A new OGL isn't needed if you, WoTC make a better product than the current ones. Tabletop is not and will never be a video game. If you make a VTT where everything is able to be a micro transaction to upgrade your characters stuff instead of earning your weapons, armor, magical items and so on that ends the role play tabletop experience. If we wanted a video game, we would play DnD Online.
If you kill D&D beyond without compensation or moving our bought for digital books you will face a class action lawsuit for sure. I'd want a full refund for everything I purchased or physical copies or digital copies of the material. Again, the material already paid for.
Bottom line is if you want to beat other VTT's like roll20 and fantasy grounds, MAKE A BETTER PRODUCT and LEAVE THE OGL ALONE.
WoTC's success is built off the back of those VTT's, content creators and 3rd party publishers as it increases flow towards your product line.
I've played for over 30 years and if WoTC continues I'll be cancelling my subscription here. As many have already done. The thing YOU (WoTC), don't understand is the majority of us will still play regardless of what you do. If you want to be involved change course.
If it wasn't for roll20, fantasy grounds, critical roll, dimension 20, and many more you would simply NOT have had the success you have today. That is fact, as my kids who were not interested in D&D at all saw those and came to me about playing as they knew I had played as a kid and into adulthood. Your success is simply owned to them.
They can't compete and they know it. All of the best stuff comes from 3PP now and no one wants thier fancy, microtransaction laden, VTT.
So thier only recourse to capture an even bigger share of the market is to knock competitors out of the market. This is thier goal. When you're a billion dollar corporation, crushing the competition with lawyers is far easier than improving your product...
Making comparable products to other companies sounds like a lot of work. It'd be easier for them if those companies just couldn't operate, or were forced to operate at a handicap so that Wizards' products look better by comparison.
As opposed to the current situation, where generally other parties in the marketplace are putting out superior products, generally faster, higher quality, cheaper, AND available in more formats that people actually want (like pdfs they can keep).
Competing in a free market sure is hard when you're hampered by having to pay dividends to public shareholders.
This has been my feedback to them from the beginning. The sad truth is that they do not make great quality products beyond the core books.
There are so many things their leadership doesn't understand about their own customers, but probably one of the most critical should have been to understand that even RPG players that mostly play one system, probably have played and like others. If they haven't, someone at their table has. And most GMs have almost certainly investigated their options.
It is essentially impossible for WotC/Hasbro to attack any member of the TTRPg community without attacking their own customers - or more realistically, the entire community.
The irony is, they're probably largely responsible for bringing it together.
I literally buy every D&D product. I can afford it and my wife is a gamer also. Spelljammer is so bad, I mean it's really bad. After this stupidity, it's really not that hard of a decision. My money will go to other companies. I have switched my groups to Savage Pathfinder. Will I come back to D&D at some point, yes I am sure I will, but I will need to see a change in the direction of D&D first.
This has been my feedback to them from the beginning. The sad truth is that they do not make great quality products beyond the core books.
Even the core books are subpar. The 5e MM is easily the worst of any edition. It's garbage as a reference book. And no one bothering to read the DMG is a running joke.
This has been my feedback to them from the beginning. The sad truth is that they do not make great quality products beyond the core books.
There are so many things their leadership doesn't understand about their own customers, but probably one of the most critical should have been to understand that even RPG players that mostly play one system, probably have played and like others. If they haven't, someone at their table has. And most GMs have almost certainly investigated their options.
It is essentially impossible for WotC/Hasbro to attack any member of the TTRPg community without attacking their own customers - or more realistically, the entire community.
The irony is, they're probably largely responsible for bringing it together.
We don't need WotC to play D&D. The people in charge don't seem to understand this. I've got everything I need to play 4 different versions of this game already...
The sad part is the best stuff comes from third party content creators because THEY actually love and care about the game and are often times geeks themselves making stuff -for themselves- and then they also happen to sell it to other geeks. That's pretty much how I got into my business, and I see it work really well for other people - sure none of us are raking in Billions, but we love what we do and we get to make awesome stuff and meet cool people doing it, what more could you ask for in life?
