Has everyone been following along with the Wizard of the Coast open gaming licence drama?
I'm going to assume you all have been, but if you need a catch-up just post "What the fuck is this shit?" and that can be arranged.
Today's news is that Kobold Press and MCDM are making their own games. Many others have announced that they will now not be working with WotC in the future, others are removing the OGL from their existing games.
Everyone's pissed off. It's even being talked about by Cory Doctorow and Ars Technica and it was in the most popular tabletop YouTube video this morning (apparently).
I think it's great. Anything which shifts frames away from D&D has to be a good thing in the long run.
I've been doing a lot of reading around this in the last few days, and honestly I don't know how this is going to shake out.
Obviously the court of public opinion – on Twitter, Subreddits and Discords, at least – have turned on Wizards fairly dramatically, though I've also seen some people point out that these kinds of communities aren't necessarily representative of how connected D&D players and GMs are on the whole. Maybe enough people play 5e that aren't heading about this clusterfuck for WotC to get away with it?
I don't know how much water that idea holds, though. A lot of three current explosion in D&D popularity is coming from things like Critical Role or The Adventure Zone, and those specific communities are definitely taking about it. Even if only one person at a given table has heard of the OGL 1.1 replacement, they're gonna tell the rest of the party.
Consensus from the handful of professional lawyers who've commented seems to be that WotC might struggle to convince a court of law that they can revoke and replace the original OGL, but that requires someone else to bring that fight (and it doesn't sound like a totally cut and dry situation, contractually speaking).
More interestingly, the EFF put out a post saying that agreeing to even the 1.0a OGL restricts your rights more than copyright law strictly requires, since it only covers the material that WotC can't claim copyright over anyway, and by agreeing to the OGL you give up the right to reference copyrighted material in a Fair Use context.
The biggest elephant in the room, though, is that Wizards haven't said a word since this leaked – I've not even seen a "no comment" reported. That could mean a couple of things – either they're trying to figure out how to solve the conflict in a way that buys back some of the goodwill they've set on fire with OGL 1.1, or they're waiting for the rage to blow over so they can go ahead with it anyway.
The OGL has always been pointless legally but it was like a gentleman's agreement. "If you make stuff for our game, we won't fuck you over." Except now they are fucking everyone over. Now they've swapped it for a promise that they will take all your profits, and maybe everything you make too.
Even if they roll it back now it's too late, most of the big third parties have said they are done with D&D. The conversation has moved to places which don't normally discuss RPGs. D&D has been growing year on year since 2014 thanks to all the communities and YouTube channels and publishers around D&D. They just gutted them all in the last ten days. So while oneD&D will almost certainly still be the biggest RPG of the next ten years it's going to be like an Xbox which only has Microsoft first party games to play on it.
I seem to be a bit of an anomaly, in that I don't really use much third-party stuff. I do homebrew/adjust a lot of stuff myself, but never "published" anything beyond a couple of homebrew items posted on blogs/Reddit.
I think Bri is pretty close to the mark - D&D is too big, too famous, too default to ever go away, but WotC have absolutely torpedoed what goodwill they had, and third-party publishing for One D&D is going to be vertically nonexistent.
The only way I can see the brand recovering at all is a(nother) complete change of leadership; the toy and software execs who've taken over in the last few years are very much in the blame-crosshairs on this.
The biggest elephant in the room, though, is that Wizards haven't said a word since this leaked – I've not even seen a "no comment" reported
There was a noncommittal tweet from D&D Beyond, does that count?
That tweet basically said "We are aware of the elephant. Thank you for your patience."
OneD&D is going to be hit hard. There will now be about a year of D&D's audience trying out new games, watching Matt Coleville build his own system and that's before we even get to the point that people generally don't like moving on to the new system when they've already invested on this one. Oh, and the new one it probably going to be a subscription service.
I suspect we will see a change in management at Wizards either very soon or in early 2025 after underwhelming uptake in OneD&D.
