The OGL Fiasco (part 2)

My previous, lengthy post was a history of D&D and the OGL, a review of recent events, and some of what we know about how the whole mess happened.

Here are some of my collected conclusions and thoughts for the future. The next post will be about how these events affect Dyslexic Character Sheets in particular.

Why all this matters: D&D is different

Tabletop roleplaying games have always been about creativity. From the original mashup of the Chainmail game that became D&D, to the first third-party supplements published in the 70s, through to the explosion of content we see today, people have always been making new things.

This game is special. It inspires players, dungeon masters, writers, artists, and everybody else to create for themselves.

This is one of the hardest things for non-roleplayers to understand. I've tried explaining the idea of the game to some older relatives repeatedly, and they keep asking, "So is it a video game? Or is it a board game?" It's neither, of course. People are so used to simply consuming media that the idea of a game that's all about YOUR creativity is hard to grasp.

There's nothing else out there quite like a tabletop roleplaying game. There's nothing else that takes the creativity and freedom we had a children and helps us to keep cherishing and developing it. That lets us visit fantastical places for hours on end. That lets us create stories with our friends that no one person would have made up on their own.

Can I keep playing D&D?

Yes, you can keep playing D&D.

Your books haven't spontaneously combusted. You aren't betraying anyone by playing 5e or any other edition.

That said, there are many other interesting games out there, and this is a perfect time to check them out. Maybe Pathfinder isn't your thing; maybe you'd prefer the lighter rules of Savage Worlds, or the retro horror of Call Of Cthulhu, or the sci fi chaos of Planet Mercenary, or the anime-style heroic fantasy of Sword World (if you can read Japanese or find a translation).

Maybe you'd rather cobble your own game together out of all these pieces, a jumbled monstrosity of mismatched limbs, and breathe life into it. All of these are perfectly valid answers.

Can I go see the film?

Yes, go ahead and enjoy it.

The pressure put on WotC's management by a rush of players cancelling their D&D Beyond subscriptions pushed them to change course, and that was incredible to see. But it's over now. The emergency has passed, and there's no longer a pressing need to boycott them.

I'm still going to avoid buying anything from them. But spite has a bitter aftertaste, and I'd rather go back to enjoying this game.

It's been argued that if the D&D movie is a flop, it'll be seen by big media companies - who are all as out of touch with their fans as Hasbro are - that the market for geek-based media isn't as big as they thought it was. This might affect their decision to put money behind the next big fantasy TV series or movie. I don't know exactly how true that is - I don't work in that area or have any great insight into it. I'd hope, since this scandal has hit the business news, that they'd see the correlation and decide the low turnout was the fault of WotC's actions, not of the low value of the brand; but it's hard to say.

Ultimately, whether you want to go see it or not is up to you, and either answer is fine.

Is Kyle Brink a good person?

I don't know. I haven't weighed his soul and compared it to a feather.

He claims to be a senior member of the D&D team; but lately his job has been press spokesman. Kyle has been working very hard to calm everybody down, to be the contrite and well-meaning face of D&D.

Like most of you, I hadn't heard of Kyle Brink until recently. I don't know how senior he really is on the D&D team, or whether that position is new. I don't know whether he really has been playing D&D since the 80s as he says.

We know that many of the creative people within WotC are on our side. We also know that some of the things Kyle says has said in these interviews are either lies, carefully crafted omissions, or a creative spin on the truth.

WotC have backed away from their terrible mistake, but the management still have an agenda and aren't being entirely honest about it. It seems like Kyle is walking a fine line between trying to save the hobby and keep to the lines his paymasters have set.

WotC are not good custodians of Dungeons & Dragons

As much as I want to encourage you to try some of the other great games out there, the one with the name Dungeons & Dragons occupies a special position. It's the representative of our hobby to the outside world. It's the one your grandparents have heard of, even if they don't get it. It's the one that celebrities talk about on TV. It's the one that gets movies and TV shows. As such, the fate of the D&D brand affects the whole TTRPG community, regardless of exactly which game we play.

The company's behaviour this year has shown that its leadership do not understand this or care about it. They don't appreciate the value of what they own, or what it means to people. They only see it as a tool to make money.

And I would be fine with them making money if they did it the right way: by making a good product that people want to buy. But instead they poisoned the water, threatening the livelihoods of thousands of people, because greed was their only motivation.

The emergency is over now. WotC got the message, reversed course, and finally did what they needed to do to stop this. But despite the apologies and the sweet words, I don't see any evidence that they actually learned anything or that they won't try to do something similar again in the future. It would be incredibly stupid of them to try it again, but nothing in the last two months makes me think they're not capable of it.

