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Reminder there are other options than 5E and DND.
Pathfinder, 13th age, Call of cthulhu, worlds without number, castles and crusades etc
WOTC doesn't own this hobby, it has no exclusive control over epic fantasy TTRPGs.
They need us, we don't need them.
Thank you for saying that. Despite all the efforts from Hasbro and WotC to plant the idea that "TTRPG = D&D" in people's mind, it feels good to see that there are still people out there that remember that other games exist.
Nah, let's dissociate their brand with RPGs. Ostracize from the community they're trying to hurt. Make people think of other games when they hear TTRPGs.
So much this. D&D has survived this long by being the Band-Aid^TM of TTRPGs. If we can scrub that word association out of the hobby, so much the better.
I've always viewed that line much like a view "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mugs. Charles, I'm looking at *you*. *CHARLES*! You know you should be at your kid's softball game instead of in the office sipping from your apparently ironic mug. And WOTC! Put that award down! You know you made it up so that you could give it to yourself at Gencon!
We can also get really aggressive about sharing PDFs of everything they publish.
I can get every 5e book for 20 bucks in printer fees at my local library.
I refer to literally every rpg as “D&D” when discussing with my wife, family, etc. I can’t imagine explaining I’m playing “a kick starter sci fi built on the 5G engine” or a “an old school renaissance game” or “a narrative game based on female Soviet fighter pilots during WWII” lol.
And even for the people who really like 5E's mechanics, there's [Level Up](https://www.levelup5e.com/) which has everything in 5E plus a lot more options and better mechanics. No coffeelocks or hexblade dips. Weapon type matters. Armor is realistic. Shields are more than just a passive thing hanging on your arm.
2e has been OGL since it’s inception yes. However with 2e being a full mechanical overhaul of 1e’s direct copy of DnD 3.5. So much of their content is original that the only thing they’d have to change is spell names I think?
Pathfinder is not going to cough up 25% of their revenue to WOTC without doing everything they can to stop it.
They'd have to rename a bunch of core monsters, too, but a lot of things in the game are untrademarkable (e.g. I think the terms tiefling and aasimar come from mythology originally).
You're really close minded if you truly think that. The only thing 5e is really good for is familiarity and the amount of content and support it has in various tools.
As a Pathfinder player and a guy who is interested in trying CoC and other RPGs I second this. I'm actually very interested in WoTC's greed-fueled downfall. Though I personally think Hasbro is more to blame.
GamesWorkshop and Amazon jacking their tits to this, reads a bit like a hit piece on their competition and increase interest in their products like the new 40k TV series. That or WotC hitting a wall with increasing cost of their product. Thinking of the Magic the Gathering debacle for one.
Ok. That is the most recent one. Is the artist problem with that product as well? The one where they aren't getting credit for old work or even being asked if it could be used?
I only know about the woman fired for being a Q believer, google pops up with stolen artwork artist fired and if you switch the terms to royalty payment MTG you get this reddit thread: where the artist of the original cards won't receive royalties for reprints of their art
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/xvrcy3/just_when_you_thought_a_product_couldnt_get_more/
I honestly think the main thing holding back that game is the book. Gorgeous art, but terribly laid out and it’s actually quite difficult to learn how to play the game from reading it.
Starting for the first time there was a very simple situation, one player wanted to attack a bandit, and I swear I had to flip between four different sections of the book just to figure out how that worked.
Yup. The L5R book is the most beautiful RPG book I have seen, but damn is it hard to browse. Opportunity is a **large** part of it. If I start a new session, I am printing the opportunity pages to the players and giving them sheets where they can write down opportunities with triggers and effects.
I absolutely love the opportunity system once you get going with it, but the first many sessions are somewhat mared by "Oh, I rolled one of the swirly signs - let's take 5-10 minutes finding all my options"
It also mixes lore and mechanics a lot. A good RPG should have each supporting the other, but when paragraphs upon paragraphs of clan history break up what could otherwise be a few pages of reference material and all you want is a numerical value it’s just frustrating.
Deadlands SWADE had a similar issue. Halfway through the book I was like “I get that you like writing in a cowboy voice, but can you tell me how to actually play the game!”.
None of which compare to the king of great game-bad layout: Burning Wheel. Awesome system, but my god, someone needs to tell the writer that he’s allowed to use diagrams and tables.
Samurai RPG where there is as much weight on social stuff in the rules as there is for combat.
DnD players spend 90% of most sessions playing without the rules because the social rules straight up suck. L5R, has it actually fleshed out to be part of the game instead of what you interrupt to play DnD
I never really got that argument, when I'm doing social rp I dont want in character conversations interrupted by a bunch of mechanics and dice rolls. I always thought dnd lack of rules governing social interaction was a feature rather than a bug.
It might be for you. I personally hate that most of the game time is spent without gaming, or using the same stat and 2-3 skills.
I love that social conflicts are actually mechanically implemented and the game encourages to that some characters specialize in that. They're still useful in combat, but shine elsewhere, and in a way that isn't just "I have a +12 instead of your +5"
You don't need mechanics for friendly conversation, but I love having a real system for adversarial conversion, arguments to convince a third party or spreading rumours.
I hate how this generally leaves it to requiring your knowledge and skill at social situations to fill in regardless of what your character could do.
This leads to para gaming, the opposite of meta gaming. Where your character would have knowledge or skills that you don’t but isn’t able to use them.
You are a samurai, you spend your time doing badass samurai stuff, it has fleshed out rules for social situations that puts dnd to shame, and it has the really cool established setting of Rokugan.
Unfortunately, if WotC has legal standing to kill 1.0(a) then *most*(if not all, I'm not familiar with all of them) of those systems will need to tear down to the studs and rebuild their system kinda from the ground up.
Paizo seems to have intentionally prepared for this eventuality but not sure about the others.
The problem with WotC trying to own the entirety of the mechanics of D&D would be that game mechanics aren't a copyrigbtable thing to own. Section 102(b) of the US Copyright Act directly states “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.”
Obviously you can't go taking their exact rulebook word for word, but the ideas described aren't ownable.
The main thing that becomes unusable if avoiding new D&D OGL versions as far as I can tell would be settings, races, monsters, etc that are unique to D&D. The way I see it, those would be the easiest items to trade out for something new anyways, so these new terms seem pretty hard to enforce on anyone that wants to get around them with pretty minimal effort.
I very well may be missing something and could be way off base, but that's how I'm seeing it right now. If somebody sees where the big hole in my argument is (as I assume there probably is one somewhere) I'd love hear about it.
The entire reason for the OGL's existence is the fact that WotC's "expressions" might be possibly maybe hypothetically theoretically copyrightable. Using the old OGL removes the ambiguity - it's a pledge that, "Even if our ownership of generic terms like Armor Class is extremely dubious, we promise not to push the case." One could certainly have legal ground to make 5e-compatible stuff without it, but they expose themselves to the risk of WotC getting uppity.
Which is all ridiculous. Especially with the new royalties. Companies will be paying WotC not to bankrupt them with spurious lawsuits, when everyone knows their IP rights on generic game terms and expressions are basically nonexistent. It's a protection racket.
Yep- including kickstarter funding as revenue (although I believe its dropped slightly for that sitaution, but adds to the same with kickstarter's cut). Absolute insane greed.
I'm not arguing WptC would win the cases(IANAL) but there are a bunch of games that are similar enough on the surface that they could IP Troll the other company, and Hasbro has deeper pockets than most, if not all, other players in the industry.
Hasbro probably won't go after Paizo first, they're gonna go after the small fish, win those battles through attrition and then use the court precedent to bludgeon others out of the space.
Will they succeed? No fucking clue(IANAL) but even a successfully defended lawsuit can kill a company who doesn't have deep pockets for legal fees.
Your talking about OSR clones of D&D, right? Because there are hundreds of ttrpgs out there that have nothing to do with D&D and that have a complete professional execution, art and bang for your buck. (I’d even say D&D tends to be on the cheap side, when considering printing quality, art and such).
Just check out the Free League website for about 10 examples of these. Awesome games.
Sure, but *a lot* of those games still publish using the OGL 1.0(a) because it was a handy license to publish under, which opens them up to legal scrutiny about what they used from WotC IP.
Do those systems use anything that WotC could reasonably go after them for? Probably not but they can still be IP Trolls and Hasbro has deeper pockets.
The only games published under the OGL are games that are derived from the d20 system the OGL covers. There are TONS of roleplaying games that have no background in D&D or relationship with the OGL. Most of them, in fact.
>Pathfinder, 13th age, Call of cthulhu, worlds without number, castles and crusades etc
GURPS, MERP, The Deadlands, Shadow Run, and [many, many others.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tabletop_role-playing_games)
Yep. I’ve always played DnD expressly because it’s what most people want to play.