Note though that One D&D will still be The Biggest RPG. Just not as big as Hasbro want it to be.
I just don't think that MCDM, Kobold Press, or whoever else are going to come close to making a dent in D&D, whatever the hardest of the core seem to think. People who aren't already deep in the hobby don't even know who they are, and in my experience most people who want to get into TTRPGs talk about D&D the same way that boomer parents in the 80s called every video game "a Nintendo". The default is a strong position to be in.
I think, if anything, you might see D&D act a little more like a gateway RPG than a closed system - some people (maybe even a lot of people) will drift to other games, but it'll be slow. As someone who's in the middle of running a big homebrew 5e campaign, the thought of uprooting everything and trying to retrofit it into something else is immensely daunting, especially given how certain parts of D&D work their way into the worldbuilding and characters.
(That's more of a conversation to have between campaigns, perhaps.)
Note though that One D&D will still be The Biggest RPG. Just not as big as Hasbro want it to be.
To quote/paraphrase Steph Sterling: They don't want more money; they want all of the money.
Kinda hilarious that their attempt to make money off the third-party content market just killed it instead.
I've seen rumours that Critical Role will be moving away from 5e to their own system. I think it's all speculation but frankly, there is no way they will be staying with D&D. I expect they will either write their own or they will throw in with MCDM. Whatever happens, if Critical Role or the next bit youtube sensation aren't there being an enormous free marketing campaign that will be a hit for Brand D&D.
They're going to have a much bigger slice of a much smaller pie. While their market share is going to go up, I don't see how this doesn't shrink their market significantly.
People who aren't already deep in the hobby don't even know who [MCDM, Kobold Press, or whoever else] are
That's maybe true to an extent, but I reckon the existence of a third party publisher market is well known to at least one person at most tables – most likely the GM, if they've been looking for material to run (or for inspiration).
Right now, you're unlikely to be able to Google "D&D" without seeing articles about this, and most online RPG communities are talking about it. It's getting play outside of the RPG sphere, too; the wider geek press is talking about it (the story broke on a gadget and sci-fi news site), so it's not just hardcore grognards talking about it.
(I imagine that if you watch Critical Role or the like on YouTube, your recommended videos will be full of thinkpieces as well.)
Whether or not this is enough to make newcomers stay away is another question – is WotC's first-party material good and abundant enough to satisfy every table currently or thinking about running a 5e game? – but given the importance of online communities and online play to RPG players in recent years, it seems weird to me to assume that the larger playerbase isn't even aware of the controversy.
I think anyone who plays a lot is probably aware, sure. I just don't know how many people that is, and for complete newcomers - people who watched Stranger Things and thought the D&D thing looks like it might be fun - I d have thought the doom-laden articles that pop up on Google are as likely to scare them off the hobby entirely as it is send them in the direction of Mörk Borg.
I realise I may be coming off as throwing my hands up on resignation, but that's not the intent. I guess I'm just wary that the community is drinking its own kool-aid on how much sway we have.
A lot of the conversations I've seen have brought up comparisons between the OGL 1.1 and the 4e GSL. D&D suffered from a lack of content, which harmed adoption of the system even more than complaints about the mechanics, but resulted in a spike of alternative systems. As far as I'm aware, the return to the OGL for 5e was a capitulation to the necessity (and benefits) of a healthy supporting ecosystem.
Also, I don't know – and wouldn't presume to guess – what the impact of this is going to be on non-D&D games. I don't think there's suddenly going to be a big spike in Vampire: The Masquerade sales or 2d20 books flying off the shelves.
I just have a strong conviction that this is going to drive 3pp away from D&D, if not out of the industry altogether, and that that will have a negative impact on the community (and revenue) of Dungeons & Dragons – and even if Hasbro relent, or they end up in court and OGL 1.0a is held to be non-revocable – the damage is done among the most hardcore members of the community. Nobody's gonna trust them enough again to put their livelihood on the line producing content for them.
