The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood?
There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. They chose to do so anyway and are backtracking out of an interest of self-preservation rather than a customer-first mindset.
I find this shameful enough behavior to warrant a legitimate, heartfelt apology. Instead, they present themselves as benevolent caretakers listening to their communities' response. This comes across as tone-deaf because they've already lost the trust of the community and don't seem to have learned how to take ownership of that fact.
Still, this is a better result than if they'd stayed their advertised course. So, for that, I am thankful.
> how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood?
IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think.
I'm not saying this as a defense or anything, but I find it helpful to think about.
> IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom.
The issue is that if you're in charge of a product/community/team/country and are out of touch with the needs/wants of that group then you are clearly mismanaging. You are effectively not performing one of the most essential parts of your job. Bad managers and politicians may be quite common but that does not excuse the actions nor the complaints and frustrations of those operating under the conditions that these leaders have set in place. I do think market research is important and needed but when a community's opinions are near unanimous (3 are ~90%!) it should serve as a huge red flag that you're so far out of touch with your core market that it is highly unlikely that you will be able to return given that you've probably gotten here through years of bad practice and not being involved with your community.
The least they could do is sit down once a month with the game designers for a session of dungeon crawling. The main two in charge have both said they don't play
The only thing worse than obstaining is half-assing it.
Do you really want a bunch of detached people paying just enough attention to something you like that they feel like they can 'contribute' by changing it?
Meeting once a month would be within the normal range for a group playing for fun. On the low side, I think, but it's not "so little attention that it's worse than nothing".
Well, there were two attempts at more minor climbdowns before this capitulation, so it seems more likely that the immediate financial impact from mass unsubscriptions was a motivating factor than prior understanding from the execs who were largely pushing this strategy if leaks are to be believed.
I think if they actually understood the community then they would not have needed this poll, which demonstrated near unanimous opinions. I would not blame anyone for believing that this retraction is simply a means to avoid larger problems and that there will be similar future attempts to make the same unpopular changes. It isn't just a misunderstanding of the community's opinions, but that they just demonstrated that they have almost no clue what those opinions actually are.
Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents such from happening.
Software is an expression of something (an algorithm, layout, etc.). So yes, you can copyright it. What you can't copyright is the underlying principles; e.g., the implementation of Google's search engine is protected by copyright, but the notion of a search engine or page rank is not. If someone wants IP restrictions for that, they need a patent, which has its own set of constraints on what is and is not allowed.
Edit to add: this is also why implementations of software from reverse engineering, like ReactOS, are perfectly legal, so long as they don't copy the actual implementation.
Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.
Sure, but the outrage from this change came about revoking the license for past works. By putting SRD 5.1 under CC, the situation for many indie creators of working with the SRD becomes clean and clear. Hasbro can do whatever they want going forward with D&D.
Game rules/mechanics usually can't be copyrighted other than just the literal text of descriptions of them. Does this give anything you couldn't have by cloning the rules with different wording flair?
The thing is, compatibility with D&D wasn't necessarily about mechanics. Fundamentally TTRPG mechanics are really just about simulating probability distributions with dice. There's the broader question of how to use a given probability distribution where.
What D&D editions do is develop a set of base mechanics, basic probability distributions, and then create a framework on how to apply them. This includes monsters, races, and classes which have particular attributes or play feel. This includes common roleplaying conflicts and guidance on how to adjudicate them. What a lot of indie RPGs that used OGL 1.0/a did is they made references to things from D&D and used them in ways inspired by D&D. Think "elves" or "faeries" being associated with the mechanics and tropes you'd expect. Now with the new CC-BY-SA 5.1 SRD, you can make explicit references to Elves in derivative works and also license it under CC-BY-SA.
There were always completely separate systems that borrowed nothing from the play feel/world of D&D. Those communities/creators had nothing to fear.
"can't be copyrighted" may be true in the ideal, but there's plenty of haziness around the edges. The particular coloring of each type of dragon is mechanically unimportant, but is a nice mnemonic for the type of breath weapon damage they do. Is dragon coloring function or flavor? If you're a small publisher, you don't have the lawyers to compete with Hasbro in court long enough to find out.
SRD 5.1 doesn't include character creation rules or feats, so it's not even enough from just the PHB/DMG to play. But it's most of what you need, and the what's left can be easily replaced.
The CC grant from the draft OGL 1.2 announcement was much less - it didn't include classes, spells, or creatures. Opening the entire SRD under CC BY makes cloning 5E trivial.
I genuinely think this is WotC giving up on 5.5/One being open. They're going to double down on the Dungeon Master's Guild and its IP-friendly, Hasbro-owned license as the way to create and distribute fan content.
Paizo's seen the target on their back now, I doubt they're going to halt their plans to produce the ORC. I suspect the only way WoTC will be able to get any trust back in the community is to sign on with that
In this case, such a measure actually might help insure continued shareholder profits, by preventing a mass exodus of gamers from their ecosystem. In fact, I would say failing to take such measures might present an existential threat to WoTC, due to the trust that has already been lost.
