You've just taken over WotC, what do you do?

[Sacrosanct]

Hostile takeover of Hasbro, forcing a split, and now you're in charge of D&D. What do you do with it, the OGL, and everything.

Maybe it's a holdover from my marketing classes in college, but I still place a lot of emphasis on branding. It's really important. So that's what I'd focus on. A lot of licensing for use of that branding, which in turn improves the value of the branding.

Everything from every previous edition rules-wise goes into CC. Let the creators create. Let them do most of the work. Sure, create a core new edition, but stick to the core rule books and IP specific settings/creatures. Let the fans create the adventures and supplement material. The core game needs to be more accessible than any other system out there.

Continue focus on VTT, but forget microtransactions. Instead allow 3PP to sell their own stuff (cosmetics, monsters, magic items, etc) on the VTT and take a % of it.

And that's pretty much it. Trying to monetize everything only leads to a financial death spiral in the end. Be happy with a steady but stable income stream rather than chase every penny.

 

[overgeeked]

Hostile takeover of Hasbro, forcing a split, and now you're in charge of D&D. What do you do with it, the OGL, and everything.

Huh. A few things, come to think of it…

Take the company private.

Fire everyone responsible for the "de-auth" attempt.

Make OGL 1.0b, a copy of 1.0a with whatever language updates are necessary to make it clearly an irrevocable license. Give ownership of that license to the law firm working on the ORC or the Creative Commons organization.

Release SRDs for every edition under OGL 1.0b, ORC (depending on the terms), and Creative Commons.

Keep 5E core in print but let the community of 3PP take care of the rest. Slight rules revisions over time to fix broken things more than new editions.

Approach various creators and 3PP who are interested in more, less, heavier, lighter version of the game and work with them to create the modularity promised during the D&D Next playtest. This might be completely moot now that the 5.1 SRD is in Creative Commons. But still worth a try. More tactical stuff...Matt Colville if he or his team are in any way interested. Hire them to work on it. Lighter, more story-focused and character-driven stuff...Matt Mercer and Critical Role. Hire them to work on it.

Bring everything ever officially printed for D&D up to snuff re: text, layout, etc, i.e. no more bad scans, aka go back and re-typeset the lot. Sell the PDFs of everything and offer them all up as high quality POD. Yes, many are there already but most are bad scans.

Do Kickstarters every year to do print runs of older core books. One Kickstarter a year but cycle through the editions. Don’t leave any behind. OD&D, AD&D, 2E, 3E, 3.5, and 4E. Basic, B/X, BECMI, and RC. If not enough people are interested, it won’t fund, so no problem.

Open all the settings on DMsGuild. Take less of a cut.

Make “ultimate editions” of all of the settings. Gather up all the lore, all the monsters, all the NPCs, all the locations, all the maps, etc from all the editions. Square any contradictions and publish those. That will be easier for some than others. After the initial release, do Kickstarters every few years to keep them in print. Start with Mystara and Hollow World. Next up Dark Sun. Next is Nentir Vale. Go from there. Publish free PDF rules updates for those settings, if necessary.

Hire whatever original creators of the settings are still around and interested. Let them have creative freedom to do as they please with their creations. Legal ownership would be retained, creative control would be handed over. Like Keith Baker. If he's still interested, give him creative control and freedom over Eberron. It's his. If he wants to make an Eberron for Savage Worlds game, go for it. Weiss and Hickman want control over Dragonlance, it's theirs. Do that with anyone and everyone still around. If WotC owns the IP, give creative control over that setting to the original creator(s).

Reach out to and make deals with various 3PP creators similar to the deal with Critical Role and their two books. The 3PP retains ownership of their IP, they create the content, but WotC funds the project and prints it as official D&D products. Set terms to drastically benefit the 3PP.

Give Goodman Games free pick of any old modules to update and make conversions for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Secretly pay the cast of Critical Role to run a short campaign of DCC. Say a five- or six-shot. Start with 0-level, of course. Then one night at each subsequent level, ending at 4th or 5th.

If it becomes obvious this is not profitable and it's going to sink as a company, gift the settings back to their original creators. It's their stuff. Their dreams and ideas. They should own them.

 

[mamba]

Continue focus on VTT, but forget microtransactions. Instead allow 3PP to sell their own stuff (cosmetics, monsters, magic items, etc) on the VTT and take a % of it.

Definitely, works great for Apple and Valve, follow that model

Release an OGL 1.0b that makes it clear that the license cannot be revoked and cannot be deauthorized, then give up on releasing old stuff under the CC, but keep 5e and newer under both the OGL and CC.

Refocus on settings as your real IP, Bring out more adventure paths and smaller adventures for them, same for monster manuals, etc., license for games, movies, TV, ...

 

[Enrahim2]

Continue focus on VTT, but forget microtransactions. Instead allow 3PP to sell their own stuff (cosmetics, monsters, magic items, etc) on the VTT and take a % of it.

I always assumed this would be the kind of microtransactions they were going for. After all the transactions are still micro independently of who made the content?

 

[Scars Unseen]

Okay, so first thing I would do is, as you said, compile the rules from every previous edition, make a Legacy of D&D collection, and release it under Creative Commons. I believe in preservation, and so this would be a pretty big priority of mine.

