Killing the goose to try to get more golden eggs is what idiotic companies do.

I actually think the attempted changes were because WoTC didn't get a cut of the Amazon money.

That’s just bad accountants. CR sells a book through WotC’s publisher. That’s bank. CR is sponsored by D&D Beyond. THEY USE IT ON THE SHOW. That’s subscriptions. Every book or miniature that people buy because they were inspired to want to play is money Hasbro earns off of their success. It’s all advertising.

Promo codes usually give money to the person shilling the code as a fraction of the promo derived sales. If the company is paying you for advertising, like on YouTube channels, that’s how it’s usually done. But people with established advertising channels can run that the other direction: we’ll promote your stuff and you give us 5% of the gross.

I think WotC could be promoting Dwarven Forge without cannibalizing their own sales, for instance. They make different kinds of miniatures.

> Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who have converted their campaign into 2 seasons on Amazon Prime.

I’m out of the loop. What does this refer to?

Critical Role, a web D&D show that has had its stories turned into animations. The one that has been released is named The Legend of Vox Machina, after their first campaign's troupe.

There speculation that the godkiller in the third campaign is there because Matt was privy to the new OGL under NDA and the main thing that ties the world he built to D&D is the pantheon. He makes his own monsters all the time, but he still has Vecna, the Raven Queen, the Wildmother, even though he gives them different names in some regions.

Sure would be a shame if something happened to that copyrighted material…

Cleverer still, in C2 and EXU he established that there is forbidden knowledge of ways that a mortal can become a god by replacing one. And when you kill a god, memory of your predecessor fades amongst mortals. Nobody human remembers the dead gods (I think it’s implied the other gods remember).

So if you can rewrite history such that only the gods remember the real story, but all of the gods are dead, you either have no pantheon or a new pantheon.

CR also still has modified versions of Sarenrae (Rae) and Taldor (Taldor'ei) from Pathfinder, so it's also possible they just do nothing or only use the non-copyrighted alternate names from now on.

(some more background)

Critical Role is a bunch of voice actors who are geeks (said affectionally and consider that these are the people who were in the acting club and comedy sports back in high school... they're still geeks today) and get together and play D&D.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Role - click the links to the cast and then look at the filmography. And they're fairly dedicated to playing ( https://youtu.be/Ou-0Lj-gOt8 )

They filmed/streamed their sessions and that has brought in a good chunk of money. They did a "let's try a kickstarter for doing it as an actual animation series" and had a $750k goal... and got $11M. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/criticalrole/critical-r... // https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/19/critical-role-vox-machina-ki...

> In March, the folks behind the “Dungeons and Dragons” webseries launched a Kickstarter campaign to create an animated special based on its first campaign. Within an hour of its launch, it raised more than $1 million in funding.

This is the reaction video to that first day on kickstarter - https://youtu.be/oAF2ZNcYBok

And it got made... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Vox_Machina

And renewed for a second season... and a third season...

https://www.amazon.com/Legend-Vox-Machina-Season-Trailer/dp/...

And you can see that there is a lot of money there... but there's also a "these people have a sizable following and even those who are second hand consumers of D&D and don't sit down at a table are now aware of what is trying to be done to it."

And they got greenlit this week for doing a series for their second campaign.