As a matter of fact we do, courtesy of WotC themselves. The Q2 2023 Earnings Call highlighted a 2 million subscriber growth in D&D Beyond subscriptions through the first half of the year, rather than a decline. Note that this was early August, i.e. before whatever bump they would have gotten from some proportion of the millions of Baldurs Gate 3 newcomers wanting to give this whole tabletop D&D thing a try.
Now, obviously earnings calls are to some extent cheerleader sessions for Wall Street, but the numbers they put out on those calls are (a) independently audited, by Big 4 auditor KPMG in this case, and (b) legally actionable if they go on the record with anything false. This is of course why regulation is so important in the corporate space.
OGL was bad, but when they totally reversed their stance on response to the backlash, I had hope that maybe they learned that they needed to look beyond the executive suite and listen to actual people in the industry when exploring new ways to grow the brand.
Then they laid off most of those people, and now the two blunders illustrate a trend.
We are still playing 5e, but the group is a lot more open to jumping ship than they were before. Primary barrier right now is that some of the group are intimidated by PF2 complexity. I'm also following the MCDM TTRPG, and that could certainly be something we try depending on the learning curve.
I honestly don't know what we'll be playing a year from now. This year's been a real rollercoaster, with some big wins for D&D that have been overshadowed by some really bad missteps that don't bode well for the future.
OGL was bad, but when they totally reversed their stance on response to the backlash, I had hope that maybe they learned that they needed to look beyond the executive suite and listen to actual people in the industry when exploring new ways to grow the brand.
Then they laid off most of those people, and now the two blunders illustrate a trend.
We are still playing 5e, but the group is a lot more open to jumping ship than they were before. Primary barrier right now is that some of the group are intimidated by PF2 complexity. I'm also following the MCDM TTRPG, and that could certainly be something we try depending on the learning curve.
I honestly don't know what we'll be playing a year from now. This year's been a real rollercoaster, with some big wins for D&D that have been overshadowed by some really bad missteps that don't bode well for the future.
PF2 is indeed complex. But I jumped in not knowing anything about the game. I was really lucky to jump in with a great crew. If people like crunch, it is orders of magnitude better than 5e. But anyone with a D&D background, other than those that think 5e is too rules heavy, can jump right in like I did, and will love it. Pazio is still small compared to wotc. But Pazio has sold out its stock of books. wotc is dumping stock at Ollie's. Colville's MCDM is up to 3.4 million in pledges, will likely top out at around 4, maybe 4.5 million. Shadowdark cleared a million. There is definite demand for non-wotc product.
I run two* groups and play in a third, the two groups i run play 5e. After the crap with the OGL we decided we would not be investing anymore in WotC products. and we will make our own material or leverage older TSR made material. My third group we are mercenary in what we play, GURPS, Savage worlds, In Nomine, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, BECMI, AD&D, Rifts, TORG, Pathfinder 1e, Starfinder, Traveler, some of the 40k properties mostly Rogue Trader and twilight 2000. For us it is not the game that is important it is the time getting to unwind with our friends. However even that group discussed the OGL snafu as it happened and they too have moved away from WotC preferring to seek 3pp content.
*edited becaue i should not type while i am waking up
I run two* groups and play in a third, the two groups i run play 5e. After the crap with the OGL we decided we would not be investing anymore in WotC products. and we will make our own material or leverage older TSR made material. My third group we are mercenary in what we play, GURPS, Savage worlds, In Nomine, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, BECMI, AD&D, Rifts, TORG, Pathfinder 1e, Starfinder, Traveler, some of the 40k properties mostly Rogue Trader and twilight 2000. For us it is not the game that is important it is the time getting to unwind with our friends. However even that group discussed the OGL snafu as it happened and they too have moved away from WotC preferring to seek 3pp content.
*edited becaue i should not type while i am waking up
Similar situation, haven't spent a cent on WotC products since that whole fiasco. We're continuing with 5e rules mostly with a whole bunch of homebrewing, and very unlikely to transition to 5.5e but never say never. Personally I honestly couldn't care less what the game is called or what the publishers logo looks like, as long as I get to RP cool characters and roll dice around with friends, I'm good to go.
I originally canceled my DnD Beyond subscription and was checking out other games to see if anything looked promising, but then they reverted the changes in a way I was satisfied with (putting the SRD in Creative Commons License was a BIG deal, they can't renege that), so I re-subscribed and I'm looking forward to the 2024 changes.
For the groups I play in, no one else seemed to care about the OGL controversy and few people even had any idea there was a controversy going on. It's really easy to overestimate how much the general public cares about details like this. It seems like a big deal if you listen to Youtube talking heads (whose livelihood depends on it so it is a big deal for them), or if you're a DM who likes to use third-party content (why it mattered a bunch to me), but if you're just playing DnD then it didn't matter even one bit.
