How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition
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Backstory:
Dungeons and Dragons was once owned by TSR, who got the reputation as extremely litigious. Thus the nickname "They Sue Regularly".Wizards of the Coast (hereafter WotC) bought it from them at the end of AD&D 2e (the year 2002 or so), and as part of rebuilding trust, they published 3.0 under what they called the Open Gaming License 1.0 (hereafter OGL 1.0). While not the most airtight of documents, it was basically interpreted (and intended) as a show of good faith, a promise that as long as you don't really do stupid things and respect some relatively specific trademarks, WotC wouldn't sue you for publishing 3rd party D&D materials.
And the market responded. Hugely. Time went on, 3.0 and 3.5 came out, had tons of 3rd party materials, and eventually Hasbro (who owns WotC at this point) decided to make a 4th edition. Seeing the plethora of 3rd party materials, they felt that they were "subsidizing competitors" and wanted to have more control. So they published 4e under what they called the Game System License (GSL). Which basically said "no. You get nothing.". And so 3rd parties mostly stayed away. For this and many other reasons, 4e...was not the biggest success.
So when 5e came out about a decade ago, they published it under the OGL, now very slightly updated to version 1.0(a).
Current day
Earlier in 2022, they'd announced they were working on what they'd codenamed OneD&D. A new, supposedly backwards-compatible system. Ok, no big deal, right?And then in December, there was an earnings call for Hasbro. Where an exec basically said "yeah, D&D is undermonetized and we want more money". And then there was talk of a new OGL version. That raised concerns, but people figured "yeah, it'll mainly be for the new system, right? cleaning up some language?"
And then, about a week ago, drafts leaked and were confirmed. They were...bad. Horrific. Horrible. Predatory. Terms like
- We're revoking the 1.0 and 1.0(a) OGL. Anything published under them needs to be pulled from sale.
- You can only publish stuff in printed form or PDF. VTTs are explicitly off the table.
- If you make more than 50k/year, you have to register with us. If you make more than 750k, you owe us 25% of the gross revenue after 750k (meaning unless your profit margin is > 25%, you lose money for every sale over that threshold. And no one's margin is 25%+).
- You give us an irrevocable, perpetual license at no charge. We can use, reprint, etc your content without even crediting you.
- We reserve the right to change these terms at any time for any reason.
- If we don't like you, we'll terminate it immediately.
- You're not allowed to sue us.
Predictably, the community...did not take that well at all. Massive uproar. For a week, there was no reaction from WotC. Then they put out a "yeah, we know you have questions, please be patient" non-statement. That didn't make things any better. And then there was a leak from a WotC employee basically saying "yeah, they only care about D&D Beyond subscriptions. That's all they're looking at, they're not listening to any of us."
And so D&D Beyond has been snowed under, with the subscription portal crashing under the load of people bailing.
And their big competitors (Paizo among others) have publicly said they're releasing a new, truly open license anyone can use. And some of the big names in 3rd party stuff (Kobold Press among others) have said they're working on non-OGL systems.
Today
They decided to finally put out an official statement. Seen https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl here.Yeah, it's basically "we're all winners! We meant to do that! See--we'll retract the really bad things...and substitute stuff that's only 98% as bad!". And they thought this would stanch the bleeding?
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I saw their official response just a bit ago...and it really does read as a "fucked around and found out" walkback.
I love D&D...but I don't know if it'll recover from this.
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@e4tmyl33t said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
I saw their official response just a bit ago...and it really does read as a "fucked around and found out" walkback.
I love D&D...but I don't know if it'll recover from this.
Without the actual walkback. They've kept the worst parts (the forced update for everything except already published material) and haven't shown any clue why everyone hated it or got so upset. And (
warning) did so in a way that insinuated that they were only concerned with protecting the community from Bad People (and so if you objected, you must be one of those Bad People).
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@e4tmyl33t said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
I saw their official response just a bit ago...and it really does read as a "fucked around and found out" walkback.
I love D&D...but I don't know if it'll recover from this.
Wdym, 3.5 is already released. Even the leather-bound versions with(out) the errata. And there's charts for converting the 3.0 stuff if you really feel you gotta Mongoose.
Also, hahaha, haha, I saw this coming for like 10 years now.
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Yeah, I was still researching the whole situation when they published that, so I haven't cancelled my Beyond subscription yet...but I don't think I'll be renewing it at minimum. Probably won't be deleting the account outright just because of the digital content I have on there, but...dammit Hasbro, stop being asshats!
We hoped when WOTC bought Beyond it would mean good things. Unfortunately...