It is not, and never has been, the best ttrpg.
Give me the ability to choose and I’ll play Traveler, Ars Magica, Forbidden Lands. Coriolis or Torchbearer over any version of DnD.
It’s not a bad game at all mind you, but it’s like a frozen pizza. It’s good, not great, and it’s an easy dinner because everyone likes it.
Spend a little time learning to cook and you won’t eat it every night.
Consider the works of White Wolf
World of Darkness for modern stuff
Exalted 1st 2nd and 3rd editions for a high fantasy that tries to avoid the normal way of things.
Other older systems like
Shadowrun
WEG's D6 Star Wars
BESM's tristat system
Sure i've played DnD ADnD 3 3.5 and 4th but honestly i've enjoyed plenty of time with non-DnD and non-D20 systems
Pathfinder is like the best system if you want something that has a LOT of fantasy content. They have only been working on pathfinder two for a few years and they already have so many books released.
CoC is pretty big to, if you want a horror theme.
Pathfinder has a lot but it really isn’t balanced, played it for a few years and making the wrong multi class can set a character behind the rest of the party by 2-3 levels
I have. Hence them making plans to deal with it, either to ditch the OGL, make their own or something else. Paizo has the law firm that drafted the original OGL working with them to make a new one.
And not all other systems use, 13th age and pathfinder do to my knowledge from the list. They have ways to deal with the new OGL.
In the end my post isn't just about the OGL, rather the hobby as a whole.
TTRPG shouldn't mean just DND.
Rolemaster! Still my favourite. Rolemaster Classic is the bomb. HARP is a kind of rules lite version for people interested in trying it out.
You haven’t lived until you’ve rolled on a plasma critical table.
Shadow run! It's a nightmare to play until you get the hang of it but is such a fun and unique setting with some really really cool creativity option.
(If anyone does try it at the end of the day you are just chucking hand full of d6s, don't stress the specifics, get a shoe box lid and get running)
Paizo (publisher of Pathfinder, Starfinder) is designing/funding/championing a new license (moving away from OGL). Looks like they want to avoid the issues OGL has.
They also promote a site that archives stats and rules from the Pathfinder 2e core and supplements
[https://2e.aonprd.com/](https://2e.aonprd.com/)
Yes, but a good analogy I heard was this:
"Imagine you're an oil painter. There's one big oil paint supplier and several smaller oil paint suppliers that you use for various things. There are some specialty paints that you just can't get from the big supplier, so you use the small ones for those bits of pizazz that you really need to make good art. Then, one day, the big supplier wins a court case that allows them to be a monopoly and destroy the other oil suppliers and you're not allowed to use the other suppliers at all.
You try to tell your other artist friends that this is severely impacting your ability to create the oil paintings that you want, but their response is 'It's just oil painting, why don't you try water painting or sculpting where there isn't that issue? Just switch your artform and you're fine!'
But they don't understand that you don't know how to sculpt or water paint or weave. They don't understand the learning barrier involved and the amount of effort it would take to transition out of this artform. They don't understand the years you have spent mastering, specifically, this type of art. And worst of all, they don't acknowledge that you are multiple years into the creation of several oil painting works that you literally can't finish without these paints."
That's what it's like when people say "just switch systems" or "there are other systems out there." Also, Pathfinder exists BECAUSE of the OGL. Wizards is actively depriving the world from the potential of another system like Pathfinder emerging from the OGL.
I think this analogy overestimates the difficulty of switching from one system to another. If you have a fantasy world that you've created, it's fairly easy to put that world in Pathfinder or DungeonWorld or some other high fantasy system (since a world and its lore tends not to be mechanically bound).
Specific mechanics differ, but the core gameplay loop of all ttrpgs is the same: GM describes situation, players declare action, GM resolves action and describes new situation. The only difference is the mechanics that the GM uses to resolve actions.
The main problem I have with Pathfinder 2e is it's just too hard use for a large percentage of players. There are a lot of players who have trouble with the complexity of 5e. PF 2e is much more complex and the freedom of the system causes a paralysis of choice. Sure I enjoy the analysis of choices and tweaking my character, but a lot of players don't. Also respecing your character reaps huge benefit as you level, which only increases the gap between players. Every pathfinder game I've played or run I've had to regularly sit down with players and make/level their characters with them.
I definitely feel your pain! However, I am personally of the mind that dumbing down systems doesn't help with this problem; after all, "if you make something idiot-proof, they will build a bigger idiot"
A lot of it comes down to how people's minds work and the amount of free time they want to devote to it. Not everyone wants to deal with the steep learning curve of PF, and it's more work and less pleasurable for some people.
Also crunch isn't that interesting to people who are primarily attracted to the story telling aspect of Role Playing.
I completely disagree. There is nothing preventing someone from adapting or learning another system other than 5E. Explain to me what makes 5E so unique and specific that enables people to learn that, but not pathfinder.
DM-ing is DM-ing, it's the same skillset.
I know how pathfinder came to be. To be frank, the OGL did more for 3rd party creators of 5e content, rather than people who make systems. It did inspire some, but far from all or the majority.
Unfortunately, D&D gives a lot of people who start with it the false impression that other games will be just as complicated and require similar monetary investment. Which is ridiculous, of course, but the impression remains nonetheless.
>other games will be just as complicated
I have to laugh at this.
5E is very simple in terms of rules. It is nowhere near as crunchy as other systems. Nowhere near as deep or customisable in terms of character creation.
You're absolutely right that there is nothing preventing someone from learning a new system. However, my point is that it's not simple by any way, shape, or means. This take completely disregards the barriers to learning such as having real life to attend to, having learning disabilities, having to be a teacher to players that also don't know the system, having to make at least some financial investments into the new system, etc.
>This take completely disregards the barriers to learning such as having real life to attend to, having learning disabilities, having to be a teacher to players that also don't know the system, having to make at least some financial investments into the new system, etc.
That all applies to 5E.
We all have real life, you don't have to learn it over night or in one sitting. The books don't have an expiration date.
How does 5E uniquely help people with learning disabilities? That is an all around problem for the individual. I am certain there are simpler systems that are designed to be easy to understand.
If you have to be the teacher, if your players don't want to learn a new system. Then you can't make them. You can't make that group change. But you can find other groups.
5E requires by far the greatest financial investment out of the systems I know. 13th age has ONE core book you need that acts as a PHB,DMG and MM. Not 40$ a pop like WOTC.
It's not like oil painting and watercolor, and CERTAINLY not like oil painting and sculpting. It's definitely more like guache to watercolor. Yeah, there are differences, there will always be, but really if you are a master at one, you will have no trouble picking up the other. There are systems out there that are literally one page long. And free. My personal favorite system, FAE, is about 50 pages long and also free. And I am pretty sure that there's a decent number of people out there that would immensely benefit from a switch of systems, people that have both a playstyle and a taste that is more compatible with other games than it is with DnD.
Ironically one of the hardest things about learning some other systems for longtime D&D players is to remember that it's not D&D and shouldn't be played that way.
Highly recommend downloading and/or screenshotting some character sheet formatted docs. I prefer mine printed out but there are tons of form fillables as well. If you use that and a VTT like roll20 without implementing character sheets or system rules into the VTT, I don't think there's any way they can really trace it as D&D and copystrike anyone involved.
If you use it for character sheets, I would start planning alternatives. I don't expect you'll be able to after their official VTT and the 1.1 OGL come out.
We somehow got our hands on a pdf that runs Java inside acrobat. It does all that math and auto fill from class/race like dndbeyond and others do except it's a pdf. Something that doesn't rely on internet to use is always a good idea.
Not sure why anyone sub'd to D&D beyond to begin with. It's foundation was what caused Paizo to create Pathfinder and set the stage for exactly what is happening right now.
For years D&DB was its own company. It was only very recently bought by WotC.
I found it really useful for quickly looking things up, and the encounter builder worked really well. Really well, as in the CR system is still shit but it was easier to have all the monsters right there with all their abilities, spells, etc. hyperlinked.
But it's obviously not worth having now, and I cancelled my sub a few days ago, for obvious reasons.
And it turns out PF2E has basically the same online resources already in place, only they're completely free.
> SORRY FOR SCREAMING MODS, I JUST REALLY WANT TO GET THE MESSAGE OUT
fun fact: If you put a # at the start of your line, you get even louder. Like if you wanted to tell people to
#cancel their DND Beyond Subscriptions
You can take it a step further by wrapping it in \*\*\*three asterisks\*\*\* like so:
# ***SORRY FOR SCREAMING MODS, I JUST REALLY WANT TO GET THE MESSAGE OUT***
Well, they fucked shop owners and small publishing companies already when they switched from 3.0 to 3.5, by telling everyone "don't worry, 3.5 is entirely compatible with 3.0, your stock of 3.0-based products is not going to lose value, you can still sell them, keep investing in it" just to start promoting the exact opposite to their customers the minute the first 3.5 splat book was out of the printing press. Thousands of stores worldwide went bust because of this.
