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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.)
There are many open source alternatives, especially if you don't limit yourself to D&D-descended games. WotC exists for the same reason McDonald's does, even though there are many much better local burger joints, plus you can always make your own.
I think tabletop RPGs have the same issue with niches that all media does these days. There's probably thousands of tabletop RPGs at this point, but most of them have zero players, a small portion have around 5 global players, an even smaller portion has enough of a fanbase to have either a healthy third party publishing adjunct or plentiful non-commercial fan material, and then there's the juggernaut that is D&D, the champion that always ends up on top in the long run.
I think sometimes that nobody besides the author has sometimes played an RPG, if that.
I don't actually think the comparison to McDonald's is fair, though I'm sure the actively anti-D&D RPG hobbyists might disagree. D&D is more like Nintendo in the 80's - it's name is almost synonymous with the hobby for the uninitiated, but there are competitors that many people know about, as well as a world of less viable competitors. The main advantage tabletop RPGs have is that you really only need to convince four other people to play a game, though if you lack support from a community and people theorizing it might be hard to learn all the little intricacies of a game, or to get inspiration for play. That networking effect is probably an important part of D&D's success.
I think there's something meaningful to the McDonald's comparison, in that D&D is pretty generic even for generic systems.
If you want to play a game of emo band kids from beyond the edge of the universe (and/or maybe a My Chemical Romance fan meetup), who've lost even the passion to burn the whole system down in a metaphor for chronic illness, and instead go on Scooby-Doo hijinks together, there's absolutely no system I would recommend over Glitch. Brilliant mechanics, excellent system fluff, 5/5 stars.
Also pretty hard to get player buy-in, both in the terms of cooperation (blowing up the moon not helping is less of a reason to avoid it if you just want to get the session over with) and in terms of players enjoying things enough to come back again. And the system really pushes you toward that setting.
And there's a lot of that. A long Don't Rest Your Head campaign is kinda an oxymoron. You can kinda fudge-factor an Exalted 2e game to not turn into incredibly slow-paced-and-'cinematic' combat, but it suffers there, and it's kinda pointless for something like Anima Prime or anything using the HERO System. To play Dreaming Waters without involving cooperative filial piety and a lot of other genre conventions would involve throwing out the character sheets and a lot of the rules and starting again.
D20 System can't really do everything well, or even that broad of a set of things well, but it doesn't break in really wacky ways three sessions in just because you houseruled out an instant death mechanic or change the rates some spells recharge, and chances are someone else has already tried that particular approach (and probably sold a poorly-written OGL supplement about it). I don't think it's necessarily inherent to D&D so much as the rest of the field growing up around it has kinda turned it into the expansive median, but it does make it useful for a lot of people.
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