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Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons and Dragons, have been in the news lately because their OGL 1.1 was leaked. The OGL was an open source-like license, originally from 2000, which allowed people to create D&D-related works and which was supposed to not be revocable, as confirmed by its drafters. WOTC is trying to revoke it by using a clause referring to "authorized" versions of the license and claiming to have de-authorized the earlier license. The new replacement license requires giving 25% of your revenue to WOTC, makes you send a copy of your content to WOTC which they can then publish for free, and they can revoke it at any time making all your products instantly unsalable.
After backlash from fans, WOTC officially released a 1.2 license instead, which has similar problems, but worded a bit more subtly.
The culture war element comes from this clause:
I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials. But every objection I've seen to this clause by fans has been a twenty Stalins objection: WOTC has produced discriminatory material in the past and can't be trusted to do this properly. There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal. Just, take it out because even people with unpopular opinions should be able to put them in games? No, nobody believes that.
(Links are trivial to google, but it's hard to find a site that has everything correct all at the same time, and is up to date as well, and also engages in trustworthy journalism in general. This EFF post at least covers part of the initial controversy, though you'll have to follow links to see what's in the license.)
I'm not clued in enough on TTRPGs to know, but was there ANYTHING that was either released or in the works that could have plausibly been covered by the "no hateful content or conduct"?
My impression is that they threw that in there as a boilerplate precaution but then when they got the vicious backlash about OGL they tried to use it as a figleaf defense in the form of "why's everyone mad? we just wanted to ban hateful conduct". That might be true, but I'm still intensely curious if there was any agitation over some RPG in the works with TERF goblins or something.
The son of the creator of D&D came out with a new TSR (the original creators) came out with a product recently that some people did say would fall afoul of the "no hateful content" policy. Conduct is a different story altogether, especially in a world where so many people view any sort of criticism as abuse. I actually think that's the bigger threat in terms of this policy.
You have to take into account, I think the larger story of what's going on. This is really targeting Virtual Tabletop providers (VTT) such as Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. That's who they really want to shut down. They're in the works making their own VTT program, and my guess is that the next version of D&D is going to be entirely based around it. To the point where I wouldn't be shocked if the next core rules simply don't include any dice formulas at all. You're expected to be logged in on your cell phone if you're playing at home, and push a button and the server will determine the outcome.
Where these things come together, I think, is to restrict the ability of these services to exist, under the guise of keeping out bad content and the bad people.
The whole point of this, is either some sort of subscription service or a Gatcha style game. The whole point is that basically WotC gotta turn D&D into a billion dollar brand and soon. That's the pressure. Which is something like a 500% increase. It's a sort of go big or go home thing. And I mean that. Apparently Hasbro is trimming the fat of their "underperforming" IPs, and this might be a gasp for that team to keep their jobs.
They've been "in the works" since 4E but there were apparently some personnel issues* during the development process and lack of user buy-in once a playable version was somewhat available.
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