Mod+ OGL 1.1 is not an Open License.

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Yeah I ain't listening to no podcast. Is there a summary?
Basically they said:
We have seen this with GW who now basically a video game company that sells war games too and that WotC probably has no choice in dumping the OGL. It stinks for the little guys that have depended on the stability of the OGL but change is inevitable and they will just have to adapt.
 
When my nephews first asked to play D&D, I gave them DCC and they didn't know any better.

That was my thought, I mean looking at games in open gaming at cons it isn't always obvious what is being played. Sure they might have books out, or a branded GM screen to give it away, but without really looking I've never seen obvious differences at a casual glance at the table between a group playing D&D, RQ, Top Secret etc. The dice may give a hint, piles of 3d6 you might be looking at HERO or GURPs or just something that uses dice pools like Shadowrun.

If you know the system, then sure you may hear make a saving throw against magic, or I try to parry the blow etc which may give it away but watching a group playing D&D5E, AD&D, Pathfinder, OSE etc I just don't see the system screaming its name at you.

If it is not obvious in real life, I really don't see it being obvious on video unless they are doing lots of product placement.

I think D&D is more brand recognition than anything when it comes to Critucal Role. D&D 5E is also reasonably straight forward enough to be background canvas for them, letting them perform for the audience.

I think it terms of viewship they wouldn't lose too many numbers if they were not WotC-centric, and are likely to gain some viewers

A good setting with reasonably simple or straight forward mechanics is all they need, as they can rift their perfirmance antics off that

However I'm almost sure that they may already be in some contracts with WotC before all this OGL situation blew up

It would be good if it was otherwise, as Critical Role and shows like it (Geek & Sundry etc) are pivotal to how this hobby grows.

I quite like D&D, but there are many more trpgs out there that Critical Role could also be running. They do so from time to time, but D&D is really their bread and butter.

It will be intersting to see what they do, but I suspect WotC already has them locked in, $1,000,000+ wow, thanks for the free $15 book...

So WOTC may actually be paying them? I watch a lot of YT that has some sponsored content or is specifically not sponsored. Getting free tools, guns etc yeah I can see the appeal, Harvey wants to give you their top of the line $4000 table saw in exchange for showing it off, sign me up. Free RPG swag seems pretty trivial even for 250,000+ subscriber channels particularly if Patreon is involved, and some of these channels are well past that.
 
Basically they said:
We have seen this with GW who now basically a video game company that sells war games too and that WotC probably has no choice in dumping the OGL. It stinks for the little guys that have depended on the stability of the OGL but change is inevitable and they will just have to adapt.
And I say fuck that. They can try, but this defeatist nonsense is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Oh, the OGL 1.0a is definitely going away and there's nothing anyone can do about it" is simply not true.
 
And I say fuck that. They can try, but this defeatist nonsense is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Oh, the OGL 1.0a is definitely going away and there's nothing anyone can do about it" is simply not true.
Their point was with movies and tv the rights issues are often dictated by the studio’s lawyers and Hasbro is going to go with that because of the money.
 
I am just paraphrasing and I’m not the best at that so it is probably best to hear them directly.
 
Their point was with movies and tv the rights issues are often dictated by the studio’s lawyers and Hasbro is going to go with that because of the money.
No I understand that, I'm saying that they can't deauthorize the OGL, it doesn't matter if they think they'll make more money that way. "You'll never get Hasbro to give up on trying to deauthorize the OGL" is a different statement than "the OGL will get deauthorized".
 
Basically they said:
We have seen this with GW who now basically a video game company that sells war games too and that WotC probably has no choice in dumping the OGL. It stinks for the little guys that have depended on the stability of the OGL but change is inevitable and they will just have to adapt.
I think that WotC trying to rebrand their D&D trademark as a video game is the best case scenario. The sooner they become a video game company, the sooner they forget the tabletop business exists, and we can go back to our hobby.

With regards to Warhammer, them losing interest in the Old Word was one the best things that happened with WFRP 4E. The Old World was dead in GW's mind, so they didn't have the issues Chris Pramas had with 2E, where he had GW insisting he had to line things up with the mini game.

