I wonder if any of the big names in the D&D house had any feedback for top management after it was released that the OGL was being revised? Could they have thought out loud that killing third party engagement might be the wrong way to grow the brand? Skyrim seemed to enjoy some extra legs embracing third party creators.
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I wonder if any of the big names in the D&D house had any feedback for top management after it was released that the OGL was being revised? Could they have thought out loud that killing third party engagement might be the wrong way to grow the brand? Skyrim seemed to enjoy some extra legs embracing third party creators.
Hey, you have to admit it's not like they're not doing any legwork bringing 3rd party sources to Beyond. It's quid pro quo; the 3rd party people get a lot more visibility and their material gets integrated with D&DB's infrastructure (a not inconsiderable draw for people who are already using Beyond for their characters/campaigns), and Wizards gets a cut of the sales. If you're gonna go casting aspersions on the model, you're gonna need to start giving dark looks to GrubHub and DoorDash too.
Hey, you have to admit it's not like they're not doing any legwork bringing 3rd party sources to Beyond. It's quid pro quo; the 3rd party people get a lot more visibility and their material gets integrated with D&DB's infrastructure (a not inconsiderable draw for people who are already using Beyond for their characters/campaigns), and Wizards gets a cut of the sales. If you're gonna go casting aspersions on the model, you're gonna need to start giving dark looks to GrubHub and DoorDash too.
Hell they added Tal'dorei to Maps even, and given all the Drakkenheim promos that's probably not far behind. They could have easily said "first-party only!"
In short, Hasbro sucks, but there are good people trying to do good things in spite of them.
That 3rd party material in the char builder is the nightmare scenario for a DM. We all know that is the process it would naturally follow, but is still brutal for a DM, as they now have to curate and cull even more stuff that players bring to the table to avoid wildly OP PC's.
Examples of wildly OP PCs from third party material in the character builder?
That 3rd party material in the char builder is the nightmare scenario for a DM. We all know that is the process it would naturally follow, but is still brutal for a DM, as they now have to curate and cull even more stuff that players bring to the table to avoid wildly OP PC's.
Examples of wildly OP PCs from third party material in the character builder?
I doubt he has any. He says that about all the newer official stuff, too.
The curation problem is real, even if it has nothing to do with stuff being "overpowered". A GM's current ability to control what their players can use from the pool of "everything anyone in the game has, including stuff they added to their homebrew collection" is limited to telling their players to turn off various toggles when they make their character.
The lack of granularity means that if you're allowing anything from under a toggle, potentially anything can come in, and it's not obvious to the players what the source is. So, if you're running a Theros game, Strixhaven stuff can seep in. (And some of the main-book stuff requires you to turn on secondary source toggles.) And Forgotten Realms stuff is just there, and if you use any homebrew, you get All! The! Homebrew!
And this is genuinely a hard problem, especially since I'm sure the backend has no support for it at all. If they're rebuilding the backend for the new rules revision, I hope they're including support for this.
Edit: Actually, the backend does support granular access control, because you have to buy stuff. It's still not a trivial operation, but it's probably less hard than I initially thought. The homebrew problem remains. (Give each campaign its own homebrew collection.)
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
It's not that easy, though. Players that I play with aren't that savvy with what content comes from what book (and I can't always remember off the top of my head. Both from a DM and a player POV, I'd much rather just have a curated list of what's allowed and say "have at it". This should really be one of the strengths of using digital media, but instead it's easier to do it with physical copies. It's really nice with spells that I don't have to look spells up and find out if the spell can be used by my class or not, unlike with cards, and a similar thing with campaign-acceptable content would be appreciated.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I'm thinking DDB/WotC is likely curating which products get put into DDB's marketplace. Tal D'L'oreal or whatever and the Ghostfire stuff make a lot of sense, as people involved in those products also have a history with DDB and/or WotC. There's some trust there that they're all playing at "the same level" and I don't think DDB/WotC wants to put on content that will be "game breaking" especially as such game breaking mechanics may not be compatible with future digital features. I think WotC/DDB will be selective about what comes online in the marketplace, favoring/trusting publishers who design material with fidelity to RAW. Ghostfire is very much up that alley, as is CR content. I don't see anything in either's catalog that breaks the game or power creeps it or whatever. Rather the Ghostfire stuff especially the sort of lair book (coming online just when MCDM's 5e Lair Book is starting to ship to backers) we're really seeing something that fills the gap for people who liked the Ravensloft book and wanted to see more of it, more tool boxes for putting gothic elements, a very broad field, into their play.