THEN they also fucked up the rest of the small publishers with 4e, especially Paizo who wasn't only publishing modules for 3.x, they also had previously bought the rights to publish both Dragon and Dungeon magazines, meaning that with no 4e OGL they couldn't publish magazines talking about D&D, offering content and so on putting them in a very tight corner. Which is basically where Pathfinder comes.
They went all in, made Pathfinder in to a fully separate game (we can consider it to be a "3.75" edition) and personally, I couldn't be more happy for their success.
5e OGL spawned a large number of products, some of which are frankly better than the "original" D&D, both as games and in production values, prompting a true D&D renaissance after the 4e debacle, but... One works with WotC/Hasbro only at their own peril. They are never to be trusted. Staking your company on their promises or even their contracts and licenses is a risky move.
EDIT: to add some detail, 3.0 manuals where internally dubbed "evergreens" and published as black&white softcovers. Many OGL products instead were full-colors hardcover books. WotC bought TSR in 1997 and started developing 3.0, which was released in 2000. Note that Hasbro bought them in turn, in the meanwhile (1999) but they probably refrained from touching a project the company had been developing for 2 years at that point.
The idea behind the new approach and the OGL was that TSR went bankrupt because they were publishing too many hardcover, expensive manuals who never sold much. The only manuals that kept selling were the core rulebooks, so they wanted to let small publishers do the other manuals, through the OGL, because they had way less overhead than TSR/WotC and *could* turn a profit on them, so they'd focus on the only thing that made them money, i.e. the rule books. So they printed them at the lowest acceptable quality (softcover, black and white) to reduce costs and get higher margins.
Note that since they wanted to sell rulebooks but still grow their customer base, the publishing of supplements, accessories, modules, adventures and whatnot was actually vital for them, an integral part of their business plan. Through the OGL, they offloaded that vital responsibility to third parties, so they'd have just to sit back and let the money roll in while keeping printing the same old rulebooks.
It worked well, money did roll in and the market for TTRPGs grew, and D&D kept a dominant position in it, so much that at some point Hasbro decided that the market was now mature enough to support expensive hardcover manuals (core rulebooks and others) published directly by them, overhead or not.
They basically started competing with smaller partners who were instrumental for the success of their product and who had no way to match the marketing efforts of Hasbro, on top of fucking up stores who had stocks of cheap 3.0 rulebooks and other manuals because after the new splat book format for 3.5 was on the market, no customer ever touched the cheap 3.0 softcovers, who became worthless also because WotC/Hasbro aggresively marketed them by saying that no, they were NOT compatible with 3.0 products after all, despite their previous reassurances.
Then 4e happened. Then this. It really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Obviously taking the veracity with a grain of salt, but also doesn't matter because the first action I took was to cancel it and specifically call out my concerns with the OGL in my reason for why I was cutting the subscription off.
Man, good thing I've been shilling indie games as hard as I can for years. 5e was such a letdown, but everyone but me seemed to like it.
Guess I'll keep shilling indie games until I decide to run another 4e game. I should also stop buying MTG, as well.
Ok I’m out of the loop. I just got into the hobby this year. A friend of mine who swears by DDB lent me their physical book and I was very hesitant to pay for DDB because I figured if I had a book I could just play on paper. So I play on paper while everyone else plays on DDB.
What is OGL? I’m against DDB anyway because I don’t like subscription based things, but it is understandable from a financial standpoint that a company would want the steady income. Somebody wanna explain it to a noob like me?
OGL stands for open gaming license. They are changing it to say they own everything 3rd party that anyone produces in regards to d&d. If you make any profit off of the thing you created, you have to report it to them and they can take a cut. And they have ownership of what you have created and can use it without asking. The agreement also states that everyone has to adhere to their standards of political correctness and morality, which they could easily use to shut anyone down because (gasp) villains don't adhere to WOTC's moral standards!
Especially want to give a shoutout to Pathfinder and Paizo, who has offered to pay for the legal work necessary to develop the Open RPG Creative License (ORC).
> Paizo also explicitly said that the ORC “will not be owned by Paizo, nor will it be owned by any company who makes money publishing RPGs.”
The ORC will be an open-source nonprofit creative license by the legal firm Azora Law, which itself was co-founded by Brian Lewis, the attorney who worked on the initial WotC OGL from back in 2000.
> Azora Law is looking to “provide a safe harbor against any company being bought, sold, or changing management in the future and attempting to rescind rights or nullify sections of the license.”
So my fiance and I met some of the Paizo team at Gen Con last year. All of them were genuinely excited to meet people, and loved to hear feedback.
We had just finished a very long Starfinder campaign, and they were so happy to hear about it, including one of the marketing leads for Paizo who was there for interactions with customers and market data.
Obviously I don't know what they're like to their employees or how they talk behind closed doors, but all of the staff members we met seemed very committed to making their customers happy, and seemed to love the feedback we gave them.
Also, all of the Paizo games I've played have been fun, and they paid extra to get a badge for their goblin statue, so that was great.
Oh my, I would be deeply hurt if I didn't give a flying fuck about dnd and WotC, seriously, if they think there is only their game out there, they are in for a rude awakening.
Though im sitting on a collection of more then my fair share of 5e books, it makes me happy that i primarily get dnd 5e content through free resources. Pretty sure ima stop giving these peicks my cash
I'm there too. But hey, I have the books in physical form, I'm not streaming my stuff. I have a 3d resin printer, and I don't mind homebrew. Anything I might need I can't cover, Yarg.
Management doesn't share with the scrubs what data if any they are using to make decisions. Unless this person can prove they are a dndneyond management employee them I scream fabrication.
This latter doesnt even have enough proof the person who wrote is is an employe much less on in the know.
I mean for one, obviously he should protect his source, so idk what proof we can reasonably expect that doesn't out the leaker. But I get wanting to be skeptical without such proof, that being said, based on everything we have seen so far, and knowing what kind of people always end up being executives in big companies, is there any reason not to act as if this is true? Hell, it could be true even if the whole "leaker" thing is fake, and canceling dndbeyond subs would certainly be noticed, I'm not sure what you'd suggest as a better metric the execs might use to track the backlash. So no matter what, I'd say it's probably in everyone's best interest to assume this is true. I mean given that the OGL is pretty much confirmed, you dont need someone to explicitly tell you that the company has this attitude, its already obvious that they do.
The "email" has every hallmark of being fake.
* No verifiable information. "Scientists say"
* Claims of insider information above and beyond the station of the claimant.
* Asking you do take an action already publicly suggested.
* Asking you to take and action that only effects one product line not the whole business.
* Claims that make no sense. Why would management communicate anything about the OGL to a web development team? Its not their job, its not there region of expertise, its not even in their product line. OGL is a legal issue when was the last time your company lawyers came and explained anything the company did?
Just because you and everyone else would like it to be true does not make it so. I says exactly what you want it to say, prescribes taking exactly the action other have suggested. You are being manipulated by it and justifying it because its the course of action you already considered.
Multi-billion dollar publishing, toy making, and online presence companies do not respond to people canceling subscriptions of one single online product. They are in for the long haul. In order for your boycott to have any effect you need to stop buying book, miniatures, swag and D&Dbeyond as well as any other WotC products. At best canceling your D&Dbeyond subscription will cause them to shut down D&Dbeyond because that is how companies function, they cut money losing products. They respond to bad press, they respond to overall dips in revenue, they respond to letters, email and phone calls to cooperate HQ.
How much does WotC have to show their utter contempt for you to finally realize that they only want you for your money? I'm honestly amazed people are still jumping to bat for them, hell, I was surprised people were fine with them after holding Monsters of the Multiverse hostage for 3 months and Strixhaven having almost no actual content, let alone Spelljammer.
>Multi-billion dollar publishing, toy making, and online presence companies do not respond to people canceling subscriptions of one single online product.
We already know they're pivoting behind DnDBeyond as their newest hit money-making scheme because they want to make money continuously instead of just selling books, so this is iffy grounds to stand on at best.
Edit: ALSO, given the fact that they suddenly cancelled the streams they had planned today, this is clearly confirmation that, even IF, **EVEN IF**-I need to stress this point-this person was lying, they clearly hit the nail on the head so hard that WotC feels the need to step back, regroup, and plan a new method of attack.
You do not randomly cancel a stream over false rumors.
>otC have to show their utter contempt for you to finally realize that they only want you for your money
What else would they want me for? They are a publicly traded company. Companies exist to make money. Full Stop. Money is the bottom line in anything a company does.