Their products are good because they invest in them, and they are willing to spend the time and energy it takes to make a good product.
Wizards seems uninterested in investing in D&D anymore, even their primary products; Spelljammer was rife with errors [literally a will save request in the book. Those don't even exist in the game. How did that slip by the editors?] and VERY light on actual content, and from what I saw the art was pretty light too - I remember being a kid and pouring through the old D&D books and being astounded at illustration after illustration of high quality monsters and dragons and elves, and now? You get a few spot illustrations and most of the time they hire a huge variety of artists so that the art doesn't really match throughout the whole book, it goes from a very painterly style to a more cell shadow style from page to page, their commitment to consistency is just a mess - all of these little details take time and energy to incorporate together, you need someone who cares at the helm that will point this stuff out and fix it before the product gets out the door to the customer.
Wizards doesn't care about that, that takes time and money and they're not investing in D&D anymore unless it's to buy something someone else made and say it's their own now.
Let’s take a look at the past two years of products:
I do not play adventures, but I have only heard good things about Dragonlance, Witchlight, and the new starter set.
Radiant Citadel and Candlekeep are both great, providing DMs an excellent additional side missions for campings.
I heard good things about Netherdeep as well, and, while helmed by a third party, remains an official book.
Strixhaven, as an adventure, has some flaws, but as a sourcebook is a whole lot of fun.
MMM was the single most customer friendly product in years, consolidating a lot of things folks would have to spend a lot of money on, and drastically reducing the barrier to entry for DMing (and thus reducing the single largest barrier to entry for the entire game—finding a DM).
Fizban’s was a lot of fun with some great new monsters for the Dragons part of Dungeons and Dragons.
Van Richten’s was delightful, with great world building and some wonderfully horrific new monsters.
Really, over the past two years, the only product widely seen as a flop was Spelljammer, and that was largely a disappointment because it had been hyped up for decades and folks thought it underdelivered for its price. Overall, however, D&D has consistently been churning out some solid content for a while now.
I do not play adventures, but I have only heard good things about Dragonlance
YMMV. My friend who picked up Dragonlance has complained a lot about the lack of basic GM information and quality of life features they've come to expect in adventure supplements, a general lack of overall content (they feel it could have been multiple books instead of one), and a lack of overall fidelity and adherence to the core themes and challenges of the setting.
We're still going to play it, because all of the investment was sunk prior to the current situation and we don't use DnD Beyond, but the general impression of product quality was in general "significantly below expectations" based on what other games provide in similar resources.
Evaluations of quality are fairly inherently subjective, but there were a lot of very specific shortfalls that were identified here. The main appeal of it was thay it was, technically, Dragonlance.
Let’s take a look at the past two years of products:
I do not play adventures, but I have only heard good things about Dragonlance, Witchlight, and the new starter set.
Radiant Citadel and Candlekeep are both great, providing DMs an excellent additional side missions for campings.
I heard good things about Netherdeep as well, and, while helmed by a third party, remains an official book.
Strixhaven, as an adventure, has some flaws, but as a sourcebook is a whole lot of fun.
MMM was the single most customer friendly product in years, consolidating a lot of things folks would have to spend a lot of money on, and drastically reducing the barrier to entry for DMing (and thus reducing the single largest barrier to entry for the entire game—finding a DM).
Fizban’s was a lot of fun with some great new monsters for the Dragons part of Dungeons and Dragons.
Van Richten’s was delightful, with great world building and some wonderfully horrific new monsters.
Really, over the past two years, the only product widely seen as a flop was Spelljammer, and that was largely a disappointment because it had been hyped up for decades and folks thought it underdelivered for its price. Overall, however, D&D has consistently been churning out some solid content for a while now.
You don't really seem to be in tune with the broader community. They couldn't give Strixhaven away and MMM was just a giant middle finger to everyone who had already purchased that content. Dragonlance sounds good but we both know the setting won't get any further support from WotC so what's the point??
