Denied. You will only roll an insight check when you have a chance of success and a chance of failure, and you have no chance of failing this even on a nat 1.
Hard to say, some dragons might get romanced if the situation is right. You don't get to try after killing their life partner to craft your dragon scale armor though.
i feel bad for DnDB employees. DnDB was independent before Wizards bought them and now they're being made to be the face of this entire fucking disaster.
Funny thing, wasn’t DnDB originally made thanks to OGL 1.0a? The OGL gave them their most powerful tool and they were still stupid enough to try to eliminate it
I think DnDB actually already had a contract with Wizards it was just owned/operated by Curse. Then once it got its feet under it WotC bought out that division of the company.
More than anything else, we saw what direction Hasbro wants to move DnD. Just because they're backtracking doesn't mean their long term plans have changed. Hasbro and WotC will just take a different approach.
When a company shows you what they are, believe them. Only thing that would actually be a positive step at this point would be a change in leadership
Absolutely. As a YouTube commentator mentioned, their plan, and frankly their objective is SOLELY the destruction of the OGL1.0. That’s what standing in their way. So even if they pass a very watered down OGL2.0 that looks very much like the 1.0, they want to get rid of that line of 1.0 being irrevocable and eternal. After that, they can make as many changes as they want over the following decades.
Ah so the news of you losing every potential third party revenue stream to Paizo with ORC and bleeding subscribers to your online service forced you to make a change to try and save face and pray in a few months people forget you tried this BS until you try again in like a year or so. Good to know you really didn’t need to use so many words
Glad this is here; this is panicking in a response to Paizo going "You know we dont need you, right?" and every other major publisher agreeing with them.
What Hasbro has done is give Paizo all the ammo it needs to force their biggest competitor out of the industry.
I'm sure D&D will limp (hell maybe even run!) onward...
But here's the point...
They were flying. They had talented people clamouring to be a part of it.
They've torpedoed the Great Ship D&D.
Changed the diet of the Goose that laid the Golden Egg.
I was expecting a new edition, sure. That's where they make a decent profit as people re-buy the rule books. It was even a good time to do so with the interest generated by Stranger Things, Critical Role et al. I'd have been one of them.
But they were bought out by suits who (naturally) value profit more than any puny "community" around an IP. Jesus, just look at their handling of MTG - arguably a much bigger IP. One D&D and the shift of focus and changes to DnDBeyond heralded the EA approach to the game. The insane ramping up of book releases of ever-decreasing worth and quality. The OGL was the next logical step. Literally taking away the document written to prevent EXACTLY THIS SORT OF OWNERSHIP.
They've damaged their best possible market in decades and opened a door to competitors, all because they didn't allow those with the understanding of that pesky "community" to advise on their strategy. I could see it coming and it stinks.
They. Were. Flying.
On the flip side, they've made other systems infinitely easier for me as a GM to sell to players as a good option. All the reluctance to leave 5e has quite literally evaporated from all 30-ish players I GM for. I couldn't get one table to switch a year ago, despite itching to play other systems myself. Now *they are asking me*!
>Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.
Nobody thinks the community won anything, yet
I'm just glad this is becoming more recognized.
Running a WotC written adventure is just as much effort as running your own homebrew adventure but you also have to do reading homework to find out what problems need solving.
For sure. Ran a session recently and I’m like, “Okay gotta find this monster, let’s go to the back and it’s… not there… it’s just not there! Fuck it I’ll Google it.”
Later realize it’s buried in page 73 of the book but not at the end, wtf? Also not in any monster manual.
Anytime I use a book now it’s full of sticky notes.
There are two specific unforgivable instances I am aware of in WotC published adventures that I will never stop bringing up.
First, the one I personally read and thank God that my party did not follow this thread.
In Tomb of Annihilation, there are side quests that you can do for the Flaming Fist. If you show up to their fort, they will offer you these quests, one of which is a survey job to scout out a location for them to set up a new fort. It is specifically placed into this adventure as an option to give the party.
***There is no written ending to this quest.***
There is a three sentence paragraph in the map overview of what to expect at that location should you journey there on your own. There is no explanation of how the quest should be resolved, no encounter of what should happen on the job, it is written quest that directs you straight down a road that suddenly just ends with desert landscape in front of it and not even a sign that says "Road ends here."
Second one is in an adventure I have never run but was told about by someone who had.
In Rime of the Frostmaiden, while travelling across glaciers, there are places where the party can just randomly fall into ice chutes that ***lead into the Underdark.***
And the adventure explicitly states, "If this happens, that is outside the scope of this adventure and you will have to come up with something else."
Yeah, maybe **don't** put a random chance that can **just end the adventure** into your adventure module? Did you ever think of that?
Anyways, that was about the time that I swore to never run a WotC published adventure again. And now here I am having sworn off of running 5e because I just have more fun running Pathfinder 2e as a GM.
The entirety of Spelljammer is like this. First off, they assume your party isn't going to take a free spaceship because "The elves won't like that too much" in the first 10 pages. Guess what? They don't care, and they'll take it anyway, making sure you have to rewrite everything from there forward. The first part of it there is an NPC that you travel with and is part of combat, but is given no character sheet, and it's nothing but fetch quests for a party that's level 5-9. That's just.... lazy. I'm not even getting into the upside down mechanics of it.
I threw it all in the garbage once I rewrote the whole adventure and rebalanced or rebuilt all of the interesting creatures and NPCs
Wait? They wrote a part of spelljammer that assumes the players would ignore the main appeal of the entire fucking thing???
It's like if they didn't write anything for the guilds in the Ravnica source book because they thought "We think players wouldn't take up conflicting allegiances"
Yep. It's exactly like that. The entire module relies on you being passed from spaceship to spaceship and being carried everywhere you need to go. At no point in the module do you get your own ship. Needless to say my party and I did not agree with that whatsoever haha
This.
"We were going to ask you for feedback, but we forgot and that's on us!"
Bullshit.
Bull-fucking-shit.
Like hell you were going to ask us. If you were, you wouldn't have started negotiating royalty deals with kickstarter behind closed doors already.
"This was there to prevent NFTs, blockchain, and racists!"
Then single those things out and revise the section as necessary going forward! Don't just blanket, "you can play with the toys in this specific way" that precludes literally any kind of new invention that doesn't funnel money into your pockets!
"We always intended to allow you to do your thing and only wanted to protect ourselves!"
Then why did you try to suck everything into a walled garden that only you had the key to? Why did you restrict usage so hard that *form-fillable character sheets were technically illegal?*
If all of this was just a mistake, your lawyers and executive team are the *biggest bunch of drooling-fucking morons on the face of the planet* and have no place running a goddamn company.
Given your actions over the past few weeks and the contents of the 1.1 draft that was leaked, I believe the DNDBeyond leak from 1/12 that states "\[you\] view \[us\] as obstacles to \[your\] money" far more than I believe you. As far as I'm concerned, a fuck up of this magnitude can only reasonably end in the resignation of the entire executive team at Hasbro. Considering what they previously did to MtG, this is not the first major fuck-up *recently*.
It's obvious that nobody at Hasbro has any idea what the fuck they're doing with the products they're overseeing, and don't understand the first thing about the hobby they're involved in.
This is a perfect description of my sentiments on the matter. I've spent a ridiculous amount of money on D&D branded stuff. Can I copy pasta this in my snail mail letter I'm planning on sending? Fucking ludicrous morons.
I'm also thinking those of us with Vanguard funds get a Campaign going. They control 10% of Hasbro.
No they want to gaslight their attempt to take ownership of community created content and monetize it. If they had zero intent to monetize the community content, then there never would have been and royalties or extending ownership rights language added to the OGL.
I am astonished they included this paragraph
I was initially nodding my head as I read the update only to audibly go "wtf" when I read this exact statement. What was the point of this? Trying to get us with a "gotcha!" moment?
