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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.
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 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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