The funniest part of this was Paizo's response to this and the letter they wrote where they basically told WoTC "Do not recite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.", because several higher ups at Paizo were old D&D staff who ACTUALLY WROTE the OGL 1.0.
Ignoring that wotc already has the rights secured via contract to produce its own critical role content and merchandise, that same contract also restricts what the team is allowed to say about this even if they do feel it sucks, which they likely do. Matt isn't screaming anything except internally right now.
@@frankl5963 Its also ok for CR to do nothing major about this. They don't have to fight this fight. Those guys are Voice actors, they already have enough on their plate as it is.
@@VaSoapman except, as public figures, especially ones who already make political/social issues statements(as poorly advised as those often are), they're in a horrible PR pickle if they don't say anything.
@@MostLikelyMortal depending on how badly this scandal fucks up the D&D brand, they might be screwed if they don't. Like I said, it's a tricky PR pickle they're in.
"We are not your community (WotC). You exist within OURS." -CritCrab "It is insane to me that WotC wants to fight a legal war with a community they trained to read 500 page rulesbooks, and taught to be upstanding moral heroes." - Stephen Glicker, of Roll for Combat
Hey now, they absolutely did not train people to be upstanding moral heroes, they trained people to be murderhobos collecting shiny, which isn't much better for them really
@@constantanxietyattacks6878 i always love reminding myself of the Dead Alewives skits. "is there a tavern? Cool! i get drunk. are there any girls? because if there are any girls i wanna *do them.*
@@constantanxietyattacks6878 That's arguably worse. Petty murderhobos who were trained to exploit every rules loophole imaginable are a far scarier enemy than a bunch of lawful-good paladins.
Unfortunately for WoTC, Paizo has had a plan for this exact scenario for YEARS. They've unleashed it now as they are releasing a new license called the Open RPG Creative license (or ORC) which several publishers have already signed on to AND Paizo will be moving Pathfinder to an original system. Also, just about every publisher has announced their own original TTRPG system to get out of the OGL entirely. Ironically, in their attempt to control the market and make a lot of cash, they have lost all of their control and have already begun hemorrhaging cash as the D&D Beyond subscription cancel page crashed from too much traffic this week.
it's believed that d&d beyond did not crash, but was taken down, as the button to unsubscribe was removed from its normal spot so that it was harder to access
And every other day the UX team has to burry the unsubscribe button further and further into the settings. It'll reach a point where it will be a 2x2 pixel where a period would be
Really don't see WOTC's logic. like D&D has an intelligence based learning curve not a single person who was into D&D enough to pay them would be on board for this not a single user is that dumb to take such a raw deal
and then they proceeded to hide the unsub options for some users (which regarding payment subscriptions is nearly or actually illegal depending on where you live)
It never ceases to be funny when companies willingly destroy free advertising for their brand simply because it allows people to enjoy their IP without giving them money directly.
I got a real sense of the mentality that creates this sort of thinking when I talked to my Brother in Law, who claimed to me NFTs were a good thing since they would “ensure companies could make/recover profit from art of their products” among other things. The thing is, as far as I am aware, this is an academically underesearched area, meaning there aren’t as many sources of hard numbers on how much this sort of authoritarian approach to copyright law hurts brands in terms of lost revenue, advertising money, etc. Even if it’s otherwise obvious how counterproductive actions like this are to increasing revenue/advertising your brand, some people will not understand without a number.
This reminds me of when Sony tried to copyright the term "let's play", they got denied because you can't copyright a concept but the obvious sidestep if they won was to call it something else. Massive companies trying to copyright concepts is always hilarious because the people will always produce a suspiciously similar substitute.
Somewhere on one of the videos I saw about this they said "The great thing about this game is the community, which exists and has existed before Wizards of the Coast was even a thing. Wizards did not create the community, it exists *because* of the community." and thats very true. But like you said, they seem to think they are the creators and stewards when they are neither.
I'm reminded of years ago, when Hasbro made the decision that no fanart could be sold at BotCon (a Transformers convention). They were in their rights to do this, sure, but fanart is usually left alone because it isn't worth enforcing, and creates bad blood with the fanbase. Vendors, and especially fans, were PISSED. Hasbro only backed down when people started pulling their tables, canceling their ticket purchases, etc, and didn't try meddling with it again. Hasbro was highly concerned they were losing out on the $15 dollars an artist alley vendor makes all weekend, and assumed the money that attendees would have spent on fanart would instead be spent on their official products. (Which would not have happened, anyway. Hasbro and artist alley's have very different types of merch available.) Unfortunately, with the DnD thing, I'm not optimistic about them backing down the same way. Especially not after the statement basically saying "J/k, j/k! It was just a draft!" But people are coming together and making their voices heard, be it through their words and their wallets, so there's hope.
Hasbro clearly has a disconnect with how their money people act and the creatives. These money folk do not know how to make money except for mobster tactics of strongarming yet they cry like bitches each time they lose $1. Most of their brands are tainted by their bullshit they're insane if they think strongarming people is gonna work like most nerds don't fall under multiple banners under Hasbro... NERF, MTG, Power Rangers, Transformers, D&D, etc. I don't know how they can just hire CEO that know nothing about the BS they did in the past or if they do enable it again and expect something different...
After Paypal tried that, only to lie about scuttling that and sneaking it in, we will have to be RUTHLESS with WoTC. Fans are rightfully tired of the mainstream media being cruel to them
they already tainted the waters everyone is leaving regardless, the fact that this stink has reached outside of the community overnight it testament that they have just fucked themselves over for good, DnD growth has just tanked.
@@PerpetualDaydreamer That's why they constantly fail. People aren't stupid and they realizing the corpos are doing all they can to make money even if it hurts the brands in the process
Critical Role could switch to Pathfinder 2e tomorrow and WOTC would instantly lose the biggest creators by far, the people who had the most to do with the unparalleled explosion of 5th edition and Critical Role would not be affected at all. They completely shot themselves in the foot.
Remember: Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns DnD. Hasbro is at the top of this shit triangle. I'm a Transformers guy, but I'm not buying any new shit from Hasbro in solidarity with DnD players. If all they want is money, then our greatest power is to withhold our money.
Hasbro's behind Beyblade here in the west and it's been shoddy lookalikes of the Takara Tomy products for 5 years now. The actual chinese ripoffs are better than what Hasbro has been putting out before the ludicrously overpriced Pro series.
@@ericbloodsmith5161 I never played Beyblade myself, but I've definitely heard about the quality issues with Hasbro's products. Same deal in many cases with Transformers; I only have a few of the Hasbro made ones, and the difference in quality compared with Takara Tomy's figures is noticeable. Sorry to hear that all of our hobbies/favourite franchises seem to be getting hit hard by the corporate greed effect. :(
@@mannythelazyguy6529 I'm not sure who you might be referring to as I don't watch many reviewers myself, but there are definitely a lot of great third party Transformers figures and model kits!
3 things I want to say about their response: 1. Their argument about combating hateful content is a lazy excuse to make what they're doing look not as bad. 2. They straight up say "we included the ability to ruin your life and career at any time for any reason without warning, but we wouldn't actually do it." 3. That paragraph about saying we all won is copium of the highest degree and shows just how desperate they are to save face.
That "We All Won" statement was written by a chubby faced bald man who used to play football in highschool. The kind of guy who wears gold chains and big fat rings on his big fat fingers. I can feel the energy of this prick like menacing Jojo vibes.
So, it’s even worse. Wizards IS actually trying to argue that a previous OGL agreements are retroactively null and ON TOP OF THAT, companies or people who were under those now void agreements retroactively owe them a shit ton of money. There’s no way that’s going to hold up in court.
15:21 it was "officially put out" just not "publicly put out" WOTC is claiming in their latest pr statement that "it was a draft, please guys don't be mad we just wanted to get feedback", however creators have gone on the record saying that they were sent copies along with contracts to sign & NDAs; you don't do that for a "draft".
Thank you Pat for not explaining the acronym of GURPS because a lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the G stands for Generic. For anyone not in the know, the whole thing is Generic Universal Role-Playing System. It's only called generic because there is no standardized setting for the games to take place in, but there are sourcebooks for original settings you can run games in. Speaking of sourcebooks, there's hundreds of them for just about anything you can think of, like period-specific weapons, genres, or licensed settings. It also uses a point buy system.
I’ve purchased Pathfinder and Starbound pocket editions and am done with Wizards forever. I’m a 12 year DM and also MtG player. They spit in our faces, sat silent for a week, and then said they won too
Yeah I'm going to do something similar, but since dnd is a majorly a pen and paper type game I'm just gonna commit mass scale piracy of 5e, get everything 5e related and nothing else from wizards as I look at other works like Ryuutama
Another thing that's funny is that for most of the creatures/races that D&D uses they can't even attempt to force a copyright because a lot of it is from mythologies and folk lore. Hell they tried that with Tolkein estate and that's what caused them to use Halfling.