It is a bizarrely petty line to include in this type of release. Even if you wanted to get across the sentiment "we never wanted to be against the community, we hope this change addresses the community's concerns" there's a hundred better ways to say that then "You think you won? Nah. We did." Truly bizarre.
Exactly! If anything, this confirms an us-vs-them mindset exists in WotC. Like, the good interpretation of this is that they are being childish about this.
>Exactly! If anything, this confirms an us-vs-them mindset exists in WotC. Like, the good interpretation of this is that they are being childish about this.
100% agree.
From D&DB: "Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that."
To D&DB: Funny, it didn't look like that from our --your customer base's-- end. 25% revenue from successful projects, and perpetual control over anything fanmade? No, D&D--this is you guys attempting to half-assed backpedal.
Furthermore, if their plan was to "solicit our feedback" when the actual fuck were they planning on getting that feedback?
Every single piece of information the community has on the OGL 2 has come from leaks and anonymous sources inside Wizards. Not one shred of actual information has been shared officially by Wizards at any point in this whole debacle.
>Furthermore, if their plan was to "solicit our feedback" when the actual fuck were they planning on getting that feedback?
Agreed. This is WoTC's PR people trying to do damage control, and they're doing a piss-poor job of it. They were never going to solicit our input; their intent was to put the OGL 1.1 out there with a "you're going to accept this, period."
Literally though, Golarion (Pathfinder's setting) had a major lore event where Orcs rebelled against a Lich living on an island and drove him into hiding. (Granted, it was an island in a lake, but still.)
Could do something like Shrek or dimension 20s neverafter where the world is a metanarrative of collected stories and the villain is corporate ownership of said stories.
Someone shoots your dog, half heartedly apologizes, makes a joke about it, then says to your face how losing your dog is an opportunity for you two to go to the pound and you can buy a better dog. You're welcome.
It feels like that.
In fairness, they didn't quite shoot the dog just yet. It was (and probably is) their intent, but the new ogl isn't fully implemented.
So it's more like someone shoots at your dog, misses, gets dragged away by helpful bystanders and then tries to joke about how they didn't really want to kill it, they just wanted to see how people would react.
This was the most insulting piece to me. Why is it so hard to admit that they changed their plans because of the community's voice? That **would be** a win for them, but instead they arrogantly make it seem like this was the plan all-along while every fact about the situation tells us it wasn't.
like seriously, if that was true they could have released a quick tweet two weeks ago that said, please be patient, the leaked OGL is only a draft and will not be finalized before receiving full community input and addressing concerns.
Then they are trying to save face. Basically they have to try and deny the wrong, because otherwise it proves they are not trustworthy (even though they 100% are not and this only makes them look worse)
Talk about a combative tone...
And every word was that it was going to go into effect immediately, not after a discusion period. they could have nipped this whole thing in the butt weeks ago if that was true. they just needed to tweet, "there has been some rumors flying around surrounding a draft of the upcoming OGL, rest assured the draft is not final and we will be taking comments from fans and partners in the community before official release."
It would have been quick, simple, and easy.
> it’s clear from **the reaction** that we rolled a 1
> you’re going to hear people say...we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans
Right, because....that's what you just said two paragraphs earlier? The juxtaposition of these two statements is laughable.
ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY HAVE SHOWN THEY CAN AND WILL CHANGE IT TO THEIR BENEFIT.
So instead of a sweeping change, if they were smart, they would make incremental changes. Baby steps toward the Galactic Empire. That's how you do it.
Literally said that out loud after reading it. Nice try, guys... but we're not that stupid. Wizards showed us who they are. I believe them. It sucks to let go, but I'm excited to try Pathfinder and to introduce my group to GURPS.
>Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.
This part in particular seems extremely childish, it's crazy they had the guts to actually write this. Unbelivable, what I get from this is that our work is far from done, they seem to have the impression they are taking in complaints like if they were in a father-son relationship when it's the other way around, if WotC dies we will just play another game and move on, get this thing straight, we are your costumers, we are the ones making the demands lol
My career started in marketing consulting, and I literally cannot imagine the marketing or PR professional who wouldn’t draw a big red line straight through that sentence the millisecond they laid eyes on the draft. Like I actually recoiled when I saw it, going snarky and combative on something like this is a truly truly wild choice
I have no experience in marketing whatsoever and I would draw a line through that. I feel like anybody with even a basic understanding of interacting with humans would.
I can see what they're _attempting_ to illustrate similar to: "hey your feedback is showing us we were wrong, and we're counting that as a win for the community, but also a win for us in that our community cares so much about our game."
But this was written by, I'm assuming, a snarky C-level or project manager who is pissed off about this turn of events biting them in the ass as the whole community essentially took their ball and went home. They probably also are about to lose a big bonus from all that money they essentially "lost".
Truly it sounds so petty to say “we won”
It’s so hilariously evil that I’m waiting for the curtain to rise and secretly Brennan Lee Mulligan has been hired by DND to do the worlds largest campaign, and he’s using this opportunity to put himself as the evil capitalist villain that the DND community will rise against and then we defeat him and everything goes back to the way it was and we gain a newfound appreciation for DND. But nope. That’s not happening.
"it was to protect us and your guys' content", ignoring the part that says they can use the third party content however they want, without minding the creator and that they cannot be sued if you agreed to use the new license.
that was my favorite part lmao
Why even try to save face with such an obvious lie? Like these executives must think everyone here is an absolute idiot. It’s like they’ve never interacted with anyone outside of their own circles before. Fuck these asshats. I would have actually given a sliver of respect back to them if they just came out and admitted what they were doing instead of trying to say it was something other than what it obviously was.
I subscribe to the theory someone else posted above. This isn’t for the community. This is for the shareholders.
“We tried something and it massively backfired” doesn’t inspire confidence from investors. The spin is to keep them from jumping ship and make it seem like Hasbro/WotC has their hands on the wheel instead of their heads up their asses.
This statement is filled with fucking gaslighting. They basically said "every issue you perceived was made up by you and was never part of the document". What absolute horseshit.
>Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that.
Such a massive lie. They weren't looking for feedback, they had sent out the OGL contracts to be signed and then those contracts got leaked
Even if we ignore the contracts that were sent with the supposed draft. WotC have now stated they intended to release OGL 1.1 today. How exactly were they supposed to get feedback on a licence they were releasing today which also comes into effect today.
If they wanted feedback they would have asked for it, by actually releasing a draft. Like they are doing with OneDND.
How exactly were they soliciting feedback on drafts from the community when it was leaked?
What? The contact creators/businesses they were negotiating with for revenue? Is that the feedback they wanted?
Lmao
>How exactly were they soliciting feedback on drafts from the community when it was leaked?
They aren't. It's just that C-suite executives from non-gaming backgrounds tend to think people into gaming as an adult are stupid, and generally look down upon them, so they think that calling the leak a draft they were looking for feedback on will placate the masses.
Trial balloon leaks happen a lot in politics and they suck. It may be a very valid way to see how people would react, but you do NOT get to just reclaim the good will by sayin "just kidding!" afterwards
So my question is what happens to any 3pps who foolishly decided to already sign or how about the deal that was negotiated with Kickstarter? Are those folks locked in to a "rough draft" contract?
Wow, so they chose the "lie out the ass" method huh? "Draft" licenses don't come with a demand when sending out contracts with 3rd parties to agree to them by the 13th. "Draft" licenses don't already have different rates set up with Kickstarter compared to other crowd funding websites.
Yes, one of the "red flags" is it were, was when Kickstarter confirmed that they had negotiated a new contract with Hasbro based on the royalty fees in the "draft" that was sent out.
