Take it private.
Top down: root out and end any and all rent seeking behaviors, and give a good recommendation and the required severance package to everyone whose job only exists bc the company was publicly traded.
All top brass would probably be gone within a few years. The company is no longer an investment portfolio profit generator. Its purpose is to provide high quality goods and service to the gaming and fiction fandom communities, and I want the leadership that rebuilds the company with me to be diverse. And young, frankly.
That done:
Put together a magic team that is really in love with the game itself, not collectors.
I want very few things from the franchise specifically, and other than those I’d let the team run it. Just give me new Gate Watch fiction, and a CRPG. (Well, work with the digital gaming team on that)
For the D&D team:
Put Artificer in the PHB and the SRD, put playable Gnolls in something, and sidekick classes in the DMG and SRD, bc I can.
Ask the team to look into reworking base classes to a model of “get your stuff by level 12, and upgrade or reduce restrictions from there on”, without making the classes incompatible with existing subclasses.
Rebuild the fiction side of D&D, put all published settings on DMsGuild, and allow fiction on DMsGuild. Work toward bringing DMsGuild in house and integrating with DDB. If someone wants to put thier alternate sorcerer class for sale on our platform, and puts in the work to code it up, I see no reason it shouldn’t allow the purchaser to then use our CB to make a character with it.
Put together a diverse lore and settings team that works closely with the game design team, and give them the task of collating all the lore of 4e, and making it coherent, and then filling in the blanks. The resulting setting will be put into the Creative Commons, alongside being released as a print product at a cheap price point along with the basic rules, and some other odds and ends, probably in paperback format like 4e Essentials.
Other than that I’d take very little direct hand in the actual design of dnd, as much as I’d want to. Instead I’d have a few directives, and manage the teams.
Basically, the digital team would build DDB into a combination of what demiplane is doing and DMsGuild and HeroForge, all connected by a VTT that is as mod friendly as we can make it. Preferably at least Skyrim level mod-friendly, but Dragon Age Origins level or better if possible. From there, just gotta trust the community to do its thing.
The D&D CC ecosystem would expand to put the very basics of every medium into the open public space, that is stuff like basic VTT assets, whatever random music they’ve licensed over the years like the Spell Jams album, basically expand the OGL ecosystem to everywhere D&D lives, and rebuild the D&D product line as the backbone of a folk tradition. Oh and SRDs of every edition.
How would we make money?
By continuing to make good products for D&D, by expanding into CRPGs seriously, by seeking out and developing diverse creative talent and letting them make great stuff for us, and by providing a platform that is versatile and feature rich on the end user side and the publisher side, with an easy to use marketplace for content, vtt mods, etc, where a new small publisher can get help finding editors and artists and whatever else they need, by making our resources community resources.
Not all of which even has to be monetized. A healthy mod community is why Skyrim still sells and was able to put out so many special editions over the years. The mantra would be, “A thriving third party community sells core books.”
Eventually I’d spin off teams to work on new games, one of which would be my own game, and work with those teams to eventually let them buy their way out from under the wings of wotc, if that seems like a healthy move for what they’re making.
Grow the industry.
If the whole endeavor fails?
Every single bit of data that makes up the D&D IP goes into a share-alike CC, unless an item’s creator wants to buy it for what they can afford, like if Baker wanted to own Eberron.
Well, assuming we didn’t get the settings into the hands of thier creators before then.
Non-D&D properties would be up to the teams that made them.
