Dungeons and Dragons continues to lurch toward a new edition, sort of, maybe, depending on how you define “edition.” One thing’s for sure, Wizards of the Coast would like us to buy a bunch of new books soon, which is a pretty big ask from a company with this kind of recent history. What recent history is that, you ask? Today’s episode happily explains!

• Dungeons and Dragons Editions 

Generously transcribed by Viviana. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Orun Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. 

[Opening Music]

Oren: Hey everyone, Oren from the future needing to chime in and give you a heads up. We had more recording difficulties than normal this episode, one of which is that Wes’ audio for the first couple minutes is entirely gone despite multiple backups. I’ve done my best to edit around it, but that’s why the opening sounds a bit weird and why Wes suddenly appears from nowhere once his audio starts recording properly. Now on with the episode. 

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast, I’m Oren, and Chris couldn’t be here today, but that’s okay because I want to complain about Dungeons and Dragons, and for that, I have invited Mythcreants’ D&D expert, Ari, onto the podcast. 

Ari: Hello!

Oren: And this is going to be great because the audio editors and the transcribers are going to love this episode because they already have trouble telling me and Wes apart sometimes and Ari and I famously sound almost exactly the same. 

Ari: Yeah, they don’t normally let me on here.

Oren: So, this is going to be a great time. I’m sure they will love us and everything will go fine. So Ari, just to remind everyone, because it might’ve been a little bit, what is your experience with D&D, both on and off of Mythcreants? 

Ari: So I’ve been playing D&D on and off since second edition, but I really got into the hobby with fifth edition, so I’ve been playing in and GMing my games for, I guess, about 10 years now, because that’s how long 5e’s been out. And I can’t even remember the first article I wrote for Mythcreants, but, at some point I started being an on and off contributor to Mythcreants, as you kindly offered to give me a platform to complain about D&D. And ever since I’ve enjoyed writing for Mythcreants, I don’t do it as often as I would like to, but we’ll get to that. We’ll get to the reasons I don’t write as often as I would like to.

Oren: And Wes, what is your history with role playing games and D&D specifically? 

Wes: Let’s see. I started role playing games in my early teen years with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons on a church trip. 

Oren: Oh! Ha ha ha! That’s delicious. 

Wes: It was thrilling.

Ari: Famously supportive of D&D. 

Wes: The youth group leader told us how to play, so I was well pleased by that. 

Ari: That’s cool. 

Wes: Yeah, it was cool. 

Oren: This is the most disappointing satanic panic I’ve ever been to.

Wes: Yeah, and started then, and then I think got way more into it in college with 3.5. That’s definitely the system that I learned a lot in a few campaigns, a lot of homebrew. And then we started playing 5th edition when that came out, and I dabbled in Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu, and that’s kind of it. Mostly my role playing game experience has definitely just been Dungeons and Dragons. 

Oren: All right, now that we’ve established our backstories. So first, I think we should talk a little bit about not even the game itself, but what Wizards has been doing outside of the game. 

Ari: Oh boy. 

Oren: Wizards of the Coast, that is, the company that owns Dungeons and Dragons, which is in turn owned by Hasbro, because not everyone is plugged into that news, people who are listening, they might have missed some of this. So I’ll give a brief recap of the main event, which is of course the OGL disaster.

Wes: To put it lightly. 

Oren: Yeah, and I’ll put some sources in the show notes that will give you a more detailed coverage. But the basic version is that the Open Gaming License slash OGL is this license that Wizards made back in 2000 or so that said anyone can use anything from most of the D&D rules. There were a few exceptions that they carved out for named monsters and what have you, but most stuff was free, anyone can use it. And that lasted until this year, or maybe it was going to, and there was a leak that Wizards of the Coast was trying to release a “new” quote unquote OGL that they were calling 1.1 that had a whole bunch of restrictions. And there were a bunch of ones about how if you made a certain amount of money, you suddenly had to give that to Wizards. And there was text in the legal agreement that made it sound like Wizards could, at any time, take something that you were making and then just say you couldn’t make it anymore, but they still could.