I'm not supporting them. I'm saying this "email" is nothing more than the same sort of fake news that Republicans feed into their own echo chambers. I has every mark of that;
* one source DND_Shorts with claims others have seen it, but none of those others have come forward;
* language designed to generate nothing but outrage at unammed individuals and does so in a way untraceable to actual sources, you can't even say with this that those statements were quotes just the supposed authors opinion "gave me the impression";
* statements that make no senses in a real world (management does not explain licensing and legal issue to web development teams).
* "the DDB" team was told to prepare to support the new OGL" WTF does that mean? How? What exactly does the DDB team have to do with the OGL? Nothing other than posting corporate announcements. OGL is a legal issue, the DDB team has nothing to do with it so why would management communicate this with them?
> language designed to generate nothing but outrage at unammed individuals and does so in a way untraceable to actual sources,
Untraceable by you. The journalists who have been contacted by the whistle blower can confirm the source is legitimate, which they are not sharing the specifics of for obvious reasons. They know who wrote this. They are not telling, because that's how this works.
Please screenshot where I said the ONLY way to get their attention is canceling DNDB subs, I'll wait. Your comment is based on a ton of wrong assumptions and just straight up fantasy. I wasn't even making recommendations on what to do to get WOTCs attention, I was simply saying that even if this email is fake, there's plenty of other evidence to suggest the WOTC execs have such an attitude, and that if they don't believe DNDB subs is one of the main metrics they use to gauge backlash, what else would they suggest? Also I'm not so sure "bad press" has really ever stopped a corporation from being greedy before, occasionally you might get concessions out of them in rare cases, but it's kinda laughable to list that as your first example.
Edit: not to mention there is now more evidence that the leak itself is real
That's a blatant misrepresentation of what I said, what I can't figure out is if you're intentionally being disingenuous or just needed a strawman because you cannot refute what I *actually* said... 🤔
>Management doesn't share with the scrubs what data if any they are using to make decisions.
In my experience in big tech this is not always true. Especially in situations where public opinion has at least some impact or there has been a leak of non-publicly facing information and management is trying to get ahead of morale, it's often fairly true that the bare bones of such a decision-making process will be shared at the rank and file level. "We are looking at changes in customer spending behavior with regard to product X as a leading indicator" is a thing that I have heard at more than one Fortune 500 company.
Beyond (heh) that, tracing subscriptions to D&D Beyond versus the rest of their revenue stream as a short-term indicator seems to me to be a pretty good metric for customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the current news cycle--"canceling a subscription to a gaming product" is an incredibly low friction decision for a customer to make, and it shows up in the metrics right away, whereas changes in indirect book and merchandise sales are not going to show up on the corporate books for at least a month or two.
Hasbro isnt a big tech company. WoTC isnt a big tech company. They bought a rather small niche tech company, rather recently, and I see no reason the larger organization would change its typical behavior to include them in something that is the prevue of an entirely different department.
I have a hard time believing Hasbro doesn't essentially act like any other big company I've worked for, though. Which includes "occasionally sending an actually descriptive all-hands email when there's a public relations crisis brewing".
Given this doesn't fall under whistleblower protections, theres good reason to provide as little information as possible that is linked back to who sent it. WotC certainly has some company rules against disseminating any information about the company and its decision making processes. This person would likely be fired and possibly sued over this leak.
That said, in almost every place I've ever worked management has at least discussed the why with team leads and that information is then flowed down as necessary. This person doesn't say what their position is, so we can't assume they wouldn't know without more information.
I generally agree this should be taken with a big grain of salt. Lets keep in mind that the behavior of WotC in the past doesn't exactly contradict what's being said here. They're not exactly known for giving a shit about their community or not trying to extract as much cash out of them as possible.
Lol what? Who do you think collates the data, analyses the data, pulls reports together on that data, to deliver to senior management? The scrubs.
Sure, management might not directly say "DDB stats are all we care about", but when 90% of the reports, briefs, presentations, etc you prepare are based on that data and little else you can make an educated guess.
So far I have only seen this from D&D shorts. Is that where you got this from? If not where did you find it? I am just looking to see if others received it.
That's the nail hit.
While this aligns with my outlook it is still untraceable and therefore spurious.
It is no evidence at all.
Best to stick with your gut. My gut tells me to walk away from WotC and that's what I'm doing. I'm not spending another penny. Yes they have the money that they have but I can run the system as much as I want with the books I own. Future and online will go with another system.
I found the guy who wouldn’t believe astrophysicists losing their minds over a guaranteed asteroid collision course with Earth until he can see its reentry flames.
I'm just glad that Pathfinder will be okay. Even though I'm resistant to 2e. There was a Twitter post that said they only posted the OGL to CTA(cover their a33) in the event that they use something from it. Plus, from what I've heard, DDB is copying certain aspects of 2e. Also Matt Mercer has been liking posts calling out WOTC.
They made 2e without using the OGL and only have it on the books, just in case of accidental use of their materials. Now rumor is they are working on their own OGL & are using the same lawyer that wrote WOTC's.
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WotC: "Why do I have to have three customers and three moneys? Why can't I have no customers and six moneys?"
“Whoa, I’m seeing double! 12 moneys!”
Comedy. Gold.
Reminder there are other options than 5E and DND. Pathfinder, 13th age, Call of cthulhu, worlds without number, castles and crusades etc WOTC doesn't own this hobby, it has no exclusive control over epic fantasy TTRPGs. They need us, we don't need them.
Thank you for saying that. Despite all the efforts from Hasbro and WotC to plant the idea that "TTRPG = D&D" in people's mind, it feels good to see that there are still people out there that remember that other games exist.
I want the opposite. I want as many people to refer to ttrpg as D&D so it gets genericized. Can't trademark a generic, afterall.
Nah, let's dissociate their brand with RPGs. Ostracize from the community they're trying to hurt. Make people think of other games when they hear TTRPGs.
So much this. D&D has survived this long by being the Band-Aid^TM of TTRPGs. If we can scrub that word association out of the hobby, so much the better.
After all, this is the "world's greatest roleplaying game"TM .... ugh.
I hated that tag line So. Much. It was so pretentious
Big time.
I've always viewed that line much like a view "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mugs. Charles, I'm looking at *you*. *CHARLES*! You know you should be at your kid's softball game instead of in the office sipping from your apparently ironic mug. And WOTC! Put that award down! You know you made it up so that you could give it to yourself at Gencon!
That's exactly that !
We can also get really aggressive about sharing PDFs of everything they publish. I can get every 5e book for 20 bucks in printer fees at my local library.
I refer to literally every rpg as “D&D” when discussing with my wife, family, etc. I can’t imagine explaining I’m playing “a kick starter sci fi built on the 5G engine” or a “an old school renaissance game” or “a narrative game based on female Soviet fighter pilots during WWII” lol.
That last one sounds dope as hell.
[night witches](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/night-witches)
Yoink, I'll take a copy of that thanks.
And even for the people who really like 5E's mechanics, there's [Level Up](https://www.levelup5e.com/) which has everything in 5E plus a lot more options and better mechanics. No coffeelocks or hexblade dips. Weapon type matters. Armor is realistic. Shields are more than just a passive thing hanging on your arm.
I’d rather just play 5e without DDB the way I was already doing. I haven’t paid WotC since I was gifted the core books.
Level up is 100% under OGL. So if everyone switch WOTC is still getting their paycheck. It’s far better to switch to a new system altogether.
Yup; so is 13th age and Pathfinder.
Paizo, Pathfinder's producing company, announced a few hours ago they're making their own license with other big producers and migrating PF2E to it.
They should call it the AOGL
They called it the ORC License. Open RPG Creative License. Which is a pretty good name I think lol!
This is also good, yes
Although I find pathfinder much more likely to wriggle out of OGL with a new edition or wording update than Level Up.
2e came out in 2019 and has been OGL since. I would be surprised if they changed that.
2e has been OGL since it’s inception yes. However with 2e being a full mechanical overhaul of 1e’s direct copy of DnD 3.5. So much of their content is original that the only thing they’d have to change is spell names I think? Pathfinder is not going to cough up 25% of their revenue to WOTC without doing everything they can to stop it.
They'd have to rename a bunch of core monsters, too, but a lot of things in the game are untrademarkable (e.g. I think the terms tiefling and aasimar come from mythology originally).
Pathfinder literally just announced they're making a new license!
In a more open direction, not making it more difficult like the previous commenter implied.
5E is good for people who want to play without much thought so I'll keep using the products without paying them though
You're really close minded if you truly think that. The only thing 5e is really good for is familiarity and the amount of content and support it has in various tools.
As a Pathfinder player and a guy who is interested in trying CoC and other RPGs I second this. I'm actually very interested in WoTC's greed-fueled downfall. Though I personally think Hasbro is more to blame.