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@e4tmyl33t said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Yeah, I was still researching the whole situation when they published that, so I haven't cancelled my Beyond subscription yet...but I don't think I'll be renewing it at minimum. Probably won't be deleting the account outright just because of the digital content I have on there, but...dammit Hasbro, stop being asshats!
We hoped when WOTC bought Beyond it would mean good things. Unfortunately...
Yeah. I cancelled my subscription (because that gives you until expiry anyway) but won't delete until I've transitioned away from 5e entirely. I've committed to finishing out the two campaigns I have in progress, but will be looking for a different system.
Which sucks, because 5e was basically my sweet spot. It was basically everything I wanted from a TTRPG mechanically (even if I loved to tinker with the content, the core system worked really well for my style). So now I'm going to have to do serious adjusting.
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Earlender Medium aberration, 8-22 HD
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
they were only concerned with protecting the community from Bad People (and so if you objected, you must be one of those Bad People).
Tbf Mongoose are bad people.
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@Benjamin-Hall Indeed. 5e was fairly mechanically sound without being overly crunchy.
I don't have any games running but most of my available playgroup right now is basically "D&D only" when they do want to play. I'm gonna have a hard time converting them to another system, especially if I pick up Pathfinder or GURPS or something...
sigh
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@e4tmyl33t said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
@Benjamin-Hall Indeed. 5e was fairly mechanically sound without being overly crunchy.
I don't have any games running but most of my available playgroup right now is basically "D&D only" when they do want to play. I'm gonna have a hard time converting them to another system, especially if I pick up Pathfinder or GURPS or something...
sigh
I'm currently looking outside the OGL box entirely--
- PF (both 1e and 2e) annoy me--too much crunch in all the wrong spots. And PF2e doubles down and makes you make buckets of inconsequential choices and claims to provide real options. No thanks.
- 13th Age looks interesting, but not sure on that. It's a possibility.
- GURPS is a huge load to get into, both financially and commitment. And I prefer class/level systems over point-buy anyway.
My current plans are either
- Worlds Without Number (which is kinda Old School-ish). Strong contender, but not 100%.
- FantasyAge, which is an offshoot of a DragonAge system. The core looks interesting, but kinda lean. So lots of work to be done there.
Thankfully I have buy-in from at least one of my play groups to try out new things. The other one (the newer one) I haven't talked to yet, but they've got a long big left on their campaign so I can delay.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Wizards of the Coast (hereafter WotC) bought it from them at the end of AD&D 2e (the year 2002 or so
More like 1998 or so. D&D3 came out in 2000, off the top of my head, and on a quick look on one of my bookshelves I found a few AD&D books dated 1999 with the WotC name on the back cover.a promise that as long as you don't really do stupid things and respect some relatively specific trademarks, WotC wouldn't sue you for publishing 3rd party D&D materials.
Ask Fast Forward Entertainment (not this one, this one) how well that went.
transitioned away from 5e entirely. I've committed to finishing out the two campaigns I have in progress, but will be looking for a different system.
Which sucks, because 5e was basically my sweet spot.
Why not keep playing it, then? You’ve got the books (or PDFs or whatever), right?
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@Gurth said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Why not keep playing it, then? You’ve got the books (or PDFs or whatever), right?
Continuing to utilize it can lead to others potentially needing/wanting to buy materials for it, which would lead to the company you want to "boycott" still receiving money.
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@Gurth said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Ask Fast Forward Entertainment (not this one, this one) how well that went.
Uh, how well did it go? That's just a listing of products. What's the story behind that listing? Were they successful? Did they get sued?
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@Benjamin-Hall So if I'm reading that update right, the new list would be this:
- We're revoking the 1.0 and 1.0(a) OGL.
- VTT/non-RPG stuff is okay. Maybe. It's unclear whether they'd be licensed under the old 1.0a, or whether there will be explicit provisions in the 2.0 OGL.
- If you make more than 50k/year, you have to register with us.
- We reserve the right to change these terms at any time for any reason.
- If we don't like you, we'll terminate it immediately.
- You're not allowed to sue us.
From the players' perspective, that's not so bad. But the last three entries still make it godawful to be a publisher. (It's unclear whether registration is required; that's unpleasant, but not godawful.) And I was not thrilled by the way that the blog post couched so much of it as "as long as you're a penny-ante creator who's not worth our time, you can do whatever you want!" ...which has more-or-less always been the case.
I find the "this lets us keep out Bad Content" stuff to be somewhere between pointless smokescreen and really, really disturbing. While I understand why a large corporation would be interested in controlling the message around their product, fringe stuff like the Book Of Erotic Fantasy has always been around, and the existence of that weird stuff is part of what gives people license to write whatever they want without worrying about it too much.
