On Friday night, So You Want to Be a Game Master won the Gold ENNIE for Best RPG Related Product and the Alexandrian won a Gold ENNIE for Best Online Content. The Alexandrian is now an ENNIE Award-winning Youtube channel!
The bad news is that there’s yet another Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast scandal.
This video is exactly what you think it is… and also something completely different.
Congrats, man. Well deserved.
Personally I haven’t played actual D&D in years, so I don’t have a dog in the fight. I’m here for game-mastering advice, and the only use I have for system-specific rules is if it brings up an idea I like well enough to steal for my house rules. But that said, the way WOTC is screwing this up kinda makes me nostalgic for TSR — but then I remember, no, TSR tried all the same bullshit, basically. It just comes around again.
I’ve heard that the font in this new PHB 2024 is slightly bigger than the font in the PHB 2014, to be easier on the eyes. Could you please confirm this?… I mean… if you can talk about that, of course!
And congratulations on both awards!
@Wagner: The font size in the PHB 2024 is larger than PHB 2014. It appears comparable to other recent D&D releases. I forget which book was the first to have the font size increase.
@colin: In response to the video, someone said that they didn’t care that WotC was threatening legal action against people posting to Youtube because it didn’t affect gamers. Which is fair, I guess. But I’m old enough to remember TSR sending cease-and-desist letters to DMs posting homebrew classes to Usenet.
I don’t feel any particular need to wait until we get back there again before drawing a line in the sand and saying, “No. This is bullshit.”
Unfortunately, Hasbro is a publicly traded company. Their board has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value. Generally, that means the share price, which is related to quarterly (i.e., short-term) financial results. So even if everybody at Hasbro wanted to give us the D&D we want, they have a legal obligation to give us the D&D that will make the most money. To be honest, I don’t see any way back.
As an individual consumer, there’s nothing I can do to affect Hasbro’s policies. My choice is to leave D&D behind (and I started playing in 1979). I won’t play it any more, or even follow content creators who understandably cater exclusively to the 600-pound gorilla in the marketplace. I realize I’m just shaking my fist at the sky.
There are *so* many wonderful alternatives; thanks for shedding light on some of them.
Justin@3 – agreed that it’s bullshit. It seems like particularly self-injurious bullshit, though. Why piss off people who are attempting to give you free advertising?
I am tempted to say that TTRPGs would be better off as a hobby if WOTC went out of business. I’m not entirely sure I believe that, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of other publishers producing better games.
WotC would have to not just go out of business, but also have the rights to D&D go somewhere other than into some copyright troll’s vault. If you think it’s bad now, having someone whose only “business model” is legal threats be the owners of D&D would be worse.
D&D being saved by a new company has, at least, happened once before… though our society seems far more infested with corporate arrogance than it used to be, so I’m less sure whether it can so easily happen to the desired effect again.
What would be ideal to my mind would be if D&D, all of it from every edition, were somehow forced into a CC0 license (essentially a worldwide, irrevocable-as-legally-possible public domain dedication). The only way I could see anything like that happening would be as a punishment in a court of law, though.
PuzzleSecretary@6: You’re right, it would suck if the rights were bought by a copyright troll who decided to bet against the enforceability of the OGL. Dunno how likely that would be; I’m just thinking that maybe a world in which Official D&D Publications somehow cease to happen, and Critical Role, MCDM, Pathfinder, Kobold Press, Shadowdark, Blades in the Dark, Chaosium, Atlas Games, and an infinite number of retroclones and story games are left to fight it out amongst themselves, would not be so bad.
The only actual downside might be the loss of the marketing budget to draw in new players. But I have the idea that maybe most of that work is already being done by Critical Role and Dimension 20, and I dunno, Penny Arcade and Stranger Things, so I don’t know how much of a loss it would actually be. How much does Hasbro actually bring to the table these days, that isn’t done better by third parties? “We’re better than a copyright troll” is a pretty low bar. Justify your existence, guys.