It has always been super weird to be that the Tolkien estate didn't claim ownership of the term Orc also. What we now think of as an orc was pretty much Tolkien's invention--before him, the word Orc either referred to either a sea monster or a zombie-like thing animated by an evil spirit, depending on the source.
@@fangk12345 But it's a direct line. All I'm saying is we wouldn't have modern orcs at all if it weren't for Tolkien--we might still have burly monster men, but there's no way we'd use the word orc to describe them. They're unique to Tolkien because he functionally ignored the orcs folkloric roots and made up his own monster that happened to have the same name. It was still a long transition to get modern orcs though, considering Tolkien orcs weren't big and strong at all. They were short and scrawny--even the big uruk-hai were described as being only almost human height.
I dunno when this was recorded, but since the announcement of One D&D and OGL 1.1/2.0, 3rd party tabletop companies led by Paizo, the creators of Pathfinder, have banded together to form A new Open RPG Creative license (ORC Liscense). And the plan is for it to basically be an open source tabletop ruleset that is free for anyone to use.
It's worse than anything that could be said. The idea that you owe them money EVEN IF you don't make money, is pure insanity. And most of this is because the DnD arm of WOTC has been doing shit lately.
@@EviIPaladin Oh i know. Pioneer (Return to Ravnica to Present MTG) has been IN SHAMBLES because of Nykthos "free mana through combo lands". It NEEDS to be banned, but they refuse to do so, making the format "uncompetitive". Same for a lot of other formats. The game is made for Commander now and set design goes straight to that. And i couldnt be less interested in the game now. So I play One Piece TCG. Which is fairly competitive and plays excellently. Its just getting certain cards (mostly starter deck exclusives), is more expensive than owning such an item is worth. But ill take THAT over "Just give us $1000 for some $5 proxies". NO! GO FUCK YOURSELF!
For the existence of 5e homebrew carried it because the damn lunks can't be moved to do anything. Like this edition was barebones for YEARS. Then everything after Tasha's was really suspect in quality and high in price. Then WotC and Hasbro been cancelling games left and right yet ironically let that shitstorm of a Dark Alliance slip on through.
"We want to celebrate Magic the Gatherings 30th anniversary by going back to our roots... So we made unplayable proxies of some of the most iconic old school cards on the market! All for the low low price of just 1000$ USD you too can have a 1/60 chance of pulling cardboard you literally cannot use!"
That's how it always works, because the people who still have the money to buy their stuff will go to bat for any corporation so long as DEI shit is used. upper middle class shit-libs and progs will support any evil mega corporation, as long as a BLM fist or pride flag is stamped on the product. There's a reason why every time a new Blizzard scandal pops up, all of a sudden they have a activist product launch
Here to promote the good word of Lancer the mech based TTRPG, because let's face it 90+% of D&D settings have mechs in them anyways, including the vanilla game
I don't think it can actually happen, but I have this horrible vision of John Hasbro walking into the Square Enix offices, strolling up to the president, and going, "Hey, I don't know if you remember, but back in 1987 you guys made a little game that had Mindflayers in it. It got a few sequels, and I just can't help but notice that we don't seem to have gotten any piece of that pie..."
Imagine harder, D&D was the first use of the term "Hit Points" to refer to a person and not naval vessels. That's a lot of pies. You're right that won't happen though lol. Also the OGL covers rules, it doesn't cover proprietary creatures like Mind Flayers, they've always been able to sue over that, it's just not worth messing with big companies like Square Enix over what would probably be a pretty small settlement.
So, to put this into more recent context: WotC already backpaddled hard with a big "this was a draft, even though we already send this towards publishers". On top of that, you can't copyright how a game is played, only the iteration. "Scrabble" for example, exists in multiple different cases where just the name is changed but the rules are the same. So games using the D20 system should be fine anyways, as long as you don't use *Characters* or *Stories from the books*. Obviously this goes a lot deeper but the wording in the "draft" was just horrible. Edit: I looked around a bit and I think "LegalEagle" did a pretty good video on it. He also names another good example, which is monopoly. Obviously you can't copyright the word and you also can't copyright the trading of "infrastructure" or how you want to name it, but the playboards (the individual iterations) and the logo are under copyright (board) and trademark (logo). And the name is trademarked, which means you can't use "monopoly" to publish your own board game.
@@zacc Was more in the middle of it. But the good thing is, they are planning to remove the royalties stuff from it completely in the next iteration. But I'll believe it when I see it.
This is technically true that you can't copyright a game mechanic, but it's a debatable point with D&D. With scrabble it's letters and points, you can't really copyright that. What you can copyright is rolling 3d6 to determine a thing called Constitution, to determine a thing called Hit Points, to determine whether or not a character is alive. There's so much of this specific language that's tied up in how it works that Hasbro could bring a case that applies to a lot of things. Keep in mind that D&D was the first thing to apply the term Hit Points to a human being and not say naval vessels. And it can't be automatically argued that they haven't been defending their copyright with a lot of these common terms we take for granted in tabletop RPGs now, because although the ship has probably sailed on the term "hit points", most of this stuff was being used in the tabletop space under the original Open Gaming License, it wasn't just being ignored, it was officially licensed, so the copyright hasn't been surrendered. The amount of things you'd have to rename with a lot less clear and intuitive language to avoid potential legal cases is absurd, and whatever it is you do it doesn't just have to be good enough to win in court, it needs to not get there in the first place, because most people can't afford to start legal proceedings against a company the size of Hasbro. They have a lot of lawyer money. LegalEagle and the "Opening Arguments" podcast he references both have a very forgiving view of the OGL1.1, most of which I feel comes from a familiarity with the normally much more draconian IP attitude companies have, and a lack of familiarity with the TTRPG space and how it has operated.
IIRC, and I could be wrong, a big part of it that LegalEagle didn't touch at all is that the old OGL gave 3rd party creators reassurance they won't get sued. While you can't *really* win a case trying to sue about a game mechanic or internal structure change like adding new spells or something, with this new 1.1 OGL there isn't that clear reassurance laid out I don't think. So Hasbro/WotC could throw their weight around and even if the little guys would win in the end, it'd be a drawn out, expensive affair for them to deal with.
@@NoNoNah306 You're still describing game mechanics. And Pat is wrong, you absolutely cannot copyright the phrase "natural 20" or "constitution" or "hit points" or any short phrase even if you're using it in a very specific way that you invented. You might be able to trademark them theoretically, but at this point they're so ubiquitous in all spheres of gaming that they'd be considered generic. But, yeah, the near complete lack of consequence for shady lawyering where you assert rights that you absolutely KNOW you don't have means that Hasbro will happily throw its weight around, and that's concerning.
Apparently, so many unsubscribed to DNDBeyond that they have to hide the subscription button. Hasbro out here realizing how greed can ruin a franchise.
God shit like that should be illegal, I had to watch a UA-cam video just to know how to unsub to audible and even then I think you had to go to Amazon specifically or something it was a while ago and a major headache.
There's another lawsuit I recently looked into (out of curiosity, I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand the legal system) and it's one accusing Valve of having a monopoly because Half-Life 2 was popular. And yes, the reason why the Half-Life series was so successful, especially in Eastern Europe where video games were less affordable in the 90s and early 2000s, is because it's you buy one video game and instantly get access to thousands of fan-created spin-offs. That's also why D&D exploded like it did. Allowing people to make stuff based on your game and release it under their own terms makes it popular.
Even without the new ORC license they are making, Paizo went to great lengths to actually make sure that nothing in Pathfinder2E needed the OGL and only included it as a courtesy basically.
A lot of RPGs did that. I think there was a period where a lot of people saw including the OGL as making a product "legit", plus they probably just wanted to be on the safe side.
More than a courtesy, they wanted other publishers to use the PF2e SRD for their own creations. Technically, you don't need to use any version of the D&D SRDs with the OGL 1.0a. The reason that you would want to is to allow other creators to your own of game system's SRD in their creations.
i'll just make my own system with stats named after Francisco Goya paintings, so you wanna break down a door with that axe? roll that "Colossus" for me, are you trying to resist a spell? roll that "Yard with Lunatics" target is 10, are you trying to write a new spell down on your grimoire? roll "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" and we'll be all set.
12:10 The real world application is they would have the ability to completely steal your entire project whole sale, make their own version of it to sell themselves, and then terminate your license so that you can no longer sell that product.
