Yeah they did some not great stuff, but let's celebrate the successes when we get them!

What D&D editions do is develop a set of base mechanics, basic probability distributions, and then create a framework on how to apply them. This includes monsters, races, and classes which have particular attributes or play feel. This includes common roleplaying conflicts and guidance on how to adjudicate them. What a lot of indie RPGs that used OGL 1.0/a did is they made references to things from D&D and used them in ways inspired by D&D. Think "elves" or "faeries" being associated with the mechanics and tropes you'd expect. Now with the new CC-BY-SA 5.1 SRD, you can make explicit references to Elves in derivative works and also license it under CC-BY-SA.

There were always completely separate systems that borrowed nothing from the play feel/world of D&D that had nothing to fear from this change. Those communities/creators had nothing to fear.

The CC grant from the draft OGL 1.2 announcement was much less - it didn't include classes, spells, or creatures. Opening the entire SRD under CC BY makes cloning 5E trivial.

I genuinely think this is WotC giving up on 5.5/One being open. They're going to double down on the Dungeon Master's Guild and its IP-friendly, Hasbro-owned license as the way to create and distribute fan content.

Read analyses by IP attorneys. OGL 1.0a restricts rights; people have more rights if they just ignore it and don't use it. Here's one from the EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...

Does this mean most software is uncopyrightable?

Edit to add: this is also why implementations of software from reverse engineering, like ReactOS, are perfectly legal, so long as they don't copy the actual implementation.

This seems somewhat unlikely IMO. WotC is a subsidiary of Hasbro, a publicly traded company.

Measures that can be potentially interpreted as restrictive on shareholders' profits seem quite difficult to pass.

Matt Colville whacked the nail on the head when he said D&D isn't really a game, it's a folk tradition and storytelling. Those are two very difficult things to monetize.

If they get rid of story telling etc. they even can look at AI DMs leading a Dungeon Crawl to increase time of their consumers on their platform, even without fixed groups etc. Extract as much value as possible (and destroy the game)

IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think.

I'm not saying this as a defense or anything, but I find it helpful to think about.

Somehow, one person or one small faction made a different decision, and the overwhelming feedback proved it was the wrong decision.

Do you really want a bunch of detached people paying just enough attention to something you like that they feel like they can 'contribute' by changing it?

The issue is that if you're in charge of a product/community/team/country and are out of touch with the needs/wants of that group then you are clearly mismanaging. You are effectively not performing one of the most essential parts of your job. Bad managers and politicians may be quite common but that does not excuse the actions nor the complaints and frustrations of those operating under the conditions that these leaders have set in place. I do think market research is important and needed but when a community's opinions are near unanimous (3 are ~90%!) it should serve as a huge red flag that you're so far out of touch with your core market that it is highly unlikely that you will be able to return given that you've probably gotten here through years of bad practice and not being involved with your community.

WOTC don't have the same incentives as their community. A company producing a game almost never has the same incentives as their community. As long as their incentives align with folding in the face of solid negative feedback, that is enough.

They made a mistake, they appear to have recognised the mistake and course corrected. Asking for more than that is going to get less - it encourages lies and bad, blandness.

At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it.

Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.

I am somewhat perplexed by that statement.

Are you implying that there are major jurisdictions in the US where WotC wouldn't have been able to fully enforce compliance with their (originally) overly restrictive license?

>I am somewhat perplexed by that statement.

I doubt that you are, honestly, and knew exactly that I meant "where I am, I am seeing evidence of corporations pushing profit to limits we haven't seen before".

I have never seen "no" registers open though.

Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too.

Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.

Their sudden claim to have ability to “deauthorize” the 20+ year old OGL and destroy the partners and competitors who built businesses on the promises of a perpetual license - this was an egregious move that was almost certainly not within their rights.

Legal analysts were quite consistent in that it’s impossible to be certain but this process wouldn’t have withstood a solid legal test.

WotC, in trying to pull this, was attempting to leverage their expensive legal team to bully people into giving away their legal rights under the open license. That’s shady and deeply unethical, and shouldn’t be considered to be within their rights.

Now for the future content they make, they can release that under a closed license if they want and that is within their rights even if I don’t like that license.

Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.

They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest.

So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?

The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.

DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_.

And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.

Same with the DnDBeyond boycott drive, did that actually make a dent? To me there is basically no evidence for this supposed level of consumer power that the fandom is claiming they have. WotC's response was the most half-assed, who-gives-a-shit, PR statement I've ever seen. They did not treat it like a real PR issue at all.

> They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design.

Well yes, they will definitely be losing those people. However it's a small percentage of DMs who are even aware of 3rd party stuff in the first place. Single digit percentage and on the lower end, at best.

I think it's hard for lots of old players to realize that post Critical Role/Stranger Things, they are a tiny minority of the market now, and they kinda suck as consumers if you are trying to extract video game level profits from your players.

Saying “but you didn’t make a dent” is clearly not correct in WotC’s judgement. If they felt they could have made this change and made more money, then they absolutely would have. That’s why they tried. And it didn’t work, per WotC’s own reversal.

CR started out on Pathfinder. Matt Mercer has been building his own world for 10 years as a full time job. If you convince CR to switch rulebooks a lot of people will follow. If you goad him into making his own rulebook, then you haven't just helped your competition, you just invented new competition.

Many times we just reduced to a few D6 tbh

If their theoretical, non-existent One VTT does all the mechanical work for the DM and dresses up lots of cheap player customization options that players actually want, the DM's power to decide the system is diminished. If anyone can DM without memorizing hundreds of rules and looking up obscure 3rd-party homebrew fixes, Hasbro bets the DM can yell all they want, the players will go to One.

I don't know or think it'll succeed - there's zero track record from anyone involved in this specific kind of venture - but I think this is Hasbro giving up on the tabletop community and going all in on VTTs and casuals who don't know (or know but don't like or care) about any existing community. If Hasbro already aren't making money off DMs, and they couldn't bend the existing DMs creating content into their new system, then they'll take their cultural cachet and do something on their own that doesn't require that kind of DM.

DMs are higher information consumers than players.

I think this is a very important point to recognize. The proper market unit for a game like D&D is the play group, led by the DM, not the individual player.

As a DM, I'm partial to 5e because I already know it inside and out, so I can forget about the mechanics and just focus on the story. But aside from the sheer volume of official and "D&D compatible" material, I don't think it has anything going for it that other systems lack.

I think people should still switch. Hasbro has shown who they are. Is there a DnD transformers crossover yet, like in MtG?