Category: Gaming

My Poorly-Informed Opinion on the Dungeons & Dragons OGL Fiasco.

~ kmcorby ~ 2 Comments

Okay, I’ve watched a bunch of Youtube videos and now feel ready to add my two bitcoins about the current Dungeons & Dragons uproar over the new Open Gaming License.

Seriously, though, I’m not unequipped to discuss this. I am an OG RPG gamer. I mean OHH GEE. I gamed with the original D&D woodgrain box. The box with chits of paper instead of polyhedral dice. I’ve been gaming since before there were ten-sided dice.

I went to a D&D tourney when I was in high school, and I was the only girl there.

I have also joined the fairly rarefied community of lady Dungeon Masters. So I do feel qualified to speak as a gamer, about gaming.

My viewpoint is that Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro is engaged in a ham-fisted money grab, and understands absolutely nothing about the customer base that is the mainstay of their revenue. And seems to care less.

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

A quick recap if you’re not aware. Back around 2000, Wizards of the Coast published Third Edition D&D with an “open gaming license,” which declared the basic rules and stats of D&D to be open source, and keeping only named IP like Elminster, the Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep, Beholder, the purview of Wizards of the Coast. A harmonious vision, that created an active culture of third-party publishers making new worlds, monsters, classes, adventures for D&D, that succeeded for twenty years.

But during those twenty years, WOTC got bought out by game giant Hasbro. Who I suspect are the real villains in this story, because they speak in bad faith and care only about the bottom line.

WOTC/Hasbro wants to rescind the Open Gaming License (which was intended to be irrevocable) and replace it with a new, far more restrictive license that demands royalties, and contains an outrageous clause that says, you, third-party publisher, “own” your original content — but WOTC can use it and publish it whenever they want, at no cost and in perpetuity.

And this has the entire tabletop gaming community in an uproar. We don’t like seeing indie creators attacked. We don’t like being gaslit and disrespected like that.

I know this is all very, very inside baseball. But my husband hasn’t shut up about it for five days now, and neither has the Internet.

Wizards attempted to backtrack, too little too late, but their press releases have actual lies in them (this was just a draft license) and are not fooling anyone. The vapid legalese indicates to me that the suits over there have no idea who they are dealing with: to wit, fandom, a legion of obsessive, obstreperous nerds like myself. Some of whom are lawyers, or also work in the gaming industry.

The whole thing is, IMO, just a clumsy, tone-deaf attempt to wring more money out of the D&D brand. Wizards/Hasbro cares nothing for “the community” of gamers, the rights of artists and makers, putting out a quality product, or any of that. They see D&D as a cash cow from which they are trying to milk every drop. Charging creators. Raising prices for the fans. Undercutting other publishers. I understand they’re trying to corner the market on the “virtual table top” software as well.

This impression is heightened by an earlier incident in which WOTC also tried to “monetize” its other flagship brand, Magic: The Gathering, by selling an overhyped anniversary set of cards that they actually expected regular gamers to buy by the case in order to play. Screw the legendary game that created a whole new market sector, and WOTC’s bones in the industry. Screw the anniversary. Screw the fans.

Well, the fans are revolting, and doing so by canceling their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, which I guess is Wizard’s own virtual table top. (I don’t really know, I’m still a pen and paper gamer.) So many cancellations, it crashed the servers. That membership which, they were planning to hike to 30 dollars a month according to some reports. Damn,. even HBO doesn’t charge that much.

Leading third-party publisher Paizo struck back at WOTC by vowing to create a true, irrevocable open-source gaming system, which they call the ORC License. Which is cute, but I’ve already forgotten what it means. … ah. the Open RPG Creative License. To be shepherded by a non-profit organization. They have the means to do it, and support it, too. So a lot of other companies are jumping on board The hashtag is #OpenDnD.

Wizards of the Coast is straight killing the goose that lays the golden egg, here. It’s hard to believe even the Hasbro suits didn’t see the folly of threatening to take other people’s stuff, without license or fee, forever. It’s a means of forcing other companies out of business, is what it is.

