or patronize WotC in any form. They severely screwed up. You figure the GSL that came out with 4E would have been a learning experience. Clearly that slap on the hand was not which means even if they backtrack now (do a 180 as noted) they will just return to the scene of the crime the way most serial killers do.
Your statement makes no sense whatsoever and really it's a gatekeeping question a lot of hobby people use. Also my post clearly said that every other part (them owning everything, not paying royalties to content creators, etc I was against).
I've bought songs of Bandcamp, not even the best way to support an artist (going to concerts is as artist make s lot of money touring, which I've done and bought merch).
I support artists by donating money to them directly.
I've bought art off artists at cons.
None of that matters in this context. So stop gatekeeping.
Not that it matters and inb4 shill, WotC Q3 revenue is down $60 million since last year. Do you not care about all the people they will lay off because of it or do only smaller publishers matter? So Paizo will have to lay people off. That's the world. Maybe they get hired by WotC? Or any other non DnD company.
They have a right to be paid royalties (my thought was 5-10% seems fair over $500k). This will still allow small people like DnDShorts and others to make a living. While DnD creators get to continue evolving the hobby. The lore is rich and a new system will have none.
Edit: Also just class action Hasbro then?? If they break the OGL and act in bad faith make a class action. It saves everyone, forces them into a lawsuit that usually favours the people and they'll want to settle.
Sorry but this is just a terrible take; Don't be upset about creators being chased out of your community, it's okay because that's just business! It's not only short sighted, it's stupid; you really think Wizards is going to be able to churn out as much content as the myriand of content creators that they're trying to hobble with this new OGL? No. You're basically handwaving away something that is going to hugely change the D&D gaming landscape and insisting it's not a big deal becuase 'that's business'.
Selling slaves was once 'just business' too; just because something is business, or legal, doesn't make it morally or ethically right. There's a reason that man's law and morals are two different words with different definitions, my dude.
The new OGL is not even remotely workable for 3rd party content creators because it literally legally gives away their content to Wizards, and NO ONE WHO MAKES CONTENT IS GOING TO WANT TO JUST GIVE AWAY THEIR LEGAL RIGHTS TO IT FOR FREE! I literally make content for companies that rhyme with shmarvel and I can promise you that if they said they owned in perpetuity my work forever I'd have never signed up to do work for them in the first place. Ergo, the content will no longer be created.
This isn't just about losing jobs. WotC will attempt to kill all other VTTs to get everyone to use DDB. Unless other VTTs can negotiate a contract that doesn't bankrupt them, other VTTs will not be allowed to let players run D&D games, because WotC will threaten them with lawsuits. All those other VTTs will not be able to stay in business on non-D&D RPGs alone.
So, yeah, this is about more than jobs, this is about our ability to play D&D wherever we want online, or to be able to find VTTs to play other RPGs.
Watch from this time stamp. https://youtu.be/MkIg7MHMRn0?t=459
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing)
You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
not a sub, never was and never will be. but i have some books on beyond. with what wotc doing im not planing to buy any more official books(no matter hardcover or on beyond) as i baked few kickstarters and i love 3rd party content.
Steam, Epic, Apple, and Amazon don't take content generated by users and then turn around and sell it back to the users, creating more content for those users of the content in the first place.
There's nothing on Amazon that I create and then Amazon uses to make more stuff for me.
Comparing Wizards to these companies and saying that we should pay royalties because other people pay royalties in DIFFERENT SITUATIONS with DIFFERENT REASONS is not a great argument, in my opinion. You're trying to say that this square object is the same as these rectangles, but really it's just not; sure, on paper you can kinda say they're the same because business business business, but like really? Come on.
D&D is a COMMUNITY GAME that is largely in existence because the players like to get together and make stuff, and then other companies find ways to make money on that stuff and ideas, and they all come together in a communal hodgepodge of a space that really NO ONE has any right to say they 'own' or deserve rights for becuase it's literally the culmination of hundreds of thousands of people's geeky minds all working together to slowly whittle something into existence in a communal space. Like, sure, some guy made the rules a long time ago; but those rules have changed many times over the years, with many iterations, and many players have made their own homebrew rules; so are they really owing royalties for something that isn't even the original game and is more something they made? Like, what your'e asking for or saying is 'reasonable' to pay royalties for is like a communal song that everyone made together and now you're trying to turn around and say 'No actually it was just that one dude and he owns it'. Like, no, that's not how any of this came into existence, and it's not how it works.
They can own the license and name and all but the players are going to utterly abandon them for this betrayal, and that's what it is, a betrayal. I can't believe there's people on here trying to insist that they should be allowed to do it, too- gross.
They're trying to complete what they failed to do with 4e. Turn the game into a digital vtt and exclude 3rd parties from the game. It failed then for a host of reasons. Will it fail this time too?
What's clear is one of the big lessons they learned from 4e seems to be that if people don't like their exclusionary practices and made-for-vtt video-game-lite mechanics... they'll just stick to whatever is being published under the OGL.
So that's why they're attacking the OGL, trying to revoke the unrevokable. Because if they don't, they know people won't opt into something as insane as the 1.1 version for 6e.
That's not the lesson they should have learned from 4e's failures, but here we are.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
If the last 10 years or so at the movies has taught us anything, it's that corporate executives are very, very prone to learning exactly the wrong lessons. Just look at the continued flailing and misfiring that WB/DC has done since 2013 in a desperate, ill-planned attempt to grab some of that sweet, sweet MCU bank.
