The D&D Clusterfuck™ Summary
This will be as concise as I can make it, any errors will be corrected when/if they are pointed out.
Wizards of the Coast (WotC) was supposed to make a live statement regarding the new Open Game License or "OGL". To very briefly summarize what the OGL was:
"The Open Game License is a public copyright license by Wizards of the Coast that may be used by tabletop role-playing game developers to grant permission to modify, copy, and redistribute some of the content designed for their games, notably game mechanics. However, they must share-alike copies and derivative works."
(source: Wikipedia )
They were going to make some changes to the OGL to be far more restrictive as the shareholders of Hasbro (aka, DICKHEAD) discovered that WotC was actually an overwhelming majority of their revenue and was "under monetized" and steps were being taken to make D&D a live service type game that was entirely digital. Eventually this leaked.
To keep a VERY FUCKING LONG story short, any creative project made within the confines of OGL 1 (eg. Critical Role, Dimension 20, Pathfinder 1st Edition) would retroactively belong to Dickhead Hasbro as would a retroactive royalty payment across the projects entire history of revenue. For the entire leaked OGL 1.1, click the following link: http://ogl.battlezoo.com
This was leaked and "confirmed" (without an official statement, nothing is certain) by a whistleblower inside WotC that the order was coming from Hasbro because now their entire existence was only to turn higher and higher profits by literally any means they could or couldn't legally accomplish. More on this in a moment though as we haven't even gotten to the livestream debacle..
When news of this caught on a few weeks ago, at first the outrage was easy to ignore, but quickly spiraled out of control when major players in the Tabletop Gaming sphere broadly started sounding the alarms. This snowballed quickly as more and more information regarding OGL 1.1 was being leaked and allegedly confirmed. During this entire clusterfuck, hasbro was dead silent on all platforms which really only made things worse.
It all came to a head yesterday (12/1/2023) at about 4pm EST when WotC was slated to make a live statement regarding the rumors, but between announcing the livestream and the time it was slated to start is when the whistleblower statement came out basically confirming everything we were seeing. They contacted a number of community creators via email which read as follows:
https://twitter.com/DnD_Shorts/status/1613576298114449409?s=20
During this time it was clear WotC was scrambling to distract people from what was happening and just before the livestream started their website appeared to crash from the sheer number of people cancelling their D&D Beyond subscriptions. What ACTUALLY happened, and I swear to Loki I am not making this up, was they took the site down to REMOVE THE UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON FROM THEIR WEBSITE.
cite: bird-app
At 30 mins past the start time of their livestream on twitch, D&D Beyond twitter page abruptly deleted the livestream announcement and said on their community Discord server that they never actually slated this livestream and it was an error on the side of twitch. At this time I cannot confirm or deny that, this is only what they said.
Them cancelling the livestream was the kill shot.
Paizo, the company behind the Pathfinder game system, dropped an announcement. I will link the entire statement below but to summarize it, here are the important takeaways:
1. The original OGL was nonrevocable and their source was that they literally fucking wrote it.
2. Pathfinder Second Edition (P2e) was not created using any materials from D&D but still included the OGL 1 so that other creative projects could use Paizo's materials.
And for the big one
3. They were willing and able to take WotC to court over this, they are no longer interested in WotC's OGL in literally any capacity, and they were going to create a brand new OGL of their own which will be owned by the same people that own the open license for Linux to ensure it stays free of corporate fuckery.
And just to really twist the knife, they announced their core rulebooks were on a discount.
Full statement from Paizo: Click Here
(please be aware their site is being slow at the time of posting)
[My Personal Opinion: PAIZO WITH THE RKO OUTTA NOWHERE!!!]
This was the most concise and brutal dickslap to the face of Hasbro and WotC, and will likely be talked about decades from now as a key moment in tabletop gaming history. But we're not freaking done yet!!
Today (13/1/2023) at about 10am EST, D&D Beyond made a statement on their website which will be linked below. Key takeaway is the typical corporate speak of "N-nuh uhh, we were doing this to keep bigots out and make the tools more accessible (read: monetized) for you all. Was that convincing?" The entire post reeks of corporate gaslighting.
WotC Statement: https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl
Sadly the damage has been done and the bridges have been burned. Entire new TTRPG gaming systems have been created and given away for free in the last few days to such a degree that we are all now spoiled for choices. It is regrettable to see such a titan of tabletop gaming that had a very accessible ruleset be torched for the Hasbro cocaine bucket fund, but it's done now.
For the future we can look to Paizo's new Open RPG Creative License (ORC, hah that had to be intentional xD) for the next big company. However if you wish to support independent TTRPG systems, here are some recommendations from myself.
-For general high fantasy, Pathfinder 2e by Paizo
link: https://paizo.com/pathfinder
-For science fiction mixed with high fantasy, Starfinder by Paizo
link: https://paizo.com/starfinder
-For gritty neon-noir, Cyberpunk Red by Talsorian Games
link: https://rtalsoriangames.com/cyberpunk/
-For Fallout universe pen and paper: The Fallout RPG by Modiphius
link: https://www.modiphius.net/en-us/pages/falloutrpg
-For classic vampire and werewolf mystery: The World of Darkness series of games including Vampire: The Masquerade / Werewolf: The Apocalypse / Hunter: The Reckoning by White Wolf Publishing
link: https://www.worldofdarkness.com
There are many others that I am certain will be brought up. If you wish to offer your favorite, please do so with a link to the publisher. I would much prefer this over amazon so that the publisher doesnt get robbed by Bezo's cut.
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