Yeah honestly I was in the same boat. I canceled my sub when everything went down, but after their response I was happy to renew my sub to show I supported the change in direction. Of the couple of groups I play in, I was really the only one that paid any attention to the situation or even cared about it. I had one other who kind of followed the situation, but it didn't really change anything for them. None of the others who had subs canceled or did anything.
All my groups are happy to continue with 5e, and are keen to try the 2024 rules revisions when they drop. Honestly there's been more interest in following the playtest amongst the groups than there ever was with the OGL debacle. That said, none of my groups have explicitly decided if we'll start using the 2024 rules straight away, and are just waiting for them to drop before deciding.
I'm optimistic that Wizards will keep working with third party contributors (I am very excited about the Dungeon Dudes drop today), and that the OneD&D ruleset and VTT will be a success.
Ok - got it.
I want to say that I don't use or even know any 3rd party stuff. But it's not really true, I play on at least a couple of VTT's, and BG3 I suppose also counts. Still, the OGL was never really my fight, in so far as I'm fairly marginal in that regard.
As a matter of fact we do, courtesy of WotC themselves. The Q2 2023 Earnings Call highlighted a 2 million subscriber growth in D&D Beyond subscriptions through the first half of the year, rather than a decline. Note that this was early August, i.e. before whatever bump they would have gotten from some proportion of the millions of Baldurs Gate 3 newcomers wanting to give this whole tabletop D&D thing a try.
Now, obviously earnings calls are to some extent cheerleader sessions for Wall Street, but the numbers they put out on those calls are (a) independently audited, by Big 4 auditor KPMG in this case, and (b) legally actionable if they go on the record with anything false. This is of course why regulation is so important in the corporate space.
Right. This is pretty much what I expected: Outside of a quite vocal minority here on the forums, the world went blissfully on =)
I have to admit - even with this not really being my fight, as stated above - I kinda wanted the fallout to be greater. I'm sort of pro-revolution, I want for the common man to RISE UP against the mind shackles of the soulless corporations, but I don't expect them to, and I'm not joining myself =) This, it saddens me to report, is what's wrong with the world. Although I'm propably getting too philosophical over the OGL.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I have to admit - even with this not really being my fight, as stated above - I kinda wanted the fallout to be greater. I'm sort of pro-revolution, I want for the common man to RISE UP against the mind shackles of the soulless corporations, but I don't expect them to, and I'm not joining myself =) This, it saddens me to report, is what's wrong with the world. Although I'm propably getting too philosophical over the OGL.
The fallout was HUGE, they caved on every single aspect they were trying to sneak into effect and completely reverted the entire thing. The masses rose up, shot down the corporate overlords' plans, and sent them into an apology PR tour groveling for forgiveness. What more fallout could have possibly happened?
I've never seen a more successful consumer protest - normally the corporation just says "we hear you, we're sorry, etc" then goes ahead and does the thing anyways knowing that consumers are powerless to do anything about it. But WotC caved and gave in to the demands, so people aren't just going to go burn the hobby to the ground out of spite after actually getting what we asked for.
I'm not sure what's wanted, to be honest. WotC did exactly what was asked and more. Was it the aim to push back against an unfair contract, or to destroy WotC and by extension D&D?
One's fair and was achieved, the other isn't.
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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 not sure what's wanted, to be honest. WotC did exactly what was asked and more. Was it the aim to push back against an unfair contract, or to destroy WotC and by extension D&D?
One's fair and was achieved, the other isn't.
I think the majority of upset players were genuinely concerned about the game—but I think the most rabid voices wanted to destroy the game, and they fed misinformation which mislead and weaponised the honest concerned voices. And I think we all know why.
Despite what most folks think, the OGL changes were likely not motivated primarily by money. That is not to say there were not financial reasons for their contract (I think they were particularly concerned about how the Critical Role and Amazon relationship might develop), but they broke on the financial terms of their draft pretty much immediately. As anyone who has negotiated a contract before knows, the things you throw in the towel on first are the things that were never all that important in the first place—especially if you basically just abandon those rather than put up some fight for them first.
But the issue Wizards stayed firm on until the end?
Timing-wise, the draft contract was likely created in response to Ernie Gygax publishing a racist Star Frontiers rulebook under the TSR brand. This was stupid of Gygax—he tried to publish his bigotry under brands Wizards completely owns the rights to, and he and his little company of awful people are now justifiably in bankruptcy proceedings.
But it did not have to be that way—he could have published his bigotry under the OGL, and Wizards would have been powerless to stop him.
The OGL leaked several months after Gygax’s court proceedings began. Exactly at the point in time you would expect it to leak—enough time for a lawyer to recognise “hey, we’re going to win this easily, but we wouldn’t be able to if he did it for D&D under OGL” and convince higher ups there was a problem, for a contract to be drafted by legal and approved, and for it to circulate and then be leaked. Further, the fact Wizards fought so hard to keep the “please don’t be racist with our content” terminology indicated that was the issue they cared about most—they were extremely willing to abandon any financial gain to try and protect their content from another Gygax.