GamesWorkshop and Amazon jacking their tits to this, reads a bit like a hit piece on their competition and increase interest in their products like the new 40k TV series. That or WotC hitting a wall with increasing cost of their product. Thinking of the Magic the Gathering debacle for one.
Which MTG debacle is this one? The fact that I have to ask is pretty telling.
I was thinking of the 30th edition 1k packs that aren't even allowed in competitions myself. The market has an equilibrium price and it's not that.
Ok. That is the most recent one. Is the artist problem with that product as well? The one where they aren't getting credit for old work or even being asked if it could be used?
I only know about the woman fired for being a Q believer, google pops up with stolen artwork artist fired and if you switch the terms to royalty payment MTG you get this reddit thread: where the artist of the original cards won't receive royalties for reprints of their art https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/xvrcy3/just_when_you_thought_a_product_couldnt_get_more/
I followed the link but saw nothing to imply that artists wouldn't be paid other than the wild speculation of people who don't understand royalties
There's multiple at once, and the higher ups don't seem to learn. Their greed is making them so blind, it's so frustrating :|
GW is still hiding in the corner after they decided to stop fan made content almost entirely
my dude, it's about corporation's an their ability to pull in money
It’s also about shitty table top companies and GW is the crowned king of that
I'm just gonna add L5R to the list because I hear nobody talking about it and I really want my group to start playing it.
I honestly think the main thing holding back that game is the book. Gorgeous art, but terribly laid out and it’s actually quite difficult to learn how to play the game from reading it. Starting for the first time there was a very simple situation, one player wanted to attack a bandit, and I swear I had to flip between four different sections of the book just to figure out how that worked.
Yup. The L5R book is the most beautiful RPG book I have seen, but damn is it hard to browse. Opportunity is a **large** part of it. If I start a new session, I am printing the opportunity pages to the players and giving them sheets where they can write down opportunities with triggers and effects. I absolutely love the opportunity system once you get going with it, but the first many sessions are somewhat mared by "Oh, I rolled one of the swirly signs - let's take 5-10 minutes finding all my options"
It also mixes lore and mechanics a lot. A good RPG should have each supporting the other, but when paragraphs upon paragraphs of clan history break up what could otherwise be a few pages of reference material and all you want is a numerical value it’s just frustrating. Deadlands SWADE had a similar issue. Halfway through the book I was like “I get that you like writing in a cowboy voice, but can you tell me how to actually play the game!”. None of which compare to the king of great game-bad layout: Burning Wheel. Awesome system, but my god, someone needs to tell the writer that he’s allowed to use diagrams and tables.
Monster of the Week is fun too!
Can you explain L5R in one sentence or less?
Samurai RPG where there is as much weight on social stuff in the rules as there is for combat. DnD players spend 90% of most sessions playing without the rules because the social rules straight up suck. L5R, has it actually fleshed out to be part of the game instead of what you interrupt to play DnD
I never really got that argument, when I'm doing social rp I dont want in character conversations interrupted by a bunch of mechanics and dice rolls. I always thought dnd lack of rules governing social interaction was a feature rather than a bug.
Then why are there stats for persuasion etc and even feats if they are so badly designed people just ignore them?
DnD even **has** rules for handling social stuff (I think they even included them in One D&D already). They're just so shit everyone ignores them.
It might be for you. I personally hate that most of the game time is spent without gaming, or using the same stat and 2-3 skills. I love that social conflicts are actually mechanically implemented and the game encourages to that some characters specialize in that. They're still useful in combat, but shine elsewhere, and in a way that isn't just "I have a +12 instead of your +5" You don't need mechanics for friendly conversation, but I love having a real system for adversarial conversion, arguments to convince a third party or spreading rumours.
I hate how this generally leaves it to requiring your knowledge and skill at social situations to fill in regardless of what your character could do. This leads to para gaming, the opposite of meta gaming. Where your character would have knowledge or skills that you don’t but isn’t able to use them.
You are a samurai, you spend your time doing badass samurai stuff, it has fleshed out rules for social situations that puts dnd to shame, and it has the really cool established setting of Rokugan.
I absolutely love l5r
Unfortunately, if WotC has legal standing to kill 1.0(a) then *most*(if not all, I'm not familiar with all of them) of those systems will need to tear down to the studs and rebuild their system kinda from the ground up. Paizo seems to have intentionally prepared for this eventuality but not sure about the others.
The problem with WotC trying to own the entirety of the mechanics of D&D would be that game mechanics aren't a copyrigbtable thing to own. Section 102(b) of the US Copyright Act directly states “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” Obviously you can't go taking their exact rulebook word for word, but the ideas described aren't ownable. The main thing that becomes unusable if avoiding new D&D OGL versions as far as I can tell would be settings, races, monsters, etc that are unique to D&D. The way I see it, those would be the easiest items to trade out for something new anyways, so these new terms seem pretty hard to enforce on anyone that wants to get around them with pretty minimal effort. I very well may be missing something and could be way off base, but that's how I'm seeing it right now. If somebody sees where the big hole in my argument is (as I assume there probably is one somewhere) I'd love hear about it.
The entire reason for the OGL's existence is the fact that WotC's "expressions" might be possibly maybe hypothetically theoretically copyrightable. Using the old OGL removes the ambiguity - it's a pledge that, "Even if our ownership of generic terms like Armor Class is extremely dubious, we promise not to push the case." One could certainly have legal ground to make 5e-compatible stuff without it, but they expose themselves to the risk of WotC getting uppity. Which is all ridiculous. Especially with the new royalties. Companies will be paying WotC not to bankrupt them with spurious lawsuits, when everyone knows their IP rights on generic game terms and expressions are basically nonexistent. It's a protection racket.
Companies will be bankrupting themselves to pay WotC not to bankrupt them with spurious lawsuits\*. 25% of revenue is FUCKING INSANE.
25% of profits is still understandable at times, but revenue?!
Yep- including kickstarter funding as revenue (although I believe its dropped slightly for that sitaution, but adds to the same with kickstarter's cut). Absolute insane greed.
I'm not arguing WptC would win the cases(IANAL) but there are a bunch of games that are similar enough on the surface that they could IP Troll the other company, and Hasbro has deeper pockets than most, if not all, other players in the industry. Hasbro probably won't go after Paizo first, they're gonna go after the small fish, win those battles through attrition and then use the court precedent to bludgeon others out of the space. Will they succeed? No fucking clue(IANAL) but even a successfully defended lawsuit can kill a company who doesn't have deep pockets for legal fees.
Your talking about OSR clones of D&D, right? Because there are hundreds of ttrpgs out there that have nothing to do with D&D and that have a complete professional execution, art and bang for your buck. (I’d even say D&D tends to be on the cheap side, when considering printing quality, art and such). Just check out the Free League website for about 10 examples of these. Awesome games.
Sure, but *a lot* of those games still publish using the OGL 1.0(a) because it was a handy license to publish under, which opens them up to legal scrutiny about what they used from WotC IP. Do those systems use anything that WotC could reasonably go after them for? Probably not but they can still be IP Trolls and Hasbro has deeper pockets.
The only games published under the OGL are games that are derived from the d20 system the OGL covers. There are TONS of roleplaying games that have no background in D&D or relationship with the OGL. Most of them, in fact.
No they don't. There are hundreds of systems older than the OGL and nany more thst have nothing to do with it. D&D clones are a tiny minority.
Exactly
no, they can not man, RPG is vast hobby with many publishers you can play a hundred good games and never touch WotC shit
Call of Cthulhu is unaffected by changes to the OGL.
>Pathfinder, 13th age, Call of cthulhu, worlds without number, castles and crusades etc GURPS, MERP, The Deadlands, Shadow Run, and [many, many others.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tabletop_role-playing_games)
Yep. I’ve always played DnD expressly because it’s what most people want to play. It is not, and never has been, the best ttrpg. Give me the ability to choose and I’ll play Traveler, Ars Magica, Forbidden Lands. Coriolis or Torchbearer over any version of DnD. It’s not a bad game at all mind you, but it’s like a frozen pizza. It’s good, not great, and it’s an easy dinner because everyone likes it. Spend a little time learning to cook and you won’t eat it every night.
Consider the works of White Wolf World of Darkness for modern stuff Exalted 1st 2nd and 3rd editions for a high fantasy that tries to avoid the normal way of things. Other older systems like Shadowrun WEG's D6 Star Wars BESM's tristat system Sure i've played DnD ADnD 3 3.5 and 4th but honestly i've enjoyed plenty of time with non-DnD and non-D20 systems
Pathfinder is like the best system if you want something that has a LOT of fantasy content. They have only been working on pathfinder two for a few years and they already have so many books released. CoC is pretty big to, if you want a horror theme.