The suits also forgot how engaged and activated subcultures are in the age of social media. This news went around the world instantly. And people responded instantly. Hasbro got caught with its pants down. Somehow they really didn’t think anyone would object to this vulgar display of hubris.

I agree with WOTC/Hasbro about one thing. There’s no reason Dungeons & Dragons couldn’t be a cultural juggernaut like the MCU or Star Trek. I mean, my God, they have forty years of adventures, campaigns, tie-in novels and more to draw from. D&D survived the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, and the nerds who were stuffed into lockers back then are now the titans of industry and culture. There’s no reason the whole country shouldn’t know what a Beholder is just like they know who Hawkeye is. The property has been sadly mishandled in that regard.

But man, this is NOT the way to go about it. Might I remind you an A-List D&D movie is coming down the pike in mere weeks. WEEKS.

Great move, WOTC, completely enrage and alienate your customer base, indeed your entire industry, RIGHT when you are launching the first of a hoped-for tentpole movie franchise. The Iron Man of D&D, as it were. GREAT MOVE.

Oh, and Hollywood just greenlighted a live-action D&D TV show, didn’t it?

If you want someone to wade into the legalese, or count the beans, you’ll find plenty on YouTube. It’s all over there.

From my viewpoint, this will be taught as a case study in business schools in how NOT to treat your customers OR your suppliers.

It’s too bad. I had hopes for that movie.

But take heart! All is not lost. D&D is not lost to you. Even if you’re poor, even if you live in the developing world.

This is what I told gamer friends who were anxious about Third Edition … and Fourth … and Fifth.

You don’t need any of that. No one can take D&D away from you. You don’t need Wizards. Or Hasbro. Or D&D Beyond, or any of it. What you need are secondhand copies of the core rulebooks from your favorite rules set , some PDF modules from DriveThruRPG, and off you go. Run a few of those and then design your own adventures. D&D lives in your head and your heart. Not in the books. Not in warehouses or cloud servers. You can game for the rest of your life and never give another penny to Wizards if you don’t want to. In the final analysis, D&D belongs to us. Not the suits.

Dungeons & Dreaming

~ kmcorby ~ Leave a comment

Dreamed I was playing D&D again.  It wants to come back into my life.

My brother’s character, who was a bard of some type, had an actual animated, talking pile of garbage as some sort of familiar.

My character, who was a ranger veteran just back from the wars, said, “What the hell is this?”

Pete sniffed, “It’s a perfectly common magical construct.”

I said, “It’s a talking pile of garbage!”

Mouthy, too. It kept interrupting.

Our dad was playing, too, but he hasn’t played in decades, so he needed a lot of hand-holding.  We had another new player, too, a young lady I knew from work, I think.  She wanted to cosplay as her character, which, fine, but she was also being shy and creating a lot of drama about it. Which was a drag, but I was trying to give her a break because she was new.  Much as in real D&D, we were simultaneously our characters, and our actual selves.

Our milieu was a rambling, seedy subtropical city on the shores of a shallow sea, built on many islands.  Like a sweaty Venice.  (New Orleans in the future?)

Hopefully I can put some of this to use one day.

Probably not the pile of garbage, though.

 

Dreams & Dragons

~ kmcorby ~ Leave a comment

I had a wild dream about D&D last night. One of those all-consuming dreams that rocks my world. My dream life has been quiescent for several years, but it has come roaring back just in the last few months. Much of the dream is fragments now, but I thought I’d write down what I remembered. Maybe I’ll remember more as I write.

I had a longstanding gaming group for much of my adulthood; over twenty years we gamed together.  But some how over the last several years we just … stopped.  This dream was about that.

The dream was about a huge, epic D campaign that my old group played. A campaign that consumed our whole lives, that we ordered our lives around. Like the campaigns we played when we were young.

When I first woke up, I was sure this was a campaign we had actually played, but as I tried to remember, I realized, no, this was unique to the dream. A whole world in my dream. God, I wish I could remember it all!

The dream proceeded in stages, moving outward like the layers of an onion.