And of course nothing you've said even addresses the fact that the 3PP are doing it all better. Soon, they'll be doing it all for other systems and D&D will be left with the B-team.
The hadozee incident was foul; knew that was going to happen; was keenly aware of the internal office conflicts going on at Wizards of the Coast long before the book was published.
Still going play 'D&D Spelljammer: Adventures in Space', however, really would appreciate having the ship model miniatures available on retail shelves.
Let’s take a look at the past two years of products:
I do not play adventures, but I have only heard good things about Dragonlance, Witchlight, and the new starter set.
Radiant Citadel and Candlekeep are both great, providing DMs an excellent additional side missions for campings.
I heard good things about Netherdeep as well, and, while helmed by a third party, remains an official book.
Strixhaven, as an adventure, has some flaws, but as a sourcebook is a whole lot of fun.
MMM was the single most customer friendly product in years, consolidating a lot of things folks would have to spend a lot of money on, and drastically reducing the barrier to entry for DMing (and thus reducing the single largest barrier to entry for the entire game—finding a DM).
Fizban’s was a lot of fun with some great new monsters for the Dragons part of Dungeons and Dragons.
Van Richten’s was delightful, with great world building and some wonderfully horrific new monsters.
Really, over the past two years, the only product widely seen as a flop was Spelljammer, and that was largely a disappointment because it had been hyped up for decades and folks thought it underdelivered for its price. Overall, however, D&D has consistently been churning out some solid content for a while now.
You don't really seem to be in tune with the broader community. They couldn't give Strixhaven away and MMM was just a giant middle finger to everyone who had already purchased that content. Dragonlance sounds good but we both know the setting won't get any further support from WotC so what's the point??
And of course nothing you've said even addresses the fact that the 3PP are doing it all better. Soon, they'll be doing it all for other systems and D&D will be left with the B-team.
So, let’s assume you are right on Strixhaven (I think it’s failings had less to do with its quality and more the fact it was a Magic book for a brand new plane that hadn’t developed a cult following), and let’s casually accept the selfish argument of “I had to pay more money for stuff, therefore Wizards should not be allowed to make something that benefits future purchasers” as something other than completely ridiculous (speaking as someone who had purchased all the other books prior to MMM).
That still leaves a solid eight out of eleven is still a solid ratio. Might there be better third party content out there? Sure, probably. And that content will assuredly continue to exist, despite what all the folks who seem to think third party publishers will be happy sharing a minnow instead of a piece of a tuna might think.
But Wizards has been consistently delivering products that fit what numerous surveys indicate the majority of players actually want—a consistent baseline they can take and use in their homebrew worlds.
Let’s take a look at the past two years of products:
I do not play adventures, but I have only heard good things about Dragonlance, Witchlight, and the new starter set.
Radiant Citadel and Candlekeep are both great, providing DMs an excellent additional side missions for campings.
I heard good things about Netherdeep as well, and, while helmed by a third party, remains an official book.
Strixhaven, as an adventure, has some flaws, but as a sourcebook is a whole lot of fun.
MMM was the single most customer friendly product in years, consolidating a lot of things folks would have to spend a lot of money on, and drastically reducing the barrier to entry for DMing (and thus reducing the single largest barrier to entry for the entire game—finding a DM).
Fizban’s was a lot of fun with some great new monsters for the Dragons part of Dungeons and Dragons.
Van Richten’s was delightful, with great world building and some wonderfully horrific new monsters.
Really, over the past two years, the only product widely seen as a flop was Spelljammer, and that was largely a disappointment because it had been hyped up for decades and folks thought it underdelivered for its price. Overall, however, D&D has consistently been churning out some solid content for a while now.