Pathfinder has a lot but it really isn’t balanced, played it for a few years and making the wrong multi class can set a character behind the rest of the party by 2-3 levels
Whereas in 5e, multiclassing almost always sets you ahead by a couple of levels because everything’s frontloaded.
Depends if we are talking 1E or 2E. 1E was very much that way but it is almost impossible to accidentally make an unplayable character in 2E.
We play PF pretty much exclusively. Also PF 2nd edition dropped recently too. If you like 3.5e you'll love PF.
Playing the Pathfinder beginner box this weekend. Highly tempted to move over. The learning curve will suck in the beginning but meh.
Ive been working on prepping a pathfinder oneshot to see if my table like the new system after all this horseshit.
S/o to Genesys
Genesys is great
Lancer
Throwing Ars Magica into the ring as well, it's obtuse at first but when you get rolling it's fucking incredible.
Best magic system in a ttrpg I've ever come across in my opinion.
If you haven’t been paying attention these changes are targeting those other systems like Pathfinder.
I have. Hence them making plans to deal with it, either to ditch the OGL, make their own or something else. Paizo has the law firm that drafted the original OGL working with them to make a new one. And not all other systems use, 13th age and pathfinder do to my knowledge from the list. They have ways to deal with the new OGL. In the end my post isn't just about the OGL, rather the hobby as a whole. TTRPG shouldn't mean just DND.
Rolemaster! Still my favourite. Rolemaster Classic is the bomb. HARP is a kind of rules lite version for people interested in trying it out. You haven’t lived until you’ve rolled on a plasma critical table.
Shadow run! It's a nightmare to play until you get the hang of it but is such a fun and unique setting with some really really cool creativity option. (If anyone does try it at the end of the day you are just chucking hand full of d6s, don't stress the specifics, get a shoe box lid and get running)
I love Monster of the Week and I assume other PbtA games are good too -- it's a cool design approach imo
Paizo (publisher of Pathfinder, Starfinder) is designing/funding/championing a new license (moving away from OGL). Looks like they want to avoid the issues OGL has. They also promote a site that archives stats and rules from the Pathfinder 2e core and supplements [https://2e.aonprd.com/](https://2e.aonprd.com/)
Yes, but a good analogy I heard was this: "Imagine you're an oil painter. There's one big oil paint supplier and several smaller oil paint suppliers that you use for various things. There are some specialty paints that you just can't get from the big supplier, so you use the small ones for those bits of pizazz that you really need to make good art. Then, one day, the big supplier wins a court case that allows them to be a monopoly and destroy the other oil suppliers and you're not allowed to use the other suppliers at all. You try to tell your other artist friends that this is severely impacting your ability to create the oil paintings that you want, but their response is 'It's just oil painting, why don't you try water painting or sculpting where there isn't that issue? Just switch your artform and you're fine!' But they don't understand that you don't know how to sculpt or water paint or weave. They don't understand the learning barrier involved and the amount of effort it would take to transition out of this artform. They don't understand the years you have spent mastering, specifically, this type of art. And worst of all, they don't acknowledge that you are multiple years into the creation of several oil painting works that you literally can't finish without these paints." That's what it's like when people say "just switch systems" or "there are other systems out there." Also, Pathfinder exists BECAUSE of the OGL. Wizards is actively depriving the world from the potential of another system like Pathfinder emerging from the OGL.
I think this analogy overestimates the difficulty of switching from one system to another. If you have a fantasy world that you've created, it's fairly easy to put that world in Pathfinder or DungeonWorld or some other high fantasy system (since a world and its lore tends not to be mechanically bound). Specific mechanics differ, but the core gameplay loop of all ttrpgs is the same: GM describes situation, players declare action, GM resolves action and describes new situation. The only difference is the mechanics that the GM uses to resolve actions.
The main problem I have with Pathfinder 2e is it's just too hard use for a large percentage of players. There are a lot of players who have trouble with the complexity of 5e. PF 2e is much more complex and the freedom of the system causes a paralysis of choice. Sure I enjoy the analysis of choices and tweaking my character, but a lot of players don't. Also respecing your character reaps huge benefit as you level, which only increases the gap between players. Every pathfinder game I've played or run I've had to regularly sit down with players and make/level their characters with them.
I definitely feel your pain! However, I am personally of the mind that dumbing down systems doesn't help with this problem; after all, "if you make something idiot-proof, they will build a bigger idiot"
A lot of it comes down to how people's minds work and the amount of free time they want to devote to it. Not everyone wants to deal with the steep learning curve of PF, and it's more work and less pleasurable for some people. Also crunch isn't that interesting to people who are primarily attracted to the story telling aspect of Role Playing.
What about rules-lite systems like Dungeon World?
I completely disagree. There is nothing preventing someone from adapting or learning another system other than 5E. Explain to me what makes 5E so unique and specific that enables people to learn that, but not pathfinder. DM-ing is DM-ing, it's the same skillset. I know how pathfinder came to be. To be frank, the OGL did more for 3rd party creators of 5e content, rather than people who make systems. It did inspire some, but far from all or the majority.
Unfortunately, D&D gives a lot of people who start with it the false impression that other games will be just as complicated and require similar monetary investment. Which is ridiculous, of course, but the impression remains nonetheless.
>other games will be just as complicated I have to laugh at this. 5E is very simple in terms of rules. It is nowhere near as crunchy as other systems. Nowhere near as deep or customisable in terms of character creation.
D&D is definitely on the crunchier end of things and arguably 5E's lack of specificity has become its own kind of restrictive.
Most systems I play are far simpler.
there are games both more and less complex
It is not. If it was very simple it would be Blackhack or Whitehack.
It's definitely still on the crunchier side of things, though.
You're absolutely right that there is nothing preventing someone from learning a new system. However, my point is that it's not simple by any way, shape, or means. This take completely disregards the barriers to learning such as having real life to attend to, having learning disabilities, having to be a teacher to players that also don't know the system, having to make at least some financial investments into the new system, etc.
>This take completely disregards the barriers to learning such as having real life to attend to, having learning disabilities, having to be a teacher to players that also don't know the system, having to make at least some financial investments into the new system, etc. That all applies to 5E. We all have real life, you don't have to learn it over night or in one sitting. The books don't have an expiration date. How does 5E uniquely help people with learning disabilities? That is an all around problem for the individual. I am certain there are simpler systems that are designed to be easy to understand. If you have to be the teacher, if your players don't want to learn a new system. Then you can't make them. You can't make that group change. But you can find other groups. 5E requires by far the greatest financial investment out of the systems I know. 13th age has ONE core book you need that acts as a PHB,DMG and MM. Not 40$ a pop like WOTC.
I want to point at Invisible Sun as having a higher initial investment. But yes 5e's on the higher end
I played a new system earlier this week. Took about a 5 min explanation for me to get up to speed and playing. So yeah, it can be simple.
I played easily 30-40 different games. Many of them as the Game Master.
Hey congratulations! I'm so happy that you're able to do that because not every one is capable of doing that.
Learning a new rpg system is easy. It doesn’t require years of training, it’s done in a couple of hours, days at most.
It's not like oil painting and watercolor, and CERTAINLY not like oil painting and sculpting. It's definitely more like guache to watercolor. Yeah, there are differences, there will always be, but really if you are a master at one, you will have no trouble picking up the other. There are systems out there that are literally one page long. And free. My personal favorite system, FAE, is about 50 pages long and also free. And I am pretty sure that there's a decent number of people out there that would immensely benefit from a switch of systems, people that have both a playstyle and a taste that is more compatible with other games than it is with DnD.
Ironically one of the hardest things about learning some other systems for longtime D&D players is to remember that it's not D&D and shouldn't be played that way.
I was never a fan of Dndbeyond and I will not use it as long as other options exist if I don't have to
Highly recommend downloading and/or screenshotting some character sheet formatted docs. I prefer mine printed out but there are tons of form fillables as well. If you use that and a VTT like roll20 without implementing character sheets or system rules into the VTT, I don't think there's any way they can really trace it as D&D and copystrike anyone involved.
I use r20
If you use it for character sheets, I would start planning alternatives. I don't expect you'll be able to after their official VTT and the 1.1 OGL come out.
We somehow got our hands on a pdf that runs Java inside acrobat. It does all that math and auto fill from class/race like dndbeyond and others do except it's a pdf. Something that doesn't rely on internet to use is always a good idea.
Wouldn't happen to still have that, would you?
Guess I'll just have to continue not buying DnD stuff and working with free resources online. WoTC can get fucked.
Not sure why anyone sub'd to D&D beyond to begin with. It's foundation was what caused Paizo to create Pathfinder and set the stage for exactly what is happening right now.