Regarding Critical Role, in most of the Youtube videos that mention Critical Role and the OGL, they run the same promo video of the cast all striking these heroic poses. It makes me laugh as it is usually in juxtaposition with a reading of their timid statement.
 
No I understand that, I'm saying that they can't deauthorize the OGL, it doesn't matter if they think they'll make more money that way. "You'll never get Hasbro to give up on trying to deauthorize the OGL" is a different statement than "the OGL will get deauthorized".
Sure, I didn't hear them wanting the OGL to be deauthorized as much as accepting it will probably have to be for Hasbro to move into the spaces they want to. Heck one of the hosts has an OGL game out there so it isn't like they were unsympathetic to third party creators.
 
No I understand that, I'm saying that they can't deauthorize the OGL, it doesn't matter if they think they'll make more money that way. "You'll never get Hasbro to give up on trying to deauthorize the OGL" is a different statement than "the OGL will get deauthorized".
Nah, we can make better ones. Let them have their hollow license. Render unto Hasbro what is Hasbro's!
 
Basically they said:
We have seen this with GW who now basically a video game company that sells war games too

um, what? GW doesnt make ANY videogames. They've licensed IP to videogame companies, but afaik they've never even attempted to make one of their own.

So my faith in the opinion of these podcasters is not high out of the gate.


and that WotC probably has no choice in dumping the OGL.

Do they provide an argument for that?
 
Sure, I didn't hear them wanting the OGL to be deauthorized as much as accepting it will probably have to be for Hasbro to move into the spaces they want to. Heck one of the hosts has an OGL game out there so it isn't like they were unsympathetic to third party creators.
Right, but if it can't be, that doesn't matter. I don't accept "but Hasbro feels it needs to do this in order to grow its profits" as a legal argument. In that case you could argue that Hasbro needs to be able to take 10% of all the money in every bank account because that will allow them to move into the spaces they want to. That Hasbro wants to deauthorize the OGL is clear. That Hasbro can deauthorize the OGL is not clear, and "but Hasbro wants to" does not make the issue clearer.
 
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Critical Role started out playing Pathfinder, and IIRC some of the other early stream/podcast campaigns used Labyrinth Lord. I’m pretty sure they could do so again and most of their audience wouldn’t even notice and even fewer would care. And if they released “Critical Role the RPG (powered by Pathfinder*)” I bet it would become an almost-instant top competitor to OneDnD (especially if the latter sticks to the subscription/microtransaction quasi-video game model they seem to be pursuing).

What Critical Role et al (and the D&D scenes in Stranger Things) helped people figure out is that playing D&D is a fun social activity to share with your friends and that the mechanical stuff (I.e. the stuff WotC is selling) is secondary to that, and can by and large be dispensed with completely. Yes, since Covid hit a lot more of that hanging out is being done virtually online, but the hanging out and socializing with your friends is still the point and the main appeal and WotC thinking that people want to pay for animated spell effects and cooler-looking outfits for their avatar and that they’ll want to play solo with an AI DM shows that they don’t understand their audience or why their game has been successful for the last 10 years AT ALL. So they’re going to crash and burn it. Luckily the real thing will survive. Probably under s different name, at least for a while, but it’ll still be there and people will still hang out around a table (real or virtual) with their friends and laugh and cheer and chuck dice and curse the DM.

*or OSE or Black Flag or whatever
 
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Look people have rubbished on this guy because he seems to have misunderstood what a disgruntled source told him about the surveys and also because Hasbro have denied a bunch of other stuff (and we believe them for some reason?) but a lot of what he says he's been told here is interesting and makes sense.,

Anyway take it with a grain of salt and make of it what you will. This isn't the TBP, I trust no one here is going to be permanently damaged by watching something that might turn out to be wrong.



Two things can be simultaneously true: WotC can be greedy, slippery corporate assholes AND this nimrod can have no business larping as a reporter.
 
Honestly, not terribly thrilled that the majority of D&D 5e Youtubers seem to be just jumping over to Pathfinder, which is...just more complicated D&D.

I mean, so many great RPGs out there and so many people still stuck in the D&D box.
 
Honestly, not terribly thrilled that the majority of D&D 5e Youtubers seem to be just jumping over to Pathfinder, which is...just more complicated D&D.