I don't know how or who, but if D&D is to survive in the long term, somebody else needs to take the brand over. The current caretakers will drive it into the ground.

WotC is a toxic workplace

In several important ways, Wizards of the Coast are not a healthy company.

There's a sharp divide between management and the people who are creating the game. While management was planning a major overhaul to the game's legal terms, the actual D&D team were kept out of the loop. It seems that at no point did they bother to talk to ANY of their own staff on the D&D team who could have told them, in just a few minutes, what a staggering mistake they were about to make. They deliberately pushed ahead with this plan blind.

They see anybody who actually cares about the game as a hinderance, or a mark.

Kyle Brink's interviews underlined this. When asked about the allegations of abusive behaviour driving employees to quit, he only responded that "each team has its own culture", and he can't speak to how other teams work. This isn't how it works in a healthy company. If somebody is a victim of abusive behaviour anywhere in the company, they should have established procedures to report it and get it addressed. In some countries this is a legal requirement; in others it's what divides decent workplaces from toxic ones.

If you're the victim of abusive behaviour at work, please don't quietly put up with it. Either report it to HR to get it addressed, or if you don't think that's a viable option at your company, then quit. There ARE healthy companies out there that don't abuse their employees, and you CAN do better.

The debacle a few months ago with the Hazodee is another sign of these problems. Practically anybody with even tangential contact with any minorities would have immediately seen that what they were about to publish was problematic. Yet the content got as far as a public release without anybody stopping it. This means either that not a single person with a clue saw the content; or worse, people did see the problem but were afraid to speak up. Either is a damning statement on the environment in the company.

Supposedly the Hadozee content was edited at the last minute by a manager, who added the problematic parts, and then it was put out without any review. I don't know if that's true, but it doesn't excuse anything. Seniority does not give somebody the right to bypass proper procedures when publishing material.

I have sympathy for the people stuck working at WotC. I hope they are all able to find somewhere better to work soon, because WotC clearly isn't a good place for them.

WotC thinks of everyone else in this hobby as competition, not community

D&D is in the middle of its biggest period of growth ever. The rise of D&D in the public consciousness has been matched by a massive increase in the number of players. D&D revenues increased more than 30% in 2021, and showed no sign of stopping; and their profits are similarly buoyant. There's a new edition coming soon that promises a surge in sales if done right. And right now is when they chose to impose these destructive new terms on third parties publishers.

Hasbro don't understand that D&D is successful because of third parties. They don't understand how much of the D&D brand's current success is a direct result of all the other creators out there contributing to it. Instead they're jealous. Not of the money - even Paizo makes peanuts compared to Wizards - but of the position and power of third parties.

They see the threat posed to them by a potential new Paizo, and as far as they're concerned the OGL is what made that possible, so to prevent any other company ever growing big enough to threaten them again, they had to shut it down. Of course, their actions may have had the opposite effect.

The tragedy is that none of this was necessary. They could have made a great deal of money simply by offering products people want to buy. In fact, they were doing exactly that. I've bought plenty of 5e stuff, and prior to this debacle I was on the verge of buying a bunch of class-specific binders for my players, more spell cards and probably some monster cards to make DMing my game easier. A lot of people I know were excited about the movie. I have shelves full of plastic minis. There are countless other ways they could have legitimately persuaded me and millions of others to part with our money.

All they needed to do was hang onto the good thing they had, and they'd have been rolling in it. Instead they've burned every ounce of goodwill. Practically the whole D&D community has turned against them now. I'm unlikely to buy anything from them ever again, and I've instead picked up a pile of books from both Paizo and Kobold Press.

More than any other game, D&D is spread by word of mouth. DMs tell players what sort of game they want to run. Game stores organise events. Influencers like Critical Role show people what the game could be like. Until recently the bulk of that influence was flowing in WotC's direction, but now a lot less of it will be.

They had a great thing and they squandered it.

One problem that really isn't

Kyle said something careless in the interview on the subject of race and diversity. When challenged about the lack of any diverse representation in the upper levels at Wizards, and whether this contributed to the Hazodee mistake, he wholeheartedly agreed, and said "people like me can't get out of the hobby soon enough". Some people have interpreted this as "White guys like me are no longer welcome playing D&D! OMG prejudice!"

This is bullshit.

He clearly mis-spoke, and like all his replies it had an air of deception about it; but the idea that white guys are the victims of prejudice rings very hollow.