Reminds me of Chapter Master. Fan game to play as your own Space Marine Chapter in a 4x/Dorfort sort of game. Completely free. Games Workshop sent that big old C&D hammer down. So it became INTERSTELLAR ARMY SIMULATOR. All copyrighted material removed, no problem. It's now just it's own, generic thing and still free and OH NO, SOMEONE MADE A MOD FOR IT TO MAKE IT BACK INTO SPESS MARHENS, DON'T DO THAT! (mod will be updated as per the original roadmap)
Pathfinder is a direct continuation of D&D 3.5, literally just took the whole system and kept it going when D&D headed into it's 4th edition. Also, other than maybe spin-offs that tie into the d20 system, Cyberpunk 2020 and Traveler have had nothing to do with D&D for like 40 years now
@@liamfoote7164 yeah I heard people didn't like it but PF one is still great. I liked them pulling in Flethcher Hanks characters like Fantomah, that shits pretty wild. And it's a good example of cool shit you can come up with when you have a free license to be creative.... Or when you used to be able to be creative before corporations fucked that all up for us
In that same document they also talked about how the customers are basically just piggy banks and we are just walking bank accounts that they should have
@@MuppetKing Absolutely not, because all the people that Hasbro are aiming this at have all already pulled out. Nobody in the business side of this is going to forget they're gonna pay 25% royalties at any moment as well as the total surrender of the ownership of their copyright to them if they ever use their brand, so obviously this will make Hasbro no money at the best case scenario for them, and a net loss of profits in a likelier case scenario.
As someone who plays DnD and Magic: the Gathering, I sure do love Wizards of the Coast and its parent company Hasbro right now! Talk about killing the golden goose, holy shit.
Wildest part is that this is literally because WOTC products are Hasbro’s only profitable ventures. It is quite literally killing the golden goose, tho thankfully given how old both MTG and DnD are, it’s not too hard to work around the bullshit and know it’ll survive in one way, shape or form.
I'm sure they'll be updated by next week, but Pathfinder 2e uses the OGL to allow other 3pp to use THEIR content, and has nothing to do with the original dnd 3rd edition rules. Paizo is just going to stop using the OGL and make their own. THE TIME OF THE ORC IS NOW
Continue to look forward to the best DnD game, Dragon's Dogma 2. On Pat's note about Hasbro canceling a bunch of DnD video games, I'm pretty sure it only applies to stuff they were directly publishing. Baldur's Gate 3 and stuff would not apply in this scenario because it is self published by Larian via Kickstarter/Early Access money.
Like when GW said "no fan animation" just before launching their official animation subscription service, threatening a ton of tge popular fan animators to either join their team, or delete all their content, or face legal trouble.
@@neighandwhinnymchorse2100 Games Workshop, best known for Warhammer and Warhamer 40,000, they made their own subscription based video streaming service where they host official Warhammer animation, and just before it launched they put out a statement that fan animation is now forbidden and will be attacked with law suits.
Not only has MTG been selling people cards they can't use, they also sold some special edition decks where every card was a foil, which basically guarantees that all of them will fold out of shape and lose value.
Only time I ever played DnD was a Persona themed campaign. Does that mean I'll have both Atlus cops (the campaign technically spoiled a 15 year old game) and Hasbro cops (need money cause they are a starving indie company) kicking in my door and rappelling through the windows?
@@ChrisMerkelStudios Just don't start a betting pool or you'll draw aggro. Either way, the Atlus cops are legally required to take a 25 minute break to sell you Persona branded mouthwash.
This whole discussion reminds me about when there were talks about video game companies were trying to license the use of their games for streaming. Just sounds insane to me.
I've always been annoyed with how D&D is viewed as the only TTRPG system. I hope this fuckup cause more people to step away from what is basically a game developed in the 80s with minor tweaks and polish that falsely claims that you can play any style of game in, and look and the vast multitude of purpose-built game system that came out over the past decade that can do their tightly-focused thing very well.
The ironic thing about all of this Critical Role talk? In their home game they were playing before broadcasting with Geek & Sundry/Their own site? They were using Pathfinder.
Pat really hit the nail on the head with that comment about ingredients and the live action content. Most people would support seeing their personal characters adapted into live action but they probably wouldn't give a shit about some other random person's OC being brought to the screen.
As a longtime Magic player, this is wotc classic move Make a very very bad PR decision which nobody likes Tank the backlash and then apologizing and then roll out their actual plan. People would think "well, at least it's not that bad" and accept it. Only this time someone leaked their "bait" statement so they are caught with their pants down.
I Dungeon Master by mashing together every fantasy plot my friends are unfamiliar with and then just plopping them in it. Tabletop gamers care nothing about copyrights, greedy Hasbro.
That’s always the advice big DMs tell new DMs. Literally just steal from works of fiction you like and hope the players are unfamiliar enough that they won’t notice when you file the serial numbers off.
@@TheHardM The best part is how that has become such an iconic part of the D&D experience that Ultima 1 and Dragon's Crown VERY MUCH do the same thing. In Ultima's case, because it was literally based on Richard Garriot's own D&D campaign, and in Dragon's Crown's case, because it was actively trying to recreate that D&D campaign feeling.
My company, Blizzard of Toast Inc., has created Gauntlets and Ghouls where you roll 2 10-sided dice and add them together as the main way to see if you pass/fail character ability measures.
My major concern now is that we might not learn our lessons and might just put all our eggs in a different basket. What Paizo is saying is great!…now let’s see them actually do it. If we just all pivot to Pathfinder their incentive to make a universal, system-agnostic license evaporates and they can just keep kicking the can down the road. It’s potentially a great idea that could serve the whole community, but right now it’s just nice words and a hope that they operate in good faith. People have been publishing games under Creative Commons licenses for decades now, and I’m not very eager to all jump back into a corporate promise that we have no information about yet when we as a community have kind of neglected a whole hobbyist subset of us who have already been doing what ORC license is promising to do, for years now.
PSA for anyone not currently into D&D, but interested: D&D is not the only RPG on the market, nor is it the best one for most people. Its just the most well marketed, and present in pop culture because it's an ancient dinosaur. If you want the D&D experience go play Pathfinder. Its D&D but written by better game designers. There are also a million more specialist games on the market for particular genres, too many to list.
I haven't played a TTRPG before, but have always been interested in the mechanics that distinguish one from another. What makes Pathfinder particularly better than others, and are there interesting deviations from DnD that go beyond just novelty or a simple change in vernacular.
@@MrValsung Pathfinder offers more mechanical complexity compared to D&D, and with that comes more freedom for every character to feel unique. That additional depth involves a bit more mental work, but its more than worth it. Then again, for groups that don't want mechanical complexity PF would be a nightmare, but there are great rules-lite systems as well. The main problem with modern D&D is how deliberately middle of the road it is. It's the plain oatmeal of rpgs. When you compare it to other games through the lens of game design, you can almost see the suits in a boardroom designing it by committee.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it again: if you are concerned that there is too much product out there that you don't have your fingers in, the smartest move would be to just turn around and *buy* those IPs; throw 30 million at Roll20 to own their market (along with a ton of other Non-ogl properties like Shadowrun or Call of Cthullu) and VTT, toss 50 to mercer for critical roll and indie publishers pushing out a module or two can get a half million to work for you. It's not like WotC isn't making idiotic money, they make around a billion dollars a year so spending now so they can profit later.
So, the funny thing about ogl is, a few video games used it. A couple of games that used ogl are the Kotor duology, and possibly the remake if anything ever comes of that. So that’s going to be fun to see if wotc goes through with this.
Had to find this clip to say that the OGL controversy and specifically Pat mentioning GURPS in relation to Fallout has gotten me DEEPLY into Tabletop RPGs since this. Started with GURPS, got kinda obsessed and got the entire GURPS library over a few months, realized nobody would ever play it with me and then got into Call of Cthulhu 7th edition (such an elegant, well designed system), and I've even dabbled in DnD now that they've backed down on the OGL controversy. And it all started with a throwaway line about GURPS from Pat. Go play GURPS, its fucking good and it needs more players.
"Mr Hasbro, tear down this wall!" Myself at gamestores shouting at the wall of 5e completely futilely. Boy howdy its a good thing that the game I run isn't based on D&D, at all
I will now go over some way WoTC and Hasbro could have monetized the D&D 1. Battle Map packs. All dry matker erasable, randomized, and allows for some Rarity. 2. Invested in a MOBA game that let's you control a FULLY COSMETICALLY CUSTOMIZABLE class. (Sub classes can be added in updates and is funded on cosmetics only.) 3. Partnered with Figma/Nendoroid/S.H. Figure arts for figures of their villains! Do you know how many people would buy Strahd or Acererak!? 4. Gotten into the Dice market like Die Hard Dice did. 5. PARTHNER WITH THE OTHER PROPERTIES OF HASBRO! They could have made a Transformer that turns into the Tarask or a Beholder! Hell, sell it with a campaign book that let's players get weapons and spells based on Transformers! 6. Stop publishing books full of Fluff and Lore unless it's a campaign setting. Short synopsis of the creature/Item/Subclass and move on. Campaign books will go into more detail for them.
For anyone wanting to understand the situation in full, I highly recommend Legal Eagle’s video on the subject. He explains how the new agreement actually works legally in an easy to understand manner.
Technically GURPS only needs to be as complicated as the person creating the game wants it to be. The major issues I've heard is that there's too much specificity to the rules as written, so there's redundancy to a few of them and they often end up having situations where two overlapping skill checks have situations where one is better but each individual skill doesn't cover the full scope of what's needed, as well as the results of each roll feeling less distinct as there's less range of potential die results, so it can be a bit less dramatic than a D20 system. GURPS is more like a buffet than a set menu, so you're intended to pick the mechanics that are going to be relevant, which can be tough given the above.