Circling back to layoffs, I've seen a few people online, most of whom had some experience doing work for hire for WotC, who see the layoffs as a harbinger of the D&D studio being more of a management system and creative work will be produced out of house after the new cores come out. As precedent they point to how the Tyranny of Dragons books, one of 5e's earliest campaigns was actually written by Kobold Press, they said "most" of the early adventures were actually written by 3rd party studios, but I only know about ToD for sure.
I think part of the issue may be mgmt and maybe the studio itself feels "stale". The revision was supposed to have more snap to it, but it seems like folks will be getting something a lot more familiar to them. There's also surveys where there's an unknown to us percentage of people who claim to use 5e and have the core but spend more money on third party products than they do official WotC D&D after the core. No one here can do more than speculate on that front, but I could see them seeing the only way to make this digital leap truly viable for D&D under WotC's stewardship is to grant 3rd party writers more license to the D&D marketplace (and from there I think we see what that NDA and wild percentage fees may have been really about).
I don't know how much I buy into the above theory. It's interesting, and I don't think it's entirely implausible that this is part of what's currently going on with D&D; but I don't think the truth is totally this or totally walled garden arguments, etc. A property that's D&D big is more complicated than those broad stroke assertions allow. But it's something to think about.
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Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
It's not that easy, though. Players that I play with aren't that savvy with what content comes from what book (and I can't always remember off the top of my head. Both from a DM and a player POV, I'd much rather just have a curated list of what's allowed and say "have at it". This should really be one of the strengths of using digital media, but instead it's easier to do it with physical copies. It's really nice with spells that I don't have to look spells up and find out if the spell can be used by my class or not, unlike with cards, and a similar thing with campaign-acceptable content would be appreciated.
Some sort of citation/annotation in the DDB character sheet would be awesome. When you hover over a spell or item or feature for the box text explainer, the end text would have some sort of parenthetical citation. Maybe even have different tiers (official, trusted 3rd party, experimental 3rd party, homebrew) font colors or indicia. I don't know how hard that is to implement other than tediously putting in the citations to everything. Would definitely help the DM: "where did you find this" Player: "it was on the menu" discussions. Might be easier than the granular control DMs, including me, have be clamoring for.
Yeah, I was thinking of items when I wrote that, and I don't know if homebrew spells/etc. (all the stuff that does get cited if it's official) pops up as homebrew or not. It'd be wonderful for DDB to actually have these sorts of settings available (and the sliders in the character maker sort of make that gesture but don't go as deep as DMs and some players would want), but I think it'd be more likely to see this as something that will aid the DM in character sheet review. If more content on the site is "outsourced" to third party, it would be of great benefit to most tables to have something like being able to at least enable/disable certain publishers (which the sliders I think currently sort of do).
This has the latest I know of, some have been walked back I believe.
They released some graphics with a May 21 date on them for the core books and a vecna adventure book. They then removed the dates from the graphics about the core books, but it stayed on the vecna book. So, read into that what you will.
This has the latest I know of, some have been walked back I believe.
They released some graphics with a May 21 date on them for the core books and a vecna adventure book. They then removed the dates from the graphics about the core books, but it stayed on the vecna book. So, read into that what you will.
I would note that Hasbro spent all year trying to rebuild trust and goodwill over the debacle at the beginning of the year, and then to do this right before Christmas?