Speaking as a cis straight white man with a decent education, a stable income, an English accent, a goatee and a fleet of powerful warships, I absolutely welcome diversity!

In the last few decades all the geeky hobbies have been going through a welcome transformation from being full of white guys to being much more diverse. If you go to an anime, comics, sci fi, board games or other such geeky event today, you're going to meet a much more diverse crowd than you would have 20 years ago. And that's wonderful! The soul behind many of these stories has always been about acceptance and love, and it's entirely right that we should practice that ourselves and welcome more people who love the things we love.

White guys are not endangered. We're not about to be shoved out of the hobby by all these different newcomers. Stop manufacturing offence.

Why the OGL matters

For the last 23 years, the OGL provided a safe space for third parties of all sizes to create and sell content without fear of being sued. It made clear exactly what properties and parts of the game third parties could use - the "open game content" - and what parts they couldn't. As long as you followed the rules, you too could write an adventure, or a subclass, or a whole new variant of the game, and sell it legally.

This is no accident. After TSR poisoned the water with its flurry of lawsuits, third parties were reluctant to trust them again; and the new team at WotC knew that without third party support the game was doomed. The legal promise found in the OGL was necessary to get third parties to write for D&D again. Without that, D&D 3e would have sunk. With the OGL in place, third party creativity thrived, and with it the D&D brand was buoyed up. You can chart the success of the D&D brand to how the engaged with the community. In the 2e and 4e days, when they (TSR and Wizards respectively) tried to lock D&D down and enforce their ownership of it, D&D took a dive. In the 3e and 5e days, when they opened up and engaged with the community, it blossomed.

People built careers writing for D&D. They quit their jobs, took out loans, put their livelihood on the line, because they believed that writing for D&D was a viable future.

The changes to the OGL threatened to take all that away. Every third party publisher suddenly faced an uncertain future, in which their career could be cut short. It wasn't just about smaller margins; Wizards might decide, at any moment, to shut them down. This was a danger to everyone working in the industry, from the largest to the smallest.

D&D cannot survive without the community, and that's what this change threatened.

The new VTT is a mistake

As well as buying D&D Beyond, WotC are investing a LOT of money into creating their new VTT, with slick 3D graphics and microtransactions. That's part of why they tried to kill other VTTs with the license change.

This is a mistake.

Dungeons and Dragons is nearly 50 years old, and it's more popular than ever. It'll be around for the next 50 years and more. How many video games have the legs to keep people coming back decades later?

Even if the new VTT is a great success, it'll be temporary. It won't last more than a few years - a decade at the outside - before it's old hat. D&D doesn't live in a single set of code and graphics, or in a single edition of the rules, it's a game of the imagination. Trying to attach the D&D brand too closely to this interface, making it the default and preferred way of playing it, is eventually going to turn into an anchor that holds D&D back.

New games are on the way

Everybody and his dog is writing a new TTRPG. Some of these are very 5e-like, while others are radically new. I'm in two minds on this: first, it's awesome that people are creating and trying out new ideas. But I'm afraid that if the third-party market fragments too much, that'll result in none of the new games gaining enough traction to catch on. Without a clear alternative to move to, the bulk of players will still be in WotC's house.

That's why the upcoming (and as yet unnamed) Project Black Flag matters so much. Not only are Kobold Press one of the biggest and most respected third party publishers for 5e, they've got a roster of other 5e publishers on board as partners. It could be the new Pathfinder, the new continuity game that plays a lot like 5e for everybody who doesn't want to leave, while also smoothing out some of the quirks to make it that little bit better. Most importantly, it could be the new default game, the basis for any number of compatible games and supplements.

A similar project is coming from Cubicle 7, who publish Warhammer Roleplaying among other things. Their C7d20 system is also going to be some sort of 5e compatible. Apart from that, we don't know a lot about it yet.

MCDM are going in a different direction. They're creating a wholly new game from scratch, and they're liveblogging it to patrons, giving them an insight into the process.

The other house to watch closely is Critical Role, who are widely rumoured to be in the process of writing their own game system. This isn't confirmed yet (and they probably couldn't say anything due to various contracts they've signed with Wizards), but if it does happen it'll probably be a lighter, more narrative-focused game than 5e.

And there are countless other, smaller houses doing the same thing. I wish them luck individually, but I suspect many of them won't survive.

The TTRPG market has interesting times ahead.

Next: how this affects me

The next and final (and shorter!) part will go into how the events of this year will affect the future of Dyslexic Character Sheets and me personally.