I hope whoever made the call to needlessly burn all of WotC's goodwill gets the boot.
I'm sure Paizo and Kobold Press are going to go ahead with ORC and Black Flag now that WotC has shown them its priorities.
Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
111–120 of 249 posts
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#112A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniver…
>WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring. Yet somehow the product completely sold out in under an hour. I really don't understand the outrage on that decision, would y…
The product didn’t sell out. Sales were merely stopped after 30 minutes.
Gotta protect that exclusivity.
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.
Sure, but the outrage from this change came about revoking the license for past works. By putting SRD 5.1 under CC, the situation for many indie creators of working with the SRD becomes clean and clear. Hasbro can do whatever they want going forward with D&D.
Game rules/mechanics usually can't be copyrighted other than just the literal text of descriptions of them. Does this give anything you couldn't have by cloning the rules with different wording flair?
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work. The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase. DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_. And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us o…
When I was a player the story was way more important than the mechanism. Many times we just reduced to a few D6 tbh
This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#115My TTRPG group has been playing together for several years - on and off. We'd been mostly playing D&D 5e, even though we had members clamoring for other systems. After the WotC fiasco started blowing up, we finally bought a couple of Pathfinder 2e books, ran a few trial characters and one-shots. We are now in process of starting a new campaign entirely based on Pathfinder that we expect could take a couple of months…
My group is finishing up a multi-year 5e campaign. None of us had ever played a TTRPG before this, so we've never experienced anything outside of 5e. We were all super excited for OneDND... But when the OGL changes hit, we canceled our DNDBeyond subscription and are switching to Starfinder as soon as our campaign is done. This announcement from WotC is too little, too late. The fun is getting together with friends. I…
I always recommend people try systems outside of DnD. I've been playing RPGs for almost 2 decades now, and I always liken it to being a fan of movies, and always watching the same movie every week on movie night. DnD is the most popular RPG, and that is really it's strongest point. There are tens of thousands of other games out there, and in my opinion most of them are better than DnD, a lot of them are better at being DnD than DnD is at being DnD.
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#116A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniver…
There's only so much water in the well, though, and they might well be close to that limit. It's not an infinitely growable market, it's a niche product. True, the niche has gotten quite large in recent years, but at this point it's at least as likely to shrink as to grow.
> It's not an infinitely growable market
This needs to be said more often about more markets.
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#117The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized the…
> how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think. I'm not saying this as a defense or anythi…
> IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom.
The issue is that if you're in charge of a product/community/team/country and are out of touch with the needs/wants of that group then you are clearly mismanaging. You are effectively not performing one of the most essential parts of your job. Bad managers and politicians may be quite common but that does not excuse the actions nor the complaints and frustrations of those operating under the conditions that these leaders have set in place. I do think market research is important and needed but when a community's opinions are near unanimous (3 are ~90%!) it should serve as a huge red flag that you're so far out of touch with your core market that it is highly unlikely that you will be able to return given that you've probably gotten here through years of bad practice and not being involved with your community.
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have never claimed that it sold out, just that the sale concluded. Stores are actually on the list to get allocation for M30 product to sell.
The gp is saying that the set sold out within an hour and that is what the parent is responding to.
Neither the GP nor the parent to my original comment were correct. Nobody said anything sold out, they ended the sale - which is very different. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it didn't.
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think. I'm not saying this as a defense or anythi…
Given the extremely fast and extremely comprehensive U-turn, it seems like a lot of people near the top did understand the community very well. Somehow, one person or one small faction made a different decision, and the overwhelming feedback proved it was the wrong decision.
I think if they actually understood the community then they would not have needed this poll, which demonstrated near unanimous opinions. I would not blame anyone for believing that this retraction is simply a means to avoid larger problems and that there will be similar future attempts to make the same unpopular changes. It isn't just a misunderstanding of the community's opinions, but that they just demonstrated that they have almost no clue what those opinions actually are.
Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
#120A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniver…
>WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring. Yet somehow the product completely sold out in under an hour. I really don't understand the outrage on that decision, would y…
Isn't there a youtuber who just buys this stuff all up to sit in his garage?