There’s is a lot of heated talk about the Dungeons & Dragons the brand.

I have thoughts. These thoughts are about the response I am seeing more than what WotC is doing.

Why are you surprised?

I am surprised that people are surprised that a publicly traded corporation is acting like a publicly traded corporation.

Hasbro is going to squeeze every bit of juice they can out of the brand. That’s what big corporations do. It is their purpose.

Hasbro brought in two Microsoft executives this year. The CEO of WotC and the VP in charge of Dungeons & Dragons. That alone should have told you what they were up to.

Be careful what you wish for.

WotC’s new edition will play out like most edition shifts. Most groups will move to the new edition. Quite a few will see no need to switch over and keep playing what they are already playing. Some will quit the hobby all together.

A few will try a different game.

I’ve seen commentators hopeful that there will be a considerable number of 5E players heading for the Old School Renaissance, and other indie RPGs.

I am all for open minded people trying OSR games because it looks like something they would enjoy.

I DO NOT want gamers who decide to play classic adventure games purely because they dislike WotC. They will likely cause more trouble than good.

What you might get is a bunch of very enthusiastic players showing up trying to make old school gaming more like new school gaming. There are all these problems with old school play and if you all would stop being so damn backward and I don’t understand why you insist on this pulp fantasy aesthetic, and character death is such an uncreative way to punish players and if you weren’t so antagonistic to collaborative storytelling…

That nonsense doesn’t affect what I do at my table but it does affect another hobby of mine; Talking about games online. It’s a hobby all it’s own. For those of us who participate in the talking about hobby games hobby, it gets annoying to have to direct “know it all” newbs to blog posts from ten years ago when they could have taken a minute to do a search.

Speculations about the OGL.

There is fiery conversation following the statement from WotC about the 1.1 OGL.

Most of the noise is whining from people who have made themselves serfs. They decided to make their income dependent on WotC and its feudal demesne, DM’s Guild.

Didn’t that agreement alert you to the sort of decisions WotC/Hasbro might make in the future?

If this OGL change is as bad as these people think it is, (I doubt it) then some folks are going to heading back to their barista jobs and WotC will barely notice.

Much of the commentary looks something like, “The Community will never tolerate that!” or “WotC doesn’t understand The Community!”

What do you mean by “The Community?” Certainly not everyone that plays 5E. Most of the people in that “community” are completely oblivious to the OGL and will pay almost no attention to any changes. “The Community” the #openDnD Twitterers are talking about is the tiny number of creators and people who prefer more creative and interesting work then the bland offerings of WotC.

The belief is that if WotC changes the OGL so that it is not worth the effort for small timers to make 3rd party products, creators will stop making them. “The Community” will be angry because the small fry are SOOO important to 5E gaming. The fans will go play a different game and the system will fail like 4E did. The ego is stunning.

5E is not 4E. It’s a better product than 4E and there are way too many people who’ve invested in it to abandon it. One D&D is going to be mechanically the same with some changes around the margins. Casual gamers (the majority of people playing 5E) hate to switch games and learn new systems. Once someone gets into the D&D system they rarely try something else. That’s why so many smaller game companies make 5E compatible versions of their products.

You might sell 1,000 copies of your Swords & Wizardry campaign if you’re lucky. With some good marketing you can sell 5,000 if you make it for 5E. Compared to what WotC sells, that’s almost nothing. For a small publisher, that’s a lot of money and can mean a year’s rent in a single Kickstarter.

The danger of selling to a gaming community built for the mass market is that the mass market doesn’t give a shit about your bespoke, boutique, auteur product. WotC sells hundreds of thousands of copies of even the most dogshit products they publish and a successful small timer sells a few hundred. Most products on DMs Guild probably don’t sell more than double digit numbers.

A few 3rd party publishers sell enough that they’ll have to give up some more money to WotC. They won’t abandon WotC or One D&D. They can’t. It’s their entire livelihood. Do you figure Matt Mercer is going to change over to Runequest?

Do you think Colville is going to give up YouTube revenue he’ll lose by leaving D&D because someone he’s never heard of has to go back to cleaning hotel rooms?

I’m more sympathetic to arguments like the one Rob Conley posted. He has a lot experience with OGL and he has honest desire for the game to remain as open as possible. It’s worth a read.

That’s all I have to say about that.

It will be interesting to see if WotC will destroy customer goodwill with some of their attempts to cash in on the “recurring revenue environment” as Ms. Williams put it during the investor call.

I predict there will be a lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth to come over the next year and half.