I could not disagree more, having bought and read through a number of these: - Strixhavenw as frankly awful, The pinnacle of its awfulness to me might well be its rules for Mages Tower, which took what could have been an awesome thing to let your casters use spells in creative ways and ins instead. No exaggeration: Roll something like 30-60 dice and tally up, then call the winner based upon that" - Fizban's Treasury was underwhelming at best; a handful of spells and a handful of subclasses, when the theme "dragons" alone could have netted so much more. - Witchlight: I was thinking about maybe running this based on positive word of mouth, so I bought it and read through ti... you couldn't PAY me to run this. Every, single, chapter is mostly made up of a huge swath of stuff that just has "figure it out DM" on it. What, in the world, is the point of buying one of these if I have to invent most of the content anyway? And that's leaving aside its central gimmick is dumb: "Combat optional!"... yeah; in the same way the Radiant citadel is "always peaceful": because of an arbitrary magical rule... An arbitrary rule the first "real" encounter of the module breaks by the way.
And I could go on about the awfulness of MMM, SPelljammer, etc. WOTC's output has been spotty at best, and awful at worst for YEARS at this point. Instead of improve; they seem to have instead decided "if there's no competition, we don't HAVE to improve!"
I am not buying anymore of the content on DND Beyond until they drop this... Good chance I'll only buy from Roll20 as that is the VTT I use. Looking at TaleSpire at the moment. I'll cancel the subscription when they publish a bad OGL. Already planning a Call of Cthulhu campaign just working out dates. What they don't understand is WE HAVE PLAYED DND PRIOR TO THE DIGITAL AGE and I know I don't need them to play as I know the majority of the information and could re write a system as fast as I can type it up... If I use voice to text even faster. LOL
DnD will be continued to be played... We don't need WoTC and Hasbro.
What books in particular are you guys so frustrated with? I've been happy with every D&D book of late aside from Spellammer. Their products could be better - improving the quality of the things you make is almost never bad - but I feel that a lot of the hate for some of the recent supplements is just unwarranted.
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BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explainHERE.
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A new OGL isn't needed if you, WoTC make a better product than the current ones. Tabletop is not and will never be a video game. If you make a VTT where everything is able to be a micro transaction to upgrade your characters stuff instead of earning your weapons, armor, magical items and so on that ends the role play tabletop experience. If we wanted a video game, we would play DnD Online.
If you kill D&D beyond without compensation or moving our bought for digital books you will face a class action lawsuit for sure. I'd want a full refund for everything I purchased or physical copies or digital copies of the material. Again, the material already paid for.
Bottom line is if you want to beat other VTT's like roll20 and fantasy grounds, MAKE A BETTER PRODUCT and LEAVE THE OGL ALONE.
WoTC's success is built off the back of those VTT's, content creators and 3rd party publishers as it increases flow towards your product line.
I've played for over 30 years and if WoTC continues I'll be cancelling my subscription here. As many have already done. The thing YOU (WoTC), don't understand is the majority of us will still play regardless of what you do. If you want to be involved change course.
If it wasn't for roll20, fantasy grounds, critical roll, dimension 20, and many more you would simply NOT have had the success you have today. That is fact, as my kids who were not interested in D&D at all saw those and came to me about playing as they knew I had played as a kid and into adulthood. Your success is simply owned to them.
They aren't listening.
Just cancel your sub. They'll hear that.
They can't compete and they know it. All of the best stuff comes from 3PP now and no one wants thier fancy, microtransaction laden, VTT.
So thier only recourse to capture an even bigger share of the market is to knock competitors out of the market. This is thier goal. When you're a billion dollar corporation, crushing the competition with lawyers is far easier than improving your product...
Making comparable products to other companies sounds like a lot of work. It'd be easier for them if those companies just couldn't operate, or were forced to operate at a handicap so that Wizards' products look better by comparison.
As opposed to the current situation, where generally other parties in the marketplace are putting out superior products, generally faster, higher quality, cheaper, AND available in more formats that people actually want (like pdfs they can keep).
Competing in a free market sure is hard when you're hampered by having to pay dividends to public shareholders.
Best part? WotC did this to themselves. Ever heard the story if Icarus WotC? That's you.