I'm not sure what the final fallout of this will be: clearly, it's going to cause a drop in sales as the more politically-minded players find something else to play, but does the average gamer care enough about licensing terms to quit D&D and play something else? There are a lot of players who refuse to learn new games.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
- GURPS is a huge load to get into, both financially and commitment. And I prefer class/level systems over point-buy anyway.
GURPS is fundamentally different from D&D: it leans heavily on the simulationist side. The combat mechanics are death spirals, and 2-v-1 combats are heavily lopsided in favor of the 2 unless the 1 has ridiculously better gear and skills. Heroic fantasy is difficult to re-create in GURPS.
There are various hacks you can try to make it more heroic, but the basic system will fight you, and the game's official Cinematic Rules are "I dunno, just make the heroes never take damage."
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@e4tmyl33t said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Continuing to utilize it can lead to others potentially needing/wanting to buy materials for it, which would lead to the company you want to "boycott" still receiving money.
If you buy them from someone else, like a game store or second-hand, WotC has already been paid for them so you’re not giving them any money they don’t already have. And else there‘s always bootleg scans.
@PotatoEngineer said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Uh, how well did it go? That's just a listing of products.
Because that was basically the best I could find on short notice :)
What's the story behind that listing? Were they successful? Did they get sued?
Yes, enough that they went out of business. I don’t remember the details, and in any case was never more than a small-time freelancer for them so not exactly up to speed on the goings-on inside the company, but as I recall, FFE put out a good deal of D&D3 supplements that they thought were within the OGL, but which WotC thought weren’t. This resulted in FFE going out of business soon after. You can tell fairly well from the dates in that product list how long they lasted.
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@Benjamin-Hall It’s nice to see TransFormers fans weren’t the only people fucked by the fallout from that meeting.
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@Zenith said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
@Benjamin-Hall It’s nice to see TransFormers fans weren’t the only people fucked by the fallout from that meeting.
Misery loves company? (Just not that company in particular =))
A couple reasons, some pragmatic and some more ideological.
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WotC has shown that they cannot be trusted. As such, I don't want to bring new people into their ecosystem. Or induce secondary demand, even if we're buying second-hand.
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I'm not just a player/DM, I'm a minor content creator. Totally free, but I post homebrew in all sorts of places and run heavily homebrewed campaigns. The license terms mean I can't continue to do so legally. And I'm not super comfortable flying the Jolley Roger. I mean...in the short term that's what I'll do, but I'd rather be on solid ground. Even if the chances of getting in trouble are nil.
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I want to punish WotC in every possible way and disassociate with them. Because they chose evil.
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@PotatoEngineer said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
@Gurth said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Ask Fast Forward Entertainment (not this one, this one) how well that went.
Uh, how well did it go? That's just a listing of products. What's the story behind that listing? Were they successful? Did they get sued?
Sort of a combo effect. In addition to the OGL, WotC also had a license for some of their trademarks (the d20 System logo and such) called the d20 STL. This license required you to do things like cease distribution of and destroy all products bearing the Trademark(s) if you broke the terms of the license. FFE included D&D things not covered under the OGL in four of their OGL+d20 STL products and ended up pulping them.
I had their Dungeon World setting book once upon a time.
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I mostly play Pathfinder; while I have a D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook (it's sitting over there
next to my 4th Edition one) I haven't played it much and I've never had a D&D Beyond subscription. Thus, sadly, I can't bail on them to show my opinion. :/Wizards of the Coast has swung back to having very corporate people in charge of it instead of creatives. Their current President was CFO and COO for Amazon's Fulfilled by Amazon group, while the previous one (now Hasbro CEO) was Microsoft's Vice President of OEM Technical Sales. The person in charge of the D&D brand was formerly COO of Microsoft Dynamics 365. To me this entire OGL 1.1/2.0 debacle smells of corporate-style bad decisions and they're probably not going to stop.
They also decided to make their own AAA video game studio and cancel five projects being made by people outside the company. I wonder if it will last long enough to release anything.
Paizo announced they want to group with other publishers to make a shared Open RPG Creative License (ORC) that serves a similar purpose to the OGL 1.0/1.0a. I hope it ends up happening and helps the game publishers and their fans.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
A couple reasons, some pragmatic and some more ideological.