My next plan would be to hire a number of people to be "D&D historians" and go through all the old setting material, whether it be game material, novels, magazine articles, etc. and start building a bible for each setting: an organized compilation of everything that has occurred in each setting, with separate appendixes for people and locations. These would then be used to create an edition agnostic digital product for each setting that is somewhat similar to the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas, but fully searchable by a number of criteria to include time, location, character name, monster(e.g. in case you wanted to know where every documented dragon could be found) and product line. Every entry would be referenced, and references to currently purchasable products would have links to the official product page. This product would receive free updates when new products for the setting came out. Additionally, the product would allow for new entries as well as "DM notes" added to existing ones so that the product could be used for campaign planning and tracking.

The next thing on the agenda would be creating solid DM tools for the use of planning and running campaigns and adventures. In addition to the kind of utilities you often see in these kinds of products, it would be hooked into a DM's advice community (also accessible by browser). One difference from a lot of similar RPG communities would be that it would be curated. A topic could be brought up and discussed, and at some point in time, it would be archived and summarized, giving the general consensus as well as any major dissenting opinions, similar to what you'd see in a court decision. This would allow someone browsing through old topics to get an idea of what was discussed and how it turned out without having to read through potentially dozens or more pages. The user of the DM tools could then save any topics they feel are useful for later reference.

Next would come a new edition of D&D. No thoughts on what would go in that edition, but it would be developed in conjunction with a VTT that allows for balancing testing so you can set up scenarios and see the various ways it might play out, hopefully to the effect of avoiding any obvious discrepancies between intent and result of design. These balancing tools could then be used in the VTT after release for encounter adjustment for groups that might be running parties that are larger, smaller or at different levels than an adventure expects.

Once the VTT is created, I would try to go the Steam route. Allow the other publishers to publish products (even non-D&D) on my platform with me taking a cut. Continually develop and improve the platform so that people want to play on my VTT. Let publishers sell keys for products on my platform on their own sites with no cut at all. The idea being that having a VTT that lets players get into a new system on a familiar platform that takes on some of the heavy lifting of learning new systems would be good for both players and publishers, and having them all advertised on a storefront I run means that even if some players don't buy on my site, they'll be on my site, making them more likely to buy something there later. And on top of it all is a steadily growing and improving set of tools that can be potentially be used for any system. Wins for everyone as far as I can see.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

• Put a hard line between finance dep. and the creatives.
• Hire in-house artists to have a brand ''look''.
• Keep the release rate pretty slow (4 a year: 1 Adventure path, 1 Anthology, 1 Player options, 1 Setting, ideally all of them somewhat related).
• Keep playtest/UA material coming, every month or so, even if its a playtest for something way farther down the road.
• PDF/POD Zine with the finalized optional rules testes in the previous point, articles or 32 pages modules.
• Sell PDF of your books.
• Do crowdfunding on your own platform for new books (it has a name, but I forget what it is).
• Bring back the small 32-ish, 2 booklets+slipcase/soft DM screen bundle they had during the Next Playtest.
• Strike a deal with huge VTT platforms and forget about doing it in-house.
• Make all editions, all settings available on DMguild.

 

[Minigiant]

Design a new rassing frassing setting with modern interpretation, art, lore, and concepts of dungeons, dragons, races, classes, monsters, equipment, magic, weapons,, toom peoples, cultures, architecture, and combat. Then sell books on it


Then DO IT AGAIN.

and collect 1 billion dollars from ALL of you as you greedily buy all the books I forced WOTC to make and the VTT designed specifically for it.

 

[aco175]

I would likely need to hire others to run things that are smarter than myself. I would want to do things that are cool, but not make money for the company and would likely run it into TSR.

 

[Jer]

I would likely need to hire others to run things that are smarter than myself. I would want to do things that are cool, but not make money for the company and would likely run it into TSR.

Yup. "Immediately lock myself in my office rocking back and forth hugging my knees while the pressure of running a company where somewhere around 1500 people's livelihoods depend on me not making stupid decisions and tanking their jobs slowly crushes my psyche" is probably the answer for me. Management material I am not.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I'd do a hard swerve into AI, focusing on creating AI DM's that can run adaptive games, and AI Players that can respond like real people. I'd train the AI's on the most popular D&D streams, and further use AI to generate 3D models of charismatic D&D players. I'd then have the AI DM's run games for the AI Players, all of it rendered in 3D. It would obviously become the most popular D&D stream in history. Note that I would never release these AI DM's or Players for other people to use.

The next step would be to train an AI on my own decisions as the owner of WotC. Slowly I'd start allowing the AI to attend my meetings, write my emails, and make decisions for the company. Soon I'll be in a cabin in the mountains, chopping wood and enjoying the sunset, knowing my AI clone is running everything for me.

Then, I'd train an AI to reproduce my life as an isolated woodsman, so when my other AI's go rogue and start trying to take over the world, the CIA finds my fake AI robot self and arrests him, instead of finding me. The real me will be in an even more isolated cabin on an even more isolated beach drinking rum out of a coconut shell.

Or will that even be the real me???