(There's a separate conversation about whether they should be doing that anyway; relying on the whims of an unrelated corporate entity for your income seems like a risky bet at the best of times.)
the damage is done among the most hardcore members of the community. Nobody's gonna trust them enough again to put their livelihood on the line producing content for them.
This, for certain.
But another concern is that, while third parties might move on to other games, is there any other community with the size to support them? How many other game publishers even make it, without having several different games (or settings, at least) under them?
There aren't going to be many putting out 450-page hardback books multiple times a year, for sure.
But then, I subscribe to the theory that the whole point of this, from Wizards' perspective (or Hasbro's, anyway) was specifically to choke off all the other people "making money off our brand".
This whole situation reads 100% like someone taking their ball and going home.
So quite a lot has happened in the last 24 hours. We have an OGL alternative being made by Paizo, Pinnacle, Green Ronin, Chasosium and others. A leak of Wizard's OGL 2.0 was barely any different. Wizard's share price dropped, but only a little. D&D Beyond's cancellation page crashed (or was disabled).
I'm loving seeing the non-D&D RPG community all coming together.
Almost the worst part - which was predicted by several people I saw talking about it - is the attempt to claim that it was just a draft. They sent it out with contracts for people to sign, ffs.
The terms might end up being better, but a lot of people are going to read them a lot more closely than they might have otherwise, and its going to take a lot more than this to regain any shred of trust and credibility.
I think the bit I hated the most was where they claimed they were only trying to protect us from hate, discrimination and nfts. Such bullshit.
The OGL 1.0 already included a provision for Wizards to terminate the license for individual publishers anyway – there was an existing mechanism for them to prohibit content they didn't like.
The official statement has been edited since it was published, too.
Apparently this is the grand plan for oneD&D:
- up to $30/month per player
- Deauthorized OGL 1.0a
- Homebrew banned at Base Tiers
- Stripped down gameplay for AI-DMs
So basically co-op Diablo with an optional DM and you get a level editor if you (and the rest of your table?) are paying $1 a day.
NASDAQ opens in two and a half hours. Looking forward to seeing where Hasbro's stock price has gone…
I think that makes you lawful evil.
NASDAQ opens in two and a half hours. Looking forward to seeing where Hasbro's stock price has gone…
Nowhere all that different, disappointingly.
There was a fairly compelling post on Reddit yesterday that suggested a boycott of the upcoming D&D movie - or a highly visible campaign to do so - might have a bigger effect than even the Beyond subs, because the hedge funds with the shares understand things like how much money the Transformers movies made much better than they do D&D.
Apparently this is the grand plan for oneD&D:
Unless they just stop selling books entirely, I don't see how this works - and not selling books for a tabletop RPG seems completely suicidal. 
D&D lasted 60 years without D&D Beyond, do they really think they can stranglehold it with that now?
Yeah, it's a bigger U-turn than I was expecting, and sooner than I expected.
I don't think it's going to change much, the 5e bubble is burst, everyone who was planning to move on to other systems will probably still do so, everyone who didn't care about the ogl won't care about this either.
OneD&D is going to be locked down tight.
I do wonder if we'll see less of an emphasis on the backwards-compatibility angle and a tighter restriction on who can say their stuff is "OneD&D compatible", in the hopes they can choke out competition that way.
Maybe, but that'll just risk putting it in the same position as 4e. Nobody will release third-party content, and WotC's stuff won't be good enough or frequent enough to fill the gaps. 4e had 37 rulebooks, but only 18 adventures and only 8 campaign setting books; now, while I don't have the numbers, I'd guess (based on what I see Kickstarted) that most of the third-party stuff that makes the big money in 5e is adventures and/or campaign settings: Grim Hollow, Humblewood, Midgard, Isles of Sina Una Heckna - hell, even other licences that use the 5e rules like Lord of the Rings, or that Dark Souls book everyone got offended about.