Yep, those make sense. Chances are I’d do much the same if I were in your position. If I would choose to keep playing by the rules I like, I’d most likely explain to new players why/how — and likely supply them with bootleg scans of stuff they want rather than encouraging them to buy their own copies …
The worst part for people like us, I agree, is:—
I post homebrew in all sorts of places and run heavily homebrewed campaigns. The license terms mean I can't continue to do so legally.
I’ve been doing just that for 30 years for systems I play/like, and IMHO this kind of move is one of the best ways for any RPG publisher to alienate its customers. They’re telling people who have a creative hobby that they can’t share their creativity anymore …
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Achtung! Unpopular opinion ahead. Well, some of it...
On one hand I sort of understand the rule #3. I've never been particularly fond of unlimited openness where every schmuck can publish stuff and profit from it. And I mean, write all you want, but if you base it on some existing commercial product, you lean on its success for an advantage. Given how 5e turned many people around (until now, anyway), it's definitely way easier to get player buy-in for your homebrew if it's 5e-based. So you must not profit or you must pay. I've no problem with that. On the other hand, the question is how much? As noted, 25% gross is excessive and inappropriate. I'd say 750k gross figure alone warrants business negotiation, but whether it needs to be 750k itself is a topic for some corporate pie chart meetings instead.
The problem I do have is (was) trying to retroactively invalidate everything currently licensed under 1.0(a). I'm not even sure they legally could do that (Paizo folks, who were there when it was written, says no). They must have felt they could get away with it (which requires to be very out of touch, but hey). Once published, it stays published, because 1.0(a) does not have the "we can do whatever we want" clause. Which is why they now did add "we can do whatever we want" clause (which is another problem).
And finally, already noted above, of course, is that they felt to pull the inclusivity card. That's the last (often also the only) argument of someone who's been fairly defeated and proceeds to flip the table, shit on the floor and scream "I win!".
It all sums up that I will not be supporting WotC and whatever they're planning (even though some of the OneD&D stuff looked quite good). Not a big problem for me - I hadn't been ever supporting them to begin with. I've never played actual tabletop anyway
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Not a big problem for me - I hadn't been ever supporting them to begin with. I've never played actual tabletop anyway
It's all rather academic for me, too. I haven't played D&D at all since the DM,
, vanished mysteriously just when our play-by-post campaign was starting to get interesting. My son is currently playing in something like five online campaigns, but he's never invited me to even spectate in a single one.
Also, I've never played actual tabletop, either.
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@HardwareGeek Try Tinder then
That's the advice I got from reddits (inb4 there's your problem). Apparently people advertise and find roleplaying groups that way. TTRPG groups, too, contrary to the obvious expectations of roleplaying groups 
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQJQYqhAgY
OGL (both versions) purport to license or restrict a whole bunch of this for which you may not need a license in the first place.
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@PleegWat … YT popped that on me yesterday as well.
On one hand, campaign and homebrew creators don't need to care because copyright covers the text of the rule books, but not the rules themselves, so creating something that just references the rules isn't covered anyway. On the other hand that makes it morally much worse, because it means they are trying to scare third parties to sharing revenue with them they have absolutely no legal right to. Ergo telling them to fuck off is the right approach—it's them who actually need that content.
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@Bulb "If you know an objectionable clause in a contract is unlawful, that still means you shouldn't sign it." Good point.
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@PleegWat said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQJQYqhAgY
OGL (both versions) purport to license or restrict a whole bunch of this for which you may not need a license in the first place.
The thing is, the boundaries of this are not in any way clear. What counts as "mechanical elements of the system"? Dunno.
So if you plan on doing this for anything not obviously excluded (ie for anything with any mechanical content whatsoever)...get a lawyer. Or several. And still you can expect to get sued if anyone notices you.
And the minimum amount for copyright is really really small--did you make a race that has Darkvision and copy the standard blurb? Yup, that's infringement without the OGL (or some other license). Did you say that your new class has a Fighting Style? Yup, infringement if you actually quoted any of the text. Did you format your class's table the same way that WotC did? Yup, infringement, because column order and contents are copyrighted. Etc.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
And the minimum amount for copyright is really really small
I don't think, in the American law and as written, it is, because the fair use exception is actually fairly broad. However it is also very vague, so its anyone's guess what a court would actually rule. And you don't want to even try to bring it to a court. Especially not in America where the lawyers are particularly expensive.
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@Bulb said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
And the minimum amount for copyright is really really small
I don't think, in the American law and as written, it is, because the fair use exception is actually fairly broad. However it is also very vague, so its anyone's guess what a court would actually rule. And you don't want to even try to bring it to a court. Especially not in America where the lawyers are particularly expensive.
Fair use is a defense, so it only works at trial. And, as you say, is really vague. So yeah. Get a lawyer.