I mean, they could have waited a few weeks and kept a lot of the goodwill and trust they had gained back.
The age of OGL is over. The Time of the ORC has come!
The moment that WotC declares OGL 1.0a "de-authorized", "revoked" or any such nonsense is the moment I release as much content as possible under OGL 1.0a and say, "Sue me WotC". OGL1.0a cannot be revoked. If thousands of us do it, the countersuit will be a class action suit.
I would note that Hasbro spent all year trying to rebuild trust and goodwill over the debacle at the beginning of the year, and then to do this right before Christmas?
I mean, they could have waited a few weeks and kept a lot of the goodwill and trust they had gained back.
I rather doubt the date truly would influence attitudes much; for better or worse, everything I’ve seen over the past year suggests few people are inclined to give them any slack and many are ready to very vocally paint everything they do in the worst possible light.
I would note that Hasbro spent all year trying to rebuild trust and goodwill over the debacle at the beginning of the year, and then to do this right before Christmas?
I mean, they could have waited a few weeks and kept a lot of the goodwill and trust they had gained back.
Hasbro likely had very little choice in the timing—the timing is decided based on various requirements for fiscal reporting and tax reporting purposes. They do not get to really choose that the tax and fiscal year are ending right around Christmas—which means that they have very limited options when it comes to how they do severance. If they delayed, they would not be able to write the severance packages off as a financial cost for 2023. That means they cannot claim those losses on their taxes for this year and cannot put it down as a failure in this already bad fiscal year.
For a company doing as badly as Hasbro, they need the extra cash on hand that deducting severance on their taxes will give them—time value of money and all that says that the money is more valuable if you get it in 2023 tax season than if you got the same numerical value in 2024 tax season. For a company that wants to show growth to survive, they want to be able to say “look, we had all sorts of problems, such as a big severance package in 2023, but we don’t have those in our 2024 reporting, so things are looking up!”
All of that is an unfortunate side effect of how reporting is done, and it isn’t really fair to blame Hasbro for how our financial system and tax code kind of force these Christmas layoffs to occur.
I rather doubt the date truly would influence attitudes much; for better or worse, everything I’ve seen over the past year suggests few people are inclined to give them any slack and many are ready to very vocally paint everything they do in the worst possible light.
I agree. I also find it interesting that no one has mentioned any of this year's PR mishaps at my two tables, nor in the Discords of a couple of Twitch streams I follow. It would seem that many of us are just happily playing the game. A game that remains enjoyable despite its rich history of controversies. I'm no WotC or Hasbro apologist, but I am for D&D.
I also find it hilarious that the D&D-specific subReddits are infested with alternative TTRPG cultists who, on an almost daily basis, clutch their pearls, blast WotC, and attempt to lure converts. No thanks. I'm happy where I'm at.
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Doubt is healthy, doubt away.
@FossMaNo1: Agreed
I wonder if any of the big names in the D&D house had any feedback for top management after it was released that the OGL was being revised? Could they have thought out loud that killing third party engagement might be the wrong way to grow the brand? Skyrim seemed to enjoy some extra legs embracing third party creators.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
They also tried to kill them.
To paraphrase a poster above, corporations gonna corporate.
Hey, you have to admit it's not like they're not doing any legwork bringing 3rd party sources to Beyond. It's quid pro quo; the 3rd party people get a lot more visibility and their material gets integrated with D&DB's infrastructure (a not inconsiderable draw for people who are already using Beyond for their characters/campaigns), and Wizards gets a cut of the sales. If you're gonna go casting aspersions on the model, you're gonna need to start giving dark looks to GrubHub and DoorDash too.
Hell they added Tal'dorei to Maps even, and given all the Drakkenheim promos that's probably not far behind. They could have easily said "first-party only!"
In short, Hasbro sucks, but there are good people trying to do good things in spite of them.
Examples of wildly OP PCs from third party material in the character builder?