D&D needs third-party, and I hope this debacle has shaken Hasbro enough that they don't try and immediately close it off again. Because everyone is waiting for it.
The big hurdle for WotC now is that OneD&D or 6e or whatever it ends up being called needs to be substantially better than its predecessor at its core, because with an effectively open-source, widely-played and community-supported 5e anyway out there, why is anybody going to change system?
I think it would be an all-time greatest example of corporate self-harm if they attempted to release One D&D/6e under a substantially locked-down licence in the wake of the last three weeks. That's not to say they definitely won't - Hasbro will, of course, do whatever they think they might get away with, though I suspect they've re-evaluated the limits of that in the last few days.
Here's the thing, though: you're right; even if there isn't an SRD for the next edition, anyone playing 5e right now won't have to deal with it. But anyone picking up D&D after the switchover? The 5e core books aren't going to be in print. Newcomers who want to buy a PHB - folks who may well be coming to the hobby entirely unaware of this OGL disaster - are going to be getting the 6e one.
This whole ordeal is, I'd wager, still a great deal more inside baseball than the last month of coverage might suggest. While the core community will remember this for a good long while, I don't think this has made anything like the splash you'd need for people outside that core to remember six months from now, much less still be angry about.
I do think that it'll be very interesting to see what Paizo come out with for the ORC, and how that'll be viewed in comparison. I get that Hasbro were playing the BBEG role very well for everyone, but the level of praise they were getting for a vague description of a document nobody's seen a single word of yet seemed ill-judged.
One D&D is going to do fine because it's going to have a massive marketing budget and a glorious 3d VTT which will practically run itself. You know, unless Wizards mess it up somehow.
I think the $30pcm intended subscription cost is too high, but then a lot of players will be quite happy with the $13pcm account and only play published content. Apparently that's how a lot of the gaming groups in the US play 5e anyway. If Wizards can attract more of a videogame audience, One D&D could be huge, but I have no idea if that's likely to happen.
What I think is inarguable is that, successful or not, One D&D will have distanced itself even further from the rest of the hobby, which means that the slow trickle of 5e players trying out new games will slow even further. I guess if One D&D is a massive success then that might increase the trickle again. Either way, it's still a trickle and basing a business model on D&D scraps can't be a good idea.
This whole OGL debacle has so far been a massive boost to the bigger RPG companies. Paizo sold 8 months of corebooks in 2 weeks. Chasosium have sold out of Cthulhu starter sets. I'm sure Free League and Modipheus are doing well too.
Just breaking that reluctance to try different games is huge. It's the other big book publisher's who are benefiting right now but some of those new players will keep exploring and I'm sure Indie publishers will get a boost down the line.
a glorious 3d VTT
I don't know how effective this is gonna be, to be honest. Not everybody who plays RPGs online is doing it on a gaming PC; the FoundryVTT subreddit and Discord are full of people trying to figure out how they can get it to run on some potato system – and that's just a 2D web browser platform.
If OneD&D's Unreal-powered tabletop doesn't scale down to run on nothing specs, and it's the main or only way to play the game online, I can see it being a hindrance rather than a benefit.
But anyone picking up D&D after the switchover? The 5e core books aren't going to be in print.
This is my main personal concern, to be honest – will my 5e character sheets on Beyond still function? I don't want to be grandfathered up to OneD&D just because I used their builder.
I think the $30pcm intended subscription cost is too high
I mean, I'd understand not believing them, but for what it's worth Wizards have specifically said this isn't a thing.
will my 5e character sheets on Beyond still function?
If be very surprised if they didn't, at least in the medium term. Given the apparent focus on compatibility, I fully expect One D&D to use the same sheet. How long you'll be able to create new characters with the 5e rules, however, is maybe a different question.
a glorious 3d VTT
I don't know how effective this is gonna be, to be honest. Not everybody who plays RPGs online is doing it on a gaming PC;
If they have any sense they'll have it running on D&D Beyond servers and people will be able to play on any old device.