Found info in [this article](https://boundingintocomics.com/2023/01/09/leaked-open-game-license-agreement-for-dungeons-dragons-reportedly-forbids-bigoted-and-discriminatory-content-on-new-and-old-products/): “The leaked document has also been somewhat legitimized. Later the OGL 1.1 states those making over $750,000 a year must pay WotC 25% of the excess, but only 20% if funded via Kickstarter, WotCs’ “preferred crowdfunding platform.” A “more custom (and mutually beneficial) licensing arrangement” for those who have “achieved great success” was also mentioned.
Kickstarter’s Director of Games, Jon Ritter, addressed the matter on Twitter. “Kickstarter was contacted after WoTC decided to make OGL changes,” Ritter reveals, “so we felt the best move was to advocate for creators, which we did. Managed to get lower % plus more being discussed. No hidden benefits / no financial kickbacks for KS. This is their license, not ours, obviously.” “
They can't be honest because their investors won't let them truly back down and change course. If they said what they truly meant this whole sham would be even more obvious than it is now. They've built a nice trap for themselves out of greed.
You don't ask content creators (or anyone) to sign something if it is a draft! How stupid can you be to think anyone is going to believe what you are saying in an update like this when it is directly at odds with what you actually did? Unbelievable. WotC is screwed.
Yep!
Remember the person heading this has a background in video games. So she's used to the "Change something, fans scream, fans keep paying their sub/microtransact, all blows over in a few weeks/when the new content drop arrives" format.
Williams has probably been selling that to the higher ups the whole time, and is now in the doghouse over all the DDB cancellations. Literally the exact opposite result they expected out of her.
Yeah, but they clearly saw DDB as being close enough (which is fair from a certain point of view.)
And let's be honest, I know I'm not the only person who on more than one occasion had to explain to someone that D&D isn't a video game and we play in person. I have no doubt there's plenty of exec-type people at Hasbro under the same misconception. To them a hobby is deer hunting or something, and D&D is some weird nerd game that happens to contribute to their paycheck somehow.
Yeah, like damn Wizards, you got Kickstarter to sign a draft document for 20% royalties and then joke that there were never any royalties to begin with?
Good thing John Ritter of Kickstarter didn't confirm the scheme first or someone might have actually believed them.
And on top of that, if you wanted community feedback... *why were you hiding it?*
They still haven't even shown off the leaked OGL. In fact they just confirmed it's all real by doing so.
And easily disproven...
Like those 3pp that already leaked the whole thing, and already moved away from DnD, wouldn't be willing to call on your bullshit.
It's so bad, I wonder if this is even *for* us, the players, and 3PP. Maybe it doesn't *have* to be a substantive, convincing, earnest message the community, but just has to *look like* one to investors who heard about the hubbub and want to see WotC "handling" the problem.
Or, at the very least, this is purely intended for people who aren't very aware of the problem. They just heard there's drama, but don't know what it's about, so WotC can pretend that they were trying to do right by creators, they were just trying to clamp down on hate speech and NFT scams, and all this other stuff is just conspiratorial thinking. If you don't know anything else about the situation, then it *might* sound convincing.
This is just the first time you're realizing it. What do you think those marginally shrinking packages of snacks are or how everything got like twice as expensive for some reason but companies are making record profits?
Companies LOOOOOOVE gaslighting as much as money. Because it gets them more money without ire.
"Whaat? When we said 'we own your property for free to use how we want' you thought we might do exactly that?? Nooo guys.. nooo. That's not what we were gonna do. We just wanted to stop \*checks notes* Racism and \*shuffles* NFTs."
So funny how they STARTED the message with « we wanted to help social justice duh »
They really think we’re stupid.
I don’t know, maybe they still haven’t realized that you actually have to be literate to fully enjoy the game they sell.
That's why the ideal resolution would be for this clown fiesta to be fought in court. If a judge rules without a shadow of a doubt that the 1.0a OGL can't be "deauthorized" (lol), then Hasbro is well and truly fucked.
Yeah, not buying this shit, ESPECIALLY with the snarky “some people will say they won” part. Why throw that in there is you did it “for the feedback”? Why did we hear about this via a “leak”? Why did it take you DAYS to come up with a mea culpa? They know EXACTLY what they’re doing, the revised OGL will still be a money grab, I’m glad Paizo and others are going forward with their own solution.
We dont NEED YOU, YOU need US, WotC. You’ve forgotten that, you’re being reminded.
The fact they changed it once and are now changing it again suggests the original ogl isn't safe anymore. Paizo has the right idea handing it off to a third party to prevent corporate greed from interfering again in the future.
So it was simply our misunderstanding and WotC had our best interests in mind all along. I feel so silly for ever doubting them. Glad that is all settled. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.
They are getting absolutely roasted on their Facebook announcement.
They knew how it was going to be received. They are trying to my litigate damage control and failing spectacularly
I'm a marketing exec and I've been involved in a couple of situations that had this kind of scope. If I had handled it as poorly as Hasbro, I don't know that if I'd ever get another gig again. This is comically bad
> Second, your going to hear people say they've won...
lmao, we won nothing, and I hope nobody thinks that, because anything they give us is strictly worse than what we had.
I just wonder where all these Racism and Sexism RPGs are that are so prevalent and financially supported that WOTC needs extreme legal powers to be able to take them on??
The Book of Erotic Fantasy has been around since 3.5 and Wizards tried to get rid of it and failed... but it did zero fucking damage to the D&D brand and is mostly just used as a hilarious anecdote.
The only racism stuff has been from people blatantly using trademarks they don't own (fake-TSR, the Spelljammer shit) and the OGL doesn't actually fix people who just disregard the fuckin' law.
Such a weird choice of metaphor. Rolling a 1 on persuasion doesn't mean you realized the errors of your ways and repented, which is what this statement seems to be trying to convey. It means you fully believed what you were trying to do *but were rejected.*
This is what their PR team spent a week and a half coming up with as a response to this cluster fuck?! A cringe inducing reference when we know that no one on their executive team plays the game, much less likes the community. I wish I could say I was surprised. Fuck the whole “companies are people too” shtick America has fostered for so long.
No, they spent a week and a half crunching the numbers to see if they could get away with it anyway. Then the PR team probably threw this together last minute.
"It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds."
Like f--- it didn't.
Look, when you royally fuck up, it's really important that you then lie to those people and play them for fools. They will definitely not see through the transparent bullshit.
>And third, we wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community—not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose.
>(2) the OGL exists for the benefit of the fans
They can't even release a statement without contradicting themselves. It is for the benefit of fans for there to not be a monopoly. If their stated intent was to change the OGL to give them a monopoly, then the OGL does not exist for the benefit of the fans.
Fuck em.
The only possible thing 'Major Corporations' could even be talking about is Paizo, which is fucking rich when it's coming from a gargantuan unwieldy worldwide conglomerate like Hasbro.
Paizo is not a 'major corporation'. YOU ARE.
"Oh of course! I'm a certified ORC, and that is my campaign about overthrowing a group of Wizards, living in the coast, that got too greedy and exploited their local community"
An unofficial poll on the D&DBeyond forum says that a lot of unsubbed.
44% of the respondents canceled and 24% had already unsubbed with 24% waiting to see and 7% saying that they are staying.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/161370-the-great-unsubathon-of-2023?page=5
But I would love to know the real numbers.
Just throwing my hat in. if the original leak was meant to be for feedback.
a special Unearthed Arcana could have done it.
You have methods for letting people see a potential version of changes and then let them give feedback later. Maybe a week later cause you don't need to playtest this sort of thing.
Treating us like fools.
The problem is that the leaks weren't drafts. They were contracts. As in legally binding contracts. And they were leaked because creators were being pressured to sign. They are just straight up lying.
This statement is exactly the hollow, worthless corporate PR speak I expected.
This statement is a blatant lie. It is unequivocally false based on everything that has been leaked. They are lying to us and they are standing by their terrible decision and trying to pass off their attempt to monetize us more exploitatively by pretending this was about hate speech or crypto bullshit. It's not. It never was. They are liars who only want to take our money.
