One, stop calling it a draft. It had a scheduled release date, NDAs, and contracts. It was a final document.
People seem to have a hard grasping that negotiations weren't taking place in a big board room, with Hasbro's executives and lawyers sitting across a table from the 10 Biggest Third-Party Partners or whatever like in the movies
It was absolutely a draft
SO WHAT!!! Draft or not it was a giant F U. So much so that the OGL debate has become moot. 3PP aren't waiting to see what WotC says. They're moving on.
It wasn't a draft. They sent it to creators to sign and accept
That is exactly how drafts work. You send a version, you say “sign this” and the other side says no, drafts a counteroffer, and says “but we will sign this.” Then they go back and forth like that for a while, each saying “no, but what about this version?” until someone says yes.
Just stop!! You OBVIOUSLY don't start a good faith negotiation by threatening to destroy the other person's business!!
One, stop calling it a draft. It had a scheduled release date, NDAs, and contracts. It was a final document.
People seem to have a hard grasping that negotiations weren't taking place in a big board room, with Hasbro's executives and lawyers sitting across a table from the 10 Biggest Third-Party Partners or whatever like in the movies
It was absolutely a draft
SO WHAT!!! Draft or not it was a giant F U. So much so that the OGL debate has become moot. 3PP aren't waiting to see what WotC says. They're moving on.
It wasn't a draft. They sent it to creators to sign and accept
That is exactly how drafts work. You send a version, you say “sign this” and the other side says no, drafts a counteroffer, and says “but we will sign this.” Then they go back and forth like that for a while, each saying “no, but what about this version?” until someone says yes.
Just stop!! You OBVIOUSLY don't start a negotiation by threatening to destroy the other person's business!!
I might recommend you take a breather, one might think from your all caps writing that you were shouting...that's not necessary here. For starters, the biggest impact on creators, regardless of any other language and terms you don't like, was royalties. Saying "you've been using our IP for free for decades, we would like you to pay us now" is not the same as a threat to destroy the others business. In fact, there are very few fields where royalties wouldn't have been paid day 1, so any company worth it's salt operating under a 0 royalty agreement should have had a contingency in place to deal with the eventuality of royalty negotiations happening. But remember, the other party always can walk away. WOTC isn't pointing a gun at their heads forcing them to sign this thing.
There seem to be a lot of delusional and misinformed folks, caught up still in their rage and lack of understanding of how contracts work. Several lawyers and folks who work in legal have already explained a few of the points these folks miss. The draft sent had zero ability to do ANYTHING until signed. An NDA is included on MOST legal contractual correspondence for dozens of reasons, none of which I intend to mention, because folks have missed the basics, so details will befuddle them further. The existing OGL has too many holes in it and needs to be reworked to suit today. For those citing history, a club was sufficient for thousands of years, so there was never a need to upgrade weaponry, right?
The existing OGL is going to get flushed or amended and now, instead of nerd-raging over things we don't understand and ragging and ragging about lies and breach of trust and all the other BS, why don't we wait patiently, pretending we're mature, responsible adults, for the next draft? We need to review it carefully, share it with friends and anyone we know who speaks fluent legal-ese to ensure it isn't double talking itself into a mirror of the shitty mess they tried to slip under the radar. We need to be part of the solution now, instead of trying to muddle the problem with foolishness.
I see several people who point out that if THIS had been the first response to the document leak AND had been done sooner, they might not be so buthurt. Well, within THIS document, the man agrees with you on that, so let's leave the horse where it lies and stop beating it already. If you think about it, this whole fiasco will be good for D&D in the longer term, as long as we all remember it. If we do remember, we will be ready to scrutinize anything WotC releases in the future and MAYBE they won't try to slip something under the door next time. To those who will try to mock my optimism, keep in mind you are what you live and I simply refuse to live wrapped up in suspicion and anger.
We're raging because we like D&D. We like having 3rd party content to include in our games. We like having tools to play our games. We like having people to play our games with.
