D&D 5E Don't Throw 5e Away Because of Hasbro

[Remathilis]

I kinda feel you have to exclude WotC D&D from the conversation, because if you don't it ends up being nearly all the conversation.

Depends on what that conversation is, I guess. If you're discussing a rules question, people will default to the ruleset they know the best. If you ask how something works in 5e, you're more than likely going to get a WotC-based answer. If you didn't, some other ruleset (like Level Up or TotV) would fill the same role. If iit'sa question of options (is there an option for...) then I tend to think people suggesting 3pp options are much more at home, because it is providing augmentation or alternatives.

 

[bedir than]

What the late period of this thread has taught me is that there are people who won't buy or play Kobold Press/MCDM/EN Pub/etc works because since they are 5e they still support WotC, despite that being absolutely untrue

 

[TheSword]

that they were making tweaks based on 3pp feedback has nothing to do with the leak and started before there even was the Gizmodo article.

They then started having a public poll that was supposed to run into February for input gathering. A preferred way by companies of stringing people along, hoping the issue goes away before they actually have to do anything.

Seeing that the crisis was only increasing and drawing ever wider circles, they eventually pulled the rope, left the OGL alone and released the SRD under CC, both to appease the crowd and to bring the 3pps back on board, which had lost all trust in the OGL by then. That was an emergency decision, pretty sure that was not being discussed internally for two weeks.

Any way you slice it, WotC tried to break existing, binding contracts and to replace them with draconian versions that would have put pretty much any 3pp using them out of business. What would have survived is the small stuff that sells a few hundred copies on DMsGuild, which ironically does not even need the OGL.

Paizo, Kobold, Frog God, MCDM and the likes all would be dead. Kickstarters would no longer exist, or only for projects that try to raise 10-20k


no, not sure what that has to do with anything, the DMsG does not use the OGL, and is by and large not what 3pps use either


they are the previous landlord… and they did more than ask. Would you say it is also ok for your landlord to send over a biker gang to talk some sense into you?

You have been downplaying and misrepresenting this from day one, not sure why, or why you still brought it up now


I don’t, I take it as them having failed at their attempt due to unexpected levels of public resistance. They should not have tried in the first place.


they were not asking, and they were way out of line.

As Monte Cook said back then “Say person A pointed a gun at person B and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. Person A then gave a half-hearted apology.

Should person B accept the apology? Should they trust person A ever again?

What if person A starts visibly trying to clear the jam but assures person B that it's all fine?

Asking for a friend.”

That is the equivalent of what WotC did, not ‘renegotiate terms in good faith’, like you pretend

Not equivalent at all. Nobody pointed a gun just more hyperbole. I’m not sure in the end anybody broke a contract, nobody was billed, or shut down. No cease and dissist were issued. Paizo and Kobald certainly wouldn’t have been shut down. Lots of people did make money off You-tube though so at least someone saw an upside. A lot of the negatives you just complained about though are just conjecture. You get to complain about actual harm, not the imagined future possibility of harm.

As we well know, the OGL was pushed through before Hasbro knew what was going on. It’s been well discussed so they are the new landlord. Are there any companies that actually closed down because of the OGL situation? Any, that weren’t just one guy operating out of the study in their spare time.

My original point about DMs guild was that there are hundreds of 3rd parties publishing on there and it was suggested they were all going to be shut down. They aren’t. Not least for the reasons you gave.

I’ve not misrepresented anything. There’s just a spectrum of views on this from the extremely negative to the more pragmatic. I’m just on the pragmatic end.

 

[TheSword]

What the late period of this thread has taught me is that there are people who won't buy or play Kobold Press/MCDM/EN Pub/etc works because since they are 5e they still support WotC, despite that being absolutely untrue

Well at the time of the OGL we were told one of the reasons that DND and WotC was successful was because of 3pp. So maybe they do support indirectly. Unless of course that wasn’t true

 

[mamba]

Not equivalent at all. Nobody pointed a gun just more hyperbole.

they pointed a figurative gun at the business, not a literal gun at the person

I’m not sure in the end anybody broke a contract

no one did, they did not touch the OGL after all, they just threatened to

You get to complain about actual harm, not the imagined future possibility of harm.

I get to complain about whatever I want to, just like you get to defend whatever you feel like defending

As we well know, the OGL was pushed through before Hasbro knew what was going on.

I do not really care, they had 20 years to figure out what they had signed there - and for much of that time they actually were pretty clear about it too...

t’s been well discussed so they are the new landlord

if you buy a company, you buy it ands its obligations, you are legally the same landlord. And you certainly cannot come 20 years later and pretend you did not know all this time (not that they did, but that seems to be your defense for it)

My original point about DMs guild was that there are hundreds of 3rd parties publishing on there

these are mostly hobbyists selling a few dozens to hundred copies for $3 to $5, I do not count those as 3pps. I listed examples for the ones I was talking about, you want to refute those, or is your defense that some guys making $500 a year on a platform that is not using the OGL are not affected?