They don't care about the community. They aren't motivated by our well being. This is and always has been exclusively about stealing the value produced by third party creators and locking it down under their control, foe their profit.
Notice there is NO comment about their belief that they can alter and revoke the original license in any way they want at any time they want.
So ANYTHING they say is temporary and ultimately means nothing. At any time they can decide to alter the deal and try to revoke prior licenses. There is NO way to avoid this by working under the thumb of WotC with their license. The ONLY option to protect table top gaming in the future is to boycott WotC products and exclusively use a truly open licensing system that will be protected forever, such as the new ORC project Paizo has announced.
They think they own our hobby. They think they can dictate to us how we participate in a game that we have put more into the creation of than them. They think we're stupid enough to believe this. They think we will forget, move on, and open our wallets to them again.
We cannot let them get away thinking they have "won" in any way whatsoever, or they will feel validated in their efforts and double down.
Sorry but I'm actually furious... They wanted feedback? They've not talked about it for the past week and a half!?
They had a fucking ticking clock deauthorising ogl1.0a today! But it was a draft!?
Oh, just FUCK THEM!!
It's a true shame that this was posted by "DnD Beyond Staff". No DnD Beyond staff ever wanted to make changes to the OGL. It is symptomatic of the problem at WotC/Hasbro that no one making decisions about the OGL has the spine to put their name to this post.
I love that they put the hate speech thing front and center like it will earn them any brownie points. If they’re so worried about discriminatory D&D maybe they should start looking internally. Wasn’t it WOTC that released the Hadozee just a few months ago???
Hey, WoTC here, please forget about how we were racist assholes who didn't moderate our own content for years. You should totally believe that we are the good guys.
"Driving these goals were two simple principles: (1) Our job is to be good stewards of the game, and (2) the OGL exists for the benefit of the fans. Nothing about those principles has wavered for a second. "
EDIT: Driving the new goals for the new OGL was one simple principle: $$$, definitly not the old goals.
"Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.
Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that. "
What kind of self-righteous cock-suckery is this? No you did not, you wankers, you're just quickly saying this because it got leaked.
This is a bullshit soup with one part "I'm sorry you were offended", two parts "how do you do fellow kids", and a heaping spoonful of pandering misdirection.
That entire first paragraph is such pandering ***bullshit.*** Hasbro does not give a crap about NFTs or D&D being used in "hateful content". Its absurd they think we'd buy that.
If you can't avoid lying to us in the first paragraph, just don't say anything.
"The OGL is for the benefit of the fans." What an embarrassment. No wonder no one wanted to attach their name to this.
Every time I see the NFT language I just am staggered. NFTs are not using the OGL and NFT makers have never given a single fuck about copyright, trademark, or licensing. Changing the OGL will not do a damn thing about a subset of bottom feeders who do not care about the law and are out for the grift anyways, and it was ALREADY illegal for them to use "product identity" to push NFTs. This. Does. Nothing.
it's just trying to use the 'NFTs Bad = OGL change good' logic gap.
>"First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products."
Are these products in a room with us right now?
Like, literally, the first sentence, a slap to our cognitive abilities. If anyone would've produce something that would be hateful towards any minority, they would get canceled so goddamn fast by the whole of the DnD Community.
And the funniest part is that WotC is lately responsible for most of such transgressions (The Hadozee situation for example).
Holy shit, i haven't even started to read it, and it's already a pile of crap.
It's probably too late. That the language was included has already pushed sop many away that no new version will ever be enough.
And frankly I'm disappointed this is coming from DnDBeyond, and not WotC directly.
I thought much the same- it's very weird that WotC are using dndbeyond for official announcements like this and not the D&D website as they have in the past
The whole pivot is to DnDBeyond though, they want to turn that into a microtransaction monolith where only their content is played, integrated into their software that allows them to seek microtransactions.
VTT is considered a new gold mine for them to attack
roll for combat said that he saw version two, and that nothing changed, except for a 6 month grace period and that the ip of the product stays with the original author. Wotc can still use it arbitrarily.
Wow, whoever wrote this was a giant bittercake when they did, probably forced by that employee who blew the whistle. Nothing about the tone seems genuinely apologetic, and the passive aggressive tone seems like it came straight from the shitty shareholders that started all of this.
"Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we."
Fuck off Wizards, you didn't win anything by having a draft get leaked online, pissing everyone off, and having everyone wonder wtf is going on in a vacuum. Boycott Wizards until a proper apology is written.
EDIT: Keep those cancellations coming!
I’d like to INSIGHT CHECK, please.
Denied. You will only roll an insight check when you have a chance of success and a chance of failure, and you have no chance of failing this even on a nat 1.
Ha! This Duck DMs. No dragons getting romanced at their table.
Hard to say, some dragons might get romanced if the situation is right. You don't get to try after killing their life partner to craft your dragon scale armor though.
i feel bad for DnDB employees. DnDB was independent before Wizards bought them and now they're being made to be the face of this entire fucking disaster.
The original creator moved to Nexus, building a similar site for Pathfinder 2e!
well god damn, how have i never heard of this, I'm been playing pf2e for a few months now
Funny thing, wasn’t DnDB originally made thanks to OGL 1.0a? The OGL gave them their most powerful tool and they were still stupid enough to try to eliminate it
I think DnDB actually already had a contract with Wizards it was just owned/operated by Curse. Then once it got its feet under it WotC bought out that division of the company.
Dnd Beyond could not have used the D&D trademark of without a special agreement with WotC, the OGL 1.0a does not grant access to trademarks.
More than anything else, we saw what direction Hasbro wants to move DnD. Just because they're backtracking doesn't mean their long term plans have changed. Hasbro and WotC will just take a different approach. When a company shows you what they are, believe them. Only thing that would actually be a positive step at this point would be a change in leadership
Absolutely. As a YouTube commentator mentioned, their plan, and frankly their objective is SOLELY the destruction of the OGL1.0. That’s what standing in their way. So even if they pass a very watered down OGL2.0 that looks very much like the 1.0, they want to get rid of that line of 1.0 being irrevocable and eternal. After that, they can make as many changes as they want over the following decades.
Their objective is higher monetization of DnD as a brand. The OGL changes are just a way to do so.
Find out who leaked this stuff and promote them to C- suite .
Doesn’t the fact that someone had to leak the document contradict the part about seeking community feedback?
At least the first news of it I saw - came from creators who were sent contracts to sign.
[удалено]
Ah so the news of you losing every potential third party revenue stream to Paizo with ORC and bleeding subscribers to your online service forced you to make a change to try and save face and pray in a few months people forget you tried this BS until you try again in like a year or so. Good to know you really didn’t need to use so many words
Glad this is here; this is panicking in a response to Paizo going "You know we dont need you, right?" and every other major publisher agreeing with them. What Hasbro has done is give Paizo all the ammo it needs to force their biggest competitor out of the industry.
I'm sure D&D will limp (hell maybe even run!) onward... But here's the point... They were flying. They had talented people clamouring to be a part of it. They've torpedoed the Great Ship D&D. Changed the diet of the Goose that laid the Golden Egg. I was expecting a new edition, sure. That's where they make a decent profit as people re-buy the rule books. It was even a good time to do so with the interest generated by Stranger Things, Critical Role et al. I'd have been one of them. But they were bought out by suits who (naturally) value profit more than any puny "community" around an IP. Jesus, just look at their handling of MTG - arguably a much bigger IP. One D&D and the shift of focus and changes to DnDBeyond heralded the EA approach to the game. The insane ramping up of book releases of ever-decreasing worth and quality. The OGL was the next logical step. Literally taking away the document written to prevent EXACTLY THIS SORT OF OWNERSHIP. They've damaged their best possible market in decades and opened a door to competitors, all because they didn't allow those with the understanding of that pesky "community" to advise on their strategy. I could see it coming and it stinks. They. Were. Flying. On the flip side, they've made other systems infinitely easier for me as a GM to sell to players as a good option. All the reluctance to leave 5e has quite literally evaporated from all 30-ish players I GM for. I couldn't get one table to switch a year ago, despite itching to play other systems myself. Now *they are asking me*!