Those angry voices here on the forum and elsewhere? Many of them were the same people who have been complaining about how Wizards has made the game more inclusive. Many of them, when push came to shove on OGL conversations, revealed their own bigotry and their own motivations. But it didn’t matter that this rabid group were bigoted—they had some non-bigoted things they could fire up players about, turning honest, concerned players into tools of their “let’s get revenge on Wizards for not being racist” campaign.
And it worked. The OGL 2.0 draft—the one that folks voted on—was better for third party publishers than what we got. Yes, it contained language saying “please don’t be racist with our stuff”, but, in exchange, Wizards gave up a much larger boon than the current “OGL and Creative Commons” system we have. Under the present system, Wizards gave content creators more expansive access to Wizards’ copyrights than the original OGL provided. Under OGL 2.0, the access to copyrights was somewhat impeded in a “don’t be a bigot” way… but in exchange they got access to something far more valuable—they would be allowed to use a Wizards trademark on their books if they complied with the licensing terms.
Folks like to think the OGL situation ended with a victory for players—which is true if you look at the original OGL versus what we have now. But if you look at the the fact Wizards was willing to let players brand their books with an official D&D logo, and thus provide the third-party publisher the legitimacy that logo carries, all for the low price of “Don’t pull a Gygax”? This could have been a much bigger victory, but folks were so riled up by folks with evil motives, so conditioned to only accept the original OGL, so mislead by misinformation that they let this bigger victory fall from their fingertips.
Fortunately, no one with any real clout has tried to weaponise the big “sure, be bigoted” hole in the OGL—most third party publishers with enough clout to get attention seem pretty cool, and Gygax (one of the few bigots with a pedigree sufficient that a product he publishes could be a problem) seems to be financially bankrupt, in addition to morally so. Hopefully the status quo will work, and the general pertinence of the large D&D content creators to not be awful will continue to hold strong.
But, speaking from the legal perspective, I would always rather have a contract term that is unnecessary 99.999% of the time than put my trust exclusively on human decency.
I'm not sure what's wanted, to be honest. WotC did exactly what was asked and more. Was it the aim to push back against an unfair contract, or to destroy WotC and by extension D&D?
One's fair and was achieved, the other isn't.
There was a wide variety of responses. For one of my DM's it was the straw that broke the camel's back situation, they already had numerous frustrations with 5e and were looking into other game systems but were holding onto 5e because that's what the rest of the group new how to play and were enjoying playing. But the OGL fiasco was enough to get the rest of the players to consider other game systems as well and allowed them to jump ship to PF2e for our new campaign.
For the other DM they had been involved in producing some 3rd party content so the OGL fiasco broke their trust in WotC and once broken, it's very difficult to regain it. They don't care about "destroy"ing WotC but they no longer trust WotC so will not invest large amounts of money with them.
Myself personally, I didn't have a subscription at the time, nor do I have one now despite the fact that I'm now DMing a campaign, but that's because I refuse to pay for junk I don't need just generally in my life, I've bought the core rule books and occasionally buy the microtransaction stuff for the couple of extras that I think are worth my money from subsequent books, but I'm not paying for lazy poor quality content nor a subscription that just allows me to do digitally what I would normally be able to do for free at a home table.
I have to admit - even with this not really being my fight, as stated above - I kinda wanted the fallout to be greater. I'm sort of pro-revolution, I want for the common man to RISE UP against the mind shackles of the soulless corporations, but I don't expect them to, and I'm not joining myself =) This, it saddens me to report, is what's wrong with the world. Although I'm propably getting too philosophical over the OGL.
The fallout was HUGE, they caved on every single aspect they were trying to sneak into effect and completely reverted the entire thing. The masses rose up, shot down the corporate overlords' plans, and sent them into an apology PR tour groveling for forgiveness. What more fallout could have possibly happened?
I've never seen a more successful consumer protest - normally the corporation just says "we hear you, we're sorry, etc" then goes ahead and does the thing anyways knowing that consumers are powerless to do anything about it. But WotC caved and gave in to the demands, so people aren't just going to go burn the hobby to the ground out of spite after actually getting what we asked for.
The fallout continues. Like I said, Shadowdark grossed over a million on Kickstarter, Colville's MCDM is up to 3.4 million, with 14 days to go, Pazio sold out all their book stock after the OGL. wotc is selling product at Ollie's at pennies on the dollar. And the biggest shoe is yet to drop. How many people never heard of D&D before Critical Role? How many of them will walk away when CR puts out their direct competition to D&D (I am not talking about that mess called candela). All that money that is going to 3rd parties would never have happened if not for the disastrous decisions about the OGL by cocks and williams. Those projects were a direct result of the OGL scandal.