Wizards sent a draft to various creators, various makers of tools, etc, and it was so egregious that instead of negotiating, a bunch of them looked at it and said - "Well, I guess I'll start doing something else."
What are we waiting patiently for? I own Kobold Press books - they looked at this and decided to spin up project Black Flag. Will I be able to incorporate future Kobold Press content into my D&D games? I kickstarted "Flee, Mortals!" - and MCDM has since announced that they'll be creating their own system. Will I be able to use their next monster book for D&D? I play my game on Foundry. Even if the new license doesn't kill their ability to provide the DnD5e system, how much worse will the experience be if there are fewer people building and maintaining modules?
It doesn't matter if the leak was a final document or a draft. Wizards is calling it a draft as if that is better, but they have done nothing to deny that the language was in there. It wasn't just some sort of typo, a cat didn't walk across the keyboard and write up those clauses. The objectionable bits were things they wanted to put in there and indicate how Wizards feels about the game and the players.
They've fractured the 5e ecosystem. That damage is done whatever ends up getting negotiated out of the draft by the time something is final. *I* may not understand how contracts work, but the people they sent those contracts to *do*, and those people are leaving D&D behind because of the language Wizards put in there to my detriment.
This confirms what I've been thinking since this whole debacle started: Perkins, Mearls, Crawford, the design team et al: this not their desire or doing. I'm betting they're as upset by it all as a lot of us are.
apparently a lot of former WotC employees got upset when they read that part of the "totally confirmed leak that's totally confirmed" and several others have been speaking up as well to counter the claim.
Why is the whole first page happy about the direction WotC is going in? Also the dude we're looking for is Chris Cocks. Legit tanking Hasbro and WotC. Toxic work environment and disregard for employees and customers. Came from Microsoft. Look him up.
Before I move into commentary, I will just say at the outset that in practical terms of influencing change, people should continue to:
Unsubscribe from DnD Beyond
Stay unsubscribed until such time as a final, executed OGL is in place which you consider acceptable
The flip side of that is:
Keep your expectations realistic and reasonable, and engage in a constructive manner. The CEO is not going to be fired, and Hasbro is not going to put out some kind of grovelling press release
If WotC does put a final OGL in place that you consider acceptable, rewarding that via resubscribing sends the right message
However the 'maintain the rage' crowd are correct when saying that corporate decision making is influenced by actions, not words. Ceasing 'industrial action' now will send the message that PR statements and surveys are sufficient crisis management. Continuing public criticism is important - people are right to say that opening a survey is (may be) largely an attempt to 'muzzle' the community.
The furor has had a measurable impact, and giving up the momentum now would be a mistake. All of the other press was fine, but this is the one which really matters: https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/01/17/big-change-coming-for-hasbro-should-investor-worry/ . Their readers do not care in the slightest about D&D, matters of principle, corporate integrity, etc. They care about one thing - stock prices - which is also the thing the Hasbro Board and executive are most concerned about. The Fool is a serious, trusted investment site, and I would not be surprised if that article all by itself causes a dip.
While the statement just made may be entirely genuine, it is also the exact same action that I would recommend, even if corporate plans were largely unchanged (I have worked in the communications department of a billion dollar company as well as the even more cutthroat field of politics, and my specialty is stakeholder relations, political communications and advocacy, and media liaison).
This is where so much change advocacy stumbles after a strong start. People see some 'concessions' being given which seem like they're heading in the right direction and they back off to an extent that they cease to be a significant problem, which then vastly reduces their 'bargaining power'.
If you want to see the outcome you want, you continue the actions which have meaningful consequences, until you get a meaningful result.
So moving onto purely personal commentary.
I have been playing TTRPGs for a long time - I cut my teeth on 1st edition AD&D - and I've been privy to the intimate workings of end-user businesses who literally made their living on sales and play of TTRPGs (and for most, CCGs, because the former couldn't pay all the rent). I've seen countless systems come and go, including long periods when D&D was very much the exception rather than the rule.