If you've been around long enough for Magic: the Gathering you'd be well familiar with how WotC operates on its own realm of logic perpendicular to that of their playerbase. That said, yes the Hasbro era is a new chapter of perpendicular thinking, if there's one thing WotC is/was historically good at it's avoiding player hemmorage, or at least staunching such hemmorage as fast as possible to preserve goodwill in some form. Hasbro seems to not be aware of how many times WotC has failed at killing Magic to get where they are now.
10:48 Pat has just wrote the next dystopian future for a cyperpunk setting. You get the stupid billionaire microchips that certain techs are pushing. Now in the future they charge you copyright for using other celebrities in your imagination.
Copyright is an antiquated bullshit system that one of the kings originally set up to give a certain guild "the right to copy". System needs to be torn apart and thrown out. Download that car boo boo.
There are DnD games where the DM sets up hard rules like “this race can only be this class” or “the correct way to play” people usually don’t have fun in those sessions.
The funniest thing about all this is that you can totally just play older editions and not spend another dime on D&D if you don't want to. It isn't like other tabletop games like 40k where in order to keep playing with other people you're expected to keep up to date with the rules. A lot of people never left AD&D, more still are playing 3.5 to this day. So if this company really wants to turn around and say "Nah, fuck you" and treat you like you're an obstacle to the money in your wallet that they feel entitled to, you can EASILY just walk away. The "We own your stuff and can use it however we want" thing is also especially cretinous, and smells of the kinda stuff Disney does. They will always "coincidentally" come up with an idea that's very similar to yours and the contract you signed makes sure you have no legal rights to do anything about it. Makes sense with them trying to do movies and TV shows now, too. I'm sure the TV show they're putting out is basically going to be Critical Role but just with a couple names and things changed. Anyway, personally I'm done with them. I quit Magic years ago and I haven't bought any new D&D books in about as long, besides the core for 5E and some dungeon tiles maybe. Not another dime. Because even if they walk this shit back they showed their true colors (while also gaslighting people in their response to all this, too, btw), and they're just gonna try this again later anyway.
If I had to guess at what WotC is trying to do, it's probably to corner the market on VTTs by making one during this huge boom they're experiencing and suing any other VTT that tries to be used to play D&D by changing the terms of the OGL. So yeah you can still play AD&D in your basement, they don't have cameras in your basement, but what they can do is algorithmically content ID what's happening on a VTT and work out if it's a WotC ruleset. This boom has been happening partially during the pandemic after all, and I know I've at least in part relied on a VTT to play every 5e campaign I've been in. If you can absolutely corner D&D play online you can use it to sell microtransactions on that VTT. That's their end goal I think.
I have stoner DND playing parents who always told me GURPS was short for Gobs of Useless Rules Permeate the System.... I'm not a tabletop player, that's all I can contribute to you 😂
I remember hearing a few years ago that Hasbro retroactively changed the lore about what teiflings look like to make all of their extreme and unique appearances homogeneous for the intention of selling more minifigs, since under the new lore they wouldn't have to make a bunch of variations for the models. And literally everyone ignored it and still made their teiflings whatever shape and color they wanted. Hasbro being stupid about D&D is nothing new, but man is it SHOCKING to see this degree of ignorance and idiocy. The scope of stupid greed is mindblowing.
The old DnD film was from 2000, so right on the cusp of the 00s. Also, the sequel, "Wrath of the Dragon God", was actually alright. The thief character was consistently the perfect mix of self serving, ruthless, helpful, and funny from the very first scene he was in. Spoilers (for those who care, it's really minor and not at all plot relevant) The thief is introduced guiding 2 guys to an ancient treasure in a catacomb, then asking for his cut. The 2 guys stiff him and tell him to leave with the implication that they'll kick his ass otherwise. The thief backs down and steps back from the treasure... and then watches the cheats die to the firespout trap protecting the treasure.
The funniest thing is that Pathfinder only exists as a popular rpg, because WotC tried this before. 4th edition D&D wasn't released under OGL, so Paizo made a game that was nearly identical to D&D 3rd edition and everyone jumped ship to that. People only came back to D&D when they released 5th edition... and they released it under the OGL. WotC has a short memory, cause this shit doesn't work.
Pathfinder 2e used the OGL because it was a convenient way to allow players to use their content and homebrew at their leisure. They were never forced to use the OGL for 2e, they chose to. Which is why they’re working with legal teams to pen a new license that WOTC can’t fuck with.
For most of human history, conquest has been focused on physical space, the taking of land and territory for resources. In modernity, all of that space is functionally owned, so now the focus of the age of international capital is conquest of the individuals life. Your time, your interests, your ideas and actions are subject to endless observation, archival and financialization. This kind of stupid shit with WotC is just a facet of a phenomenon you’ve experienced your entire life, that of corporations seeking to own every aspect of your existence through piecemeal monetization of everything you do and think.
The funniest part of this was Paizo's response to this and the letter they wrote where they basically told WoTC "Do not recite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.", because several higher ups at Paizo were old D&D staff who ACTUALLY WROTE the OGL 1.0.
Matt Mercer is running around backstage, screaming for Vince.
Ignoring that wotc already has the rights secured via contract to produce its own critical role content and merchandise, that same contract also restricts what the team is allowed to say about this even if they do feel it sucks, which they likely do. Matt isn't screaming anything except internally right now.
@@frankl5963 Its also ok for CR to do nothing major about this.
They don't have to fight this fight. Those guys are Voice actors, they already have enough on their plate as it is.
@@VaSoapman except, as public figures, especially ones who already make political/social issues statements(as poorly advised as those often are), they're in a horrible PR pickle if they don't say anything.
@@RipOffProductionsLLC they’re bankrupt if they do. I don’t blame them for being quiet, it’s the only thing they can do
@@MostLikelyMortal depending on how badly this scandal fucks up the D&D brand, they might be screwed if they don't.
Like I said, it's a tricky PR pickle they're in.
"We are not your community (WotC). You exist within OURS."
-CritCrab
"It is insane to me that WotC wants to fight a legal war with a community they trained to read 500 page rulesbooks, and taught to be upstanding moral heroes."
- Stephen Glicker, of Roll for Combat
Hey now, they absolutely did not train people to be upstanding moral heroes, they trained people to be murderhobos collecting shiny, which isn't much better for them really
@@constantanxietyattacks6878 i always love reminding myself of the Dead Alewives skits. "is there a tavern? Cool! i get drunk. are there any girls? because if there are any girls i wanna *do them.*
No, Gygax tried to teach people to be upstanding moral heroes. D&D taught people as a whole to be backstabbing sociopaths.
@@constantanxietyattacks6878 That's arguably worse. Petty murderhobos who were trained to exploit every rules loophole imaginable are a far scarier enemy than a bunch of lawful-good paladins.
Unfortunately for WoTC, Paizo has had a plan for this exact scenario for YEARS. They've unleashed it now as they are releasing a new license called the Open RPG Creative license (or ORC) which several publishers have already signed on to AND Paizo will be moving Pathfinder to an original system. Also, just about every publisher has announced their own original TTRPG system to get out of the OGL entirely.
Ironically, in their attempt to control the market and make a lot of cash, they have lost all of their control and have already begun hemorrhaging cash as the D&D Beyond subscription cancel page crashed from too much traffic this week.
it's believed that d&d beyond did not crash, but was taken down, as the button to unsubscribe was removed from its normal spot so that it was harder to access
And every other day the UX team has to burry the unsubscribe button further and further into the settings. It'll reach a point where it will be a 2x2 pixel where a period would be
That is some next-level corporate anime shit. I'd love to watch a show about this.
Really don't see WOTC's logic. like D&D has an intelligence based learning curve not a single person who was into D&D enough to pay them would be on board for this not a single user is that dumb to take such a raw deal
and then they proceeded to hide the unsub options for some users (which regarding payment subscriptions is nearly or actually illegal depending on where you live)
In a leak from an alleged WOTC insider, executives see customers as "obstacles" between them and money. That's the level of contempt going on here.
Thats the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard
So you're saying we need to be worried about them trying to lobby the government to make it legally mandatory to buy their games?
Nothing like the large monolith of an entire hobby shitting itself AGAIN
It never ceases to be funny when companies willingly destroy free advertising for their brand simply because it allows people to enjoy their IP without giving them money directly.
I got a real sense of the mentality that creates this sort of thinking when I talked to my Brother in Law, who claimed to me NFTs were a good thing since they would “ensure companies could make/recover profit from art of their products” among other things.
The thing is, as far as I am aware, this is an academically underesearched area, meaning there aren’t as many sources of hard numbers on how much this sort of authoritarian approach to copyright law hurts brands in terms of lost revenue, advertising money, etc.
Even if it’s otherwise obvious how counterproductive actions like this are to increasing revenue/advertising your brand, some people will not understand without a number.