Now, is the VTT going to be a success? Yes. There are so many video gamers out there that will jump on it. Let alone all the video gamers (and D&D players who can't find a table) out there that will love it when the AI DM portion is added to the VTT (that is not happening immediately). But that is in the short term. But the VTT, initially, is not going to provide content. It has been stated by people that have actually played with the VTT at PAX that they visualize a serious market for 3rd party creators to build dungeons for the VTT, upload them to D&DB, at which point hasbro sells them to their customer base. Sort of like Minecraft meets DTRPG.
So, at least in the short term, hasbro will indeed monetize D&D far more than it has today. But long term, well, I don't see it happening. hasbro owns the brand name "D&D". What they plan on twisting the franchise into they can still call D&D. But it will be un-recognizable to anyone who plays earlier editions.
Way I see it, WotC deliberately attempted to graze innocent 3rd Party creators as collateral while dialling in their scopes at the bigots. When it finally came time to pull the trigger they managed to shoot themselves in the foot, so I have zero sympathy for them. Either their legal/PR departments consist of 5 years olds who thought that was a good idea, or they managed to convince themselves that their player base were a bunch of 5 year olds who wouldn't notice. It's a terrible look either way. The Dervish-esque whirling that subsequently took place during that period of time was conducted on BOTH ends of the spectrum, and I personally got dizzy just from the amount of spinning I had to witness. But as general rule of thumb, I am extremely weary of "but trust me..." excuses (or promises) from people who've just managed to break my trust not 2 seconds ago.
arrested development there are dozens of us dot gif
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
But it will be un-recognizable to anyone who plays earlier editions.
This may shock you to see, so please sit down:
You are correct in the part I quoted.
However, I will note that right now, 5e is unrecognizable to 1e and BECMI and OG players. So was 4e. And 3.5e. and 3e.
Hell, AD&D is unrecognizable compared to the initial release of the game. Mechanics remain: Class system, Ability system, the names of some spells. The rules and actual play, though? Might as well be the difference between Risk and Monopoly and Poker, lol.
So anything that they change going forward is part of a tradition that started with the birth of the game.
I am thrilled that so many other games are out there and are getting support -- as you keep pointing out, those games, those companies, owe their existence to D&D; without D&D doing both good and bad, they wouldn't even have a chance.
They aren't a threat to D&D, though. At least, not right now or in the future out to the next decade or so. They often have several hundred thousand fans, with a couple -- Paizo and CR, for example, having a couple million. I think that is, pardon the language, ******* amazing. In five decades, I hope that all of them, every single last one, has a user base the size of D&D. I hope they get it faster than D&D did.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth right now. There are about 5 billion of them who could totally be playing some kind of TTRPG right now. Add all the TTRPGs up right now, and they won't even come close to 10 percent of that.
There's probably 3 Billion who haven't even heard of D&D.
Let them succeed, I say. Let all of it succeed -- D&D included.
It isn't a competition. It is a kind of magic...
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Either their legal/PR departments consist of 5 years olds who thought that was a good idea, or they managed to convince themselves that their player base were a bunch of 5 year olds who wouldn't notice.
Wizards’ PR department might be run by five-year-olds—they are consistently so far behind the stories that, by the time they respond, misinformation has already taken hold… and when they do respond, they respond in a pretty mediocre manner which consistently forgets their playerbase (especially after seeing misinformation) is not exactly great at reading comprehension.
However, from the legal side of things, everything was pretty much conducted within the regular course of business. Standard operating procedure in multi-million dollar contracts is to ask for more than you actually want, so you can negotiate down to something you do want. And you typically ask for more money than you care for, since money is almost always the easiest point of contention to address in a contract negotiation.
Had conversations stayed where Legal wanted them, and where they should have stayed until something more final was worked out, I don’t think there would have been much of an issue. Wizards and the major third parties would have worked something out, then they would have gone to the public and mutually said “hey, we negotiated this new thing, we think this would be better for the game for these reasons.” Players, for the most part, would be more inclined to trust this process if Wizards, CR, and others were presenting a unified front on these changes.
But things did not go as Legal planned—someone leaked the document to a third-rate gaming journalist who forgot to ask some pretty darn important questions a competent journalist would have asked (what stage the negotiations were at, when this draft was made, had there been other offers or counteroffers and how they were received, etc.). Players saw a document that represented Wizards’ negotiation position and confused that for what Wizards wants—as stated above, negotiation positions are almost always more aggressive than what you want.
I feel for Wizards’ legal team on this. They did their jobs exactly how any of the rest of us in the field might—and they trusted they were working with adults who would act in good faith. Instead, they had one of their counterparts leak the document for whatever reason, choosing to introduce thousands of laypeople with no real understanding of licensing or the law into a conversation they had no place in being at that early of a stage.
