Potentially The End · 5:54am Jan 28th, 2023
Due to the suddenly VERY uncertain landscape that TTRPGs have been dropped into thanks to Wizards of The Coast and Hasbro, I am now faced with a problem.
For those of you who don't really pay attention to the world of Dungeons and Dragons, something of a war has begun. It is the fans vs. D&D owner and creator, Wizards of the Coast and, by proxy, Hasbro.
The cause for the war?
The Open Gaming License.
To make a very long and fairly complicated story short, Hasbro stock holders are OBVIOUSLY not happy when money is not flowing in. I can even understand and agree with that on some level. You don't invest into something if it's not gonna have some kind of return eventually. Wizards of the Coast, who answer to Hasbro, are sitting on a game (Dungeons and Dragons) that the fans are allowed to profit off of, and Hasbro finally realized this. Dollar Signs promptly replaced their eyes.
So, the Open Gaming License is the document that grants players the right to profit off of content they created that made use of D&D game mechanics. The license was born from the fact that D&D was a labor of both love and community, and not something that was ever meant to be singularly controlled by one entity. This was to encourage creativity as well as mathematical development, as D&D is a fairly math heavy game.
This is the core of the 1.0a version of the Open Gaming License, and no new version has been needed since its conception... until an employee at Wizards of the Coast grew a conscience and leaked plans for a revision to the OGL. The leak contained a startlingly developed document that Wizards of the Coast hoped to turn into the new Open Gaming License; revision 1.1.
Under revision 1.1, players no longer had the right to profit off of any content they created, and were in fact required to report any such content to Wizards of the Coast, as it would now be their property due to the use of D&D mechanics. Worse yet, this would be retroactive, meaning any company or team that have built a living off of creating this content would either be subsumed by Wizards of the Coast, or go bankrupt.
As you can imagine, fans were beyond livid. Boycots and mass exodus to other TTRPGs ensued, and Wizards was forced to remember that their fans were their source of revenue. No fans, no money.
As nothing more than a casual player, this admittedly does little to affect me on the D&D scene. I don't have a D&D Beyond subscription, and I play the game the way it was originally meant to be played; with dice, pencils, paper, and an imagination.
But as a fan, I was just as incensed as everyone else, because I could see the writing on the wall. If Wizards changes the OGL, they set a precedent that states quite clearly that past promises mean nothing to them, and money is all they care about.
Thankfully, the first battle was a victory for the fans. Wizards realized the fans weren't just being dramatic and they were losing revenue to competitors in droves. They released a statement stating quite clearly that they "rolled a 1", and promised to remove all of the retroactive and royalty language in the now-in-development OGL 1.2. They tried REAL hard to come across as misunderstood, but there are no ifs ands or buts. Read the OGL 1.1 and you'll see what everyone else saw.
Anyways, long but necessary rant is over. As for why this may be the end of my stories? Well, for one very simple reason.
I created a magic system for my own use in some of my stories that leans heavily on the magic system of Dungeons and Dragons, more so in Tartarus Forged than the others.
Wizards tried once to steal everything from their fans. Worse, despite the backlash, they're still going forward with revising the OGL. That means they're not done. I'm not putting myself in a position to have a corporation ruin me.
As a result, I have washed my hands of D&D. Further, I refuse to use anything of theirs, or anything they can use to try and "legally" force me to give them money.
Effectively immediately, Tartarus Forged, the Hero Souls series, Small Changes, and A Wish Your Heart Makes is cancelled. All of them make use of D&D mechanics in one way or another, especially Hero Souls with its reincarnation theme. I might be able to rewrite some of these stories one day, but Hero Souls is definitely something I can't do anything about. Sadly, it's come to an end.
On top of all of that, I'm giving serious consideration to pulling out of Fimfiction in its entirety, as Hasbro was the driving force behind this. I'm well aware that Hasbro does not own Fimfiction, but the fact remains they played a part in this monstrosity, and I fear they may try something with the fan fiction community soon.
I guess everything rides on Wizards of the Coast's new OGL 1.2. Depending on how that goes, we'll see what my next move is.
Well darn. Would you be willing to provide what your story plans were for your cancel stories at all?
They've apparently backpedaled super-hard, to the point that they've put the SRD 5.1 into Creative Commons.
https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-will-no-longer-deauthorize-its-open-1850041837
Yeah, I can understand why you would not want anything to do with Dungeons and Dragons anymore considering what you just explained and, while a bit frustrated that you have to cancel those series, I can understand why you would do so.
Just out of curiosity, though. since the series are being cancelled anyway, how about a cliff notes on what your plans for the series WOULD be? For example we already know Pinkie would have gotten Frisk's Hero Soul, Rainbow would have gotten Sonic's and Spike would have gotten Naruto's but what Villain Souls would have eventually emerged and who would have had them?
And, on the glass-half-full end, this will also allow you to give more focus to some of your other stories if you want to do them (such as your Poker Night series and Many Twilights of Ascension). But only if you actually want to do them.
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I'm thinking about it. I don't know yet if I will, especially as most of it is incomplete and NOT organized in any way shape or form, but I'll see about trying to organize it a little bit first.
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Yeah. That's pretty fair.
A shame to see Hero Souls end due corporate, but it's your work...
Then again, it seems they backpedaled in the "get all the rights" plan, but in the end I get why you feel the need to plug out
I fail to see how a story just using the concept of "Reincarnation" could be construed at having to do anything with D&D. It's not like the concept doesn't predate it's inclusion there.