I mean, so many great RPGs out there and so many people still stuck in the D&D box.
classes, levels, shiny twee artwork, and familiarity. It's a pretty conservative hobby overall.
 
Honestly, not terribly thrilled that the majority of D&D 5e Youtubers seem to be just jumping over to Pathfinder, which is...just more complicated D&D.

I mean, so many great RPGs out there and so many people still stuck in the D&D box.
I really like D&D-ish games but going for an even more "fiddly" system is baffling (to me, speaking as a DM/GM). But then I don't get kids these days...
 
I really like D&D-ish games but going for an even more "fiddly" system is baffling (to me, speaking as a DM/GM). But then I don't get kids these days...
I think it's common for people new to gaming to keep looking for more mechanical detail. It's can be reassuring to new GMs to have a rule for everything.
 
Does PF have tools that automate the crunch the way D&D does? And (assuming you’re not a rules lawyer who actually cares about such stuff) how badly would the game break if you just ignore a ton of the rules and play it as de-facto D&D? Because while people online love to argue and obsess over rules minutiae, my experience in the real world is that most people don’t care at all about if they’re remembering all of their modifiers and calculating their gestalt bonuses correctly and all that fiddly stuff.
 
I really like D&D-ish games but going for an even more "fiddly" system is baffling (to me, speaking as a DM/GM). But then I don't get kids these days...
I wouldn't be shocked if a ton of these people talking about switching to PF haven't actually read or played Pathfinder (or least not PF2). It's a recognizable name, and it was the default "not D&D" the last time D&D stepped on its dick.
 
I think it's common for people new to gaming to keep looking for more mechanical detail. It's can be reassuring to new GMs to have a rule for everything.
Having personally experienced a couple groups with novice DMs imploding with lingering bad feelings from (opinion) 5e's shit "how to run this game" book, I feel that people often mistake more or less comprehensive sets of rules for a set of rules that is novice friendly or less prone to catastrophy via common errors. Basically the metrics of "many rules", "good rules", "how well person X runs game Y", and "how well game Z teaches/informs people how to play it", are all generally disconnected from each other. But very few people seem to accept that I have this point of view, and will often argue endlessly that more or less amounts of rules plus their personal preference is the determinator of a "good" system and therefore any failure state cannot be at all related to their favorite rule set.

But that's probably a whole 'nother discussion. Tldr: I agree and Douglas Adams had it right; "people are a problem."
 
Mechanically, I think WWN would be a better fit for 5E people, and it has plenty of tools and advice for GMs. It has a lot of character build options to get players interested. The issue is I don't think the aesthetics of the default setting are going to draw the 5E crowd, and art direction isn't Crawford's strong point. Even when the art is attractive, there is never anything happening on the cover of his RPGs.
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They don't do much to help you sell the players on running the game. At least one of them has a person in it, even if he is just standing there.
 
Having personally experienced a couple groups with novice DMs imploding with lingering bad feelings from (opinion) 5e's shit "how to run this game" book, I feel that people often mistake more or less comprehensive sets of rules for a set of rules that is novice friendly or less prone to catastrophy via common errors. Basically the metrics of "many rules", "good rules", "how well person X runs game Y", and "how well game Z teaches/informs people how to play it", are all generally disconnected from each other. But very few people seem to accept that I have this point of view, and will often argue endlessly that more or less amounts of rules plus their personal preference is the determinator of a "good" system and therefore any failure state cannot be at all related to their favorite rule set.

But that's probably a whole 'nother discussion. Tldr: I agree and Douglas Adams had it right; "people are a problem."

Is it really a surprise that a handheld generation would want to play games that handhold them with rules for everything?
 
Watching the D&D Beyond boards is interesting. There seems to be a slowly gaining feeling of defeat and dissatisfaction with loyalists. A recognition they are getting screwed too if only because their pleas are falling on deaf ears.
 
Is the open space where Pathfinder books were or is that just to have a dusty shelf to add to the FLGS ambiance?
That’s the pathfinder book spot. There were a couple of 2e books on the side, but almost everything else was gone.

behind me, lower down, was the good stuff. All the stray old boxed sets, obscure games, and long ago supplements, and also like 8 copies of modiphius’s dune

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