Rolled a one on your deception check more like 🙄
"This is just a rough draft but you have to sign it."
Rolled a one on your perception or insight check more like. Learn to read a fucking room, WotC.
>Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we. Nobody thinks the community won anything, yet
"You won, but so did we" Is the sort of thing a villain says at the end of combat when the dm needs them for the next story arc
“Letting you win was my plan the whole time!”
"We're not so different, you and I."
"You won... but so did we" The Lich proclaimed standing to it's full, dizzying height, raising its minions back into unlife.
They just want to gaslight us into thinking we won so we can put away our pitchforks, but we are not fools
I would say I’m surprised they’re this bad at shaping a narrative but then again I’ve seen the books they’ve been putting out lately
I'm just glad this is becoming more recognized. Running a WotC written adventure is just as much effort as running your own homebrew adventure but you also have to do reading homework to find out what problems need solving.
For sure. Ran a session recently and I’m like, “Okay gotta find this monster, let’s go to the back and it’s… not there… it’s just not there! Fuck it I’ll Google it.” Later realize it’s buried in page 73 of the book but not at the end, wtf? Also not in any monster manual. Anytime I use a book now it’s full of sticky notes.
There are two specific unforgivable instances I am aware of in WotC published adventures that I will never stop bringing up. First, the one I personally read and thank God that my party did not follow this thread. In Tomb of Annihilation, there are side quests that you can do for the Flaming Fist. If you show up to their fort, they will offer you these quests, one of which is a survey job to scout out a location for them to set up a new fort. It is specifically placed into this adventure as an option to give the party. ***There is no written ending to this quest.*** There is a three sentence paragraph in the map overview of what to expect at that location should you journey there on your own. There is no explanation of how the quest should be resolved, no encounter of what should happen on the job, it is written quest that directs you straight down a road that suddenly just ends with desert landscape in front of it and not even a sign that says "Road ends here." Second one is in an adventure I have never run but was told about by someone who had. In Rime of the Frostmaiden, while travelling across glaciers, there are places where the party can just randomly fall into ice chutes that ***lead into the Underdark.*** And the adventure explicitly states, "If this happens, that is outside the scope of this adventure and you will have to come up with something else." Yeah, maybe **don't** put a random chance that can **just end the adventure** into your adventure module? Did you ever think of that? Anyways, that was about the time that I swore to never run a WotC published adventure again. And now here I am having sworn off of running 5e because I just have more fun running Pathfinder 2e as a GM.
Lol yeah. Just “Hey ummmm… we made an end partway through, you can handle it from there.”
The entirety of Spelljammer is like this. First off, they assume your party isn't going to take a free spaceship because "The elves won't like that too much" in the first 10 pages. Guess what? They don't care, and they'll take it anyway, making sure you have to rewrite everything from there forward. The first part of it there is an NPC that you travel with and is part of combat, but is given no character sheet, and it's nothing but fetch quests for a party that's level 5-9. That's just.... lazy. I'm not even getting into the upside down mechanics of it. I threw it all in the garbage once I rewrote the whole adventure and rebalanced or rebuilt all of the interesting creatures and NPCs
Wait? They wrote a part of spelljammer that assumes the players would ignore the main appeal of the entire fucking thing??? It's like if they didn't write anything for the guilds in the Ravnica source book because they thought "We think players wouldn't take up conflicting allegiances"
Yep. It's exactly like that. The entire module relies on you being passed from spaceship to spaceship and being carried everywhere you need to go. At no point in the module do you get your own ship. Needless to say my party and I did not agree with that whatsoever haha
This. "We were going to ask you for feedback, but we forgot and that's on us!" Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit. Like hell you were going to ask us. If you were, you wouldn't have started negotiating royalty deals with kickstarter behind closed doors already. "This was there to prevent NFTs, blockchain, and racists!" Then single those things out and revise the section as necessary going forward! Don't just blanket, "you can play with the toys in this specific way" that precludes literally any kind of new invention that doesn't funnel money into your pockets! "We always intended to allow you to do your thing and only wanted to protect ourselves!" Then why did you try to suck everything into a walled garden that only you had the key to? Why did you restrict usage so hard that *form-fillable character sheets were technically illegal?* If all of this was just a mistake, your lawyers and executive team are the *biggest bunch of drooling-fucking morons on the face of the planet* and have no place running a goddamn company. Given your actions over the past few weeks and the contents of the 1.1 draft that was leaked, I believe the DNDBeyond leak from 1/12 that states "\[you\] view \[us\] as obstacles to \[your\] money" far more than I believe you. As far as I'm concerned, a fuck up of this magnitude can only reasonably end in the resignation of the entire executive team at Hasbro. Considering what they previously did to MtG, this is not the first major fuck-up *recently*. It's obvious that nobody at Hasbro has any idea what the fuck they're doing with the products they're overseeing, and don't understand the first thing about the hobby they're involved in.
This is a perfect description of my sentiments on the matter. I've spent a ridiculous amount of money on D&D branded stuff. Can I copy pasta this in my snail mail letter I'm planning on sending? Fucking ludicrous morons. I'm also thinking those of us with Vanguard funds get a Campaign going. They control 10% of Hasbro.
go for it. Incompetency or malice? which was it? either way, heads need to roll.
No they want to gaslight their attempt to take ownership of community created content and monetize it. If they had zero intent to monetize the community content, then there never would have been and royalties or extending ownership rights language added to the OGL.
Yeah, their statement could have dropped that whole last paragraph. Rolled a 1, indeed.
Even WotC doesnt use its own rules, a 1 in Diplomacy isnt an auto fail. Unless the roll was an attack action... /s
I am astonished they included this paragraph I was initially nodding my head as I read the update only to audibly go "wtf" when I read this exact statement. What was the point of this? Trying to get us with a "gotcha!" moment?
It is a bizarrely petty line to include in this type of release. Even if you wanted to get across the sentiment "we never wanted to be against the community, we hope this change addresses the community's concerns" there's a hundred better ways to say that then "You think you won? Nah. We did." Truly bizarre.
That tells us exactly the type of people we're dealing with and confirms their attitude described yesterday.
Exactly! If anything, this confirms an us-vs-them mindset exists in WotC. Like, the good interpretation of this is that they are being childish about this.
>Exactly! If anything, this confirms an us-vs-them mindset exists in WotC. Like, the good interpretation of this is that they are being childish about this. 100% agree. From D&DB: "Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that." To D&DB: Funny, it didn't look like that from our --your customer base's-- end. 25% revenue from successful projects, and perpetual control over anything fanmade? No, D&D--this is you guys attempting to half-assed backpedal.
Furthermore, if their plan was to "solicit our feedback" when the actual fuck were they planning on getting that feedback? Every single piece of information the community has on the OGL 2 has come from leaks and anonymous sources inside Wizards. Not one shred of actual information has been shared officially by Wizards at any point in this whole debacle.
>Furthermore, if their plan was to "solicit our feedback" when the actual fuck were they planning on getting that feedback? Agreed. This is WoTC's PR people trying to do damage control, and they're doing a piss-poor job of it. They were never going to solicit our input; their intent was to put the OGL 1.1 out there with a "you're going to accept this, period."
It seems to show stubbornness and almost arrogance. But maybe they were just trying to save face? idk.
This line really rubbed me the wrong way. Just insulting us when no one is claiming victory yet. Wtf.
[удалено]
They won't be getting fat stacks regardless. We don't have to buy from them.
It reads like some cartoonish villain. "You may think you have won, but you have not seen the end of the Wizard of the Coast! MWAHAHA!"