Ari: We made this. 

Oren: It was just very bad. The hilarious part was that everyone protested. Like, it was frankly amazing to see the entire community of D&D that normally can’t agree on anything suddenly come together and be like, “No, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened and we hate it.”

Wes: There was some prelude to that release as well. I remember in the fall being, I want to say some Hasbro exec, but don’t quote me on that, about it coming out about how under monetized the D&D brand is. Do you guys remember that?

Oren:  Yes, there was, I believe, an investors meeting. 

Wes: Exactly. And all of us who heard that were like, “uh oh.”

Ari: I think it was even the president or the top person of Wizards who mentioned that D&D was under monetized because books are hard to sell and you only need one of them. 

Oren: And like in a complete vacuum, I’m actually not unsympathetic to that view because role playing game books are both too expensive and too cheap. They’re too expensive in that, if you sell them at anything close to an adequate price point, people don’t want to buy them because they’re really expensive. But also each group only needs one, so it’s really hard to make money selling them. 

Wes: Yeah, that’s true. 

Oren: So, I don’t disagree with the notion in a complete vacuum, but wow, did they manage to mess it up. 

Ari: The biggest of unforced errors too. I was clued into this a lot. And from what I can tell, I just don’t think the people who made the decision considered this as a possible outcome. They just didn’t think it would be a big deal. 

Wes: That checks out. 

Ari: And like people just wouldn’t notice or no one would care enough to actually do anything about it. And then that was, as it turns out, not correct. 

Oren: And they did reverse course after a few weeks of just the worst publicity this company has gotten. This is a company that has literally sent Pinkerton agents after people. 

Ari: And I’m still surprised that they reversed course at all. It was very unexpected. The YouTubers I was watching were just as surprised. The journalists I saw covering it also seemed surprised. Like, we’ve seen companies do things like this and just wait it out because they can and it was very surprising to see Wizards not only walk it back, but actually take more steps to make it harder to do this in the future.

Oren:  Because what they were counting on to make this work was that the OGL was a perpetual license but not an irrevocable license. So that was the thing that was really getting everyone’s goat. It wasn’t just that the new game wasn’t going to be released under the OGL, it was that they were retroactively canceling everything else that the OGL had applied to, and  so now what they did instead was all the new stuff is going to be released under a Creative Commons license, which is irrevocable. Again, aside from the exceptions. Like you can’t actually call your game “D&D” and you can’t use certain monster names and what have you. But the rest of it is now under Creative Commons, which, if they tried this again, it would be harder. For now, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief because no one has to test this in court. 

Ari: Because we think we know what would happen. But no one’s actually tried this in court yet, and I don’t think anyone wants to do it. 

Oren: That’s the thing that kept coming up in this analysis was this question of “Does this matter?” because it doesn’t seem like you can actually copyright game mechanics. That was an opinion that most legal experts looking at this seem to share and that’s something that’s been known in the games industry for a long time. Basically every serious game designer that I’ve ever talked to is aware of that, but at the same time it’s never been tested. No one has ever gone to court over game mechanics. So, we can’t be sure how the court would rule on that. An interesting thing that came out of this was a ton of people and companies all announced they were making their own game to try to replace 5e. Do you guys think any of those are going to go anywhere now? 

Wes: No. 

Ari: So the ones I’m aware of, there’s the Kobald Press one, which will probably do fine. Their kickstarters have always done really well. So they’ll probably sell it to their existing audience and it’ll be okay. And it looks to be very similar to D&D but D&D the way they wanted to make it. I think that’ll do okay but no big reach. The one coming out of MCDM and Matthew Kovil who’s like a pretty big D&D YouTuber, it’s the most interesting of the bunch because it’s one that they’re like we don’t want this shackled to all these things that D&D has had to do because old D&D did it, which is a complaint I have about 5e. And so that’s cool and they once again have a built-in audience. So I think these games, none of them are going to become Pathfinder, right? That’s the question. Will we have another Pathfinder? And that’s just not going to happen because they reversed course. It wasn’t like 4e where they didn’t do that. And then there’s all the little homebrew ones which, they will be tiny and small and if they succeed they will hopefully produce enough money to keep their creators fed and have the lights on but I don’t think any of them will have much reach beyond that. 