> has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic.
At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it.
Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.
A minor point, but I am grateful for the self checkout lanes — they have greatly speeded up my checkout, and w/ covid spiking I just want to leave asap.
I don't mind the OPTION of self checkout, but not having the choice is a big fuck-you to the customers purely to make more millions of profit. At our local Wal Mart, they have registers for humans, but no humans are ever there. 100% do it yourself, with someone wanting to check your receipt. I never stop, if they want to see it's done right, hire someone to do it right.
Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too.
Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.
Not the US, but no manned registers happens often enough across various store chains here in Dublin at least. To the point where you might have to wave down a staff member restocking a shelf because the self-service needs someone to authorise your alchohol purchase or whatever.
Are you implying that there are major jurisdictions in the US where WotC wouldn't have been able to fully enforce compliance with their (originally) overly restrictive license?
Presumably michaelcampbell means "There might be ethical corporations elsewhere, US equivalents of Mondragon Corporation for example, I don't claim to have proven the complete nonexistence of corporations that give a shit"
I doubt that you are, honestly, and knew exactly that I meant "where I am, I am seeing evidence of corporations pushing profit to limits we haven't seen before".
I disagree because the fundamental core of this argument is "everyone in a community should think alike". That isn't realistic, and using that as a principle leads to bad results - we have to be used to having robust communities with questionable leadership. The natural state of leadership is to be a bit shabby and not quite up to the task. We have the internet now, we have great visibility on what leaders actually do and they can't meet impossible standards. Although that is why decentralisation is so powerful - WOTC doesn't run your games night and doesn't send out a goon squad to police that people aren't using house rules.
WOTC don't have the same incentives as their community. A company producing a game almost never has the same incentives as their community. As long as their incentives align with folding in the face of solid negative feedback, that is enough.
They made a mistake, they appear to have recognised the mistake and course corrected. Asking for more than that is going to get less - it encourages lies and bad, blandness.
I think they've completely misunderstood their product. The execs in charge of running the show come from video games, and watching what they're trying to do with DnD beyond makes it pretty obvious they're trying to introduce micro transaction hell and loot boxes into the product.
Matt Colville whacked the nail on the head when he said D&D isn't really a game, it's a folk tradition and storytelling. Those are two very difficult things to monetize.
Yes, that is a critical part. They want to make DnD Beyond the core of the product. The main channel, where "ideally" both, DMs and players, have to buy each little piece of content and an expensive subscription to create their own scenarios instead of books, which are expensive to produce, ship etc. and then are shared in a group (or kept for DM's eyes only) And they "have to" extract as much revenue from third parties like Paizo and get consumers of their platform.
If they get rid of story telling etc. they even can look at AI DMs leading a Dungeon Crawl to increase time of their consumers on their platform, even without fixed groups etc. Extract as much value as possible (and destroy the game)
Ah yes, and then if you try to tell even the slightest bit controversial story about say, adventuring in an ancient Egyptian city with slaves, that will be flagged as hateful content and you’ll be banned from D&D forever.
It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this.
They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest.
So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?
That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work.
The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.
DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_.
And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.
There's still a lot to see about what D&D One actually is in terms of product and not system. But these moves really make me suspect that they're going to try to make it a walled garden of player-driven transactional rewards, and to minimize the DM role as much as possible.
If their theoretical, non-existent One VTT does all the mechanical work for the DM and dresses up lots of cheap player customization options that players actually want, the DM's power to decide the system is diminished. If anyone can DM without memorizing hundreds of rules and looking up obscure 3rd-party homebrew fixes, Hasbro bets the DM can yell all they want, the players will go to One.
I don't know or think it'll succeed - there's zero track record from anyone involved in this specific kind of venture - but I think this is Hasbro giving up on the tabletop community and going all in on VTTs and casuals who don't know (or know but don't like or care) about any existing community. If Hasbro already aren't making money off DMs, and they couldn't bend the existing DMs creating content into their new system, then they'll take their cultural cachet and do something on their own that doesn't require that kind of DM.
Yeah. Why not? Monetizing only 20% of the player base in DMs isn't making them enough money to justify the investment otherwise, and casual DMs don't care about any of this.
> The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.
DMs are higher information consumers than players.
I think this is a very important point to recognize. The proper market unit for a game like D&D is the play group, led by the DM, not the individual player.
I don't think a DM will go entirely against their players' wishes, but I could easily see a DM and 2 players deciding they can 'work on' the rest of the group. So you could lose 100% of your users by pissing off the wrong 33%. Or 50% for pissing off 1/6th of your users. Which still supports the road trip etiquette of "don't piss off the driver."
Even that understates the situation, I think. Most players I know just aren't that particular about what system they play. (Sometimes they are particular about what system they don't play.) So if the DM says "I'm going to run the next campaign in Pathfinder", their players will shrug and look up Pathfinder character options. The more invested players might have more of a "cool, I've been meaning to give that a try" response. I don't know anyone personally who would fight against such a thing or quit the group because they only want to play D&D 5e.