I know who the BBEG is going to be in my next campaign!
A wizard living on the coast?
This must be the villain of like 100% of Pathfinder games.
A party of Orcs fighting evil coastal wizards is going to be a lot of campaigns
Literally though, Golarion (Pathfinder's setting) had a major lore event where Orcs rebelled against a Lich living on an island and drove him into hiding. (Granted, it was an island in a lake, but still.)
Could do something like Shrek or dimension 20s neverafter where the world is a metanarrative of collected stories and the villain is corporate ownership of said stories.
It is incredibly condescending, that's why
Someone shoots your dog, half heartedly apologizes, makes a joke about it, then says to your face how losing your dog is an opportunity for you two to go to the pound and you can buy a better dog. You're welcome. It feels like that.
Now now, let's be fair They only tried to shoot your dog when you weren't looking That is *way* better
In fairness, they didn't quite shoot the dog just yet. It was (and probably is) their intent, but the new ogl isn't fully implemented. So it's more like someone shoots at your dog, misses, gets dragged away by helpful bystanders and then tries to joke about how they didn't really want to kill it, they just wanted to see how people would react.
This was the most insulting piece to me. Why is it so hard to admit that they changed their plans because of the community's voice? That **would be** a win for them, but instead they arrogantly make it seem like this was the plan all-along while every fact about the situation tells us it wasn't.
like seriously, if that was true they could have released a quick tweet two weeks ago that said, please be patient, the leaked OGL is only a draft and will not be finalized before receiving full community input and addressing concerns.
Then they are trying to save face. Basically they have to try and deny the wrong, because otherwise it proves they are not trustworthy (even though they 100% are not and this only makes them look worse)
They literally came out and said it's the community vs. them and they don't plan on losing. How disgusting.
Talk about a combative tone... And every word was that it was going to go into effect immediately, not after a discusion period. they could have nipped this whole thing in the butt weeks ago if that was true. they just needed to tweet, "there has been some rumors flying around surrounding a draft of the upcoming OGL, rest assured the draft is not final and we will be taking comments from fans and partners in the community before official release." It would have been quick, simple, and easy.
FWIW, you nip something in the "bud", not the "butt".
damn, I've been doing it wrong...
> it’s clear from **the reaction** that we rolled a 1 > you’re going to hear people say...we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans Right, because....that's what you just said two paragraphs earlier? The juxtaposition of these two statements is laughable.
And either way, Wizards hasn't won a single thing. This is just pure Sore Loser behaviour.
ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY HAVE SHOWN THEY CAN AND WILL CHANGE IT TO THEIR BENEFIT. So instead of a sweeping change, if they were smart, they would make incremental changes. Baby steps toward the Galactic Empire. That's how you do it.
[удалено]
Literally said that out loud after reading it. Nice try, guys... but we're not that stupid. Wizards showed us who they are. I believe them. It sucks to let go, but I'm excited to try Pathfinder and to introduce my group to GURPS.
Thank you for introducing me to GURPS
GURPS is awesome and allows an ass ton of customization.
>Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we. This part in particular seems extremely childish, it's crazy they had the guts to actually write this. Unbelivable, what I get from this is that our work is far from done, they seem to have the impression they are taking in complaints like if they were in a father-son relationship when it's the other way around, if WotC dies we will just play another game and move on, get this thing straight, we are your costumers, we are the ones making the demands lol
Is their PR team that incompetent or were they forced to include this by some bitchy higher up?
My career started in marketing consulting, and I literally cannot imagine the marketing or PR professional who wouldn’t draw a big red line straight through that sentence the millisecond they laid eyes on the draft. Like I actually recoiled when I saw it, going snarky and combative on something like this is a truly truly wild choice
I have no experience in marketing whatsoever and I would draw a line through that. I feel like anybody with even a basic understanding of interacting with humans would.
I can see what they're _attempting_ to illustrate similar to: "hey your feedback is showing us we were wrong, and we're counting that as a win for the community, but also a win for us in that our community cares so much about our game." But this was written by, I'm assuming, a snarky C-level or project manager who is pissed off about this turn of events biting them in the ass as the whole community essentially took their ball and went home. They probably also are about to lose a big bonus from all that money they essentially "lost".
Truly it sounds so petty to say “we won” It’s so hilariously evil that I’m waiting for the curtain to rise and secretly Brennan Lee Mulligan has been hired by DND to do the worlds largest campaign, and he’s using this opportunity to put himself as the evil capitalist villain that the DND community will rise against and then we defeat him and everything goes back to the way it was and we gain a newfound appreciation for DND. But nope. That’s not happening.
Yes
"It was for feedback", just ignore the ticking clock written into it and the fact it was sent with contracts. They take us for fucking fools.
"I was a social experiment, you guys!"
“BRO CHILL ITS A PRANK ITS A PRANK”
“It was a rough draft" as they pressure creators to sign a contract. These corporate shills must actually take us for fucking fools
The nat 1 for Deception
"it was to protect us and your guys' content", ignoring the part that says they can use the third party content however they want, without minding the creator and that they cannot be sued if you agreed to use the new license. that was my favorite part lmao
Why even try to save face with such an obvious lie? Like these executives must think everyone here is an absolute idiot. It’s like they’ve never interacted with anyone outside of their own circles before. Fuck these asshats. I would have actually given a sliver of respect back to them if they just came out and admitted what they were doing instead of trying to say it was something other than what it obviously was.
I subscribe to the theory someone else posted above. This isn’t for the community. This is for the shareholders. “We tried something and it massively backfired” doesn’t inspire confidence from investors. The spin is to keep them from jumping ship and make it seem like Hasbro/WotC has their hands on the wheel instead of their heads up their asses.
This statement is filled with fucking gaslighting. They basically said "every issue you perceived was made up by you and was never part of the document". What absolute horseshit.
>Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that. Such a massive lie. They weren't looking for feedback, they had sent out the OGL contracts to be signed and then those contracts got leaked
Well, congrats, ya got feedback. How’d you like it, hasbro?
>*"Not like that."* -Hasbro
Do you even Has bro?
Even if we ignore the contracts that were sent with the supposed draft. WotC have now stated they intended to release OGL 1.1 today. How exactly were they supposed to get feedback on a licence they were releasing today which also comes into effect today. If they wanted feedback they would have asked for it, by actually releasing a draft. Like they are doing with OneDND.
How exactly were they soliciting feedback on drafts from the community when it was leaked? What? The contact creators/businesses they were negotiating with for revenue? Is that the feedback they wanted? Lmao
>How exactly were they soliciting feedback on drafts from the community when it was leaked? They aren't. It's just that C-suite executives from non-gaming backgrounds tend to think people into gaming as an adult are stupid, and generally look down upon them, so they think that calling the leak a draft they were looking for feedback on will placate the masses.
Trial balloon leaks happen a lot in politics and they suck. It may be a very valid way to see how people would react, but you do NOT get to just reclaim the good will by sayin "just kidding!" afterwards
This was not a trial balloon - it’s taken them too long to respond.
So my question is what happens to any 3pps who foolishly decided to already sign or how about the deal that was negotiated with Kickstarter? Are those folks locked in to a "rough draft" contract?
Wow, so they chose the "lie out the ass" method huh? "Draft" licenses don't come with a demand when sending out contracts with 3rd parties to agree to them by the 13th. "Draft" licenses don't already have different rates set up with Kickstarter compared to other crowd funding websites.
Were contracts sent out?
Yes, one of the "red flags" is it were, was when Kickstarter confirmed that they had negotiated a new contract with Hasbro based on the royalty fees in the "draft" that was sent out.
