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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've been arguing about with this a buddy of mine constantly.
Short version everyone complaining about this is getting what they deserve.
Long version is, all these WotC personality driven "content creators" have been rabble rousing for WotC to "do something" about people like me for years. And over time, WotC has fashioned a superweapon built out of services, contracts and copyright to effectively kick my kind out of the community. If we allow our believes to be known, we are banished from conventions, online services, even FLGS events.
Well, now that they've motivated WotC to put all this effort into privatizing the community so that they can kick witches like me out, WotC is looking at this fantastic weapon they've built, and are mugging the "content creators" who cheerleaded my banishment with it. I love it. At this point they deserve each other. I hope WotC takes 99% of their income.
I have my old AD&D 2e collection, hard copies of the Gold Box games, as well as the Infinity Engine games. I barely recognize nu-DND anyways, and barely wish to with woke blank slatism and alphabet people being the new core of the rules and community.
Are you talking about 5E content creators, or people using the OGL to create OSR games? Because while there is some woke virtue-signaling in the OSR community, like everywhere else, it's mostly a bastion of grognard greybeards who want nothing to do with that nonsense. GaryCon and CyclopsCon and NTRPGCon and a bunch of others I could name have stayed politically neutral and are quite welcoming of "people like you" (unless you're, like, dropping n-bombs at the table or going all murderhobo with a Lawful party).
Also, 1E > 2E.
2e had all the good settings though. I love Planescape and Dark Sun.
Mechanically, the core rules are practically identical though. You could have a party of 1e and 2e players in the same game and it would mostly go off without a hitch. The main difference is that 2e sanitized all the "evil" and "demonic" parts of 1e to make it more marketable to scared Christian house wives.
Yeah, I never understood the fuss about THAC0, but as an owner of the original Deities and Demigods (before they had to remove the Moorcock, Lovecraft, and Lieber pantheons because lol what's IP infringement? man, those were the days...) I resented the scrubbing of demons and devils to placate all the angry moms. I was precocious when it came to sensing culture war bullshit.
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I don't think this is a productive comment. While it's true that the influx of new players from actual play podcasts has resulted in tabletop gaming becoming a younger, queerer, and more progressive community than before (I have witnessed the transformation first-hand on Tumblr) I don't think the rest of us who haven't been calling for witch burning should have to suffer just to spite them.
This is because of WotC's greed, pure and simple. Hasbro isn't doing well, and the command has come down from on high to make D&D more profitable, and the people in charge made the calculated risk that shrinking their fanbase but increasing the amount of money they were getting from them would be a gamble worth taking. They want to become like Games Workshop - small number of actual players, but that small number is super dedicated, and is happy to fork over all their money no matter what shitty things you do.
I don't think anyone is fooled enough to believe this is WotC's real motivation. They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's. They just included clauses that would limit two things lots of people hate in the hopes that they wouldn't overly scrutinize the new license.
I've been playing MTG for quite a while now and for years participated in their core subreddit. I wouldn't call this accurate:
From last year as they started purging card art:
The playerbase has asked for the company to take more control over its IP and purge witches. From the "thought leaders" the nerds unquestionably worship down to the Red Guards in reddit comment sections.
All that being said, I think the motivation for profit still wins as the majority influencer in these actions. Once again looking to MtG, the player base has shown that it's willing to accept any kind of abuse at any time. When, as a customer, your default position is face-down and ass-up your surprised indignation reads as idiocy.
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Why do we keep pretending that woke companies that walk like woke ducks, talk like woke ducks and purge wrongthink like woke ducks aren't actually woke ducks?
There is clearly a principal-agent problem at play here. Woke companies are woking it out even when it hurts their bottom line. If it doesn't sink the company or leads to massive lay-offs, why should the individual employee or executive care more about this than about their twitter clout? And even if it does, well.
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I don't believe this is actually true. Were 13 and 14 year olds really not playing D&D in the 80s and 90s? Is it really likely that young gay kids were too busy playing football to have any interest in TTRPGs? Or is this just that young people nowadays - particularly of the indoorsy and nerdy variety - are more likely to have strong progressive opinions and to be gay, trans, or otherwise GNC?
They cared enough to declare that Nielsen's art would never be reprinted.
I was. Not gay, also not a football player. The TTRPG scene in the 80s and 90s skewed liberal (it was an even nerdier space then than it is now) but "queer" was still a dirty word; gay kids didn't gravitate towards D&D, they gravitated towards theater or music.
Like @Iconochasm says, the rise of games like Vampire :The Masquerade (heavily influenced by Anne Rice's homoerotic Vampire Lestat series) and other games focused on drama over miniature skirmishes was responsible for bringing a lot of those kids into RPGing.
GURPS writer Willian Stoddard once described the core thesis of all the WhiteWolf games as something like "You are a unique locus of suffering and drama, and from this you derive powers and abilities that affirm your special nature." Those games introduced a whole genre of personalities to TTRPGs, coming from music and theatre, and the gay kids came with them. I remember so many huffing sighs at the guys who couldn't remember their attack rolls, but had very strong opinions about how their character should look.
Tbf, that era of games had a lot stronger opinions about how your character should look (or how local coinage should work, lol Exalted) than the mechanical ramifications of any of their attack rolls, too. But even the more mechanically 'robust' splats were very much, even if they were also very far from any of the modern-day story games.
And Changeling was pretty queer whether the authors intended it to be gay-queer.
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Some of them played. More were doing band, or theater, or hanging out in alternative subculture venues. D&D coded more STEMlord back then, and that faded slowly over decades as things like Vampire and LARP became popular.
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Idk. I nope'd out of WOTC products when they started stuffing homosexual characters into the Magic cards hand-over-fist in the Theros set ten years ago. Can't remember whether that was before or after they memory-holed cards like Crusade and Invoke Prejudice; it was certainly before they started firing their own artists for making anodyne pro-Trump statements on their own social media.
There's a pattern of behaviour. Maybe WOTC is un-woke itself but desperately seeking validation from its woke customers; or maybe it's putting on the political commissar jacket with full gusto. But I feel at this point it's a distinction without a difference as to how pleased I should be that the revolution is eating its own.
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