Then, when chaos did erupt, PR did nothing for a week or so, making legal’s job vastly harder. Legal did as well as they could under the circumstances—but those are the kind of circumstance legal cannot really fix without a competent PR team turning the temperatures down to the level where adults can actually have meaningful conversations.
I didn’t exactly leave, I just focused on other games. Bought some Pathfinder stuff, some 3rd party 5e stuff, some Free League stuff. Planning to run a Free League game soon.
The truth is, in my own opinion, WotC D&D isn’t all that anyways. There are plenty of systems that provide what I personally want in an RPG better than D&D can. Games with better exploration, more streamlined combat, more interesting monsters.
And that’s okay — D&D can’t possibly follow everyone’s expectations. It’s just one game with a big job — being broad enough and general enough to satisfy everyone that plays it. You like horror? You play D&D. You like brutal, gritty combat? You play D&D. It’s the vanilla of RPGs.
Since I like the community and still play occasionally, I’ve stuck around here. I’m just a little quieter, that’s all.
I didn’t exactly leave, I just focused on other games. Bought some Pathfinder stuff, some 3rd party 5e stuff, some Free League stuff. Planning to run a Free League game soon.
The truth is, in my own opinion, WotC D&D isn’t all that anyways. There are plenty of systems that provide what I personally want in an RPG better than D&D can. Games with better exploration, more streamlined combat, more interesting monsters.
And that’s okay — D&D can’t possibly follow everyone’s expectations. It’s just one game with a big job — being broad enough and general enough to satisfy everyone that plays it. You like horror? You play D&D. You like brutal, gritty combat? You play D&D. It’s the vanilla of RPGs.
Since I like the community and still play occasionally, I’ve stuck around here. I’m just a little quieter, that’s all.
I kitbashed the Defy Death from Scarlet Heroes into a 5e game about 10 days ago, because we were really light on players that night. It did not go well. But ultimately, I would like to take about 25-40% of 5e, and use that as a basis for a good game. As you said, there are vastly superior systems than 5e out there, but each has its failings. I would take the best of about 4 games, and try to bash them together. The biggest problem, which I see is lessening all the time, is the resistance to playing something other than 5e. I have posted earlier the evidence I am seeing for that resistance dropping.
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As a matter of fact we do, courtesy of WotC themselves. The Q2 2023 Earnings Call highlighted a 2 million subscriber growth in D&D Beyond subscriptions through the first half of the year, rather than a decline. Note that this was early August, i.e. before whatever bump they would have gotten from some proportion of the millions of Baldurs Gate 3 newcomers wanting to give this whole tabletop D&D thing a try.
Now, obviously earnings calls are to some extent cheerleader sessions for Wall Street, but the numbers they put out on those calls are (a) independently audited, by Big 4 auditor KPMG in this case, and (b) legally actionable if they go on the record with anything false. This is of course why regulation is so important in the corporate space.
OGL was bad, but when they totally reversed their stance on response to the backlash, I had hope that maybe they learned that they needed to look beyond the executive suite and listen to actual people in the industry when exploring new ways to grow the brand.
Then they laid off most of those people, and now the two blunders illustrate a trend.
We are still playing 5e, but the group is a lot more open to jumping ship than they were before. Primary barrier right now is that some of the group are intimidated by PF2 complexity. I'm also following the MCDM TTRPG, and that could certainly be something we try depending on the learning curve.
I honestly don't know what we'll be playing a year from now. This year's been a real rollercoaster, with some big wins for D&D that have been overshadowed by some really bad missteps that don't bode well for the future.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
PF2 is indeed complex. But I jumped in not knowing anything about the game. I was really lucky to jump in with a great crew. If people like crunch, it is orders of magnitude better than 5e. But anyone with a D&D background, other than those that think 5e is too rules heavy, can jump right in like I did, and will love it. Pazio is still small compared to wotc. But Pazio has sold out its stock of books. wotc is dumping stock at Ollie's. Colville's MCDM is up to 3.4 million in pledges, will likely top out at around 4, maybe 4.5 million. Shadowdark cleared a million. There is definite demand for non-wotc product.
I run two* groups and play in a third, the two groups i run play 5e. After the crap with the OGL we decided we would not be investing anymore in WotC products. and we will make our own material or leverage older TSR made material. My third group we are mercenary in what we play, GURPS, Savage worlds, In Nomine, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, BECMI, AD&D, Rifts, TORG, Pathfinder 1e, Starfinder, Traveler, some of the 40k properties mostly Rogue Trader and twilight 2000. For us it is not the game that is important it is the time getting to unwind with our friends. However even that group discussed the OGL snafu as it happened and they too have moved away from WotC preferring to seek 3pp content.
*edited becaue i should not type while i am waking up
Similar situation, haven't spent a cent on WotC products since that whole fiasco. We're continuing with 5e rules mostly with a whole bunch of homebrewing, and very unlikely to transition to 5.5e but never say never. Personally I honestly couldn't care less what the game is called or what the publishers logo looks like, as long as I get to RP cool characters and roll dice around with friends, I'm good to go.
