How to Run a Business?

Well, then. This has certainly been an interesting month for Dungeons and Dragons.

Two weeks ago, it sure looked like the sky was falling. WOTC trying to kill the OGL 1.0, issuing a new, nasty version, drawing universal abuse, people dropping D&D Beyond, threatening to boycott the upcoming movie. It got bad enough that WOTC tried something different - releasing what they called the OGL 1.2, still trying to de-authorize the old OGL, but dropping a lot of the worst things in 1.1 - the royalties, license back clauses, and so on. They added a kind of morality clause - claiming the right to cancel the license for anyone publishing hateful, offensive, illegal content - or engaging in hateful, offensive, illegal conduct anywhere, all this at WOTC's discretion and preemptively waiving the right to sue, to seek any redress. They put this out to a survey, like their playtest surveys for One D&D or Unearthed Arcana.

This went over poorly.

So they completely backed down. They announced on D&D Beyond that they were going to leave the 1.0 OGL in place, release all of the current SRD under Creative Commons, and - there you go. 

It is still hard to wrap my head around this. Companies do not usually back off from power grabs like that. I can see why they did it - they released the survey feedback - about 90% disapproval for everything they were up to, losing the old OGL, their VTT policies, everything. And there was the growing talk of boycotting the movie. All this coming as Hasbro took a big hit financially, stock going down, sales going down, massive layoffs - they obviously decided to cut their losses, and do it fast. But it's still an amazing result. 

So here we are. What comes next? I don't think things go back to what they were - Paizo's ORC license is still in the works, I assume companies like Kobold Press and MCDM are moving ahead with their new systems. Will all the people swearing off D&D come back? Pathfinder 2 and Call of Cthulhu both, apparently, sold out their entire stock of core books - that's a lot of money that didn't go to WOTC. Will those people just sit those books on the shelf and play D&D now? 

I admit this leaves me with something like mixed feelings. Not really mixed feelings - this is absolutely a good thing, good for all those third party publishers, good for the industry and the hobby, good for me, good for Wizards of the Coast. I still think this whole fiasco was a War Games kind of situation - the only way to win was not to play. WOTC lost the minute they tried it; dropping the plans gives them the closest thing to a win they were ever going to get.

But I still hope all those people poking at Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu and the rest go through with it. I hope the YouTubers promising to diversify their content do - I want to see more videos about Cthulhu, Traveller, Cyberpunk, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, from people I have come to enjoy watching talk about D&D. The whole situation has been a strange one for me - I was already on the way out of D&D. Not as much from anything D&D did wrong as from the promise of other games, and my own growing dissatisfaction with both fantasy and level/class games. Skills! real world! science fiction! Those are the things I want to play! It has been odd watching the rest fo the world do what I was already doing, often for completely different reasons. But gratifying. I hope that goes on, whatever D&D does.

Anyway. what this probably means for me specifically is that I am going to buy the Keys From the Golden Vault book after all. The first D&D product I have bought in a year (when I buy it) - and probably the last one for a while. But there you go.

Also, I see that I have managed to outdo last year's post totals to this blog inside a month. Nothing like a big company trying to burn itself down to generate content, I guess.