DnD vs Wizards of the Coast

  Forward! Forward! The DnD Brigade!

The struggle between big corporations and small creators feels like it started from the genesis of man. When the big megacorporation of Heaven, with it's tyrannical overlord big man God decided to crack down on the independent efforts of small time Lucifer- actually, maybe this doesn't make for the best comparison, somehow. Yeah, for some reason I don't think this is a favourable way of equating the D&D Community running up against the publishers of the game, Wizards of the Coast. Instead I guess I'm going to have to actually touch on the raging fire of chaos which is the fandom as I explore what on earth is happening in what should be one of the more chill corners of gaming. Because I mean, you really wouldn't expect the developer of a board game which encourages adventures that are told largely within people's heads to interact with it's community enough to cause upset... but you'd be wrong.

Afterall, how do you actually go about making a profit off a property that doesn't actually have all that much in the way of physical goods? Thinking like a soulless megacorporation would, obviously. Well, you want to charge for the ruleset and updates; although that information is easy to find online for free which makes for poor recurrent pay value. Provide a 'convenience' platform that requires subscription, Dnd Beyond! Sell merch wherever you can, licence games (most of which are bad) and a movie. (which looks a little bad too) But what do you do when the well runs dry? What do you do when there's multiple billions flying around your industry and profits are seeing less than a fifth of that? Well there's nothing for it, I guess; but to pull the reigns and slowly strangle the community until they start sliding their funds your way in order to keep their favourite pass-time alive. Because as the trend goes so often in the gaming industry; DnD might make a lot of money... but it doesn't yet make all the money.

As I understand things, the way that Wizards of the Coast used to handle their franchise and intellectual property was under a standard known as the OGL, or 'Open Game licence'. A fairly permissive standard that permits for the modification and alteration of Wizards DnD content to be created and even distributed without royalties or exclusivity, providing it's content that evolves on formulas and doesn't just nick a character or an original DnD race. (Which apparently applies to Mindflayers despite how eye-wateringly derivative they are.) The OGL is a fairly complicated little document designed to keep the spirit of personal creativity that bore DnD and table-top gaming in general, alive and well whilst the company moved into becoming more corporate and profit-driven. Of course, that OGL is also part of the reason why mega brands like Critical Role can exist under DnD without being pay slaves to Wizards of the Coast, and you can bet they don't like that one bit.

In fact, last year there were already furtive eyes being shared around the community after a leaked memo from Wizard's and Hasbro high-ups revealed their concerns on DnD; calling it an 'under monetised' property. An insane thing to say for such a huge brand that has a movie and AAA mega video game on the way in the very near future, both of which are not exempt from royalties, by the way, products of that type aren't protected by the OGL. As such, the cautious were doing what us in the video game do whenever news like this drops; they were bracing for impact over the next few years as Wizards slowly put their plans in play to- or they just turn around and do it obviously and plainly for all the world to see? Wait... have Wizards learnt nothing from the years of greedy industry encroaching that happens all around them, or are the Wizards show-runners just increadibly impatient? I can only assume that CEO, Cynthia Williams, has a daughter with one big-ass sweet sixteen coming up and she needs to start offsetting that bill now.

2023 started with a RPG splash as Wizards brand new OGL 1.1 leaked to the public after being shoved at creatives with all the subtly and care of a jack-hammer enema. This new license, itself a prelude to a full 2.0 licence that we can only guess about at this stage, made great 'shifting the goal posts' statements, from demanding immediate royalties from big enough entities, forcing the complete surrender of creative rights and requiring a brand new 'check in' system with Wizards so that all new projects need to go through them before being published. Absolutely antithetical to the heart of DnD and largely naïve to think such a proposition would go 'under the radar' or be 'swept away after a week' in an industry populated predominately with highly market literate nerds who loves to check the small details and care a lot about their pass time not being stamped on. Wizards should have known this fight was coming a mile away.

Of course, Wizards response to this is pitifully weak. They want people to know that they aren't going to turn around and steal content, and that only the obscenely successful will be paying royalties and only the hateful and inappropriate will be censored. (Which is itself questionable given that Wizards have shown such an overzealous approach to 'censorship' that they removed the badass cruelty from 'Dark Elf' lore so as to be less 'racist'. Dark Elves are blue, Wizards; Black people tend to be brown; from my experience as being half of one.) But the problem is the precedent that this sets. With 1.1, Wizards have deliberately put themselves in the position to start clamping down on independent DnD content and created an environment where in sudden hairpin policy changes are possible. Who's to say that they don't suddenly start getting desperate and start stealing someone's homebrew character guide to sell it to bump up a slump season? That would be legally within their right to do so under this new policy.

Backlash has been severe and swift with a general movement started to start cancelling DnD Beyond Subscriptions, as that is proven to be one of the key immediate metrics that Wizards relies on to measure their success; but no one has been as proactive with this as Paizo has been, the publishers of Pathfinder. Pathfinder, despite being the property behind one of my favourite CRPG computer games of all time, is itself an offshoot of DnD created after a spat with Wizards led to a team that was working under them having rights ripped away so that Wizards could centralise their brand. Basically, they're a team that fully recognise this face of Wizards and know how to face it. Which is why it was probably with a practised ease that the team got around to reaching out to other TRPG friends and drafting their own, freer, OGL with rights to be held by a third party that then passes it on to a non-profit so at no point can the terms be changed by some greedy suit-wearing Beholders ten years from now. (Get it, because Beholders had a long history seeped in slavery before Wizards' nuked that lore out of exsistence because it reflected on their own practises too neatly.)

Which brings us to our current holding pattern. The 1.1 OGL has been held back and hastily withdrawn, whilst the Wizards higher-ups wait for the community aggro meter to run out so we'll all go back to our neutral, wary, state. 2.0 is the real threat and is very much bubbling in the bowels behind each and every story, waiting to explode forth with apocalyptic potential whenever it is that we'll least expect it. Now the table top community have found themselves stuck right in the tug-of-war between consumers and creative leads that the games industry has maintained for the past ten years. Where every bit of land preserved is at the cost of chipping away nuggets here and there until we don't even recognise the standards we set out trying to save anymore. Here's hoping that the community here are a hell of a lot more successful preserving their dignity than we've all been!