Free Content: [Basic Rules],
[Phandelver],[Frozen Sick],[Acquisitions Inc.],[Vecna Dossier],[Radiant Citadel], [Spelljammer],[Dragonlance], [Prisoner 13],[Minecraft],[Star Forge], [Baldur’s Gate], [Lightning Keep], [Stormwreck Isle], [Pinebrook], [Caverns of Tsojcanth], [The Lost Horn], [Elemental Evil].Free Dice: [Frostmaiden],
[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].I originally canceled my DnD Beyond subscription and was checking out other games to see if anything looked promising, but then they reverted the changes in a way I was satisfied with (putting the SRD in Creative Commons License was a BIG deal, they can't renege that), so I re-subscribed and I'm looking forward to the 2024 changes.
For the groups I play in, no one else seemed to care about the OGL controversy and few people even had any idea there was a controversy going on. It's really easy to overestimate how much the general public cares about details like this. It seems like a big deal if you listen to Youtube talking heads (whose livelihood depends on it so it is a big deal for them), or if you're a DM who likes to use third-party content (why it mattered a bunch to me), but if you're just playing DnD then it didn't matter even one bit.
Yeah honestly I was in the same boat. I canceled my sub when everything went down, but after their response I was happy to renew my sub to show I supported the change in direction. Of the couple of groups I play in, I was really the only one that paid any attention to the situation or even cared about it. I had one other who kind of followed the situation, but it didn't really change anything for them. None of the others who had subs canceled or did anything.
All my groups are happy to continue with 5e, and are keen to try the 2024 rules revisions when they drop. Honestly there's been more interest in following the playtest amongst the groups than there ever was with the OGL debacle. That said, none of my groups have explicitly decided if we'll start using the 2024 rules straight away, and are just waiting for them to drop before deciding.
Ok - got it.
I want to say that I don't use or even know any 3rd party stuff. But it's not really true, I play on at least a couple of VTT's, and BG3 I suppose also counts. Still, the OGL was never really my fight, in so far as I'm fairly marginal in that regard.
Right. This is pretty much what I expected: Outside of a quite vocal minority here on the forums, the world went blissfully on =)
I have to admit - even with this not really being my fight, as stated above - I kinda wanted the fallout to be greater. I'm sort of pro-revolution, I want for the common man to RISE UP against the mind shackles of the soulless corporations, but I don't expect them to, and I'm not joining myself =) This, it saddens me to report, is what's wrong with the world. Although I'm propably getting too philosophical over the OGL.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
The fallout was HUGE, they caved on every single aspect they were trying to sneak into effect and completely reverted the entire thing. The masses rose up, shot down the corporate overlords' plans, and sent them into an apology PR tour groveling for forgiveness. What more fallout could have possibly happened?
I've never seen a more successful consumer protest - normally the corporation just says "we hear you, we're sorry, etc" then goes ahead and does the thing anyways knowing that consumers are powerless to do anything about it. But WotC caved and gave in to the demands, so people aren't just going to go burn the hobby to the ground out of spite after actually getting what we asked for.
I'm not sure what's wanted, to be honest. WotC did exactly what was asked and more. Was it the aim to push back against an unfair contract, or to destroy WotC and by extension D&D?
One's fair and was achieved, the other isn't.
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 think the majority of upset players were genuinely concerned about the game—but I think the most rabid voices wanted to destroy the game, and they fed misinformation which mislead and weaponised the honest concerned voices. And I think we all know why.
Despite what most folks think, the OGL changes were likely not motivated primarily by money. That is not to say there were not financial reasons for their contract (I think they were particularly concerned about how the Critical Role and Amazon relationship might develop), but they broke on the financial terms of their draft pretty much immediately. As anyone who has negotiated a contract before knows, the things you throw in the towel on first are the things that were never all that important in the first place—especially if you basically just abandon those rather than put up some fight for them first.
But the issue Wizards stayed firm on until the end?
Timing-wise, the draft contract was likely created in response to Ernie Gygax publishing a racist Star Frontiers rulebook under the TSR brand. This was stupid of Gygax—he tried to publish his bigotry under brands Wizards completely owns the rights to, and he and his little company of awful people are now justifiably in bankruptcy proceedings.
But it did not have to be that way—he could have published his bigotry under the OGL, and Wizards would have been powerless to stop him.
The OGL leaked several months after Gygax’s court proceedings began. Exactly at the point in time you would expect it to leak—enough time for a lawyer to recognise “hey, we’re going to win this easily, but we wouldn’t be able to if he did it for D&D under OGL” and convince higher ups there was a problem, for a contract to be drafted by legal and approved, and for it to circulate and then be leaked. Further, the fact Wizards fought so hard to keep the “please don’t be racist with our content” terminology indicated that was the issue they cared about most—they were extremely willing to abandon any financial gain to try and protect their content from another Gygax.