This has been my feedback to them from the beginning. The sad truth is that they do not make great quality products beyond the core books.
There are so many things their leadership doesn't understand about their own customers, but probably one of the most critical should have been to understand that even RPG players that mostly play one system, probably have played and like others. If they haven't, someone at their table has. And most GMs have almost certainly investigated their options.
It is essentially impossible for WotC/Hasbro to attack any member of the TTRPg community without attacking their own customers - or more realistically, the entire community.
The irony is, they're probably largely responsible for bringing it together.
I literally buy every D&D product. I can afford it and my wife is a gamer also. Spelljammer is so bad, I mean it's really bad. After this stupidity, it's really not that hard of a decision. My money will go to other companies. I have switched my groups to Savage Pathfinder. Will I come back to D&D at some point, yes I am sure I will, but I will need to see a change in the direction of D&D first.
Even the core books are subpar. The 5e MM is easily the worst of any edition. It's garbage as a reference book. And no one bothering to read the DMG is a running joke.
We don't need WotC to play D&D. The people in charge don't seem to understand this. I've got everything I need to play 4 different versions of this game already...
The sad part is the best stuff comes from third party content creators because THEY actually love and care about the game and are often times geeks themselves making stuff -for themselves- and then they also happen to sell it to other geeks. That's pretty much how I got into my business, and I see it work really well for other people - sure none of us are raking in Billions, but we love what we do and we get to make awesome stuff and meet cool people doing it, what more could you ask for in life?
Their products are good because they invest in them, and they are willing to spend the time and energy it takes to make a good product.
Wizards seems uninterested in investing in D&D anymore, even their primary products; Spelljammer was rife with errors [literally a will save request in the book. Those don't even exist in the game. How did that slip by the editors?] and VERY light on actual content, and from what I saw the art was pretty light too - I remember being a kid and pouring through the old D&D books and being astounded at illustration after illustration of high quality monsters and dragons and elves, and now? You get a few spot illustrations and most of the time they hire a huge variety of artists so that the art doesn't really match throughout the whole book, it goes from a very painterly style to a more cell shadow style from page to page, their commitment to consistency is just a mess - all of these little details take time and energy to incorporate together, you need someone who cares at the helm that will point this stuff out and fix it before the product gets out the door to the customer.
Wizards doesn't care about that, that takes time and money and they're not investing in D&D anymore unless it's to buy something someone else made and say it's their own now.
Let’s take a look at the past two years of products:
I do not play adventures, but I have only heard good things about Dragonlance, Witchlight, and the new starter set.
Radiant Citadel and Candlekeep are both great, providing DMs an excellent additional side missions for campings.
I heard good things about Netherdeep as well, and, while helmed by a third party, remains an official book.
Strixhaven, as an adventure, has some flaws, but as a sourcebook is a whole lot of fun.
MMM was the single most customer friendly product in years, consolidating a lot of things folks would have to spend a lot of money on, and drastically reducing the barrier to entry for DMing (and thus reducing the single largest barrier to entry for the entire game—finding a DM).
Fizban’s was a lot of fun with some great new monsters for the Dragons part of Dungeons and Dragons.
Van Richten’s was delightful, with great world building and some wonderfully horrific new monsters.
Really, over the past two years, the only product widely seen as a flop was Spelljammer, and that was largely a disappointment because it had been hyped up for decades and folks thought it underdelivered for its price. Overall, however, D&D has consistently been churning out some solid content for a while now.
YMMV. My friend who picked up Dragonlance has complained a lot about the lack of basic GM information and quality of life features they've come to expect in adventure supplements, a general lack of overall content (they feel it could have been multiple books instead of one), and a lack of overall fidelity and adherence to the core themes and challenges of the setting.
We're still going to play it, because all of the investment was sunk prior to the current situation and we don't use DnD Beyond, but the general impression of product quality was in general "significantly below expectations" based on what other games provide in similar resources.