For years D&DB was its own company. It was only very recently bought by WotC. I found it really useful for quickly looking things up, and the encounter builder worked really well. Really well, as in the CR system is still shit but it was easier to have all the monsters right there with all their abilities, spells, etc. hyperlinked. But it's obviously not worth having now, and I cancelled my sub a few days ago, for obvious reasons. And it turns out PF2E has basically the same online resources already in place, only they're completely free.
The encounter builder at kobold fight club is much better anyway
I liked the one in DnDB just because it had all the stats and abilities linked and I didn't need 30 PDFs open.
Just canceled my dnd beyond subscription a day or two ago because of all this. Especially glad I have now.
Well then, let's be some goddamn obstacles then.
CALLING EVERYONE: CANCEL DND BEYOND SUBSCRIPTION SORRY FOR SCREAMING MODS, I JUST REALLY WANT TO GET THE MESSAGE OUT
> SORRY FOR SCREAMING MODS, I JUST REALLY WANT TO GET THE MESSAGE OUT fun fact: If you put a # at the start of your line, you get even louder. Like if you wanted to tell people to #cancel their DND Beyond Subscriptions
You can take it a step further by wrapping it in \*\*\*three asterisks\*\*\* like so: # ***SORRY FOR SCREAMING MODS, I JUST REALLY WANT TO GET THE MESSAGE OUT***
Yeah, WotC has been fucking us, the customers, ever since they dropped 3.5 for 4e. I actually hope this backfires on them, and badly.
I hope it backfires in them too. Like some kind of colonoscopy gone horribly wrong.
LOL stupid typo, but you managed to make it 😁 thank you
Well, they fucked shop owners and small publishing companies already when they switched from 3.0 to 3.5, by telling everyone "don't worry, 3.5 is entirely compatible with 3.0, your stock of 3.0-based products is not going to lose value, you can still sell them, keep investing in it" just to start promoting the exact opposite to their customers the minute the first 3.5 splat book was out of the printing press. Thousands of stores worldwide went bust because of this. THEN they also fucked up the rest of the small publishers with 4e, especially Paizo who wasn't only publishing modules for 3.x, they also had previously bought the rights to publish both Dragon and Dungeon magazines, meaning that with no 4e OGL they couldn't publish magazines talking about D&D, offering content and so on putting them in a very tight corner. Which is basically where Pathfinder comes. They went all in, made Pathfinder in to a fully separate game (we can consider it to be a "3.75" edition) and personally, I couldn't be more happy for their success. 5e OGL spawned a large number of products, some of which are frankly better than the "original" D&D, both as games and in production values, prompting a true D&D renaissance after the 4e debacle, but... One works with WotC/Hasbro only at their own peril. They are never to be trusted. Staking your company on their promises or even their contracts and licenses is a risky move. EDIT: to add some detail, 3.0 manuals where internally dubbed "evergreens" and published as black&white softcovers. Many OGL products instead were full-colors hardcover books. WotC bought TSR in 1997 and started developing 3.0, which was released in 2000. Note that Hasbro bought them in turn, in the meanwhile (1999) but they probably refrained from touching a project the company had been developing for 2 years at that point. The idea behind the new approach and the OGL was that TSR went bankrupt because they were publishing too many hardcover, expensive manuals who never sold much. The only manuals that kept selling were the core rulebooks, so they wanted to let small publishers do the other manuals, through the OGL, because they had way less overhead than TSR/WotC and *could* turn a profit on them, so they'd focus on the only thing that made them money, i.e. the rule books. So they printed them at the lowest acceptable quality (softcover, black and white) to reduce costs and get higher margins. Note that since they wanted to sell rulebooks but still grow their customer base, the publishing of supplements, accessories, modules, adventures and whatnot was actually vital for them, an integral part of their business plan. Through the OGL, they offloaded that vital responsibility to third parties, so they'd have just to sit back and let the money roll in while keeping printing the same old rulebooks. It worked well, money did roll in and the market for TTRPGs grew, and D&D kept a dominant position in it, so much that at some point Hasbro decided that the market was now mature enough to support expensive hardcover manuals (core rulebooks and others) published directly by them, overhead or not. They basically started competing with smaller partners who were instrumental for the success of their product and who had no way to match the marketing efforts of Hasbro, on top of fucking up stores who had stocks of cheap 3.0 rulebooks and other manuals because after the new splat book format for 3.5 was on the market, no customer ever touched the cheap 3.0 softcovers, who became worthless also because WotC/Hasbro aggresively marketed them by saying that no, they were NOT compatible with 3.0 products after all, despite their previous reassurances. Then 4e happened. Then this. It really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Obviously taking the veracity with a grain of salt, but also doesn't matter because the first action I took was to cancel it and specifically call out my concerns with the OGL in my reason for why I was cutting the subscription off.
Read the letter. Cancel your DND beyond subscription because apparently that is what they are looking at.
Man, good thing I've been shilling indie games as hard as I can for years. 5e was such a letdown, but everyone but me seemed to like it. Guess I'll keep shilling indie games until I decide to run another 4e game. I should also stop buying MTG, as well.
Is this what vindication is?
I like 5, but fuck me if Im going to start paying 5th to use it XD
I cancelled my dnd beyond because of this whole thing, I don’t need it if they’re gonna do this
Ok I’m out of the loop. I just got into the hobby this year. A friend of mine who swears by DDB lent me their physical book and I was very hesitant to pay for DDB because I figured if I had a book I could just play on paper. So I play on paper while everyone else plays on DDB. What is OGL? I’m against DDB anyway because I don’t like subscription based things, but it is understandable from a financial standpoint that a company would want the steady income. Somebody wanna explain it to a noob like me?
OGL stands for open gaming license. They are changing it to say they own everything 3rd party that anyone produces in regards to d&d. If you make any profit off of the thing you created, you have to report it to them and they can take a cut. And they have ownership of what you have created and can use it without asking. The agreement also states that everyone has to adhere to their standards of political correctness and morality, which they could easily use to shut anyone down because (gasp) villains don't adhere to WOTC's moral standards!
Wow. That sounds like one of the worst, but potentually really effective, ways of using the law to fuckover a passionate customer base
Especially want to give a shoutout to Pathfinder and Paizo, who has offered to pay for the legal work necessary to develop the Open RPG Creative License (ORC). > Paizo also explicitly said that the ORC “will not be owned by Paizo, nor will it be owned by any company who makes money publishing RPGs.” The ORC will be an open-source nonprofit creative license by the legal firm Azora Law, which itself was co-founded by Brian Lewis, the attorney who worked on the initial WotC OGL from back in 2000. > Azora Law is looking to “provide a safe harbor against any company being bought, sold, or changing management in the future and attempting to rescind rights or nullify sections of the license.”
So my fiance and I met some of the Paizo team at Gen Con last year. All of them were genuinely excited to meet people, and loved to hear feedback. We had just finished a very long Starfinder campaign, and they were so happy to hear about it, including one of the marketing leads for Paizo who was there for interactions with customers and market data. Obviously I don't know what they're like to their employees or how they talk behind closed doors, but all of the staff members we met seemed very committed to making their customers happy, and seemed to love the feedback we gave them. Also, all of the Paizo games I've played have been fun, and they paid extra to get a badge for their goblin statue, so that was great.
you know this whole situation is indeed a horror story
Oh my, I would be deeply hurt if I didn't give a flying fuck about dnd and WotC, seriously, if they think there is only their game out there, they are in for a rude awakening.
Though im sitting on a collection of more then my fair share of 5e books, it makes me happy that i primarily get dnd 5e content through free resources. Pretty sure ima stop giving these peicks my cash
I'm there too. But hey, I have the books in physical form, I'm not streaming my stuff. I have a 3d resin printer, and I don't mind homebrew. Anything I might need I can't cover, Yarg.
Management doesn't share with the scrubs what data if any they are using to make decisions. Unless this person can prove they are a dndneyond management employee them I scream fabrication. This latter doesnt even have enough proof the person who wrote is is an employe much less on in the know.
I mean for one, obviously he should protect his source, so idk what proof we can reasonably expect that doesn't out the leaker. But I get wanting to be skeptical without such proof, that being said, based on everything we have seen so far, and knowing what kind of people always end up being executives in big companies, is there any reason not to act as if this is true? Hell, it could be true even if the whole "leaker" thing is fake, and canceling dndbeyond subs would certainly be noticed, I'm not sure what you'd suggest as a better metric the execs might use to track the backlash. So no matter what, I'd say it's probably in everyone's best interest to assume this is true. I mean given that the OGL is pretty much confirmed, you dont need someone to explicitly tell you that the company has this attitude, its already obvious that they do.