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@PleegWat said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
@Bulb "If you know an objectionable clause in a contract is unlawful, that still means you shouldn't sign it." Good point.
This advice is more important for Americans than Europeans, because in the USA, contract > law (unless the contract is for something blatantly illegal, I think), while in the EU, law > contract.
@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Did you format your class's table the same way that WotC did? Yup, infringement, because column order and contents are copyrighted. Etc.
IIRC (but IANAL), US copyright law says that any information presented in the form of a table is not copyrightable.
@Benjamin-Hall said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
Fair use is a defense, so it only works at trial.
That’s the real problem, when you get down to it, of course: if they do sue you, their pockets are far deeper than yours, so good luck winning the trial if your money for lawyers runs out. Again, sucks to be in the USA for this, because AFAIK, even if you do win, you still have to pay your legal fees (in the rest of the world, the loser normally pays for both sides, as an incentive to avoid filing lawsuits they have no chance to win).
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@Gurth said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
IIRC (but IANAL), US copyright law says that any information presented in the form of a table is not copyrightable.
Systems, methods, and facts are not copyrightable, but if there's any creative element in how they're presented that isn't directly related to the utility of that presentation -- if certain columns within a group can be interchanged without making the usefulness of the table worse, for example -- that part is copyrightable.
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@Gurth said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
US copyright law says that any information presented in the form of a table is not copyrightable.
That's bad news for @Zenith.
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@TwelveBaud said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
if certain columns within a group can be interchanged without making the usefulness of the table worse, for example
That would be a colossally thin thing to try to bring to court. You might use it as part of a complaint, but not the whole. The particular wording of descriptive text would be much easier to prove a case with (especially of non-functional parts of the text).
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@boomzilla said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
D&D OGL 2 - The Bosses Strike Back
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@Atazhaia as much as I want to shit on Hasbro/WotC for that, I fear that the reality will be more:
1st picture: A community that spends an obscene amount of time reading and interpreting legalities and rules
2nd picture: Company lawyers who know how the law actually works
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@Gurth said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
in the rest of the world, the loser normally pays for both sides
I mean, yes, that's the theory, but when you look at actual court cases, the amount paid by the looser is rarely close to what the winner spent.
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@remi said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
@Atazhaia as much as I want to shit on Hasbro/WotC for that, I fear that the reality will be more:
1st picture: A community that spends an obscene amount of time reading and interpreting legalities and rules
2nd picture: Company lawyers who know how the law actually worksThe point of the meme is that people are recognizing what they're up to.
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@boomzilla said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
The point of the meme is that people are recognizing what they're up to.
And they're doing it pretty much immediately. They've had to deal with munchkins for far too long.
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@boomzilla said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
The point of the meme is that people are recognizing what they're up to.
I get that, and I appreciate the reaction (or what I can see here -- while I was interested in TTRPG some years ago, it's no longer really the case, and in any case I never cared about (A)D&D in all its forms).
But rather than "we're the mighty train that's going to derail the Bad Guys," I suspect it's more like "we're the tiny screaming toddler that annoys its parent but still get dragged out of the shop."
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@remi said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
But rather than "we're the mighty train that's going to derail the Bad Guys," I suspect it's more like "we're the tiny screaming toddler that annoys its parent but still get dragged out of the shop."
Leaving the shop is their intent in the first place.
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@boomzilla well replace by "dragged to school" then.
My point is that I've seen many cases of users/consumers/... of something getting shafted by the company that makes it, screaming bloody murder and promising to boycott it, and then the company keeping making heaps of money and continuing on its merry way. Either because the screamers are actually a small minority, or because they don't carry their threat or because the company is actually making money in other ways.
Mind you, there are also cases where the user revolt works, so this isn't automatically a lost cause, and again I'm definitely not on WotC side on that one. But "
everyone is against it" isn't a guarantee of success.
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@remi that's a fair criticism, but it's not really related to the meme.
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@boomzilla wait, making fun of how a meme (wrongly, IMO) portrays its authors (I guess) as the-hero(es)-that-save-the-day isn't relevant to the meme?
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Well, you know you're on WTDWTF when your
gets horribly mutilated by someone wielding a 
. (I did not read too deeply into the meme, I just found it funny.)
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@remi said in How to lose trust and alienate customers, TTRPG edition:
@boomzilla wait, making fun of how a meme (wrongly, IMO) portrays its authors (I guess) as the-hero(es)-that-save-the-day isn't relevant to the meme?
When you put it that way...retconning your post is definitely relevant to WTDWTF.