As a DM, I'm partial to 5e because I already know it inside and out, so I can forget about the mechanics and just focus on the story. But aside from the sheer volume of official and "D&D compatible" material, I don't think it has anything going for it that other systems lack.
I'm not sure these are the same market segments. Generally though, I agree. DMs are also the people buying most of the merchandise (books, supplements, etc) so they're going to drive more of the conversation around systems.
This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.
Depends on when you played. Earlier editions of D&D were much more like this, offering guidelines with dice and otherwise just leaving it up to DM or group discretion. This usually demands more of the group and also makes it harder to stitch a wide, cohesive story together. Later editions responded to this and added more mechanics and rules to D&D.
Yeah, there's a form of D&D which is "I want to tell an interactive story and see where it goes" where the dice are basically just a way to keeping things a bit sane, and then there's "let's simulate a computer program using sheets of paper and a bunch of random number generators" which I kind of feel is where D&D went.
Us too. Though in the end we settled on the Fighting Fantasy RPG rules as they were simple enough to play in the school playground whilst also providing just a little bit of authority to decisions.
Why didn't it work? Paizo had a big jump in sales ... for Paizo, the numbers are a rounding error for WotC.
Same with the DnDBeyond boycott drive, did that actually make a dent? To me there is basically no evidence for this supposed level of consumer power that the fandom is claiming they have. WotC's response was the most half-assed, who-gives-a-shit, PR statement I've ever seen. They did not treat it like a real PR issue at all.
> They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design.
Well yes, they will definitely be losing those people. However it's a small percentage of DMs who are even aware of 3rd party stuff in the first place. Single digit percentage and on the lower end, at best.
I think it's hard for lots of old players to realize that post Critical Role/Stranger Things, they are a tiny minority of the market now, and they kinda suck as consumers if you are trying to extract video game level profits from your players.
My friend, WotC tried to make this change, was hit with backlash, and backed down. That’s a fact. Their statement of backing down is literally the article that you’re commenting on.
Saying “but you didn’t make a dent” is clearly not correct in WotC’s judgement. If they felt they could have made this change and made more money, then they absolutely would have. That’s why they tried. And it didn’t work, per WotC’s own reversal.
The point is they tried to make a money grab from their most influential users. If those users go they take a lot of people with them.
CR started out on Pathfinder. Matt Mercer has been building his own world for 10 years as a full time job. If you convince CR to switch rulebooks a lot of people will follow. If you goad him into making his own rulebook, then you haven't just helped your competition, you just invented new competition.
Real people have disagreements and work through them. Lets not be mad for the sake of being mad. It was completely within the rights of WOTC to do whatever they wanted. People complained and they decided not to do and guarantee they will never do it in the future. Be happy.
I understand what you’re saying, but attempting to revoke a widely-used open source license is not just something completely within their rights.
Their sudden claim to have ability to “deauthorize” the 20+ year old OGL and destroy the partners and competitors who built businesses on the promises of a perpetual license - this was an egregious move that was almost certainly not within their rights.
Legal analysts were quite consistent in that it’s impossible to be certain but this process wouldn’t have withstood a solid legal test.
WotC, in trying to pull this, was attempting to leverage their expensive legal team to bully people into giving away their legal rights under the open license. That’s shady and deeply unethical, and shouldn’t be considered to be within their rights.
Now for the future content they make, they can release that under a closed license if they want and that is within their rights even if I don’t like that license.
Corporations are not "real people" and "they were acting in their rights" is not a defense against criticism for shitty behavior.
Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.
I’d bet they anticipated the backlash, but thought it could be managed - some short term anger followed by long term profits. It so far hasn’t worked out that way, but these are still recent events; they may just wait to roll out changes more quietly.
They might be right long term, but that's 1) pretty cynical and 2) I think they might have just created the origin story for their competitors. So good news, they're making $1 billion, bad news they are now making $1 billion of a $1.7 billion market instead of $800 million of a $1 billion market.
If anything, this shows the power of a product that is driven by subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions sent a strong signal to how the player base felt and it was felt high enough that execs pivoted directions.
agreed. a substantial amount of the playerbase and 3rd party creators are looking for non-DnD games moving forward, and Hasbro finally realized they handed the opportunity to take all those players and creators to their competition.
I think people should still switch. Hasbro has shown who they are. Is there a DnD transformers crossover yet, like in MtG?
There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. They chose to do so anyway and are backtracking out of an interest of self-preservation rather than a customer-first mindset.
I find this shameful enough behavior to warrant a legitimate, heartfelt apology. Instead, they present themselves as benevolent caretakers listening to their communities' response. This comes across as tone-deaf because they've already lost the trust of the community and don't seem to have learned how to take ownership of that fact.
Still, this is a better result than if they'd stayed their advertised course. So, for that, I am thankful.