I think the $30pcm intended subscription cost is too high
I mean, I'd understand not believing them, but for what it's worth Wizards have specifically said this isn't a thing.
I expect the base sub will be $10, but then the premium sub giving access to all the rules updates and UA material will be $20 and when you add storage/custom encounters/whatever else, it'll be near enough $30.
Where are those numbers coming from? D&D Beyond's current top-tier sub is $5.99 a month, and the base is only $2.99 - hiking the cost by three to five times would be suicidal, especially if alternatives - like Roll20, which will have One D&D character sheet support, even if it's unofficial - are half or a third of the price.
Maybe. The numbers are guesses by me. This seems to be Wizard's plan though, force everyone onto their platform. Do we know that Roll 20 are going to have OneD&D sheets and adventures? Wizards can't stop players running D&D games wherever they want but they can make it difficult for people who aren't subscribing to D&D Beyond by not letting Roll20 host OneD&D sheets. And sure, that'll piss of people but they might be ok with that.
If they have any sense they'll have it running on D&D Beyond servers and people will be able to play on any old device.
I wouldn't assume they're going to be springing for streaming videogame backend tech. Google just abandoned the idea, and they have more money than God.
I know it's a complex proposition, but it wouldn't need to be anything like as high-end as that. Occasional lag wouldn't matter, it would be running one small 3d environment at a time with occasional animation and on average you will have four paying customers (however much they are actually pay) using one server.
I don't know, it's an option for them. It works for foundry.
Anyway Google cancels everything.
Do we know that Roll 20 are going to have OneD&D sheets and adventures? Wizards can't stop players running D&D games wherever they want
Yes, Roll20 will have One D&D sheets. Adventures are more questionable, depending on the licence, but the ability to record numbers to add to a die roll isn't something WotC can lock down.
It works for foundry.
It works for Foundry because it's serving relatively small 2D assets on a web canvas. Beyond's Unreal-powered VTT isn't going to look like it does in the trailers if they're using native browser rendering at the best of times, and still isn't going to run on potato machines. And if they're using server-side video rendering and delivery (à la GamePass streaming), they'll need at least an Unreal client per player view.
But I expect at least early on they'll have a (probably Windows-only) custom client.
like Roll20, which will have One D&D character sheet support, even if it's unofficial
This will largely depend on whether the licence agreement(s) for OneD&D permit character sheets. There's plenty of unofficial stuff up there at the moment, sure, but Roll20 might not be willing to risk the legal wrath of WotC – and if the VTT is as big a pillar of the OneD&D business as everyone's assuming, I'd expect the C&D letters will be warmed up and ready.
Okay, but the fact is that to a certain degree, the license WotC choose to offer doesn't matter - you don't have to release things under that license. Even the hallowed OGL 1.0a was more restrictive than what's allowed under just, like… normal copyright law.
It would be completely nonsensical to try and prevent people making character sheets, anyway, regardless of the platform or method of distribution, because you can't copyright mechanics, only a specific expression of those mechanics - so as long as the Roll20 sheet (or the one I make in Photoshop, or whatever) isn't identical to the WotC one, there is nothing they could do. Even if I did want to use a licence, all I need to do is say that it's a 5e sheet under CCBY4.0, and leave things open enough to make it possible to enter 6e options.
There's plenty of ways that Wizards could make it just difficult enough that players don't want to use Roll20 over D&D Beyond. Just having drop down lists of feats and class abilities and equipment make all the difference and if the R20 sheet has those them Wizards could have ground for a cease and desist. Players are then left having to copy and paste their own character features and deciding if they can be bothered with macros.
I don't know if this will happen, but it certainly could.
It could. But I think given the kicking WotC just got, it's incredibly unlikely. I also think it's fairly unlikely they'd cut off a revenue stream, though I suppose that depends on how much they actually get in terms of sales on those platforms vs. D&D Beyond (and how those subscriber numbers react to their climbdown).