The first layer, we actually were the characters, living the adventure. We visited a lord’s halls and were feasting. We were there visiting as his guests, but we had come because we suspected something hinky was going on in his domain, and we were trying to find out what it was. We were pretending to be honored guests, but were actually there to spy on him. We attended a banquet where we bragged about our martial accomplishments and flattered the lord obsequiously to make him friendly to us. We were already at this point high-level characters and had fought many battles together, had many war stories and knew each other well.

Then the dream stepped out one level, and we were us, ourselves, my old core D&D group — myself, my husband, my bother, his roommate, our friends Charlie & Bill, etc. — playing that module. We snooped around the lord’s domain. His manor house was large and opulent, containing many rooms that were broken out on a kind of holographic map – the library, the women’s quarters. You would touch a room on the map and it would rise up as a holographic projection. Super-cool.  There was, of course, some kind of monster in the dungeons. More kind of Lovecraftian than standard D hack and slash. Shapeless, tentacles, malevolent. Yes, I am remembering things. Intense fighting and magic.

Then the dream stepped out again, and we were hanging and decompressing after the session, going over it as we used to do. It was good to see and play with our old friend Jonny again, who we lost touch with years ago. He was our Dungeon Master through all those years.  Strangely enough, we were still in the manor house, but it was us, the real people, hanging in a drawing room and processing.

Then the dream stepped out again, and it was us, now, our present-day selves, reminiscing about this campaign that had been so epic and transformative for us. I was specifically trying to recapture the magic at this point, looking over the campaign book. The campaign was contained in a thick hardback book, like the Ptolus campaign, with all the modules, maps, a bestiary and prestige classes, everything. And it was like a living book — it had printed pages, but then other pages came to life , showed animations or came off the page as holographic moving pictures. It was amazing. And we were saying to each other, “Remember when we did this, remember when we did that? Yeah, that was cool, that was great, we had so much fun.”

And I turned to my dear old friend Bill and I said, “Bill, how did we do this? How could we let this happen? How did we let this fall out of our lives? We had such a good time. It was such a big part of our lives, how could we let it slip away?”

It felt like a message from the deepest part of myself. It had that epic, mythic quality. Numinous quality.  I feel, this morning now, like, fuck writing. Fuck crafting. Fuck my job. I want to have a D&D campaign.

I wish I could remember more. Just fragments. There was a module called the Tomb of Ra. The milieu was sort of a desert milieu. But not a cheesy, Arabian Nights sort of milieu, even less Western. More like Dune, maybe? But D&D-level technology, with magic. More sort of Bronze Age. Not a howling desert, like the Empty Quarter, more arid scrubland, like Palestine maybe? People had tattoos, which were used in magic somehow. And there were magical dogs, wise and powerful dogs that people kept as familiars and used in magic somehow. But the dogs were alignment-neutral, the good guys and the bad guys both had them.

In the lord’s domain, the leaders in the town had parasites that were controlling their brains, that made them act according to some sinister plan.  Lovecraftian, as I said.

The campaign had a quality like the Dragonlance campaign, as I understand it, which my friends played before I joined; it starts with a rather quotidian module in a village, and then moves out and gets bigger and bigger until you’re in a war for the entire realm. A showdown between good and evil, very LOTR feel. Tents — many of the races and peoples were nomadic, and that brought a very different flavor to it from standard European medieval tropes. Gnolls, the default humanoid race seemed to be gnolls. Towering mountains to the north, that we adventured in for a while, looking for a vital artifact.

My brother Peter’s character was a kind of halfing, more like a kender. He was young and naive, who had been sent from a little country village to travel with a band of adventurers, to learn to fight, to overcome a monster or evil wizard that had threatened and dominated the village for generations. So he was very naive and clueless, first level, but he was a fighter after all, and he was a little scrapper — he was in the front rank and gave as good as he got every time. He earned tattoos that were warrior marks of distinction.

It’s a continual torture to me that I have this creative power in my dream state — I can create whole words, whole lived lifetimes, years of time, without even trying.  Which power I can barely access when I’m awake. Everyone does! Even if they don’t remember it upon waking.  Maddening!

But I really do have to ask myself that, what I cried out to Bill. How did we let this go? Dungeons & Dragons.  It was the best part of us in some ways. The most magical part.  And what to do about it now?