Oren: Yeah that was pretty much my thought. I’m interested to see what Kovil comes up with though. He’s had some very interesting mechanics. 

Ari: He also just always seemed like he didn’t really want to be designing D&D. And he has said as much in some of his videos that I’ve watched of his. So yeah that’s the one I’m most interested in. Because I can make D&D but different myself. In fact I have already done that. But this seems to be not D&D which is interesting. 

Wes: I think that is an interesting point as part of this fallout is that a lot of the influencers I think because of the OGL fiasco have realized that there is an avenue for them to branch out into other content. Keep the D&D stuff in their mix but then really start looking and exploring and that just widens the discussion. In terms of that kind of content we’re all definitely benefiting from it because I felt like before that it was like D&D all the time. A lot of these people made their names, on YouTube for example, for that. And now I’m seeing them show me new systems and talk about other alternative things and just big praise. I’m really happy. 

Oren: That would be pretty cool if that stuck.

Wes: Yeah it would be. 

Ari: Although there is unfortunately that at least some of the YouTube channels I’ve been watching they’ve talked about how their Pathfinder videos were doing well for a little bit but now they’re just not doing very well because the interest didn’t stick and Pathfinder’s complicated so no one wants to learn a new system. 

Oren: Yeah especially not one as complicated as Pathfinder. That’s been my experience is that players will learn new systems. Most of us learned our big tome RPGs when we were in high school or college and, if you’re older than that, learning a new giant tome is a big ask. Whereas like I can bring them my like little homebrew dice pool game where the rules mostly fit on five pages and they’re like “Yesh I’ll play that, whatever.” But if I try to bring them like here’s a Shadowrun 5th edition and they’re like why? Why would you make me do that? 

Wes: It was hard enough getting us all to play in the first place and you want to do this, Oren?

Ari:  I started reading the Pathfinder 2 PDF and I stopped when I got to where the dwarves could weaponize racism to do more damage and I have not returned since. 

Wes: Classic dwarf move. 

Oren: A friend of mine invited me to play in a Mage the Awakening 2nd edition game a while back and I was like I used to love Mage and I mostly played Ascension. Awakening’s fun too. I’ll play Awakening. And I looked at the spell casting rules and my eyes just slid off the page. I just could not figure it out. I have no idea how to cast a spell. I sat there for an hour trying to figure out how you cast a spell and it would not enter the brain. I couldn’t figure it out so I was eventually like “Hey, could we play like, Base Hunter instead? That one’s a lot simpler.”

Ari: A little easier. I’ve just spent a decade learning the ins and outs of 5th edition. I don’t want to start from scratch in a more complex game with Pathfinder. If I played in a group, I would learn the rules but it’s really hard to motivate myself to learn them when I have no plans to play in it.

Oren:  And I get why most content creators switched back to D&D. You only have to look at Mythcreants and our traffic numbers and see the traffic on our old non-D&D RPG articles that I wrote and then compare that to the traffic on Ari’s D&D articles and let me tell you it’s not even close. 

Ari: It is the biggest game in town. 

Oren: It’s the biggest game in town and if you depend on that to make your living it’s a huge risk to try something else.

Ari:  I do not envy the content creators. I couldn’t even come up with one article a week. You got D&D content creators coming out with two videos every week and it’s just oh boy I couldn’t do that. That’s too much. 

Oren: Although in fairness I think your articles probably take longer because you spend a lot of time checking and double checking and some of the YouTube D&D creators do that too but a lot of them are just “I’m going to talk into a microphone about whatever I happen to be thinking about right now.”

Ari: Like what I’m doing right now. It’s so much easier.

Oren:  It is. There’s a reason why we have a podcast every week instead of a third article because if Chris and I tried to write a third article every week we would die. 

Ari: Also some of the content creators nowadays have discords that they crowdsource their math to which makes it I’m sure a lot easier. 

Wes: Oh yeah, good point. 