I’ve not misrepresented anything.

you most definitely are

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

they are the previous landlord… and they did more than ask. Would you say it is also ok for your landlord to send over a biker gang to talk some sense into you?

You sort of have a point here. When Hasbro purchased WotC in 1999, it was presumably for to acquire the Magic property. They couldn't have cared less about this dinosaur D&D property that WotC had recently picked up, presumably. In 2000, WotC announced the OGL for D&D. In the landlord analogy, the previous landlord and current landlord are both technically Hasbro, but I would think that WotC released this under Hasbro's radar. Buyer's remorse.

But... I don't think the biker gang inclusion makes sense in the analogy honestly. Coming from left field, and needlessly inflammatory.

I don’t, I take it as them having failed at their attempt due to unexpected levels of public resistance. They should not have tried in the first place.

Why should they have not tried? They own the product and want control over what they own!

Having said that, I think that was a poor business decision on their part to try to quash the OGL. Allowing 3rd party products to build on their product strengthens the RPG scene overall. The number of players grows, which increases their sales.

they were not asking, and they were way out of line.

Out of line to ask to have control over a product they purchased? In a discussion, I think it's important to separate personal feelings about a topic from the neutral facts at hand. Use your personal feelings to pick a side, but don't cross the line of letting those feelings blind you to both sides of an argument.

As Monte Cook said back then “Say person A pointed a gun at person B and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. Person A then gave a half-hearted apology.

Should person B accept the apology? Should they trust person A ever again?

What if person A starts visibly trying to clear the jam but assures person B that it's all fine?

Asking for a friend.”

This is the analogy of someone with a personal stake in the outcome, as opposed to an analogy that makes sense to someone looking at the situation neutrally (see my comment above). The analogy is coloured by a personal self-interest rather than mirroring the reality of what's actually happening.

You have been downplaying and misrepresenting this from day one, not sure why, or why you still brought it up now

That is the equivalent of what WotC did, not ‘renegotiate terms in good faith’, like you pretend

It makes it much harder to take your arguments seriously when you resort to personal attacks on others.

 

[The Scythian]

The whole fiasco happened over the course of about two weeks as I recall. Which is about as long as it takes a large corporation to tie its shoelaces. In relative terms the turn around happened about as quickly as it’s possible to do. I’m very surprised that in such a short time any established business’ was shut down.

The Gizmodo article was published on January 5th 2023. Apparently Roll for Combat got some insider info on January 4th and discussed it on their show - https://www.enworld.org/forums/publishing-business-licensing.704/. The WotC rollback was on January 27th. So, not 3 months!

Both of you are incorrect.

Indestructoboy was the first to leak WotC's intent to gut the OGL on November 10th, 2022. This is easily verifiable. He was vague about the specifics in order to protect his source, but he stated that he was told that the OGL would effectively go away and that WotC would release more information in January. (Both claims turned out to be true, as WotC originally intended to release OGL 1.1 on January 4th.) That resulted in conversations and arguments online that continued for close to a month and a half before WotC responded on December 21st, 2022. Again, this is easily verifiable. That was two weeks before Linda Codega's January 5th Gizmodo article. By the time that article came out, the controversy had been going on for nearly two months. WotC would eventually back down three weeks later, putting the total time from the first leak to WotC's capitulation pretty close to three months.

 

[mearls]

What the late period of this thread has taught me is that there are people who won't buy or play Kobold Press/MCDM/EN Pub/etc works because since they are 5e they still support WotC, despite that being absolutely untrue

I'm not sure I'd slice it that way.

First, most people don't buy anything. I mean anything at all. They borrow books and might not even take their character sheet home. If they are online, they might use free resources.

To those people, that's the game. It's like playing pick up basketball with their friends. They don't buy a ball, or a hoop. They just show up at place X and time Y to play.

The next ring out are people who buy a PHB. They don't buy anything else. They don't see the need. To extend our basketball metaphor, this group might buy a specific pair of sneakers they wear to play basketball. If they showed up with more equipment, they literally couldn't use it. There's no opportunity to use a second pair of shoes or a hoop that you brought to the game.

From there, an even smaller group buys stuff beyond the PHB. These are DMs, and even they rarely venture beyond the core rulebooks. In basketball world, they buy a basketball and follow the schedule at the local gym so they can reserve court time to play. No one else in the group needs to duplicate this effort because they have a game schedule and can't play beyond their current time commitment.

From there, we have a relatively tiny group that collects TTRPG books. This group varies a lot, but I think the three big components are:

• People who collect D&D books made by whoever is making D&D at the time (Hasbro, TSR)
• People who collect books from a specific group of publishers (or a single one)
• People who collect books across a variety of publishers based on their tastes

I think it all comes down to bandwidth. People only have so much time to put into TTRPGs, so they develop a sorting mechanism to help them figure out what to buy. It looks really weird to high bandwidth people (like me!) that other people have seemingly arbitrary habits when it comes to buying or using stuff.

The good news is that the TTRPG business has grown enormously in the past few years. Especially with crowdfunding, what was once a marginal business is much more viable. I think users and publishers just need to avoid expecting to match a global, multi-billion dollar conglomerate's market reach.