If there's one thing I believe, it's that the TTRPG environment benefits from a diverse and wide range of companies, ideas and developers contributing to what's out there. Competition drives innovation and all that. In recent years D&D has again become the big dog on the block, to the point of completely dominating, and while to some extent I think that's a shame, for the most part I've thought good for them.
However this blatant attempt to crush the competition and become a monopoly leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So for the time being and until WotC becomes a 'community friendly' company again - as demonstrated by their actions, not their words - my disposable funds and that of almost everyone I know will go elsewhere. The vast majority of us aren't going to rant and rave about it in person, let alone online, but WotC aren't getting any more of our money.
...and hell, if we do want to play D&D instead of another system, we already own the hard copy books released before now - we can happily play 5e for decades without giving WotC a dime.
Sorry, but WOTC has exposed themselves. This goes all the way back to when they cancelled the Dragon and Dungeon publications preparing for their move to 4th edition which was a horrible decision on their part and looks like history will end repeating itself. They need to fix this before its gets out of control.
At this point, will not be getting a subscription.....[redacted]
Yeah just joining the thread after having just heard about the update. It's leaps and bounds better than the last one, but the last one was absolute hogwash cringe so it's not exactly a high bar to clear. But at the end of the day they're still lying and pretending to be open to 'having a conversation' when the conversation has already happened. Do they want a survey? well look at the internet the last week and a half, you got your survey results right there. What possible version of the OGL do they think they could possibly put out that wouldn't result in every single survey result being "We want OGL 1.0b where the only change is that you make it clear in no uncertain terms that you cannot update or replace this document at any point in the future" Any other update to the OGL is simply unacceptable and they're using this as an excuse to try and push through some bullshit when it is abundantly clear what we want at this point.
It's funny, when I internalized the 'History will end up repeating itself' message as a kid, I took it to mean like... Broad patterns of history; using the same strategies to chase out a minority in a certain culture over and over again but like, generations apart because the reason it was repeating itself was due to the people currently living hadn't been alive to see it happen before, and they just didn't learn enough about history to know to avoid it.
Now I see history repeating itself ad nauseum within the same company or country in the span of a single decade and I'm wondering why no one else seems to notice that it's just the same thing they did ten, fifteen years ago - like you'd think with the advent of the internet and well documented history it'd be easier than ever to avoid the mistakes of 10 years ago, but I guess not!
They're still trying to say that what got leaked was a draft?
Yep.
This is a problem. Communcation isnt in good faith/transparent when this small but significant bit of BLATANT gaslIghting persists.
It objectively was a draft. A legal document like a contract or license is always a draft until it is executed. I work with procurement, and we submit our purchase orders and contractor terms as drafts. Sometimes they get signed off on with no changes. Sometimes the vendor has a bunch of redlines and it goes back and forth while that gets sorted. It is 100% correct terminology to refer to the documents as drafts. Now, to what degree they were looking to negotiate vs try and push it through is a matter we're never going to actually know, but I for one don't care if they save a little face as long as they don't try and turn 3rd party content into an actual legal battleground.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Just stop!! You OBVIOUSLY don't start a good faith negotiation by threatening to destroy the other person's business!!
Long-term? We shall see.
Obviously.....?
Sterling - V. Human Bard 3 (College of Art) - [Pic] - [Traits] - in Bards: Dragon Heist (w/ Mansion) - Jasper's [Pic] - Sterling's [Sigil]
Tooltips Post (2024 PHB updates) - incl. General Rules
>> New FOW threat & treasure tables: fow-advanced-threat-tables.pdf fow-advanced-treasure-table.pdf
I might recommend you take a breather, one might think from your all caps writing that you were shouting...that's not necessary here. For starters, the biggest impact on creators, regardless of any other language and terms you don't like, was royalties. Saying "you've been using our IP for free for decades, we would like you to pay us now" is not the same as a threat to destroy the others business. In fact, there are very few fields where royalties wouldn't have been paid day 1, so any company worth it's salt operating under a 0 royalty agreement should have had a contingency in place to deal with the eventuality of royalty negotiations happening. But remember, the other party always can walk away. WOTC isn't pointing a gun at their heads forcing them to sign this thing.