This reminds me of when Sony tried to copyright the term "let's play", they got denied because you can't copyright a concept but the obvious sidestep if they won was to call it something else. Massive companies trying to copyright concepts is always hilarious because the people will always produce a suspiciously similar substitute.
as a fubn aside did you know that rooster teeth owns the Let's Play channel on youtube
Worst case scenario you could always go with something just a little different like Woolie Stares At or something like that.
"The age of Wizards is over, the time of the ORC has come!"
Say it with me now...
"WAAAAAAGGGHHHHH!!!"
@@shadow98004 WEZ NEED MOR DAKKA! WWWWAAAAAUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHH!
When a company is absolutely convinced that its brand name is what made the product great.
Only to realize they don't even own the product at all, and are fighting for custody of everybody's Imagination Box.
Somewhere on one of the videos I saw about this they said "The great thing about this game is the community, which exists and has existed before Wizards of the Coast was even a thing. Wizards did not create the community, it exists *because* of the community." and thats very true. But like you said, they seem to think they are the creators and stewards when they are neither.
I'm reminded of years ago, when Hasbro made the decision that no fanart could be sold at BotCon (a Transformers convention). They were in their rights to do this, sure, but fanart is usually left alone because it isn't worth enforcing, and creates bad blood with the fanbase. Vendors, and especially fans, were PISSED. Hasbro only backed down when people started pulling their tables, canceling their ticket purchases, etc, and didn't try meddling with it again.
Hasbro was highly concerned they were losing out on the $15 dollars an artist alley vendor makes all weekend, and assumed the money that attendees would have spent on fanart would instead be spent on their official products. (Which would not have happened, anyway. Hasbro and artist alley's have very different types of merch available.)
Unfortunately, with the DnD thing, I'm not optimistic about them backing down the same way. Especially not after the statement basically saying "J/k, j/k! It was just a draft!" But people are coming together and making their voices heard, be it through their words and their wallets, so there's hope.
Hasbro clearly has a disconnect with how their money people act and the creatives. These money folk do not know how to make money except for mobster tactics of strongarming yet they cry like bitches each time they lose $1. Most of their brands are tainted by their bullshit they're insane if they think strongarming people is gonna work like most nerds don't fall under multiple banners under Hasbro... NERF, MTG, Power Rangers, Transformers, D&D, etc. I don't know how they can just hire CEO that know nothing about the BS they did in the past or if they do enable it again and expect something different...
After Paypal tried that, only to lie about scuttling that and sneaking it in, we will have to be RUTHLESS with WoTC. Fans are rightfully tired of the mainstream media being cruel to them
@@ExeErdna Sadly, logic doesn't exactly vibe with the "more money, NOW" mentality.
they already tainted the waters everyone is leaving regardless, the fact that this stink has reached outside of the community overnight it testament that they have just fucked themselves over for good, DnD growth has just tanked.
@@PerpetualDaydreamer That's why they constantly fail. People aren't stupid and they realizing the corpos are doing all they can to make money even if it hurts the brands in the process
Critical Role could switch to Pathfinder 2e tomorrow and WOTC would instantly lose the biggest creators by far, the people who had the most to do with the unparalleled explosion of 5th edition and Critical Role would not be affected at all.
They completely shot themselves in the foot.
They can't and won't because they have their own contract with wotc completely independent of this fiasco.
I think they have a contract with D&D beyond though
@@Broomer52 yeah, if that post is accurate, someone took a big chance and breached contract to make it known. This is legally very dangerous for them.
@@frankl5963 Chad Move
Good, maybe youtube will stop recommending me their cringe videos just because I like AD&D.
Remember: Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns DnD. Hasbro is at the top of this shit triangle. I'm a Transformers guy, but I'm not buying any new shit from Hasbro in solidarity with DnD players. If all they want is money, then our greatest power is to withhold our money.
Hasbro's behind Beyblade here in the west and it's been shoddy lookalikes of the Takara Tomy products for 5 years now. The actual chinese ripoffs are better than what Hasbro has been putting out before the ludicrously overpriced Pro series.
Watching the asian funny fat dude showed me that third party transformer figures are the way to go
@@ericbloodsmith5161 I never played Beyblade myself, but I've definitely heard about the quality issues with Hasbro's products. Same deal in many cases with Transformers; I only have a few of the Hasbro made ones, and the difference in quality compared with Takara Tomy's figures is noticeable. Sorry to hear that all of our hobbies/favourite franchises seem to be getting hit hard by the corporate greed effect. :(
@@mannythelazyguy6529 I'm not sure who you might be referring to as I don't watch many reviewers myself, but there are definitely a lot of great third party Transformers figures and model kits!
@@effluviah7544 jobby the hong is the channel, great for reviewing figures
3 things I want to say about their response:
1. Their argument about combating hateful content is a lazy excuse to make what they're doing look not as bad.
2. They straight up say "we included the ability to ruin your life and career at any time for any reason without warning, but we wouldn't actually do it."
3. That paragraph about saying we all won is copium of the highest degree and shows just how desperate they are to save face.
That "We All Won" statement was written by a chubby faced bald man who used to play football in highschool. The kind of guy who wears gold chains and big fat rings on his big fat fingers. I can feel the energy of this prick like menacing Jojo vibes.
So, it’s even worse. Wizards IS actually trying to argue that a previous OGL agreements are retroactively null and ON TOP OF THAT, companies or people who were under those now void agreements retroactively owe them a shit ton of money.
There’s no way that’s going to hold up in court.
15:21 it was "officially put out" just not "publicly put out" WOTC is claiming in their latest pr statement that "it was a draft, please guys don't be mad we just wanted to get feedback", however creators have gone on the record saying that they were sent copies along with contracts to sign & NDAs; you don't do that for a "draft".
"It's just a draft" is corpo-speak for "It's just a joke guys!"
Thank you Pat for not explaining the acronym of GURPS because a lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the G stands for Generic. For anyone not in the know, the whole thing is Generic Universal Role-Playing System. It's only called generic because there is no standardized setting for the games to take place in, but there are sourcebooks for original settings you can run games in. Speaking of sourcebooks, there's hundreds of them for just about anything you can think of, like period-specific weapons, genres, or licensed settings. It also uses a point buy system.
I’ve purchased Pathfinder and Starbound pocket editions and am done with Wizards forever. I’m a 12 year DM and also MtG player.
They spit in our faces, sat silent for a week, and then said they won too
Yeah I'm going to do something similar, but since dnd is a majorly a pen and paper type game I'm just gonna commit mass scale piracy of 5e, get everything 5e related and nothing else from wizards as I look at other works like Ryuutama
Another thing that's funny is that for most of the creatures/races that D&D uses they can't even attempt to force a copyright because a lot of it is from mythologies and folk lore. Hell they tried that with Tolkein estate and that's what caused them to use Halfling.
It has always been super weird to be that the Tolkien estate didn't claim ownership of the term Orc also. What we now think of as an orc was pretty much Tolkien's invention--before him, the word Orc either referred to either a sea monster or a zombie-like thing animated by an evil spirit, depending on the source.
@@Crust_Monster honestly most modern orcs like the DND orcs are nothing like Tolkien orcs apart from being big built and humanoid
@@fangk12345 But it's a direct line. All I'm saying is we wouldn't have modern orcs at all if it weren't for Tolkien--we might still have burly monster men, but there's no way we'd use the word orc to describe them. They're unique to Tolkien because he functionally ignored the orcs folkloric roots and made up his own monster that happened to have the same name.
It was still a long transition to get modern orcs though, considering Tolkien orcs weren't big and strong at all. They were short and scrawny--even the big uruk-hai were described as being only almost human height.
I dunno when this was recorded, but since the announcement of One D&D and OGL 1.1/2.0, 3rd party tabletop companies led by Paizo, the creators of Pathfinder, have banded together to form A new Open RPG Creative license (ORC Liscense). And the plan is for it to basically be an open source tabletop ruleset that is free for anyone to use.
It's worse than anything that could be said. The idea that you owe them money EVEN IF you don't make money, is pure insanity. And most of this is because the DnD arm of WOTC has been doing shit lately.
That's just WotC in general. I mean, have you seen the MtG controversies recently? Like, every week. It's incredible.
@@EviIPaladin Oh i know. Pioneer (Return to Ravnica to Present MTG) has been IN SHAMBLES because of Nykthos "free mana through combo lands". It NEEDS to be banned, but they refuse to do so, making the format "uncompetitive". Same for a lot of other formats. The game is made for Commander now and set design goes straight to that. And i couldnt be less interested in the game now.
So I play One Piece TCG. Which is fairly competitive and plays excellently. Its just getting certain cards (mostly starter deck exclusives), is more expensive than owning such an item is worth. But ill take THAT over "Just give us $1000 for some $5 proxies". NO! GO FUCK YOURSELF!
For the existence of 5e homebrew carried it because the damn lunks can't be moved to do anything. Like this edition was barebones for YEARS. Then everything after Tasha's was really suspect in quality and high in price. Then WotC and Hasbro been cancelling games left and right yet ironically let that shitstorm of a Dark Alliance slip on through.