Evaluations of quality are fairly inherently subjective, but there were a lot of very specific shortfalls that were identified here. The main appeal of it was thay it was, technically, Dragonlance.
You don't really seem to be in tune with the broader community. They couldn't give Strixhaven away and MMM was just a giant middle finger to everyone who had already purchased that content. Dragonlance sounds good but we both know the setting won't get any further support from WotC so what's the point??
And of course nothing you've said even addresses the fact that the 3PP are doing it all better. Soon, they'll be doing it all for other systems and D&D will be left with the B-team.
The hadozee incident was foul; knew that was going to happen; was keenly aware of the internal office conflicts going on at Wizards of the Coast long before the book was published.
Still going play 'D&D Spelljammer: Adventures in Space', however, really would appreciate having the ship model miniatures available on retail shelves.
Not going to order these fine items online.
So, let’s assume you are right on Strixhaven (I think it’s failings had less to do with its quality and more the fact it was a Magic book for a brand new plane that hadn’t developed a cult following), and let’s casually accept the selfish argument of “I had to pay more money for stuff, therefore Wizards should not be allowed to make something that benefits future purchasers” as something other than completely ridiculous (speaking as someone who had purchased all the other books prior to MMM).
That still leaves a solid eight out of eleven is still a solid ratio. Might there be better third party content out there? Sure, probably. And that content will assuredly continue to exist, despite what all the folks who seem to think third party publishers will be happy sharing a minnow instead of a piece of a tuna might think.
But Wizards has been consistently delivering products that fit what numerous surveys indicate the majority of players actually want—a consistent baseline they can take and use in their homebrew worlds.
I could not disagree more, having bought and read through a number of these:
- Strixhavenw as frankly awful, The pinnacle of its awfulness to me might well be its rules for Mages Tower, which took what could have been an awesome thing to let your casters use spells in creative ways and ins instead. No exaggeration: Roll something like 30-60 dice and tally up, then call the winner based upon that"
- Fizban's Treasury was underwhelming at best; a handful of spells and a handful of subclasses, when the theme "dragons" alone could have netted so much more.
- Witchlight: I was thinking about maybe running this based on positive word of mouth, so I bought it and read through ti... you couldn't PAY me to run this. Every, single, chapter is mostly made up of a huge swath of stuff that just has "figure it out DM" on it. What, in the world, is the point of buying one of these if I have to invent most of the content anyway? And that's leaving aside its central gimmick is dumb: "Combat optional!"... yeah; in the same way the Radiant citadel is "always peaceful": because of an arbitrary magical rule... An arbitrary rule the first "real" encounter of the module breaks by the way.
And I could go on about the awfulness of MMM, SPelljammer, etc. WOTC's output has been spotty at best, and awful at worst for YEARS at this point. Instead of improve; they seem to have instead decided "if there's no competition, we don't HAVE to improve!"
I was immensely excited for Spelljammer and Dragonlance.
I was immensely disappointed in them both.
There's not much in the books that I couldn't have cobbled together from older material and very little for a new DM to get creativity flowing.
At worst I thought we would at least get more of both from 3PP and actual play streamers...but once the promotional streams were done....crickets.
Why? Because they are poor products designed to make money not bring imagination to life.
I am not buying anymore of the content on DND Beyond until they drop this... Good chance I'll only buy from Roll20 as that is the VTT I use. Looking at TaleSpire at the moment. I'll cancel the subscription when they publish a bad OGL. Already planning a Call of Cthulhu campaign just working out dates. What they don't understand is WE HAVE PLAYED DND PRIOR TO THE DIGITAL AGE and I know I don't need them to play as I know the majority of the information and could re write a system as fast as I can type it up... If I use voice to text even faster. LOL
DnD will be continued to be played... We don't need WoTC and Hasbro.
What books in particular are you guys so frustrated with? I've been happy with every D&D book of late aside from Spellammer. Their products could be better - improving the quality of the things you make is almost never bad - but I feel that a lot of the hate for some of the recent supplements is just unwarranted.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.