Gamer Geek thread: D & D and the new OGL dustup

[Neutral Corner]

Yes and no. What's happening is that Fifth Edition will be under creative commons and 3PP will be able to design around it freely and irrevocably. My expectation is that the OGL for One D&D (6th Ed.) will be far more restrictive as Wizards builds a fence around it. For most players that's not a big deal - if there are changes in the new version they can simply be added to their current game without fully rolling over into 1D&D.

OTOH, Wizards had promised that all new 1D&D content would be backward compatible with 5e. I wonder how committed they remain to that as they have released 5e into the wild. They are going to be doing all they can to get gamers to switch over, as that means that they have to buy new books ($). I also expect them to try to muscle out the various virtual table tops, either not to license 1D&D or to make it costly for more ROI. Their biggest goal is to move more gamers to D&D Beyond, the VTT they bought and are upgrading with the Unreal game engine. They'll charge subscription fees to play on that, probably several levels of access at different price points. I've seen $30/month floated as their top level (!), which would include all the stuff that would otherwise only be available via in game microtransactions. This is another reason to make it more costly for competing VTT's to offer 1D&D - it would be counterproductive for it to be available via competing VTT's for less money than at DDB.

 

[JRoyal]

I keep seeing people worried about the VTTs for OneD&D, but with everything they just did, I think it's much ado about very little. Other platforms will be able to keep using what's in CC or in the old OGL, so 5E will continue to live on other VTTs. If they try to close off 1DD, a lot of people will just keep playing 5E on the other VTT platforms. They can't pull that back now. So what they'd be doing is cutting off a ton of their core current customers, some who may adopt the D&D Beyond VTT, to get possible maybe potential customers. That doesn't make business sense. This isn't like a video game; you need the current core there to teach the game to the new customers. If you lose too much of that core audience, you won't have a positive experience for the new players. And the folks on the design side of D&D know that. If Hasbro has learned one thing in all this, I think they've learned they need to listen to the folks n their own company that they weren't listening to before.

I think they'll have a new OGL for 1DD, but I don't think it'll be as restrictive as a lot of folks worry it will be, and there's no way it will have the same language as OGL 1.2 did. They learned that lesson. I think a lot of the "concern" about it, or at least a lot I've seen on Twitter, has come from folks who weren't playing D&D before and have no interest in the game and are Pished folks aren't going to be turning to their beloved indy TTRPGs like they thought they would be a couple weeks ago. They're fanning the flames with folks who rightfully felt burned, and they have no interest in playing D&D and what happens to D&D in any form other than wanting to see Wizards fail. Hell, some of them don't even want to see the ORC license succeed because of Paizo's past (current?) labor issues.

This was a big win for D&D fans. Bigger than we could've hoped for. It makes sense to be cautious about what's ahead, but there's way too much "they're just gonna fork us later" going on without realizing how much that would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.

 

[Neutral Corner]

"In the social media era, when one tweet can reach three million people in a day, you kinda can't afford to be a deck."

Nice follow on here. The other guy in this video is a giant M:tG Youtuber, and knows what he's talking about. What's happening here is that the people on the Board and in the executive suite are screwing up by the numbers. They've gone for the quick buck anywhere they can think of, they've alienated sooo many groups that want to support the company, groups that either make or sell or buy product, and they've Pished them all off one after the other. This is pretty well stated.

 

[Neutral Corner]

 

[JRoyal]

"In the social media era, when one tweet can reach three million people in a day, you kinda can't afford to be a deck."

Nice follow on here. The other guy in this video is a giant M:tG Youtuber, and knows what he's talking about. What's happening here is that the people on the Board and in the executive suite are screwing up by the numbers. They've gone for the quick buck anywhere they can think of, they've alienated sooo many groups that want to support the company, groups that either make or sell or buy product, and they've Pished them all off one after the other. This is pretty well stated.

I don't trust anything the DnD Shorts guy is putting out any more. He got so Pished at Wizards when everything happened, he let it color what he was putting out, and now it feels he sees these kind of WotC hate videos as a way to get clicks. I liked him better when he was making insane builds that no one could ever actually play in a game. I don't think he was ever about the game, though; just about how he could monetize his content for it.

 

[Neutral Corner]

I agree about his prior content. It was 95% amusing one shot nonsense or builds that would work but be either boring as hell after one session or would annoy everyone else to the point of a lynching. I generally did not even look at his stuff because he was a one trick pony.

If this is his close out essay on the subject and he basically drops it from here I'm willing to consider his opinions - I agree with much of it, but by no means all. If he continues to flog it (unless events justify further conversation) he's just milking it.

That said, the fact that the people who run Wizards don't/never played D&D and their singleminded push to monetize the product does not make me trust them not to return to the well over time. I think that they are willing to leave 5e pretty much as things stand and make what they can off of it, not that they had much choice about that, but I think that they are going to build an enormous spiky paywall around OneD&D and D&D Beyond.