Wasn't it specifically said that 25% thing kicks in after certain amount of profits.
@@StanNotSoSaint ive heard it said its based on GROSS earned. So even if you dont make anything, 25% of the nothing is still owed to them.
Gotta love when companies talk about how much they love inclusion and then price almost everyone out of their products and services.
"We want to celebrate Magic the Gatherings 30th anniversary by going back to our roots... So we made unplayable proxies of some of the most iconic old school cards on the market!
All for the low low price of just 1000$ USD you too can have a 1/60 chance of pulling cardboard you literally cannot use!"
That's how it always works, because the people who still have the money to buy their stuff will go to bat for any corporation so long as DEI shit is used. upper middle class shit-libs and progs will support any evil mega corporation, as long as a BLM fist or pride flag is stamped on the product. There's a reason why every time a new Blizzard scandal pops up, all of a sudden they have a activist product launch
Here to promote the good word of Lancer the mech based TTRPG, because let's face it 90+% of D&D settings have mechs in them anyways, including the vanilla game
no one believes me when I tell them that Gary Gygax wrote a whole adventure about exploring a downed spaceship and getting a suit of power armor.
Preach brotha!
I don't think it can actually happen, but I have this horrible vision of John Hasbro walking into the Square Enix offices, strolling up to the president, and going, "Hey, I don't know if you remember, but back in 1987 you guys made a little game that had Mindflayers in it. It got a few sequels, and I just can't help but notice that we don't seem to have gotten any piece of that pie..."
Imagine harder, D&D was the first use of the term "Hit Points" to refer to a person and not naval vessels. That's a lot of pies. You're right that won't happen though lol.
Also the OGL covers rules, it doesn't cover proprietary creatures like Mind Flayers, they've always been able to sue over that, it's just not worth messing with big companies like Square Enix over what would probably be a pretty small settlement.
Go even further. He strolls in and says "I heard this game called dragon quest took some inspiration from us and is your most popular franchise."
They could also hit star wars, because kotor was made under the ogl. If they tried that disney would stomp them into the ground, but it'd be funny.
@@NoNoNah306 The one they would have got legitimately sued over was the Beholder but that got caught and changed to EYE before the NA release.
@@TheHenrytouchdown I don't think anyone who matters at Disney is even aware that those games exist, much less cares about copyright issues with them.
So, to put this into more recent context: WotC already backpaddled hard with a big "this was a draft, even though we already send this towards publishers".
On top of that, you can't copyright how a game is played, only the iteration. "Scrabble" for example, exists in multiple different cases where just the name is changed but the rules are the same. So games using the D20 system should be fine anyways, as long as you don't use *Characters* or *Stories from the books*. Obviously this goes a lot deeper but the wording in the "draft" was just horrible.
Edit: I looked around a bit and I think "LegalEagle" did a pretty good video on it. He also names another good example, which is monopoly. Obviously you can't copyright the word and you also can't copyright the trading of "infrastructure" or how you want to name it, but the playboards (the individual iterations) and the logo are under copyright (board) and trademark (logo). And the name is trademarked, which means you can't use "monopoly" to publish your own board game.
Yeah, didn’t they kick off their whole response with some corny joke like “oh no! We rolled a nat 1!”
@@zacc Was more in the middle of it. But the good thing is, they are planning to remove the royalties stuff from it completely in the next iteration. But I'll believe it when I see it.
This is technically true that you can't copyright a game mechanic, but it's a debatable point with D&D. With scrabble it's letters and points, you can't really copyright that. What you can copyright is rolling 3d6 to determine a thing called Constitution, to determine a thing called Hit Points, to determine whether or not a character is alive. There's so much of this specific language that's tied up in how it works that Hasbro could bring a case that applies to a lot of things. Keep in mind that D&D was the first thing to apply the term Hit Points to a human being and not say naval vessels. And it can't be automatically argued that they haven't been defending their copyright with a lot of these common terms we take for granted in tabletop RPGs now, because although the ship has probably sailed on the term "hit points", most of this stuff was being used in the tabletop space under the original Open Gaming License, it wasn't just being ignored, it was officially licensed, so the copyright hasn't been surrendered. The amount of things you'd have to rename with a lot less clear and intuitive language to avoid potential legal cases is absurd, and whatever it is you do it doesn't just have to be good enough to win in court, it needs to not get there in the first place, because most people can't afford to start legal proceedings against a company the size of Hasbro. They have a lot of lawyer money.
LegalEagle and the "Opening Arguments" podcast he references both have a very forgiving view of the OGL1.1, most of which I feel comes from a familiarity with the normally much more draconian IP attitude companies have, and a lack of familiarity with the TTRPG space and how it has operated.
IIRC, and I could be wrong, a big part of it that LegalEagle didn't touch at all is that the old OGL gave 3rd party creators reassurance they won't get sued. While you can't *really* win a case trying to sue about a game mechanic or internal structure change like adding new spells or something, with this new 1.1 OGL there isn't that clear reassurance laid out I don't think. So Hasbro/WotC could throw their weight around and even if the little guys would win in the end, it'd be a drawn out, expensive affair for them to deal with.
@@NoNoNah306 You're still describing game mechanics. And Pat is wrong, you absolutely cannot copyright the phrase "natural 20" or "constitution" or "hit points" or any short phrase even if you're using it in a very specific way that you invented. You might be able to trademark them theoretically, but at this point they're so ubiquitous in all spheres of gaming that they'd be considered generic.
But, yeah, the near complete lack of consequence for shady lawyering where you assert rights that you absolutely KNOW you don't have means that Hasbro will happily throw its weight around, and that's concerning.
Apparently, so many unsubscribed to DNDBeyond that they have to hide the subscription button. Hasbro out here realizing how greed can ruin a franchise.
God shit like that should be illegal, I had to watch a UA-cam video just to know how to unsub to audible and even then I think you had to go to Amazon specifically or something it was a while ago and a major headache.
@@Kango234 As long as unsubscriptions are technically possible, the law can't prevent you from hiring King Minos to design your system.
@@conspiracypanda1200 Minos didn't design his labyrinth, he hired Daedalus to do it for him. So actually even more like WOTC.
There's another lawsuit I recently looked into (out of curiosity, I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand the legal system) and it's one accusing Valve of having a monopoly because Half-Life 2 was popular. And yes, the reason why the Half-Life series was so successful, especially in Eastern Europe where video games were less affordable in the 90s and early 2000s, is because it's you buy one video game and instantly get access to thousands of fan-created spin-offs. That's also why D&D exploded like it did. Allowing people to make stuff based on your game and release it under their own terms makes it popular.
Even without the new ORC license they are making, Paizo went to great lengths to actually make sure that nothing in Pathfinder2E needed the OGL and only included it as a courtesy basically.
A lot of RPGs did that. I think there was a period where a lot of people saw including the OGL as making a product "legit", plus they probably just wanted to be on the safe side.
More than a courtesy, they wanted other publishers to use the PF2e SRD for their own creations. Technically, you don't need to use any version of the D&D SRDs with the OGL 1.0a. The reason that you would want to is to allow other creators to your own of game system's SRD in their creations.
Can't wait to roll up a Basements and Wyverns wizard and cast Magic Mi- ELFSHOT BARRAGE, excuse me
Sex pistols
You mean Sorcerous Salvo?
@@TimeFro Arcane Artillery
i'll just make my own system with stats named after Francisco Goya paintings, so you wanna break down a door with that axe? roll that "Colossus" for me, are you trying to resist a spell? roll that "Yard with Lunatics" target is 10, are you trying to write a new spell down on your grimoire? roll "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" and we'll be all set.
12:10 The real world application is they would have the ability to completely steal your entire project whole sale, make their own version of it to sell themselves, and then terminate your license so that you can no longer sell that product.
Somewhere Steve Jackson is whispering to himself “all according to keikaku”.
Wait what does this mean. Did Steve Jackson make Pathfinder?? All I know him for is the Sorcery! Choose Your Own Adventures.
@@BonnieBoestarNo, Steve Jackson didn't make Pathfinder. He made GURPS.
Reminds me of Chapter Master. Fan game to play as your own Space Marine Chapter in a 4x/Dorfort sort of game. Completely free.
Games Workshop sent that big old C&D hammer down. So it became INTERSTELLAR ARMY SIMULATOR. All copyrighted material removed, no problem. It's now just it's own, generic thing and still free and OH NO, SOMEONE MADE A MOD FOR IT TO MAKE IT BACK INTO SPESS MARHENS, DON'T DO THAT! (mod will be updated as per the original roadmap)
Can't wait for Mercer to play Oubliettes and Basilisks
Pathfinder is a direct continuation of D&D 3.5, literally just took the whole system and kept it going when D&D headed into it's 4th edition. Also, other than maybe spin-offs that tie into the d20 system, Cyberpunk 2020 and Traveler have had nothing to do with D&D for like 40 years now
Pathfinder 1e yes, Pathfinder 2e things have changed a fair bit
@@liamfoote7164 yeah I heard people didn't like it but PF one is still great. I liked them pulling in Flethcher Hanks characters like Fantomah, that shits pretty wild. And it's a good example of cool shit you can come up with when you have a free license to be creative.... Or when you used to be able to be creative before corporations fucked that all up for us
@@zechwheeler5939 I've heard mostly positive things about pathfinder 2. What I've read of the rules I like, though I haven't played it.