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Characters in active campaigns:
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Wyll Forest Gnome, 4 Divination Wizard
I doubt he has any. He says that about all the newer official stuff, too.
The curation problem is real, even if it has nothing to do with stuff being "overpowered". A GM's current ability to control what their players can use from the pool of "everything anyone in the game has, including stuff they added to their homebrew collection" is limited to telling their players to turn off various toggles when they make their character.
The lack of granularity means that if you're allowing anything from under a toggle, potentially anything can come in, and it's not obvious to the players what the source is. So, if you're running a Theros game, Strixhaven stuff can seep in. (And some of the main-book stuff requires you to turn on secondary source toggles.) And Forgotten Realms stuff is just there, and if you use any homebrew, you get All! The! Homebrew!
And this is genuinely a hard problem, especially since I'm sure the backend has no support for it at all. If they're rebuilding the backend for the new rules revision, I hope they're including support for this.
Edit: Actually, the backend does support granular access control, because you have to buy stuff. It's still not a trivial operation, but it's probably less hard than I initially thought. The homebrew problem remains. (Give each campaign its own homebrew collection.)
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
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[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
It's not that easy, though. Players that I play with aren't that savvy with what content comes from what book (and I can't always remember off the top of my head. Both from a DM and a player POV, I'd much rather just have a curated list of what's allowed and say "have at it". This should really be one of the strengths of using digital media, but instead it's easier to do it with physical copies. It's really nice with spells that I don't have to look spells up and find out if the spell can be used by my class or not, unlike with cards, and a similar thing with campaign-acceptable content would be appreciated.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Couple of things on the third party tangent.
I'm thinking DDB/WotC is likely curating which products get put into DDB's marketplace. Tal D'L'oreal or whatever and the Ghostfire stuff make a lot of sense, as people involved in those products also have a history with DDB and/or WotC. There's some trust there that they're all playing at "the same level" and I don't think DDB/WotC wants to put on content that will be "game breaking" especially as such game breaking mechanics may not be compatible with future digital features. I think WotC/DDB will be selective about what comes online in the marketplace, favoring/trusting publishers who design material with fidelity to RAW. Ghostfire is very much up that alley, as is CR content. I don't see anything in either's catalog that breaks the game or power creeps it or whatever. Rather the Ghostfire stuff especially the sort of lair book (coming online just when MCDM's 5e Lair Book is starting to ship to backers) we're really seeing something that fills the gap for people who liked the Ravensloft book and wanted to see more of it, more tool boxes for putting gothic elements, a very broad field, into their play.
Circling back to layoffs, I've seen a few people online, most of whom had some experience doing work for hire for WotC, who see the layoffs as a harbinger of the D&D studio being more of a management system and creative work will be produced out of house after the new cores come out. As precedent they point to how the Tyranny of Dragons books, one of 5e's earliest campaigns was actually written by Kobold Press, they said "most" of the early adventures were actually written by 3rd party studios, but I only know about ToD for sure.
I think part of the issue may be mgmt and maybe the studio itself feels "stale". The revision was supposed to have more snap to it, but it seems like folks will be getting something a lot more familiar to them. There's also surveys where there's an unknown to us percentage of people who claim to use 5e and have the core but spend more money on third party products than they do official WotC D&D after the core. No one here can do more than speculate on that front, but I could see them seeing the only way to make this digital leap truly viable for D&D under WotC's stewardship is to grant 3rd party writers more license to the D&D marketplace (and from there I think we see what that NDA and wild percentage fees may have been really about).