Ari: Get your math wizards on this in your discord channel and then just report on the findings. 

Oren: Just get a gut check from the two of you. Why do you think wizards did this? What was their main motivation if they had one beyond a vague desire to make more money, somehow?

Ari: My best guess is that the new D&D is trying to, as I said, monetize the game and one of the ways they’re doing that is by making it more of a video game with their new digital tabletop program that they’re making in the Unreal Engine for some reason. And so, things like microtransactions and whatnot, and I think this OGL thing was just aimed at locking things down. As they moved into this new space, they wanted to make sure that they had the tools to set the tone and the ground rules against all these established digital tabletop spaces like Roll20 is probably the biggest one. But then you have things like Foundry. You have Tailspire, which is one that I use personally. There are system-agnostic ones. There are ones that are made specifically for D&D. So I think it was just them trying to cover their bases and make sure that as they moved into this like new vision for D&D, because the guy in charge of this his background was in mobile gaming. 

Oren: Oh really?

Ari:  I think it was mobile gaming. I’m probably gonna get some of these details wrong. It was a while ago but his background was not in RPGs. It was in video games and so that’s how they’re approaching this because microtransactions make a lot of money and, if you can bring microtransactions successfully to D&D, that’s probably gonna fix your monetization problem. 

Oren: Wes, what do you think?

Wes: I echo all of that and when Ari was talking I remembered when D&D Beyond officially got bought. That was what months before the OGL? That was last fall. And I remember the second that happened I was like “Yep, they’re gonna do their own tabletop and they’re gonna do their own VTT. Like, absolutely going to happen.” And yeah, Ari,  I didn’t even think about that broader connection because if they lock that down and then all the physical gaming assets become microtransactions and all of that stuff around the subscription, all of it, and then yeah that’s it you’ve solved it. 

Ari: I just think they didn’t think about it or they didn’t care because from what I understand the creative team behind D&D knew this was an awful idea and they said as much this isn’t their decision and I just think the business folks in charge didn’t look at this as like a possible powder keg. They’re just like “Yeah we’ll just do this it’ll be fine. No one cares about legal licensing. What fandom pays attention to that?”

Oren: Have either of you actually looked at the document? Because I did and I was surprised at how petty it sounded because it had a bunch of “You’re freeloading, you’ve been freeloading off us long enough,  time to pay up!” type language. Where was this quote here? “Moving forward hugely successful businesses that generate more than $750,000 of annual revenue will need to share some of that success with us.” Whoa calm down there, Lenin. 

Ari: We are D&D. Communism intensifies. 

Oren: That was so weird it didn’t feel like a legal document it felt like a gossip post.

Ari: No, 100%. You combine that with the first apology document they put out if you remember that famous line “You won, and so did we.” And it was like the tone of this was real bad and it is bonkers. My recent jobs have put me in some very large orgs so I actually can see this kind of thing happening but it’s still such a botched job it’s impressive how bad it was handled. 

Oren: Was that before or after they did the We Rolled a One? 

Ari: That was the same one the same document and then they brought forward that poor schmuck they put in front of the camera who had to pay the dues with all these interviews, that guy, Kyle Brink I think was his name or something like that. 

Oren: Was that the one Ginny Di talked to? 

Ari: Yeah he did a bunch of interviews with prominent youtubers and I feel for the guy because this wasn’t his decision either and he had to put his name on all this stuff and he had to like try and tell the truth and they really didn’t want to be caught lying right then but he was in such an unwinnable position and credit to the youtubers like Ginny Di their livelihood is so intrinsically tied to Wizards of the Coast that there is a powerful motivation to not hold their feet to the fire for this and she did, she did a really good job. Great integrity from some of these creators. I think D&D shorts and Ginny Di were the ones that really stood out to me as folks who set aside the possible financial benefits of just not talking about this or softballing it.

Oren:  It felt like Ginny Di definitely felt she’d been betrayed almost because wasn’t she one of the early advocates for One D&D as it’s being called? 

Ari: It’s possible. I wasn’t following her until super recently but not in the beginning of all of this I was only tangentially aware of her and D&D shorts, they weren’t channels that I watched. 