I think we should be given time to provide feedback with the knowledge of ORC.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/162054-ogl1-1-and-orc-draft-give-the-community-time-to
We're raging because we like D&D. We like having 3rd party content to include in our games. We like having tools to play our games. We like having people to play our games with.
Wizards sent a draft to various creators, various makers of tools, etc, and it was so egregious that instead of negotiating, a bunch of them looked at it and said - "Well, I guess I'll start doing something else."
What are we waiting patiently for? I own Kobold Press books - they looked at this and decided to spin up project Black Flag. Will I be able to incorporate future Kobold Press content into my D&D games? I kickstarted "Flee, Mortals!" - and MCDM has since announced that they'll be creating their own system. Will I be able to use their next monster book for D&D? I play my game on Foundry. Even if the new license doesn't kill their ability to provide the DnD5e system, how much worse will the experience be if there are fewer people building and maintaining modules?
It doesn't matter if the leak was a final document or a draft. Wizards is calling it a draft as if that is better, but they have done nothing to deny that the language was in there. It wasn't just some sort of typo, a cat didn't walk across the keyboard and write up those clauses. The objectionable bits were things they wanted to put in there and indicate how Wizards feels about the game and the players.
They've fractured the 5e ecosystem. That damage is done whatever ends up getting negotiated out of the draft by the time something is final. *I* may not understand how contracts work, but the people they sent those contracts to *do*, and those people are leaving D&D behind because of the language Wizards put in there to my detriment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euy59kA5GA0
(TL;DW - An alternative open gaming license that Paizo is working to develop with other companies.)
Sterling - V. Human Bard 3 (College of Art) - [Pic] - [Traits] - in Bards: Dragon Heist (w/ Mansion) - Jasper's [Pic] - Sterling's [Sigil]
Tooltips Post (2024 PHB updates) - incl. General Rules
>> New FOW threat & treasure tables: fow-advanced-threat-tables.pdf fow-advanced-treasure-table.pdf
for those saying not to do the survey because WotC doesnt read feedback:
https://twitter.com/DarkestCrows/status/1615840618701545472
when that survey drops, use it.
also, even DNDShorts is walking back the "They dont read survey rhetoric" now
https://twitter.com/DnD_Shorts/status/1615854768575979521
do the survey (when it drops)
This confirms what I've been thinking since this whole debacle started: Perkins, Mearls, Crawford, the design team et al: this not their desire or doing. I'm betting they're as upset by it all as a lot of us are.
apparently a lot of former WotC employees got upset when they read that part of the "totally confirmed leak that's totally confirmed" and several others have been speaking up as well to counter the claim.
I would be shocked if we have ORC before May let alone June. This survey WOTC seems to plan for release in the next week or two.
Why? ORC is currently vaporware; if anything, the results of this mess, whether successful or otherwise, will inform the development of ORC.
Why is the whole first page happy about the direction WotC is going in? Also the dude we're looking for is Chris Cocks. Legit tanking Hasbro and WotC. Toxic work environment and disregard for employees and customers. Came from Microsoft. Look him up.
Before I move into commentary, I will just say at the outset that in practical terms of influencing change, people should continue to:
The flip side of that is:
However the 'maintain the rage' crowd are correct when saying that corporate decision making is influenced by actions, not words. Ceasing 'industrial action' now will send the message that PR statements and surveys are sufficient crisis management. Continuing public criticism is important - people are right to say that opening a survey is (may be) largely an attempt to 'muzzle' the community.
The furor has had a measurable impact, and giving up the momentum now would be a mistake. All of the other press was fine, but this is the one which really matters: https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/01/17/big-change-coming-for-hasbro-should-investor-worry/ . Their readers do not care in the slightest about D&D, matters of principle, corporate integrity, etc. They care about one thing - stock prices - which is also the thing the Hasbro Board and executive are most concerned about. The Fool is a serious, trusted investment site, and I would not be surprised if that article all by itself causes a dip.