I won't buy anything on DNDBeyond.com unless I have a physical copy. Therefore DNDBeyond is nice and has some convenient features for character creation and management, but is not necessary. I have subscribed out of convenience, OGL 1.1 and the WOTC TOS has made me consider DNDBeyond more of a liability than it is worth.
The whole oversimplification of the rules to make it easier to code for VTT had already had me questioning whether I wanted to keep using D&D Beyond or not (did they learn nothing from 4e?) but the new OGL has me probably going to abandon D&D altogether, and I'm the type of person who is nearly impossible to talk into playing a different TTRPG because I've been a fan of not only the game but the lore for decades now. I think this OGL was written by someone with no business sense, as D&D's popularity isn't just because of Critical Role and 5e's accessible ruleset, it's because at a time when everyone is buried in their gadgets 24/7 a lot of people found it refreshing to play a game that could be played without electricity if one so chooses. They're looking to make it just another video game and yeah it will attract more people but everyone will have less fun playing it and then those people will move away from the game just like they do with the latest MMOs rather than continue to play it for decades. On top of that, they are afraid that new Pathfinders will pop up and use their ruleset to create competing games. Nobody needs to do this right now, how many of the influencers that are out there freelancing for D&D content are also making their own settings and rulesets? What's going to happen, and it seems is already happening is one of the larger 3rd party publishers for 5e is going to create their own open platform that does not use the OGL or SRD at all, and the majority of people are going to go there and not look back, and it's not going to be like Pathfinder, because back then you didn't have the huge influence of social media to direct new players on which game to play. Congrats, Wizards, you played yourself.
What WOTC is doing is cutting off its nose to spite its face and they are hoping the ignorance of there player base to do so. This effects anyone from the Dm who streams his shitty little games to Critical Role. It effects every company who used the OGL because it makes it WOTC property
So many other publishers have relied on the OGL, and released their own work on it, sometimes publishing their own SRDs for unrelated systems. If Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast go through with this, I'm not going to pick up any more TSR books (was looking at old and new Dragonlance and converting to other game systems), I'm not going to pick up DM's Guild Books (again, Dragonlance, as well as disability-themed books), and I'm going to cancel my DnD Beyond subscription (I ran into too many accessibility problems to actually use it though).
Switching to a new system other than DND will be a pain. It's hard to get into new stuff for me and I'm hoping Wizards will come to their senses, or hell, give out any statement, but I'm willing to drop the sub depending on how things continue.
As a person who invested into dndbeyond my subscription helps my group play. DM Tier - so that would require me to abandon my investment which I won’t do until I find a suitable replacement.
What I am currently doing is no longer supporting new content on dndbeyond and books.
Spelljammer with no ship to ship combat. DragonLance porting w an optional board game, DNDBeyond losing its connection w the community w the loss of dev updates. Now this? Things are going downhill - and they are silent and deaf about it.
The Golden Age is over folks.
The sad part about it is in the end, it's not going to make them more money, they're essentially demonetizing D&D. It's like when a lot of manufacturers get popular and they decide to cut costs and drop prices so even more people will buy, and more people do until they start realizing the quality is crap and then a brand that has been around for decades is suddenly selling off their properties to a competitor that was once far smaller than them.
My renewal date is the end of the month. I also have purchased everything here on D&DBeyond, along with many hardcover books. I've canceled my subscription until they do the right thing.
As a member of both the DnD fandom and the Games Workshop/Warhammer fandom, I can tell you from experience that an outright fandom rebellion/boycott against the company does indeed have an impact.
Games Workshop substantially changed their policies and revamped their entire customer service/outreach team several years back when the fandom began to abandon them en masse.
Companies hear when you talk to them with your wallet.
100%.... I might still be out even if they do a 180. #opendnd
I've spent over $700 on DnD content for 5E directly to WotC between DnD Beyond and the physical books. I've also spent probably another $200 or so with third party creators. Those third party creators increased my attachment to the game and helped me buy additional DnD Beyond content.
If WotC moves forward, WotC can expect:
- I'll explore a lot more gaming systems, my attachment to DnD will decrease as I seek out more open systems
- WotC will have the difficulty of competing with both the first and third-party content of more open systems
To start, I'll just cancel my DnD Beyond subscription as I'm not that reliant on it for my games.
Beyond that, it'll really be in WotC's court. Prove to me that One DnD with only first-party content can really be better than the other systems and their attached third-party ecosystems that I'll be evaluating. Tough place to be WotC. I was happily paying for my Netflix subscription. Now you've made me rethink that and I'm evaluating Hulu and Disney+.
I love DND, and I spend most of my allowance on DND products, but if this doesn't change, I'm not going to consider playing DND at all
the biggest screwup since the screw was invented
I have the entire collection on DnDBeyond (plus most of the physical books) also, but the silence is so deafening that I think I'm done as a customer of WotC.
Will that stop me from playing D&D.? I have the books, so I can continue playing with what I have, but I won't purchase anymore D&D content or patronize WotC in any form. They severely screwed up. You figure the GSL that came out with 4E would have been a learning experience. Clearly that slap on the hand was not which means even if they backtrack now (do a 180 as noted) they will just return to the scene of the crime the way most serial killers do.
Thanks for killing my favorite game.
Info, Inflow, Overload. Knowledge Black Hole Imminent!