Oren: That was just a vibe I got but good on them I appreciate their journalism in this. 

Ari: And Linda Codega was also super pivotal in this. They were the one that was actually giving this a lot of legitimate outside-the-gaming-sphere spotlight that these things really need some of the time. Sometimes things blow up in a small corner of the internet and it just doesn’t leave that area, and, when that happens, companies can just ignore it because the general public isn’t seeing it but then you had some more widespread reporting. Like you said the community came together and lots of folks stuck their neck out in various ways. 

Oren: I would just really love to know what the actual subscription losses on D&D Beyond were because all we know for sure is that there was a call on Twitter I think is where it started, and it spread to other places to cancel your D&D Beyond subscription as a form of protest, and then there was a report that the subscription management page had crashed. And that’s a pretty convenient thing to crash when people are trying to cancel their subscription. 

Wes: Yep!

Oren: That’s real lucky on that one but we don’t know how many people actually canceled there’s no way to know and I would just love to know what that number was. Was it actually a bunch of people or was it a small number who were very loud about it?

Ari:  I think it had to be large because if it hadn’t been they wouldn’t have done anything. As far as we can tell, all the information, these people don’t care about D&D. The folks making these decisions they’re business folks, they don’t play the game they don’t really know much about the game, and so they didn’t do this for the love of the game. They did this because there was an obvious financial backlash that they were suffering and that’s the only thing I can imagine motivating them was that there was a substantial drop in revenue from this giant purchase they just made. And if you are trying to turn D&D Beyond into the centerpiece of your new digital platform for D&D that’s really not the direction you want that going in.

Oren: All right so speaking of D&D Beyond, it really looks like they’re trying to move into the direction of D&D as a service more than D&D as a product, though I don’t think D&D as a product is going away. I think they’re still going to sell books. I just think that they are trying to emphasize it as a service that you continually pay for, and I have to admit that doesn’t sound great to me but I’m also not really plugged into D&D Beyond, Ari, and I think you are, certainly more than me. 

Ari: Yeah I think this is generally going to be neutral to bad for most D&D consumers. I personally don’t use D&D Beyond because I actually think it’s one of the worst resources out there and it’s one I have to pay for. There are better free resources out there for folks. But, yeah, they’re going to more heavily monetize it. It’s going to be, I think more confusing for users because that often accompanies monetization because they are trying to confuse you into losing your money. But when the new VT comes out it’s going to, I would imagine, just some simple things that come to mind is like miniature customization will cost you money. A spell customization will cost you money. You’ll have a lot of base effects and then if you want cool stuff you have to give them a lot of money. So, it’ll be all the problems that games as a service have in the video games industry but in D&D, and so I think it’ll look cool. That’s one good thing coming out of this, their VTT looks cool. So for the folks who aren’t bugged by big microtransaction-laden services it’ll probably be neutral to maybe good if you like the VTT’s base offerings. But there are going to be a lot of people out there who are going to feel pressured to spend a lot of money that they weren’t spending before on D&D.

Oren:  Wes have you used D&D Beyond much? 

Wes: We use it regularly because one of our players is a teacher and he started a D&D club at his secondary school and apparently Beyond, this happened before they were bought, comped the books as part of a school program so we have access to basically everything which is great. Out of the bounds of what any reasonable person would spend. We’re talking basically a grand. I’m just like “Yikes, the books are so expensive.” But having access to all that is great. It’s well set up. I make pretty good use of the encounter builder for like tracking initiative and it pulls up the stat blocks right there for me for rolling and things like that. Would I have bought all that myself? Absolutely not. I was doing fine before I found it convenient because it’s all just there and I didn’t have to pay for it. It has probably one of the worst search functions I’ve experienced on any website. 

Ari: It is a shame. 

