Yes, the criticism about WotC and Hasbro isn’t that they want to make money for selling a product but they are now trying to create an “ecosystem” that “consumers” buy into which assures that they can get a constant stream of revenues for subscriptions and microtransactions (analogous to BMW forcing owners to buy a subscription to use the heated seats that they paid for when they bought the car) rather than constantly having to produce high quality new material or (horror of horrors!) support third party content creators who have been largely responsible for keeping Dungeons & Dragons as a premium brand and having contributed most of the actual successful innovations to the game in the last thirty years. Some pod of MBA conslutants looked at all of that and wonder, “Why aren’t we getting all of that money?” rather than “This is really giving us free promotion and buoying our financial success at no cost or loss of product identity…Sweet!” Hasbro corporate management is being not only greedy but stupid, and so transparently venal that the rest of the RPG industry and most of the 5e content creators have gone all in on moving to other gaming systems and open licenses that explicitly state they they will remain open in perpetuity. There is shooting yourself in the foot, and then doing to repeatedly, but Hasbro ran out of bullets and decided to reload and keep going, presumably under the thesis that if they shoot the entire foot off it will stop hurting.
While the self-described “Professor Dungeon Master” is critical of Hasbro and WotC’s business practices and their OGL 1.1 shit-fuckery, he’s actually said a lot of good things about D&D, including the fifth edition even though it clearly isn’t his style of fast play and character vulnerability, and especially regarding the original Open Gaming License. Checking the thread, you are literally the only person who has referred to Hasbro or WotC as “evil” (technically the o.p. did as well in one post but he was being intentionally hyperbolic), so the notion that Hasbro needs defending against a bunch of (largely substantiated) criticisms is risible to say the least.
This is pure “whataboutism” about a company that is quite rightly regarded as pretty usurious and disreputable by much of the RPG community, and not just for being litigious and manipulative.
Which nearly every video game company does- so what?
That is not true- most of the good stuff is from WotC. The best 3rd party stuff is updated Old School modules.
Yes he has- every D&D product NOT made by WotC- including his own- which has a slightly different combat system, but steals all the spells, etc from 5e.
Given most people’s opinions towards modern EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc I don’t think that “Well, video games do this too” is a winning argument.
“Most” video games don’t really have aggressive monetization schemes. It’s the big AAA style games published by the major corps that treat games as a monetization service and people complain about being shitty money-grabs banking on major franchise names/audiences rather than quality product. Not the comparison I’d want to be making to defend a company.
WotC/Hasbro is not a video game company. Why would they try and use that license in their model?
I did?? goes to look
I did! Well remembered, as I didn’t.
A lot has happened since I last posted. Lots of games have come out. I have now run two Level Up campaigns. And we are currently running PF2! It’s different. Not better or worse, just different. Trying to use new Core books but with how they broke out classes, it’s a mix between PF2.1 and PF2.2.
Looking over this thread, I’m still sad that @Aspenglow, and others, and I talked past each other. My apologies on my poor communication skills.
On that topic, I don’t think any of us are surprised. They have said it’s what they want to do. I knew someone who refused to play any RPG but DND and this was back in the 00s. I don’t know his motivation for that but that attitude is not new. If WotC manages to do this, it might be the success they want. It will be sad but the success they want. Given that they couldn’t do this back in '08 with 4E, it will be interesting to see what they have learned 16 years later.
I usually like Prof DM but this time I found it annoying because several of his talking points, I think he praised in the DC20 review he did. I’m talking about how things all look the same. DC20 allows you to use your top stat for whatever you are good at, even if it’s strength and you are a spell caster. I can understand fighting intelligently, so mental stats in place of physical in some way, but not in everything. Not sure how INT would let you hit harder.
You put the URL on its own line, and Discourse will automagically embed with the thumbnail as an image:
The above is some commentary about WotC events and Paizo licensing by Jophdan’s Jocular Junction (“the ‘ph’ is silent”) who largely covers a lot of Goodman Games content for 5e and their own pseudo-OSR, Dungeon Crawl Classics, as well as other OSR games such as Cairn, Knave, and Old School Essentials.
Ha! This makes me think of the Doom Patrol character Flex Mentallo, a muscular dude in a speedo who flexes and poses like a bodybuilder in order to generate reality-altering effects.
Okay, fair. We aren’t caught up but did see him in Doom Patrol. For that show, it worked but it’s not what I want in my fantasy game, more due to the tone of it.
It could just be because it was a limited release at Gen Con two weeks ago, and they don’t want any details “leaked” before the full release in September. Meanwhile, everybody still has to wait until, what, November for the DM Guide, and then next February for the Monster Manual?
Many Youtube online ‘reviews’ are essentially just pagethroughs, often looking more at art, layout, binding, and structure than the mechanics of the game or details of the setting. Nobody other than Hasbro has any problem with this whatsoever because not only are viewers not going to be able to assemble a facsimile rulebook from standard definition quality screen captures but part of the reason to do such a pagethrough is to highlight the quality of the paper and binding, or the appeal of the art and layout. In other words, it is basically fluffing the audience to get excited about the product by showing contents inside the cover. Leave it to WotC and Hasbro to attack the people giving them free advertising because they don’t have total control over the review. I guess the reviewers should just be happy that they didn’t have armed Pinkertons showing up at their door.
That’s hardly an edge case opinion; lots of people on gaming forums I’ve read feel that 5e quickly becomes a superhero game after level six or so. 5e especially with basically everyone getting magical-style powers as class features.
Bingo. The sweet spot for me it between levels 4-7 but that’s just a preference. The last time I ran a higher level game was for Curse of Strahd which ended with the PCs at level 10. I don’t enjoy high level play at all.
That was an opinion about 4e and it was silly then, too. There are a bunch of players out there, apparently, who think giving a non-caster any options past “swing sword shoot bow” is giving them magical powers.