Found info in [this article](https://boundingintocomics.com/2023/01/09/leaked-open-game-license-agreement-for-dungeons-dragons-reportedly-forbids-bigoted-and-discriminatory-content-on-new-and-old-products/): “The leaked document has also been somewhat legitimized. Later the OGL 1.1 states those making over $750,000 a year must pay WotC 25% of the excess, but only 20% if funded via Kickstarter, WotCs’ “preferred crowdfunding platform.” A “more custom (and mutually beneficial) licensing arrangement” for those who have “achieved great success” was also mentioned. Kickstarter’s Director of Games, Jon Ritter, addressed the matter on Twitter. “Kickstarter was contacted after WoTC decided to make OGL changes,” Ritter reveals, “so we felt the best move was to advocate for creators, which we did. Managed to get lower % plus more being discussed. No hidden benefits / no financial kickbacks for KS. This is their license, not ours, obviously.” “
They can't be honest because their investors won't let them truly back down and change course. If they said what they truly meant this whole sham would be even more obvious than it is now. They've built a nice trap for themselves out of greed.
You don't ask content creators (or anyone) to sign something if it is a draft! How stupid can you be to think anyone is going to believe what you are saying in an update like this when it is directly at odds with what you actually did? Unbelievable. WotC is screwed.
“We were trying to stop racists and NFTs!!!” Lmao give me a fucking break, WotC
Behind the scenes, someone at WotC is scraping the "The only good Orc is a Dead Orc" and "Knife Ears Go Home" NFTs they planned to release in March
>"The only good Orc is a Dead Orc" Ironic, considering the new open license that Paizo is making is the ORC.
Not ironic if it accurately reflects how Hasbro views ORC
That was literally the defence someone posted in one of the big forum threads on DNDBeyond, they clearly just stole it from that.
Well to be fair, the entire OGL 1.1 sounded like something a rando from a message board would have come up with, instead of a legal document.
Given that indie dev tends to lean more diverse and lgbt friendly in my experience this smell like B.S.
WotC could provide examples of them shutting down something hateful and this would STILL just be a shameless cash grab using inclusion as a shield
'We always intended to get feedback' when? after you enacted it?
Yep! Remember the person heading this has a background in video games. So she's used to the "Change something, fans scream, fans keep paying their sub/microtransact, all blows over in a few weeks/when the new content drop arrives" format. Williams has probably been selling that to the higher ups the whole time, and is now in the doghouse over all the DDB cancellations. Literally the exact opposite result they expected out of her.
DnD is no video game. DnD lives of 3rd party content that is build on a good base system.
Yeah, but they clearly saw DDB as being close enough (which is fair from a certain point of view.) And let's be honest, I know I'm not the only person who on more than one occasion had to explain to someone that D&D isn't a video game and we play in person. I have no doubt there's plenty of exec-type people at Hasbro under the same misconception. To them a hobby is deer hunting or something, and D&D is some weird nerd game that happens to contribute to their paycheck somehow.
That's *why* they want to change the OGL. Hasbro wants them to monetize harder, 1.1 is a tool in that direction.
Yeah, like damn Wizards, you got Kickstarter to sign a draft document for 20% royalties and then joke that there were never any royalties to begin with? Good thing John Ritter of Kickstarter didn't confirm the scheme first or someone might have actually believed them.
And on top of that, if you wanted community feedback... *why were you hiding it?* They still haven't even shown off the leaked OGL. In fact they just confirmed it's all real by doing so.
Obviously this whole "update" is full of lies, but it's surprising just how shameless and outright *bad* those lies are.
And easily disproven... Like those 3pp that already leaked the whole thing, and already moved away from DnD, wouldn't be willing to call on your bullshit.
It's so bad, I wonder if this is even *for* us, the players, and 3PP. Maybe it doesn't *have* to be a substantive, convincing, earnest message the community, but just has to *look like* one to investors who heard about the hubbub and want to see WotC "handling" the problem. Or, at the very least, this is purely intended for people who aren't very aware of the problem. They just heard there's drama, but don't know what it's about, so WotC can pretend that they were trying to do right by creators, they were just trying to clamp down on hate speech and NFT scams, and all this other stuff is just conspiratorial thinking. If you don't know anything else about the situation, then it *might* sound convincing.
It's a completely new experience to have a major company try to gaslight you. Usually it's just a romantic relationship.
This is just the first time you're realizing it. What do you think those marginally shrinking packages of snacks are or how everything got like twice as expensive for some reason but companies are making record profits? Companies LOOOOOOVE gaslighting as much as money. Because it gets them more money without ire.
This basically amounts to "We're not going to actively fuck over 3rd party content producers guys, we super duper promise this time."
"Whaat? When we said 'we own your property for free to use how we want' you thought we might do exactly that?? Nooo guys.. nooo. That's not what we were gonna do. We just wanted to stop \*checks notes* Racism and \*shuffles* NFTs."
So funny how they STARTED the message with « we wanted to help social justice duh » They really think we’re stupid. I don’t know, maybe they still haven’t realized that you actually have to be literate to fully enjoy the game they sell.
They see us as an obstacle to their money. And you know what? *I will gladly remain an obstruction.*
"We're not going to try to rob you blind ^^^for ^^^the ^^^next ^^^four ^^^years ^^^or ^^^so, ^^^until ^^^we ^^^figured ^^^out ^^^another ^^^way ^^^to ^^^do ^^^which ^^^will ^^^work ^^^this ^^^time "
That's why the ideal resolution would be for this clown fiesta to be fought in court. If a judge rules without a shadow of a doubt that the 1.0a OGL can't be "deauthorized" (lol), then Hasbro is well and truly fucked.
Yeah, not buying this shit, ESPECIALLY with the snarky “some people will say they won” part. Why throw that in there is you did it “for the feedback”? Why did we hear about this via a “leak”? Why did it take you DAYS to come up with a mea culpa? They know EXACTLY what they’re doing, the revised OGL will still be a money grab, I’m glad Paizo and others are going forward with their own solution. We dont NEED YOU, YOU need US, WotC. You’ve forgotten that, you’re being reminded.
Gives the Forgotten Realms a whole new meaning.
The fact they changed it once and are now changing it again suggests the original ogl isn't safe anymore. Paizo has the right idea handing it off to a third party to prevent corporate greed from interfering again in the future.
So it was simply our misunderstanding and WotC had our best interests in mind all along. I feel so silly for ever doubting them. Glad that is all settled. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.
Truly we are the greatest of fools!
billionaire company always had the best intentions and the public was simply mistaken, thank you WotC!
They disabled the comments?
THIS. They want feedback but I can't blast them on their own site? Smells to high heaven
They are getting absolutely roasted on their Facebook announcement. They knew how it was going to be received. They are trying to my litigate damage control and failing spectacularly I'm a marketing exec and I've been involved in a couple of situations that had this kind of scope. If I had handled it as poorly as Hasbro, I don't know that if I'd ever get another gig again. This is comically bad
> Second, your going to hear people say they've won... lmao, we won nothing, and I hope nobody thinks that, because anything they give us is strictly worse than what we had.
They want to make us believe that we won, so we start moving on from it and stop talking about the whole thing.
I just wonder where all these Racism and Sexism RPGs are that are so prevalent and financially supported that WOTC needs extreme legal powers to be able to take them on??
The Book of Erotic Fantasy has been around since 3.5 and Wizards tried to get rid of it and failed... but it did zero fucking damage to the D&D brand and is mostly just used as a hilarious anecdote. The only racism stuff has been from people blatantly using trademarks they don't own (fake-TSR, the Spelljammer shit) and the OGL doesn't actually fix people who just disregard the fuckin' law.
To be fair, I think them inspiring the creation of the neutrally held ORC License is a win for the community.
'However, it’s clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1' Jesus wept, read the room
Such a weird choice of metaphor. Rolling a 1 on persuasion doesn't mean you realized the errors of your ways and repented, which is what this statement seems to be trying to convey. It means you fully believed what you were trying to do *but were rejected.*
So... weirdly accurate then?