Wes: It is a shame. My experience with the digital books and stuff is nice. It’s fun to just filter those bookmark pages keep things handy for like prep and tabs and things like that for running a campaign, but nothing that I couldn’t do elsewhere. It’s just what we ended up doing because it ended up being free and accessible so I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody, especially with the other alternatives out there, but it’s fun and like I already said I mean it is nice because it’s pretty it’s well-formatted there’s good styling and the books are cool and you can have all the images and things like that ready to go. So, yeah, there are some pros for sure. 

Ari: The biggest sticking point for me besides the price because Wes is right it’s so expensive for a digital product that costs them nothing to make but the biggest problem for me is the D&D Beyond is awful at supporting custom rules and specifically custom classes. You can make a subclass if you want to, but you can’t make your own classes so a lot of the custom content in homebrew that I’ve made just doesn’t work in D&D Beyond. Anyone who does stuff like that is just out of luck for D&D Beyond at the moment and I hope that changes. There was some leaks about the tiers of D&D Beyond subscriptions and like which ones would allow you to make certain homebrew stuff and I don’t know how much of that was true, there was a lot of contention about how true those things were, but it definitely worries me about what the environment looks like for GMs like me who want to create their own content. How friendly will this new D&D be to that? 

Oren: The thing that gets me about D&D Beyond, and regular D&D has this problem too, but with D&D Beyond it feels like it’s getting more intense where the reason why I seek out free sources of D&D rules isn’t because I don’t want to buy the books it’s because, to make a basic character now, I would need to buy an absurd number of books. 

Ari: All the books. 

Wes: Yeah good point. 

Oren: It’s weird because these books are not sectioned off it’s not like a video game where we’re all playing the same version. I only have the player’s handbook but my good friend Bobbo he has the player’s handbook, and Tasha’s, and the Sword Coast expansion, and so I either have to be able to use those rules too or his character’s just better than mine and mine will be sad. There’s just a huge pressure to be able to make a character from whatever is available and yet it’s way too expensive to do that, and I’m worried that with the increased reliance on D&D Beyond that Wizards will take harder stances trying to get rid of other options that currently let me do that without dropping a fortune. 

Wes: Yeah Ari’s covered a lot of that with his class and subclass posts like, as new books come online and offer either new subclass or like new rules, it’s just fundamentally changing how characters operate and, if you don’t have access to that, you’re just playing an eldritch knight. 

Ari: The player who isn’t bringing Xanathar’s Guide and Tasha’s to the table is just going to feel very sad a lot of the time compared to the players who are. Another thing about D&D Beyond is once you do own all that, from what I’ve seen, it’s really hard to actually parse all the information you have across a million books. I’ve seen creators try to like live search for specific monsters that have certain features and the search function has just failed them time and time again. There are free resources out there with significantly better and more granular search capabilities than D&D Beyond and finding very specific things is important when you’re a GM. I want to find every monster that can cast Hold Persin. That was a real search that I did recently and I’ve seen D&D Beyond’s, tools they aren’t good for stuff like that. 

Oren: Why are you trying to cast so many hold persons, Ari? Is this something your party should be aware of?

Ari: I was watching like a gauntlet video and I was trying to examine the kind of unreasonableness of a single character attempting to beat everything and so I was just looking at all the monsters that demand different saves and Hold Person was the wisdom save I was looking for because like that’s one of the worst spells to fail a wisdom save on that is pretty early level. 

Oren: All right now that we know Ari’s evil plans I’m sorry to the players in Ari’s current game you’re gonna get held. Your person is gonna get held a lot. 

Ari: That’s definitely what I’m doing. No, they just showed up in Avernus, I’m gonna give them their Mad Max dune buggy soon. It’s gonna be great.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: I think we are gonna take a pause because we’ve covered the out of game stuff that Wizards has been up to but we got a whole list of things to talk about with the actual new mechanics so we’re gonna pause the episode here and we’ll do this as a little two-parter, so we’ll come back next week with the rest of it, but in the meantime, if this episode was better than Wizards’ weird “We rolled a one” apology you can support us for just a dollar on Patreon which we would consider a critical success.

Wes: Nice

Oren: Keeping us in the D&D mode. So, you just go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants, and, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie McLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And, finally, we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will be back next week with more D&D. 

[Closing Music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening-closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.