While the statement just made may be entirely genuine, it is also the exact same action that I would recommend, even if corporate plans were largely unchanged (I have worked in the communications department of a billion dollar company as well as the even more cutthroat field of politics, and my specialty is stakeholder relations, political communications and advocacy, and media liaison).
This is where so much change advocacy stumbles after a strong start. People see some 'concessions' being given which seem like they're heading in the right direction and they back off to an extent that they cease to be a significant problem, which then vastly reduces their 'bargaining power'.
If you want to see the outcome you want, you continue the actions which have meaningful consequences, until you get a meaningful result.
So moving onto purely personal commentary.
I have been playing TTRPGs for a long time - I cut my teeth on 1st edition AD&D - and I've been privy to the intimate workings of end-user businesses who literally made their living on sales and play of TTRPGs (and for most, CCGs, because the former couldn't pay all the rent). I've seen countless systems come and go, including long periods when D&D was very much the exception rather than the rule.
If there's one thing I believe, it's that the TTRPG environment benefits from a diverse and wide range of companies, ideas and developers contributing to what's out there. Competition drives innovation and all that. In recent years D&D has again become the big dog on the block, to the point of completely dominating, and while to some extent I think that's a shame, for the most part I've thought good for them.
However this blatant attempt to crush the competition and become a monopoly leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So for the time being and until WotC becomes a 'community friendly' company again - as demonstrated by their actions, not their words - my disposable funds and that of almost everyone I know will go elsewhere. The vast majority of us aren't going to rant and rave about it in person, let alone online, but WotC aren't getting any more of our money.
...and hell, if we do want to play D&D instead of another system, we already own the hard copy books released before now - we can happily play 5e for decades without giving WotC a dime.
Once again, the party claiming they want transparency and dialogue does not allow comments on the post.
Sorry, but WOTC has exposed themselves. This goes all the way back to when they cancelled the Dragon and Dungeon publications preparing for their move to 4th edition which was a horrible decision on their part and looks like history will end repeating itself. They need to fix this before its gets out of control.
At this point, will not be getting a subscription.....[redacted]
Yeah just joining the thread after having just heard about the update. It's leaps and bounds better than the last one, but the last one was absolute hogwash cringe so it's not exactly a high bar to clear. But at the end of the day they're still lying and pretending to be open to 'having a conversation' when the conversation has already happened. Do they want a survey? well look at the internet the last week and a half, you got your survey results right there. What possible version of the OGL do they think they could possibly put out that wouldn't result in every single survey result being "We want OGL 1.0b where the only change is that you make it clear in no uncertain terms that you cannot update or replace this document at any point in the future" Any other update to the OGL is simply unacceptable and they're using this as an excuse to try and push through some bullshit when it is abundantly clear what we want at this point.
It's funny, when I internalized the 'History will end up repeating itself' message as a kid, I took it to mean like... Broad patterns of history; using the same strategies to chase out a minority in a certain culture over and over again but like, generations apart because the reason it was repeating itself was due to the people currently living hadn't been alive to see it happen before, and they just didn't learn enough about history to know to avoid it.
Now I see history repeating itself ad nauseum within the same company or country in the span of a single decade and I'm wondering why no one else seems to notice that it's just the same thing they did ten, fifteen years ago - like you'd think with the advent of the internet and well documented history it'd be easier than ever to avoid the mistakes of 10 years ago, but I guess not!
Yep.
This is a problem. Communcation isnt in good faith/transparent when this small but significant bit of BLATANT gaslIghting persists.
It objectively was a draft. A legal document like a contract or license is always a draft until it is executed. I work with procurement, and we submit our purchase orders and contractor terms as drafts. Sometimes they get signed off on with no changes. Sometimes the vendor has a bunch of redlines and it goes back and forth while that gets sorted. It is 100% correct terminology to refer to the documents as drafts. Now, to what degree they were looking to negotiate vs try and push it through is a matter we're never going to actually know, but I for one don't care if they save a little face as long as they don't try and turn 3rd party content into an actual legal battleground.