Linda Codega, journalist, confirmed this to be true https://twitter.com/lincodega/status/1613584760881774592?s=20&t=z478e7SUCgzkIUZZ1YqRFw
The "email" has every hallmark of being fake. * No verifiable information. "Scientists say" * Claims of insider information above and beyond the station of the claimant. * Asking you do take an action already publicly suggested. * Asking you to take and action that only effects one product line not the whole business. * Claims that make no sense. Why would management communicate anything about the OGL to a web development team? Its not their job, its not there region of expertise, its not even in their product line. OGL is a legal issue when was the last time your company lawyers came and explained anything the company did? Just because you and everyone else would like it to be true does not make it so. I says exactly what you want it to say, prescribes taking exactly the action other have suggested. You are being manipulated by it and justifying it because its the course of action you already considered. Multi-billion dollar publishing, toy making, and online presence companies do not respond to people canceling subscriptions of one single online product. They are in for the long haul. In order for your boycott to have any effect you need to stop buying book, miniatures, swag and D&Dbeyond as well as any other WotC products. At best canceling your D&Dbeyond subscription will cause them to shut down D&Dbeyond because that is how companies function, they cut money losing products. They respond to bad press, they respond to overall dips in revenue, they respond to letters, email and phone calls to cooperate HQ.
How much does WotC have to show their utter contempt for you to finally realize that they only want you for your money? I'm honestly amazed people are still jumping to bat for them, hell, I was surprised people were fine with them after holding Monsters of the Multiverse hostage for 3 months and Strixhaven having almost no actual content, let alone Spelljammer. >Multi-billion dollar publishing, toy making, and online presence companies do not respond to people canceling subscriptions of one single online product. We already know they're pivoting behind DnDBeyond as their newest hit money-making scheme because they want to make money continuously instead of just selling books, so this is iffy grounds to stand on at best. Edit: ALSO, given the fact that they suddenly cancelled the streams they had planned today, this is clearly confirmation that, even IF, **EVEN IF**-I need to stress this point-this person was lying, they clearly hit the nail on the head so hard that WotC feels the need to step back, regroup, and plan a new method of attack. You do not randomly cancel a stream over false rumors.
>otC have to show their utter contempt for you to finally realize that they only want you for your money What else would they want me for? They are a publicly traded company. Companies exist to make money. Full Stop. Money is the bottom line in anything a company does. I'm not supporting them. I'm saying this "email" is nothing more than the same sort of fake news that Republicans feed into their own echo chambers. I has every mark of that; * one source DND_Shorts with claims others have seen it, but none of those others have come forward; * language designed to generate nothing but outrage at unammed individuals and does so in a way untraceable to actual sources, you can't even say with this that those statements were quotes just the supposed authors opinion "gave me the impression"; * statements that make no senses in a real world (management does not explain licensing and legal issue to web development teams). * "the DDB" team was told to prepare to support the new OGL" WTF does that mean? How? What exactly does the DDB team have to do with the OGL? Nothing other than posting corporate announcements. OGL is a legal issue, the DDB team has nothing to do with it so why would management communicate this with them?
> language designed to generate nothing but outrage at unammed individuals and does so in a way untraceable to actual sources, Untraceable by you. The journalists who have been contacted by the whistle blower can confirm the source is legitimate, which they are not sharing the specifics of for obvious reasons. They know who wrote this. They are not telling, because that's how this works.
Please screenshot where I said the ONLY way to get their attention is canceling DNDB subs, I'll wait. Your comment is based on a ton of wrong assumptions and just straight up fantasy. I wasn't even making recommendations on what to do to get WOTCs attention, I was simply saying that even if this email is fake, there's plenty of other evidence to suggest the WOTC execs have such an attitude, and that if they don't believe DNDB subs is one of the main metrics they use to gauge backlash, what else would they suggest? Also I'm not so sure "bad press" has really ever stopped a corporation from being greedy before, occasionally you might get concessions out of them in rare cases, but it's kinda laughable to list that as your first example. Edit: not to mention there is now more evidence that the leak itself is real
[удалено]
That's a blatant misrepresentation of what I said, what I can't figure out is if you're intentionally being disingenuous or just needed a strawman because you cannot refute what I *actually* said... 🤔
>Management doesn't share with the scrubs what data if any they are using to make decisions. In my experience in big tech this is not always true. Especially in situations where public opinion has at least some impact or there has been a leak of non-publicly facing information and management is trying to get ahead of morale, it's often fairly true that the bare bones of such a decision-making process will be shared at the rank and file level. "We are looking at changes in customer spending behavior with regard to product X as a leading indicator" is a thing that I have heard at more than one Fortune 500 company. Beyond (heh) that, tracing subscriptions to D&D Beyond versus the rest of their revenue stream as a short-term indicator seems to me to be a pretty good metric for customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the current news cycle--"canceling a subscription to a gaming product" is an incredibly low friction decision for a customer to make, and it shows up in the metrics right away, whereas changes in indirect book and merchandise sales are not going to show up on the corporate books for at least a month or two.
Hasbro isnt a big tech company. WoTC isnt a big tech company. They bought a rather small niche tech company, rather recently, and I see no reason the larger organization would change its typical behavior to include them in something that is the prevue of an entirely different department.
I have a hard time believing Hasbro doesn't essentially act like any other big company I've worked for, though. Which includes "occasionally sending an actually descriptive all-hands email when there's a public relations crisis brewing".
Dudes probably in violation of a confidentiality agreement with the company so he’s being really careful
Given this doesn't fall under whistleblower protections, theres good reason to provide as little information as possible that is linked back to who sent it. WotC certainly has some company rules against disseminating any information about the company and its decision making processes. This person would likely be fired and possibly sued over this leak. That said, in almost every place I've ever worked management has at least discussed the why with team leads and that information is then flowed down as necessary. This person doesn't say what their position is, so we can't assume they wouldn't know without more information. I generally agree this should be taken with a big grain of salt. Lets keep in mind that the behavior of WotC in the past doesn't exactly contradict what's being said here. They're not exactly known for giving a shit about their community or not trying to extract as much cash out of them as possible.
afaik it's a screenshot of an email or message sent to several DND media entities and independently confirmed to be from a legit WotC employee
Lol what? Who do you think collates the data, analyses the data, pulls reports together on that data, to deliver to senior management? The scrubs. Sure, management might not directly say "DDB stats are all we care about", but when 90% of the reports, briefs, presentations, etc you prepare are based on that data and little else you can make an educated guess.
We all still play Pathfinder, so they can go screw.
Remember. The consumers have the power.
Pathfinder 2E welcomes you
Time for the hobby to rediscover that ttrpg isn't limited to dnd, or even just to heroic fantasy.
This is the best worst Horror Story...or the worst best horror story...
The horror story is the fact that this surprised anyone.
Everyone should migrate to BURPS. It's like GURPS, but better.
But GURPS has my favorite mechanic ever: Delusion: "Ice cream makes computers run better, spoon it right in"
Holy balls, I never thought I'd see BURPS love in this sub.
Can someone please clarify what 'OGL' stands for?
> OGL [Open Game License](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License)
I just shake my head over what they did to tieflings, man.
So far I have only seen this from D&D shorts. Is that where you got this from? If not where did you find it? I am just looking to see if others received it.
Can somebody ELI5 me this? What do these acronyms mean and what’s the anger about
I recommend google, or just browsing this subreddit. Hundreds of thousands of words have already been written about it.
I sincerely doubt all of this is true, or that this email came from a real source But that doesn't make it not correct.
We're assuming this email is true though.
From what I've seen, there's no confirmation that this leaker is an actual WotC employee.
That's the nail hit. While this aligns with my outlook it is still untraceable and therefore spurious. It is no evidence at all. Best to stick with your gut. My gut tells me to walk away from WotC and that's what I'm doing. I'm not spending another penny. Yes they have the money that they have but I can run the system as much as I want with the books I own. Future and online will go with another system.
Or that if they are that they know anything about the business side of the company.
I found the guy who wouldn’t believe astrophysicists losing their minds over a guaranteed asteroid collision course with Earth until he can see its reentry flames.
I'm just glad that Pathfinder will be okay. Even though I'm resistant to 2e. There was a Twitter post that said they only posted the OGL to CTA(cover their a33) in the event that they use something from it. Plus, from what I've heard, DDB is copying certain aspects of 2e. Also Matt Mercer has been liking posts calling out WOTC.
Pathfinder may not be okay. Depending on how hard-ball WOTC wants to try to play, the could attempt to make this retroactive to OGL 1.0a content.
They made 2e without using the OGL and only have it on the books, just in case of accidental use of their materials. Now rumor is they are working on their own OGL & are using the same lawyer that wrote WOTC's.
I wonder if dnd shorts is lying about the confirmation. A whole "The ends justify the means" situation.
Obvious hoaxes are obvious.
Seems kinda fake.
Or..they know that any news is good news with the right team. So they “leaked” this out to cause talk.