Dawn of a New Age?

Well, I might have had ambitions about posting on this blog, but it's been almost 9 months, and not a word. That is how it goes, but it is time to get in here. D&D is coming out with a new edition! or - revision to the current edition! or - what is this thing?

They have new books coming out: Player's Handbook due in a couple weeks, DMG later, Monster Manuel sometime next year. Is this a new edition? They say not; the 2024 - something - to D&D 5th edition. I guess. I don't really mean with make a lot of this - this has become something of a trend in the industry. Mongoose did it with Traveller - their 2nd edition rules came out I'm 2016, and they put out a revision in 2022 - a revision that was in fact pretty much the same book. Better art, better layout, some clean up here and there, a few changes to tables here and there, but nothing that changed the game. Transparently easy to play a game with both books at the table - the revision really is a revision top the look of the book, more than anything. And Paizo did something similar with Pathfinder 2nd Edition - their 2E came out in 2018, and a "remastered" edition came out in 2023. This had more changes than Traveller - including removing anything that could tie the books to WOTC's old OGL - but it's a similar idea. New books, same game.

That's what WOTC claims we will have. They tout its backward compatibility - they tout its improved look. Things like that. Will it be true? Have to have the things in hand, I suppose, to say. Now - there are a lot of the things out in the wild; people have been reviewing them. I have not seen one - I have watched some of the reviews, but not obsessively. This post is very definitely about the anticipation, and expectations. When the thing itself arrives (and I've put in a word at my FLGS for one) I will come back and see what I have to say about it. (I promise that post, is nothing else; hopefully before 7th edition comes out.) For now? What do I think is going to happen?

First: I will buy one. I would no matter what - I am a completist, I have the rest of the D&D versions (not true: I don't have ODD, Holmes Basic, Cook basic, or most of the 2E core books; I have access to most of them though), and would get this no matter what. I am curious, as well - what is in there? is it worth the hype? is there anything better in it? I want to know. I will probably get the DMG on those grounds alone - with curiosity maybe overcoming the completeness: can they make something of the DMG? the current one is a bit of a flop, I think. I want to see these books. There is that. And I have put in a word for one - the alt cover, specifically, since the alt PHB cover is just fantastic. I want to have one of these things.

Will I use it? I will certainly play around with it - make up characters, play some fights - try to play a couple adventures maybe - a starter set or something like the old adventures in the Infinite Staircase or Yawning Portal books. I expect the D&D games I am in will start using it - at least next year, or whenever we get out of the adventures we're in now - maybe sooner depending on what people think of it. So I will use them. 

On the other hand, I doubt I will run anything with them. That doesn't have a lot to do with the editions - that has to do with D&D. I have kind of gotten tired of D&D. Again - not really because of anything wrong with D&D - because I am tired of level/class based games. I like skill based systems. I would much rather devote my time to something like Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, maybe Cyberpunk or try out Pendragon or Vaesen or something instead. But this is taste, and doesn't have much to do with the editions, and isn't enough to make me stop playing D&D if someone else is willing to run - so - just keep it in mind.

So - still anticipating this new version - what do I think, based on what I have seen so far? I think - it looks like it will be more or less easy to switch. I don't think it is exactly compatible with the 2014 version, the way Mongoose 22 is compatible with Mongoose 16. There are twists in character creation, in classes and subclasses, in abilities, attributes and so on that I think will make blending the systems a bit off. But it looks easy to switch, without wrecking what you have. (Unless you are playing a swashbuckler.) 

From what I have seen - I like character creation - I think the redistribution of decision points among races, backgrounds and the like makes sense - makes the whole process easier, more rational, more modular. I like most of the specifics and I like the general al shape of it. Classes? seem fine - close enough to what they are to not require relearning anything; maybe simpler to explain to newbies - I think they have something in there warning new players about what classes are more work than others. Sounds good. The subclasses also seem fine - though a lot of the changes seem kind of fiddly. Just shifting things around in a maybe pointless effort to make everything sort of work the same. Most of the specifics seem fine - though there are a couple completely unexplainable decisions. Going from 567.5 cleric domains to 4 is going to be painful, especially since at least 6 of the 2014 cleric domains were absolute bangers, and only 2 of those bangers made the cut. (Light and Life; but Tempest might have been the best subclass in the game, and Grave, Forge, and Twilights are all monsters and - so are a bunch of others. Clerics were the boss class in 5e 2014.) 

Worse: in 10 years of playing, I have seen people play 2 subclasses of rogue (other than a couple random thieves and multi class scouts and the like). Arcane Triocksters made the cut, as they should. But there is no excuse for not making the Swashbuckler a core rogue subclass. They gave us a psionic thief over the swashbuckler? they tried to fix the assassin, rather than just give us the swashbuckler? This is a failure off the worst kind. Swashbucklers are as fundamental to the class as it comes. It is certainly what people want to play. Just unbelievable.

The rest? Rangers still seem to suck. They've done a bunch of stuff with weapons and fighters to make them more complicated. They've allegedly improved monks and maybe warlocks, tried to gimp paladins, etc. The overall impression I get though is that things are roughly the same - but a lot more fiddly. In fac fiddly is the word I would use to describe almost all the changes I have seen. Fiddly in two senses. First - they've just fiddled around with all these things. Nothing is really different - but it is full of little differences that are mostly just going to confuse people who can't keep their editions straight. And second - they've added a lot of things - like weapon properties and masteries - that are fiddly in the sense of adding a bunch of little stuff to think about. Things to remember in a fight; things to keep track of; new ways of keeping track of things. Will it matter? I don't know, until we get it - maybe not in practice - but who knows? It does sound, from a lot of the online comments I've seen, that they have added a lot of fodder for the min-maxers among us. Is that good? if you're a min-maxer, I suppose. I don't know.