However, that doesn't mean games can't succeed and grow. You just need to understand how people interact with the product and what you need to do as a publisher to get your game in the right hands.

 

[mamba]

You sort of have a point here. When Hasbro purchased WotC in 1999, it was presumably for to acquire the Magic property. They couldn't have cared less about this dinosaur D&D property that WotC had recently picked up, presumably. In 2000, WotC announced the OGL for D&D. In the landlord analogy, the previous landlord and current landlord are both technically Hasbro, but I would think that WotC released this under Hasbro's radar. Buyer's remorse.

it may have been under the radar, but that does not mean that Hasbro did not know what the OGL was. They tried to rid themselves of it with 4e, without touching it mind you, they understood that they could not. They then deliberately brought it back with 5e, they knew what it was, no need to pretend otherwise

But... I don't think the biker gang inclusion makes sense in the analogy honestly. Coming from left field, and needlessly inflammatory.

it was meant to show the disparity between Hasbro and the 3pps when this came to a legal fight. Hasbro can pretty much bankrupt just about any 3pp just by dragging the trial out, even if they stood no chance of actually winning.

Out of line to ask to have control over a product they purchased?

they do control their product, it's not like I can publish my version of Curse of Strahd or whatever. Out of line for trying to break a binding contract that they felt did not benefit them as much as a different deal they wanted to install in its place.

This is the analogy of someone with a personal stake in the outcome, as opposed to an analogy that makes sense to someone looking at the situation neutrally (see my comment above). The analogy is coloured by a personal self-interest rather than mirroring the reality of what's actually happening.

I am a neutral person, I'd say it is pretty accurately reflecting what was going on. They did not threaten to kill a person, they 'only'
threatened to destroy their business. I do not for a second believe that these were open ended talks amongst friends which more likely than not would have left the OGL in place once WotC had learned of the impact on 3pps, if not for the uproar of the crowd. That uproar was their gun jamming in the analogy.

It makes it much harder to take your arguments seriously when you resort to personal attacks on others.

I am not sure what you consider a personal attack, the 'pretend'? I do not believe anyone is naive enough to actually believe that, not sure thinking you are smarter than your argument is a personal attack Replace it with 'claim' if you like.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

they do control their product, it's not like I can publish my version of Curse of Strahd or whatever. Out of line for trying to break a binding contract that they felt did not benefit them as much as a different deal they wanted to install in its place.

Well, duh! If you, mamba, were personally caught in a contract that benefited the other party more than it did you, I would fully support your right to renegotiate as well. As I said earlier, this was a short-sighted move on Hasbro's part, because I think the contract actually benefited them.

I am a neutral person, I'd say it is pretty accurately reflecting what was going on. They did not threaten to kill a person, they 'only' threatened to destroy their business.

A company owns a property. That property is being used for free by other companies, who are making money largely on the fact that they are borrowing IP from the initial company. It is not wrong for the initial company to negotiate for compensation if the initial landscape has changed. The terms of that compensation come out of negotiation between all of the companies involved. No company owes another company anything. The business that is being 'threatened' only exists because the larger company exists. If the two companies can't come to an agreement, the smaller company is free to disband or strike out on its own. Its employees can choose to stick around or find other employment.

I think you might be conflating a personal attachment to a hobby or perhaps some sort of perceived harm to an individual with the way having a job in general works. Obtaining a job is not an entitlement. You have employment with a company as long as it's successful, meaning you are working in an industry that company founders see as profitable and the folks running that company aren't otherwise messing things up. If a company goes under and you lose your job, you go out and find a job with a company that lines up with what society has a need for. If there is a particular job you have an interest in, you work to obtain the skills needed for you to land that job. If putting in the time and effort to do that doesn't interest you, that's fine too, but the consequences of that are you end up with a job you are not as satisfied with. Neither path is wrong; it's all about what's more important to you, as an individual.

I have worked for nearly 20 companies over my career. I have been a part of larger company layoffs and startups that have gone under. Sometimes I change jobs or careers because of personal interest or finding I'm on a career path that is a dead end. I've never complained or cried because I lost a job... I just went out and found another one.

Adults working at jobs is what greases the (economic, not social) wheels of society. The economic framework works (for the most part... there are exceptions): jobs appear, then disappear, without there being heroes and villains.

I do not for a second believe that these were open ended talks amongst friends which more likely than not would have left the OGL in place once WotC had learned of the impact on 3pps, if not for the uproar of the crowd. That uproar was their gun jamming in the analogy.

So much for neutrality! What discussion amongst friends? This was a company which owned a property which they had been giving away for free to other companies. All of whom were trying to make money. There is no 'faceless corporation vs. hapless human beings' situation here. This was just a fight between companies over who was going to make the most money.

You have been downplaying and misrepresenting this from day one, not sure why, or why you still brought it up now

I would consider telling someone that they are 'misrepresenting' something as a personal attack, yes. Let's just chalk this up to a poor choice of words on your part, and that you didn't actually mean what you said (I don't believe that you did mean that, honestly).