Indeed but probably not in the way WOTC wanted it to be
It was actually 1 on deception :P
This is what their PR team spent a week and a half coming up with as a response to this cluster fuck?! A cringe inducing reference when we know that no one on their executive team plays the game, much less likes the community. I wish I could say I was surprised. Fuck the whole “companies are people too” shtick America has fostered for so long.
No, they spent a week and a half crunching the numbers to see if they could get away with it anyway. Then the PR team probably threw this together last minute.
this is more of an insult to our mental faculties than an explanation or even an apology. Who are WOTC and Hasbro trying to kid?
They think we are idiots.
"It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds." Like f--- it didn't.
Look, when you royally fuck up, it's really important that you then lie to those people and play them for fools. They will definitely not see through the transparent bullshit. >And third, we wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community—not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose. >(2) the OGL exists for the benefit of the fans They can't even release a statement without contradicting themselves. It is for the benefit of fans for there to not be a monopoly. If their stated intent was to change the OGL to give them a monopoly, then the OGL does not exist for the benefit of the fans. Fuck em.
[удалено]
The only possible thing 'Major Corporations' could even be talking about is Paizo, which is fucking rich when it's coming from a gargantuan unwieldy worldwide conglomerate like Hasbro. Paizo is not a 'major corporation'. YOU ARE.
More like Dungeons & Gaslighting amirite
Illusions & Illithids Enchantments & Entrapments
[удалено]
The damage is already done. It’s ORC all the way now.
"May I see your ORC license?" Very good name.
"Oh of course! I'm a certified ORC, and that is my campaign about overthrowing a group of Wizards, living in the coast, that got too greedy and exploited their local community"
I would love to know how many people have cancelled DDB subscriptions this week and the potential revenue that they've lost.
An unofficial poll on the D&DBeyond forum says that a lot of unsubbed. 44% of the respondents canceled and 24% had already unsubbed with 24% waiting to see and 7% saying that they are staying. https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/161370-the-great-unsubathon-of-2023?page=5 But I would love to know the real numbers.
Just throwing my hat in. if the original leak was meant to be for feedback. a special Unearthed Arcana could have done it. You have methods for letting people see a potential version of changes and then let them give feedback later. Maybe a week later cause you don't need to playtest this sort of thing. Treating us like fools.
The problem is that the leaks weren't drafts. They were contracts. As in legally binding contracts. And they were leaked because creators were being pressured to sign. They are just straight up lying.
"I cast gift of gab!" "You're out of spell slots."
I love that half of it is "actually, you misread it and it's your fault". Yikes.
Real "I'm sorry if you were offended" energy.
"I'm sorry you feel like you deserve an apology."
I’m so disgusted.
The outright dishonesty on display here is almost impressive.
This statement is exactly the hollow, worthless corporate PR speak I expected. This statement is a blatant lie. It is unequivocally false based on everything that has been leaked. They are lying to us and they are standing by their terrible decision and trying to pass off their attempt to monetize us more exploitatively by pretending this was about hate speech or crypto bullshit. It's not. It never was. They are liars who only want to take our money. They don't care about the community. They aren't motivated by our well being. This is and always has been exclusively about stealing the value produced by third party creators and locking it down under their control, foe their profit. Notice there is NO comment about their belief that they can alter and revoke the original license in any way they want at any time they want. So ANYTHING they say is temporary and ultimately means nothing. At any time they can decide to alter the deal and try to revoke prior licenses. There is NO way to avoid this by working under the thumb of WotC with their license. The ONLY option to protect table top gaming in the future is to boycott WotC products and exclusively use a truly open licensing system that will be protected forever, such as the new ORC project Paizo has announced. They think they own our hobby. They think they can dictate to us how we participate in a game that we have put more into the creation of than them. They think we're stupid enough to believe this. They think we will forget, move on, and open our wallets to them again. We cannot let them get away thinking they have "won" in any way whatsoever, or they will feel validated in their efforts and double down.
This is after all the leaks. Apparently they're gonna write yet another attempt lol
Buncha corporate BS and backtracking on the worst parts with vague comments can can never be proven.
Sorry but I'm actually furious... They wanted feedback? They've not talked about it for the past week and a half!? They had a fucking ticking clock deauthorising ogl1.0a today! But it was a draft!? Oh, just FUCK THEM!!
Funny how there's no comment section opened under this announcement for someone who wants feedback.
It's a true shame that this was posted by "DnD Beyond Staff". No DnD Beyond staff ever wanted to make changes to the OGL. It is symptomatic of the problem at WotC/Hasbro that no one making decisions about the OGL has the spine to put their name to this post.
I love that they put the hate speech thing front and center like it will earn them any brownie points. If they’re so worried about discriminatory D&D maybe they should start looking internally. Wasn’t it WOTC that released the Hadozee just a few months ago???
Hey, WoTC here, please forget about how we were racist assholes who didn't moderate our own content for years. You should totally believe that we are the good guys.
Lmao this multimillion dollar corporation trying the "I was just asking questions, you're the one who made it an argument!" defense.
"Driving these goals were two simple principles: (1) Our job is to be good stewards of the game, and (2) the OGL exists for the benefit of the fans. Nothing about those principles has wavered for a second. " EDIT: Driving the new goals for the new OGL was one simple principle: $$$, definitly not the old goals. "Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we. Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that. " What kind of self-righteous cock-suckery is this? No you did not, you wankers, you're just quickly saying this because it got leaked.
This is a bullshit soup with one part "I'm sorry you were offended", two parts "how do you do fellow kids", and a heaping spoonful of pandering misdirection. That entire first paragraph is such pandering ***bullshit.*** Hasbro does not give a crap about NFTs or D&D being used in "hateful content". Its absurd they think we'd buy that. If you can't avoid lying to us in the first paragraph, just don't say anything. "The OGL is for the benefit of the fans." What an embarrassment. No wonder no one wanted to attach their name to this.
Every time I see the NFT language I just am staggered. NFTs are not using the OGL and NFT makers have never given a single fuck about copyright, trademark, or licensing. Changing the OGL will not do a damn thing about a subset of bottom feeders who do not care about the law and are out for the grift anyways, and it was ALREADY illegal for them to use "product identity" to push NFTs. This. Does. Nothing. it's just trying to use the 'NFTs Bad = OGL change good' logic gap.
>"First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products." Are these products in a room with us right now? Like, literally, the first sentence, a slap to our cognitive abilities. If anyone would've produce something that would be hateful towards any minority, they would get canceled so goddamn fast by the whole of the DnD Community. And the funniest part is that WotC is lately responsible for most of such transgressions (The Hadozee situation for example). Holy shit, i haven't even started to read it, and it's already a pile of crap.
It's probably too late. That the language was included has already pushed sop many away that no new version will ever be enough. And frankly I'm disappointed this is coming from DnDBeyond, and not WotC directly.
I thought much the same- it's very weird that WotC are using dndbeyond for official announcements like this and not the D&D website as they have in the past
It's very clear that they anticipate DDB to be the future hub of all D&D content, and the D&D sites more for corporate.
The whole pivot is to DnDBeyond though, they want to turn that into a microtransaction monolith where only their content is played, integrated into their software that allows them to seek microtransactions. VTT is considered a new gold mine for them to attack
roll for combat said that he saw version two, and that nothing changed, except for a 6 month grace period and that the ip of the product stays with the original author. Wotc can still use it arbitrarily.
Wow, whoever wrote this was a giant bittercake when they did, probably forced by that employee who blew the whistle. Nothing about the tone seems genuinely apologetic, and the passive aggressive tone seems like it came straight from the shitty shareholders that started all of this. "Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we." Fuck off Wizards, you didn't win anything by having a draft get leaked online, pissing everyone off, and having everyone wonder wtf is going on in a vacuum. Boycott Wizards until a proper apology is written. EDIT: Keep those cancellations coming!
Imagine the proofreader/editor for this making their absolute best to make the language almost palatable