I don't know how much I buy into the above theory. It's interesting, and I don't think it's entirely implausible that this is part of what's currently going on with D&D; but I don't think the truth is totally this or totally walled garden arguments, etc. A property that's D&D big is more complicated than those broad stroke assertions allow. But it's something to think about.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Some sort of citation/annotation in the DDB character sheet would be awesome. When you hover over a spell or item or feature for the box text explainer, the end text would have some sort of parenthetical citation. Maybe even have different tiers (official, trusted 3rd party, experimental 3rd party, homebrew) font colors or indicia. I don't know how hard that is to implement other than tediously putting in the citations to everything. Would definitely help the DM: "where did you find this" Player: "it was on the menu" discussions. Might be easier than the granular control DMs, including me, have be clamoring for.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah, I was thinking of items when I wrote that, and I don't know if homebrew spells/etc. (all the stuff that does get cited if it's official) pops up as homebrew or not. It'd be wonderful for DDB to actually have these sorts of settings available (and the sliders in the character maker sort of make that gesture but don't go as deep as DMs and some players would want), but I think it'd be more likely to see this as something that will aid the DM in character sheet review. If more content on the site is "outsourced" to third party, it would be of great benefit to most tables to have something like being able to at least enable/disable certain publishers (which the sliders I think currently sort of do).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I’ve been a little out of the loop. Can anyone tell me when we’re expecting the 2024 revisions to release?
Terra Lubridia archive:
The Bloody Barnacle | The Gut | The Athene Crusader | The Jewel of Atlantis
They released some graphics with a May 21 date on them for the core books and a vecna adventure book. They then removed the dates from the graphics about the core books, but it stayed on the vecna book. So, read into that what you will.
Thanks to both of you.
Terra Lubridia archive:
The Bloody Barnacle | The Gut | The Athene Crusader | The Jewel of Atlantis
I would note that Hasbro spent all year trying to rebuild trust and goodwill over the debacle at the beginning of the year, and then to do this right before Christmas?
I mean, they could have waited a few weeks and kept a lot of the goodwill and trust they had gained back.
The age of OGL is over. The Time of the ORC has come!
The moment that WotC declares OGL 1.0a "de-authorized", "revoked" or any such nonsense is the moment I release as much content as possible under OGL 1.0a and say, "Sue me WotC". OGL1.0a cannot be revoked. If thousands of us do it, the countersuit will be a class action suit.
I rather doubt the date truly would influence attitudes much; for better or worse, everything I’ve seen over the past year suggests few people are inclined to give them any slack and many are ready to very vocally paint everything they do in the worst possible light.
Hasbro likely had very little choice in the timing—the timing is decided based on various requirements for fiscal reporting and tax reporting purposes. They do not get to really choose that the tax and fiscal year are ending right around Christmas—which means that they have very limited options when it comes to how they do severance. If they delayed, they would not be able to write the severance packages off as a financial cost for 2023. That means they cannot claim those losses on their taxes for this year and cannot put it down as a failure in this already bad fiscal year.
For a company doing as badly as Hasbro, they need the extra cash on hand that deducting severance on their taxes will give them—time value of money and all that says that the money is more valuable if you get it in 2023 tax season than if you got the same numerical value in 2024 tax season. For a company that wants to show growth to survive, they want to be able to say “look, we had all sorts of problems, such as a big severance package in 2023, but we don’t have those in our 2024 reporting, so things are looking up!”
All of that is an unfortunate side effect of how reporting is done, and it isn’t really fair to blame Hasbro for how our financial system and tax code kind of force these Christmas layoffs to occur.
I agree. I also find it interesting that no one has mentioned any of this year's PR mishaps at my two tables, nor in the Discords of a couple of Twitch streams I follow. It would seem that many of us are just happily playing the game. A game that remains enjoyable despite its rich history of controversies. I'm no WotC or Hasbro apologist, but I am for D&D.
I also find it hilarious that the D&D-specific subReddits are infested with alternative TTRPG cultists who, on an almost daily basis, clutch their pearls, blast WotC, and attempt to lure converts. No thanks. I'm happy where I'm at.
Neutral Good
Characters in active campaigns:
Rowan Wood elf, 10 Circle of Stars Druid
Wyll Forest Gnome, 4 Divination Wizard