In that same document they also talked about how the customers are basically just piggy banks and we are just walking bank accounts that they should have
"Just wait till it blows over. People have short memories."- An Investor, probably
The sad thing is that they're completely right.
@@MuppetKing Absolutely not, because all the people that Hasbro are aiming this at have all already pulled out. Nobody in the business side of this is going to forget they're gonna pay 25% royalties at any moment as well as the total surrender of the ownership of their copyright to them if they ever use their brand, so obviously this will make Hasbro no money at the best case scenario for them, and a net loss of profits in a likelier case scenario.
The replacement of Landfill in Beerfest is one of the funniest concepts I've seen put into a film.
As someone who plays DnD and Magic: the Gathering, I sure do love Wizards of the Coast and its parent company Hasbro right now!
Talk about killing the golden goose, holy shit.
Wildest part is that this is literally because WOTC products are Hasbro’s only profitable ventures. It is quite literally killing the golden goose, tho thankfully given how old both MTG and DnD are, it’s not too hard to work around the bullshit and know it’ll survive in one way, shape or form.
As a YGO player this is hilarious. Konami has never looked better
Damn those lawyers were thorough when writing that. They’re even including tiktok dances lol
14:28 "Hasbro's Death Squads have been sent to your location! And Remember Imagination ™ is property of Hasbro Inc.*
I'm sure they'll be updated by next week, but Pathfinder 2e uses the OGL to allow other 3pp to use THEIR content, and has nothing to do with the original dnd 3rd edition rules.
Paizo is just going to stop using the OGL and make their own.
THE TIME OF THE ORC IS NOW
Wizards of the coast won’t stop me from running my jojo’s bizarre adventure themed campaign with their 1d6 health
Ever seen the Jooj system?
they really made a hydra outta this whole thing. they struck down one and like 50 games have risen.
18:04
“We’re going to see how legally close can you get.”
“Draw 1 of 20 cards”
Gloomhaven players: Allow us to introduce ourselves
Continue to look forward to the best DnD game, Dragon's Dogma 2. On Pat's note about Hasbro canceling a bunch of DnD video games, I'm pretty sure it only applies to stuff they were directly publishing. Baldur's Gate 3 and stuff would not apply in this scenario because it is self published by Larian via Kickstarter/Early Access money.
It's always a good week at CSB when the biggest company within an industry manages to "over-greed" and pisses off a bunch of people.
Like when GW said "no fan animation" just before launching their official animation subscription service, threatening a ton of tge popular fan animators to either join their team, or delete all their content, or face legal trouble.
@@RipOffProductionsLLC GW?
@@neighandwhinnymchorse2100 Games Workshop, best known for Warhammer and Warhamer 40,000, they made their own subscription based video streaming service where they host official Warhammer animation, and just before it launched they put out a statement that fan animation is now forbidden and will be attacked with law suits.
@@RipOffProductionsLLC ohhh, that does sound pretty friggin bad.
Woolie, Pat didn't mention GURPS to be funny, he mentioned it because it's a genuine and prominent alternative to D&D.
Not only has MTG been selling people cards they can't use, they also sold some special edition decks where every card was a foil, which basically guarantees that all of them will fold out of shape and lose value.
Only time I ever played DnD was a Persona themed campaign. Does that mean I'll have both Atlus cops (the campaign technically spoiled a 15 year old game) and Hasbro cops (need money cause they are a starving indie company) kicking in my door and rappelling through the windows?
That scene with the police crashing an elders' party immediately pop in my jead when reading your comment.
@@KreuzDrache Transformers 1 FBI scene and a Rainbow Six Siege match happening simultaneously
Maybe you can trick the Atlus cops and the Hasbro cops into fighting each other.
@@ChrisMerkelStudios Just don't start a betting pool or you'll draw aggro. Either way, the Atlus cops are legally required to take a 25 minute break to sell you Persona branded mouthwash.
@@conspiracypanda1200 8 hour stream where they announce the raid at the end with a 20 second teaser of the sledgehammer hitting your front door
This whole discussion reminds me about when there were talks about video game companies were trying to license the use of their games for streaming. Just sounds insane to me.
I'm just happy GURPS got a mention in this day and age.
I've always been annoyed with how D&D is viewed as the only TTRPG system. I hope this fuckup cause more people to step away from what is basically a game developed in the 80s with minor tweaks and polish that falsely claims that you can play any style of game in, and look and the vast multitude of purpose-built game system that came out over the past decade that can do their tightly-focused thing very well.
The ironic thing about all of this Critical Role talk? In their home game they were playing before broadcasting with Geek & Sundry/Their own site? They were using Pathfinder.
Pat really hit the nail on the head with that comment about ingredients and the live action content. Most people would support seeing their personal characters adapted into live action but they probably wouldn't give a shit about some other random person's OC being brought to the screen.
As a longtime Magic player, this is wotc classic move
Make a very very bad PR decision which nobody likes
Tank the backlash and then apologizing and then roll out their actual plan. People would think "well, at least it's not that bad" and accept it.
Only this time someone leaked their "bait" statement so they are caught with their pants down.
I Dungeon Master by mashing together every fantasy plot my friends are unfamiliar with and then just plopping them in it. Tabletop gamers care nothing about copyrights, greedy Hasbro.
That’s always the advice big DMs tell new DMs. Literally just steal from works of fiction you like and hope the players are unfamiliar enough that they won’t notice when you file the serial numbers off.
@@TheHardM The best part is how that has become such an iconic part of the D&D experience that Ultima 1 and Dragon's Crown VERY MUCH do the same thing. In Ultima's case, because it was literally based on Richard Garriot's own D&D campaign, and in Dragon's Crown's case, because it was actively trying to recreate that D&D campaign feeling.
Mages of the Beach sounds like a Death Stranding themed band
My company, Blizzard of Toast Inc., has created Gauntlets and Ghouls where you roll 2 10-sided dice and add them together as the main way to see if you pass/fail character ability measures.
I knew you guys were going to cover this, because a company burning down is always a feast for y'all
KOTOR 1 and 2 used the d20 modern SRD and OGL 1.1. It's almost like this was handcrafted to hand Disney the win.
Can already see Hasbro trying to sell pre-fill character sheets for 5 bucks a pop for each campaign ☠️
Discard WotC, return to Big Eyes, Small Mouth and FATAL.
Hes out of line, but hes right
My major concern now is that we might not learn our lessons and might just put all our eggs in a different basket. What Paizo is saying is great!…now let’s see them actually do it. If we just all pivot to Pathfinder their incentive to make a universal, system-agnostic license evaporates and they can just keep kicking the can down the road. It’s potentially a great idea that could serve the whole community, but right now it’s just nice words and a hope that they operate in good faith. People have been publishing games under Creative Commons licenses for decades now, and I’m not very eager to all jump back into a corporate promise that we have no information about yet when we as a community have kind of neglected a whole hobbyist subset of us who have already been doing what ORC license is promising to do, for years now.
16:22 Yes, that is money on the table, money that isn't yours to take WotC
WotC: How many layers of community hate are you on?
Games Workshop: like maybe 5 or 6 my dude
WotC: you are like a baby, watch this.
SUCC
"Hasbro is the worst hobby company to ever have existed."
Games Workshop: We exist damn it!
PSA for anyone not currently into D&D, but interested: D&D is not the only RPG on the market, nor is it the best one for most people. Its just the most well marketed, and present in pop culture because it's an ancient dinosaur.
If you want the D&D experience go play Pathfinder. Its D&D but written by better game designers.
There are also a million more specialist games on the market for particular genres, too many to list.
I haven't played a TTRPG before, but have always been interested in the mechanics that distinguish one from another. What makes Pathfinder particularly better than others, and are there interesting deviations from DnD that go beyond just novelty or a simple change in vernacular.
@@MrValsung Pathfinder offers more mechanical complexity compared to D&D, and with that comes more freedom for every character to feel unique. That additional depth involves a bit more mental work, but its more than worth it.
Then again, for groups that don't want mechanical complexity PF would be a nightmare, but there are great rules-lite systems as well.
The main problem with modern D&D is how deliberately middle of the road it is. It's the plain oatmeal of rpgs. When you compare it to other games through the lens of game design, you can almost see the suits in a boardroom designing it by committee.
@@chrisd4960 there anything I can read up on online that gets into the mechanical complexity of PF?
I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it again: if you are concerned that there is too much product out there that you don't have your fingers in, the smartest move would be to just turn around and *buy* those IPs; throw 30 million at Roll20 to own their market (along with a ton of other Non-ogl properties like Shadowrun or Call of Cthullu) and VTT, toss 50 to mercer for critical roll and indie publishers pushing out a module or two can get a half million to work for you.