Those angry voices here on the forum and elsewhere? Many of them were the same people who have been complaining about how Wizards has made the game more inclusive. Many of them, when push came to shove on OGL conversations, revealed their own bigotry and their own motivations. But it didn’t matter that this rabid group were bigoted—they had some non-bigoted things they could fire up players about, turning honest, concerned players into tools of their “let’s get revenge on Wizards for not being racist” campaign.
And it worked. The OGL 2.0 draft—the one that folks voted on—was better for third party publishers than what we got. Yes, it contained language saying “please don’t be racist with our stuff”, but, in exchange, Wizards gave up a much larger boon than the current “OGL and Creative Commons” system we have. Under the present system, Wizards gave content creators more expansive access to Wizards’ copyrights than the original OGL provided. Under OGL 2.0, the access to copyrights was somewhat impeded in a “don’t be a bigot” way… but in exchange they got access to something far more valuable—they would be allowed to use a Wizards trademark on their books if they complied with the licensing terms.
Folks like to think the OGL situation ended with a victory for players—which is true if you look at the original OGL versus what we have now. But if you look at the the fact Wizards was willing to let players brand their books with an official D&D logo, and thus provide the third-party publisher the legitimacy that logo carries, all for the low price of “Don’t pull a Gygax”? This could have been a much bigger victory, but folks were so riled up by folks with evil motives, so conditioned to only accept the original OGL, so mislead by misinformation that they let this bigger victory fall from their fingertips.
Fortunately, no one with any real clout has tried to weaponise the big “sure, be bigoted” hole in the OGL—most third party publishers with enough clout to get attention seem pretty cool, and Gygax (one of the few bigots with a pedigree sufficient that a product he publishes could be a problem) seems to be financially bankrupt, in addition to morally so. Hopefully the status quo will work, and the general pertinence of the large D&D content creators to not be awful will continue to hold strong.
But, speaking from the legal perspective, I would always rather have a contract term that is unnecessary 99.999% of the time than put my trust exclusively on human decency.
There was a wide variety of responses. For one of my DM's it was the straw that broke the camel's back situation, they already had numerous frustrations with 5e and were looking into other game systems but were holding onto 5e because that's what the rest of the group new how to play and were enjoying playing. But the OGL fiasco was enough to get the rest of the players to consider other game systems as well and allowed them to jump ship to PF2e for our new campaign.
For the other DM they had been involved in producing some 3rd party content so the OGL fiasco broke their trust in WotC and once broken, it's very difficult to regain it. They don't care about "destroy"ing WotC but they no longer trust WotC so will not invest large amounts of money with them.
Myself personally, I didn't have a subscription at the time, nor do I have one now despite the fact that I'm now DMing a campaign, but that's because I refuse to pay for junk I don't need just generally in my life, I've bought the core rule books and occasionally buy the microtransaction stuff for the couple of extras that I think are worth my money from subsequent books, but I'm not paying for lazy poor quality content nor a subscription that just allows me to do digitally what I would normally be able to do for free at a home table.
My group has currently switched from D&D to Cyberpunk.
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The fallout continues. Like I said, Shadowdark grossed over a million on Kickstarter, Colville's MCDM is up to 3.4 million, with 14 days to go, Pazio sold out all their book stock after the OGL. wotc is selling product at Ollie's at pennies on the dollar. And the biggest shoe is yet to drop. How many people never heard of D&D before Critical Role? How many of them will walk away when CR puts out their direct competition to D&D (I am not talking about that mess called candela). All that money that is going to 3rd parties would never have happened if not for the disastrous decisions about the OGL by cocks and williams. Those projects were a direct result of the OGL scandal.
Now, is the VTT going to be a success? Yes. There are so many video gamers out there that will jump on it. Let alone all the video gamers (and D&D players who can't find a table) out there that will love it when the AI DM portion is added to the VTT (that is not happening immediately). But that is in the short term. But the VTT, initially, is not going to provide content. It has been stated by people that have actually played with the VTT at PAX that they visualize a serious market for 3rd party creators to build dungeons for the VTT, upload them to D&DB, at which point hasbro sells them to their customer base. Sort of like Minecraft meets DTRPG.
So, at least in the short term, hasbro will indeed monetize D&D far more than it has today. But long term, well, I don't see it happening. hasbro owns the brand name "D&D". What they plan on twisting the franchise into they can still call D&D. But it will be un-recognizable to anyone who plays earlier editions.