So - that is all I have for now. We're getting close: I do look forward to seeing this and playing with it. I hope it works, I hope it doesn't annoy me (and worse than not putting swashbucklers in the core book.) I do look forward to seeing the thing itself - the art looks - gorgeous, if maybe a bit off. Their recent pastel color palette is not encouraging - though all the art I have seen is really great looking. Who knows. I am looking forward to it, even if I am kind of sour on D&D.

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.

How Not to Run a Business

Ladies and gentlemen, here we are, two weeks into 2023 - and holy shit! We do live in interesting times, RPG wise.

RPG business wise, I suppose. This is about the OGL of course; I alluded to it in my yearly post, but that was before the actual document was leaked. What WOTC was actually trying to do was worse than even most of the pessimists feared. It was bad.

This has been in the news for more than a week (and WOTC has done nothing but issue a mealy mouthed statement about a revised version of the new license), and has been widely reported and discussed, so I won't go too deep here. But:

What's wrong with this "OGL" 1.1? Basically - 

1) It claims to deauthorize the OGL 1.0 OGL 1.0 has been around since 2000, released with third edition; it uses the word "perpetual" - though not "irrevocable", a choice that will feed a lot of lawyers. There is another clause that says that though the OGL can be changed by WOTC, you can use any "authorized" version fo thew license to publish material. Clearly, when this was written, no one imagined that any published version could somehow become unauthorized. We can guess that from the language used, though we also know it because the writers of the OGL 1.0 have said so explicitly. But WOTC apparently thinks otherwise, in 2023. This is, in any case, the biggest cause of wrath about this new license.

2) Later in the document, there is a clause allowing them to change the license as they see fit, with 30 days notice. This is another clause that is utter anathema. This lets them change all the other terms in the license - which we will get to - without any clarity about what happens to material published under this license after they change it. Not good.

The other objectionable parts are more specific to the contract itself. That is, I think you can split resistance to the new license into two parts: those above, that wreck the very framework of licensing; and the contents of the license, its terms - which are more bad or good in themselves, but don't really affect the rest of the world.

3) OGL 1.1 adds royalties on revenue about 750,000 - this is a change that might not seem all that terrible, except - the royalties are 25% of revenues - gross, not profits. That is onerous.

4) There are requirements to register works made under the license, and report income over 50,000. Again - good or bad - though coupled with WOTC's ability to change the license at any time, to lower the royalty threshold, for instance - it's not reassuring.

5) There is a clause that grants WOTC a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, world wide license to anything anyone publishes under the new license. This, needless to say, is another non-starter. 

There's more, but that's enough. As it is, there's no reason at all to agree to it, and most rumors go that the purpose of distributing it was to get large entities to cut their own separate deals. That doesn't seem to have happened. The backlash has been close to universal. The companies using the OGL have been scrambling to get away from it. Paizo is sponsoring a new license, the Open RPG Creative License (ORC) which they hope to replace the OGL with. It will be system and company neutral (hosted by a neutral third party), with buy in across the industry. Meanwhile, Kobold Press is planning to issue their own game system - Project Black Flag. I mention those two because they are among the most prominent OGL-based publishers, but pretty much everyone is reacting similarly. 

It is, in short, a complete disaster for WOTC and Hasbro (and D&D). No one is defending this new license, not even WOTC. They have issued one statement - a gutless and dishonest deflection, claiming the leaked OGL was a "draft" to elicit feedback, and claiming they will back off the royalties and the license-back clause (my #5), adding some weasel words about 1.0 being "unaffected" - but not addressing the big issues, the ongoing authorization of 1.0 and their ability to modify the license at will. Of course this came without an actual OGL, draft or final or anything else, so let's not get too excited.

Everyone else is hammering it. Youtube and Twitter are awash is complains and analysis and speculation and what should I start playing now posts. WOTC's competitors are running sales and promising new systems to compete with D&D and so on. And since it came out that what WOTC and Hasbro care about most are D&D Beyond subscriptions (no surprise - all of this seems to be tied to an effort to turn D&D into an online subscription model), people have been cancelling their D&D Beyond subs in droves. 

It's all - amazing to see. What on earth possessed them to think this was a good idea? Sure they want to get more money out of D&D - but they could do that by offering the services they are clearly trying to offer! Get that VTT up and running! make it better than all the rest! keep your stuff closer to hand! None of this required getting a cut of Pathfinder's income or pissing off every gamer with a webcam on earth. All of this seems to me to add up to WOTC deciding that the D&D brand is more valuable to them than the D&D game - they want to sell the experience, they want to sell it to other markets - they want movies and TV shows and everything else, they want people playing it online and paying for everything on there - that's what they want. And they can look at the brand that way because it is the dominant brand in the TTRPG world. And it is the dominant brand in the TTRPG world because of the OGL.

All that third party content supports the D&D brand. It has made D&D the definitive RPG, made it almost synonymous with RPGs. It pushes everyone - all those new people, getting into games because of stranger things or whatever it is, to D&D. Last year, before all this nonsense hit, there was controversy about the way people kept trying to port other games into D&D. Someone was making a 5E compatible version of Dr. Who. Paizo was looking into publishing their material for 5E. People would watch Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and ask how to make edgerunners for D&D 5E! despite the actual game it was based on being right there in the title! All this created a massive body of material that WOTC could tap into to sell their brand. They did not need to shut it down - they just needed to take their cut as all of it fed into their system.

What can I say. Now, people will look at other games, think twice about buying any WOTC products, and think three times about doing anything on D&D Beyond, and might even skip their movie, and stop buying tee shirts and everything else. They are going to lose millions of dollars on this and run the risk of letting someone else reap all those benefits. I don't know.