It's not like WotC isn't making idiotic money, they make around a billion dollars a year so spending now so they can profit later.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian phrase is getting stronger and stronger
So, the funny thing about ogl is, a few video games used it. A couple of games that used ogl are the Kotor duology, and possibly the remake if anything ever comes of that.
So that’s going to be fun to see if wotc goes through with this.
Had to find this clip to say that the OGL controversy and specifically Pat mentioning GURPS in relation to Fallout has gotten me DEEPLY into Tabletop RPGs since this. Started with GURPS, got kinda obsessed and got the entire GURPS library over a few months, realized nobody would ever play it with me and then got into Call of Cthulhu 7th edition (such an elegant, well designed system), and I've even dabbled in DnD now that they've backed down on the OGL controversy. And it all started with a throwaway line about GURPS from Pat. Go play GURPS, its fucking good and it needs more players.
Make a Marvel DND campaign
Pay Hasbro 25% of that and let Disney know that Hasbro's collecting copyright toll on their property
Let them *FIGHT*
"Mr Hasbro, tear down this wall!"
Myself at gamestores shouting at the wall of 5e completely futilely. Boy howdy its a good thing that the game I run isn't based on D&D, at all
I will now go over some way WoTC and Hasbro could have monetized the D&D
1. Battle Map packs. All dry matker erasable, randomized, and allows for some Rarity.
2. Invested in a MOBA game that let's you control a FULLY COSMETICALLY CUSTOMIZABLE class. (Sub classes can be added in updates and is funded on cosmetics only.)
3. Partnered with Figma/Nendoroid/S.H. Figure arts for figures of their villains! Do you know how many people would buy Strahd or Acererak!?
4. Gotten into the Dice market like Die Hard Dice did.
5. PARTHNER WITH THE OTHER PROPERTIES OF HASBRO! They could have made a Transformer that turns into the Tarask or a Beholder! Hell, sell it with a campaign book that let's players get weapons and spells based on Transformers!
6. Stop publishing books full of Fluff and Lore unless it's a campaign setting. Short synopsis of the creature/Item/Subclass and move on. Campaign books will go into more detail for them.
For anyone wanting to understand the situation in full, I highly recommend Legal Eagle’s video on the subject. He explains how the new agreement actually works legally in an easy to understand manner.
hasbro dun realize most people who DM are in fact smart enough to just move to a different system and wont kowtow to their bs
"The gamers: dorkness rising" is the truest d&d movie
I for one am looking forward to the Riot/Blizzard like spinoff of WOTC with 'Orcs of the Sands'.
"No one gives a shit about Monopoly," Pat colleges literally have classes on playing Monopoly. Don't buy hotels.
Technically GURPS only needs to be as complicated as the person creating the game wants it to be.
The major issues I've heard is that there's too much specificity to the rules as written, so there's redundancy to a few of them and they often end up having situations where two overlapping skill checks have situations where one is better but each individual skill doesn't cover the full scope of what's needed, as well as the results of each roll feeling less distinct as there's less range of potential die results, so it can be a bit less dramatic than a D20 system.
GURPS is more like a buffet than a set menu, so you're intended to pick the mechanics that are going to be relevant, which can be tough given the above.
If you've been around long enough for Magic: the Gathering you'd be well familiar with how WotC operates on its own realm of logic perpendicular to that of their playerbase.
That said, yes the Hasbro era is a new chapter of perpendicular thinking, if there's one thing WotC is/was historically good at it's avoiding player hemmorage, or at least staunching such hemmorage as fast as possible to preserve goodwill in some form. Hasbro seems to not be aware of how many times WotC has failed at killing Magic to get where they are now.
10:48 Pat has just wrote the next dystopian future for a cyperpunk setting. You get the stupid billionaire microchips that certain techs are pushing. Now in the future they charge you copyright for using other celebrities in your imagination.
Copyright is an antiquated bullshit system that one of the kings originally set up to give a certain guild "the right to copy". System needs to be torn apart and thrown out. Download that car boo boo.
Imagine the outrage if there was a whisper of cancelling Baldur's Gate 3 in the background
11:04 GURPS
Pat revealing his GURPS live on stream for the first time! (Gone wrong. Wizards called.)
THERE it is!
There are DnD games where the DM sets up hard rules like “this race can only be this class” or “the correct way to play” people usually don’t have fun in those sessions.
The funniest thing about all this is that you can totally just play older editions and not spend another dime on D&D if you don't want to. It isn't like other tabletop games like 40k where in order to keep playing with other people you're expected to keep up to date with the rules. A lot of people never left AD&D, more still are playing 3.5 to this day. So if this company really wants to turn around and say "Nah, fuck you" and treat you like you're an obstacle to the money in your wallet that they feel entitled to, you can EASILY just walk away.
The "We own your stuff and can use it however we want" thing is also especially cretinous, and smells of the kinda stuff Disney does. They will always "coincidentally" come up with an idea that's very similar to yours and the contract you signed makes sure you have no legal rights to do anything about it. Makes sense with them trying to do movies and TV shows now, too. I'm sure the TV show they're putting out is basically going to be Critical Role but just with a couple names and things changed.
Anyway, personally I'm done with them. I quit Magic years ago and I haven't bought any new D&D books in about as long, besides the core for 5E and some dungeon tiles maybe. Not another dime. Because even if they walk this shit back they showed their true colors (while also gaslighting people in their response to all this, too, btw), and they're just gonna try this again later anyway.
If I had to guess at what WotC is trying to do, it's probably to corner the market on VTTs by making one during this huge boom they're experiencing and suing any other VTT that tries to be used to play D&D by changing the terms of the OGL.
So yeah you can still play AD&D in your basement, they don't have cameras in your basement, but what they can do is algorithmically content ID what's happening on a VTT and work out if it's a WotC ruleset. This boom has been happening partially during the pandemic after all, and I know I've at least in part relied on a VTT to play every 5e campaign I've been in.
If you can absolutely corner D&D play online you can use it to sell microtransactions on that VTT. That's their end goal I think.
I have stoner DND playing parents who always told me GURPS was short for Gobs of Useless Rules Permeate the System.... I'm not a tabletop player, that's all I can contribute to you 😂
I remember hearing a few years ago that Hasbro retroactively changed the lore about what teiflings look like to make all of their extreme and unique appearances homogeneous for the intention of selling more minifigs, since under the new lore they wouldn't have to make a bunch of variations for the models. And literally everyone ignored it and still made their teiflings whatever shape and color they wanted. Hasbro being stupid about D&D is nothing new, but man is it SHOCKING to see this degree of ignorance and idiocy. The scope of stupid greed is mindblowing.
All I got from this talk is that I need to go watch Beerfest again. And Super Troopers.
The old DnD film was from 2000, so right on the cusp of the 00s. Also, the sequel, "Wrath of the Dragon God", was actually alright. The thief character was consistently the perfect mix of self serving, ruthless, helpful, and funny from the very first scene he was in.
Spoilers (for those who care, it's really minor and not at all plot relevant)
The thief is introduced guiding 2 guys to an ancient treasure in a catacomb, then asking for his cut. The 2 guys stiff him and tell him to leave with the implication that they'll kick his ass otherwise. The thief backs down and steps back from the treasure... and then watches the cheats die to the firespout trap protecting the treasure.
Correction: Pathfinder 2nd is not based on the OGL. Whatever happens, Paizo can keep selling it without wotc/hasbro getting any.
The time of the OGL is over. The time of the ORC is here!
Don't forget that Hasbro has Power Rangers NFTs. Show them no quarter.
The funniest thing is that Pathfinder only exists as a popular rpg, because WotC tried this before. 4th edition D&D wasn't released under OGL, so Paizo made a game that was nearly identical to D&D 3rd edition and everyone jumped ship to that. People only came back to D&D when they released 5th edition... and they released it under the OGL. WotC has a short memory, cause this shit doesn't work.
5:40 Apparently Second Edition Pathfinder isn't OGL/doesn't use OGL content
Pathfinder 2e used the OGL because it was a convenient way to allow players to use their content and homebrew at their leisure.
They were never forced to use the OGL for 2e, they chose to. Which is why they’re working with legal teams to pen a new license that WOTC can’t fuck with.
Pat said what I've been saying elsewhere, that this looks a lot like the Warcraft 3: Reforged EULA.
For most of human history, conquest has been focused on physical space, the taking of land and territory for resources. In modernity, all of that space is functionally owned, so now the focus of the age of international capital is conquest of the individuals life. Your time, your interests, your ideas and actions are subject to endless observation, archival and financialization. This kind of stupid shit with WotC is just a facet of a phenomenon you’ve experienced your entire life, that of corporations seeking to own every aspect of your existence through piecemeal monetization of everything you do and think.
Cyberpunk writers: Write that down! WRITE THAT DOWN!
“If we can’t make money from it, no one can!”