Way I see it, WotC deliberately attempted to graze innocent 3rd Party creators as collateral while dialling in their scopes at the bigots. When it finally came time to pull the trigger they managed to shoot themselves in the foot, so I have zero sympathy for them. Either their legal/PR departments consist of 5 years olds who thought that was a good idea, or they managed to convince themselves that their player base were a bunch of 5 year olds who wouldn't notice. It's a terrible look either way. The Dervish-esque whirling that subsequently took place during that period of time was conducted on BOTH ends of the spectrum, and I personally got dizzy just from the amount of spinning I had to witness. But as general rule of thumb, I am extremely weary of "but trust me..." excuses (or promises) from people who've just managed to break my trust not 2 seconds ago.
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You are correct in the part I quoted.
However, I will note that right now, 5e is unrecognizable to 1e and BECMI and OG players. So was 4e. And 3.5e. and 3e.
Hell, AD&D is unrecognizable compared to the initial release of the game. Mechanics remain: Class system, Ability system, the names of some spells. The rules and actual play, though? Might as well be the difference between Risk and Monopoly and Poker, lol.
So anything that they change going forward is part of a tradition that started with the birth of the game.
I am thrilled that so many other games are out there and are getting support -- as you keep pointing out, those games, those companies, owe their existence to D&D; without D&D doing both good and bad, they wouldn't even have a chance.
They aren't a threat to D&D, though. At least, not right now or in the future out to the next decade or so. They often have several hundred thousand fans, with a couple -- Paizo and CR, for example, having a couple million. I think that is, pardon the language, ******* amazing. In five decades, I hope that all of them, every single last one, has a user base the size of D&D. I hope they get it faster than D&D did.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth right now. There are about 5 billion of them who could totally be playing some kind of TTRPG right now. Add all the TTRPGs up right now, and they won't even come close to 10 percent of that.
There's probably 3 Billion who haven't even heard of D&D.
Let them succeed, I say. Let all of it succeed -- D&D included.
It isn't a competition. It is a kind of magic...
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Wizards’ PR department might be run by five-year-olds—they are consistently so far behind the stories that, by the time they respond, misinformation has already taken hold… and when they do respond, they respond in a pretty mediocre manner which consistently forgets their playerbase (especially after seeing misinformation) is not exactly great at reading comprehension.
However, from the legal side of things, everything was pretty much conducted within the regular course of business. Standard operating procedure in multi-million dollar contracts is to ask for more than you actually want, so you can negotiate down to something you do want. And you typically ask for more money than you care for, since money is almost always the easiest point of contention to address in a contract negotiation.
Had conversations stayed where Legal wanted them, and where they should have stayed until something more final was worked out, I don’t think there would have been much of an issue. Wizards and the major third parties would have worked something out, then they would have gone to the public and mutually said “hey, we negotiated this new thing, we think this would be better for the game for these reasons.” Players, for the most part, would be more inclined to trust this process if Wizards, CR, and others were presenting a unified front on these changes.
But things did not go as Legal planned—someone leaked the document to a third-rate gaming journalist who forgot to ask some pretty darn important questions a competent journalist would have asked (what stage the negotiations were at, when this draft was made, had there been other offers or counteroffers and how they were received, etc.). Players saw a document that represented Wizards’ negotiation position and confused that for what Wizards wants—as stated above, negotiation positions are almost always more aggressive than what you want.
I feel for Wizards’ legal team on this. They did their jobs exactly how any of the rest of us in the field might—and they trusted they were working with adults who would act in good faith. Instead, they had one of their counterparts leak the document for whatever reason, choosing to introduce thousands of laypeople with no real understanding of licensing or the law into a conversation they had no place in being at that early of a stage.
Then, when chaos did erupt, PR did nothing for a week or so, making legal’s job vastly harder. Legal did as well as they could under the circumstances—but those are the kind of circumstance legal cannot really fix without a competent PR team turning the temperatures down to the level where adults can actually have meaningful conversations.
I didn’t exactly leave, I just focused on other games. Bought some Pathfinder stuff, some 3rd party 5e stuff, some Free League stuff. Planning to run a Free League game soon.
The truth is, in my own opinion, WotC D&D isn’t all that anyways. There are plenty of systems that provide what I personally want in an RPG better than D&D can. Games with better exploration, more streamlined combat, more interesting monsters.
And that’s okay — D&D can’t possibly follow everyone’s expectations. It’s just one game with a big job — being broad enough and general enough to satisfy everyone that plays it. You like horror? You play D&D. You like brutal, gritty combat? You play D&D. It’s the vanilla of RPGs.
Since I like the community and still play occasionally, I’ve stuck around here. I’m just a little quieter, that’s all.
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I kitbashed the Defy Death from Scarlet Heroes into a 5e game about 10 days ago, because we were really light on players that night. It did not go well. But ultimately, I would like to take about 25-40% of 5e, and use that as a basis for a good game. As you said, there are vastly superior systems than 5e out there, but each has its failings. I would take the best of about 4 games, and try to bash them together. The biggest problem, which I see is lessening all the time, is the resistance to playing something other than 5e. I have posted earlier the evidence I am seeing for that resistance dropping.