If you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of the legendary “Deck of Many Things” – one of the game’s most iconic magical items. It’s a lot of fun, and it has always been something associated with brand-name Dungeons and Dragons.
This article is about the legal usage of “Deck of Many Things,” and about how Wizards of the Coast seems to be trying to take it back in 2025 after giving it to the community in 2023. And it’s about how you can hit them where it hurts.
Thanks. I read the article and posted a link, with a brief explanation, on my Facebook page.
This is just sleazy and wrong. When longtime fans and the target market for your products tell you that your corporation’s greed and desire for control are problems, the correct response is certainly not to quietly attempt to take back ownership of something you gave away.
Well, it wouldnt be WotC if they didn’t find some way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
They finally do something good, something that should earn back trust after their biggest (or at least highest profile) scandel, and they cant help but ruin it by trying to sneak something like this through.
I think they also couldn’t invalidate the OGL1.0b, which was how this thread started. I think what they were going to do was publish things going forward under their new OGL (1.1? I don’t remember now) such that anyone that wanted to publish current 5E stuff would be forced to use the new one. I could be wrong on that.
The other speculation I have heard is that this was all about getting a piece of Critical Role, the only people making significant money off of “their property.” Maybe Shadowdark would have fallen under this, if Kelsey had been silly enough to publish under the new OGL, due to its successful Kickstarters. I don’t think anyone else would fall into that.
Although “getting a piece of Critical Role” (and presumably every other streaming liveplay that they might have assumed to be forthcoming) was probably some MBA’s wet dream but it is total nonsense to anyone who actually understands the tabletop gaming community. Critical Role became a success not because they used Dungeons & Dragons (and in fact the ‘home game’ that it came out of used Pathfinder but they elected to switch to D&D because it would be more well-known outside of the tabletop RPG space) but because of the performances (of professional actors) and camaraderie. It was in essence free advertising for the game and Hasbro/WotC could have just leveraged off of the growth in popularity due to this (and Stranger Things) but instead decided that they needed to monetize every aspect of the gaming experience and drive off anyone who didn’t comply with their scheme.
Shadowdark, for all that it broke Kickstarter records, and the OSR movement in general is such a tiny piece of even the ‘DnD’ fantasy roleplaying pie (and a demographic of players who were already disinterested in the excessive rules growth and content bloat) that it really shouldn’t be worth Hasbro’s time to try to curtail or control it. It really just appeals to people who have a nostalgia for tactical dungeon crawling and the cruder black & white line drawing art. It’s far from unique given the proliferation of OSR-type games that proceeded it from Old School Essentials and The Black Hack to the more gonzo Dungeon Crawl Classics, and was really distinguished by more modern but highly streamlined mechanics, the real-time torch mechanic driving player action (which wasn’t novel but had never been codified into the rules of an OSR game), and Dionne’s direct marketing to a customer base already primed for a more challenging game with simple rules. After the OGL debacle, scraping off all of the 5E-specific content (mostly trademarked names and anything with a hint of copyright) was trivial because you can’t copyright or patent game mechanics, and the game is different enough to already be classified as a generic D20-type system anyway.
The dumb thing about this entire mess is that WotC bit the hand of a community of third party content creators who have sustained interest in the game and produced supplemental material even when WotC itself was indifferent or ill-equipped to do so. They didn’t need to do anything with the license or third party content except to use it to foster continuous interest and use it as a farm league for talent while investing in other D&D-branded media and digital properties. But not being content to have the biggest part of the pie, they decided to try to snatch more from small creators for whom it was at most a marginal living.
The article is not true. WotC has not rolled back the OGL, but the new 2024 rules are under the Creative Commons instead.
The DEck is out there on free pages currently-
This is not true.
True, under the new rules, if you use WotC content, you have to say you got it from them- which is fair.
Nor do most other game companies have things like the OGL. Every.Single.Thing from Games Workshop is copyrighted and they will sue you even if you are a fan artist.
Yes, no other RPG is close to DND. Nothing. Even in its weakest selling 4E days, it sold more than everything else combined. I do think someone in WotC wanted a piece of what CR was doing, though, and the OGL change was the reason for it. Maybe not just CR. CR might have been (still is? I don’t pay attention to them.) the biggest piece on YT but I would bet they are a small fraction of the overall YT presence of DND at the time and now. I could see them wanting a piece of the bigger picture of DNDs presence on YT. I also think they wanted to stop independent publishers and bring them over to DMs Guild, at a minimum, so they could get a piece of all things being created for DND. I have read too many statements that execs didn’t like how much control they didn’t have over their IP.
My other evidence for that is a YT video that Adam Conover did on movies.
The point being made in that video, although about movies, fits with what WotC is seeing with DND. They have lost control of their IP and need that to have control of their brand. They want to be TSR of the 80s which sued anyone that even came close to a DND like game. Yes, I do think they envy Games Workshop and the control it has over Warhammer.
I do think that CR said they picked 5E and converted because they knew it wouldn’t have wide appeal to watch them play a rules heavy game like PF. I think it would also cut down on commenters trying to say what they did wrong, since DND is rulings.
I talk about this below, in discussing how DND was played in the 70s. I don’t understand the whole OSR movement but that’s because it’s not for me.
This isn’t directly related to the OGL but it’s my thread I’m hijacking and I like the discussion in one place.
The Youtuber Daddy Rolled a 1 has created some interesting videos.
I think that while these are good, they are way too long. He proves his point very quickly in both of them, within ten to fifteen minutes, but then keeps going.
The first one talks about how alignment was used in a wargaming way to indicate which faction monsters sided with. The second one talks about how wargaming and early role playing is not what it is now. In fact, what it was in the 70s was lost by many groups in the 80s, IMO.
DND rose out of wargaming. Wargaming was about recreating battles, whether real or fictional. DND was about controlling one character instead of units of a side. The rules of Gary’s game was time was constant between real and game world. They might have a standard weekly game but Gary, or someone, might decide to run a game on a different night with whoever could make it. That could be as little as six, as many as thirty, but my understanding is somewhere around twenty.
With twenty people, the role of Caller was needed. This was the only person allowed to talk to the DM about what the group was doing. There could be exceptions. The twenty players would discuss tactics, the Caller would take all of that and present it to the DM. That was so twenty people weren’t trying to tell the DM what they were doing. The Mapper was important, then, because if they didn’t leave the dungeon by the end of the session, it was assumed their characters were there until they played again with real time equalling game time. The characters could die “off screen” if the DM said something came and attacked them.
Alignment, then, was more about your cosmic allegiance than what an individual believed. It was based on Law v Chaos not Good v Evil. It wasn’t about morals, just what side you were in the grand struggle of the cosmos.
As ChatGPT summarized those videos, “Old-school D&D was a strategic, faction-driven, exploration-and-survival game with harsh consequences, living worlds, and a strong emphasis on teamwork, mapping, and logistics—not cinematic heroism.” Indeed, it says that death and replacement were common.
I’m glad that is not how my brother, who introduced me to role playing, played it because I don’t think I would have kept playing a smaller scale game of Risk.
I’m in the last ten minutes of Critical Roles campaign 3, which means that between that and campaign 2 I’ve listened to a little shy of a thousand hours of their podcast. The things they do with the game are fascinating, and the contrast between how they treat it and how Hasbro treats it is instructive.
For Critical Role, the game rules aren’t the thing: the thing is to create a dramatic, funny, compelling story with good character beats and strong friendships. The rules are there to facilitate the experience.
For Hasbro, the game rules aren’t the thing: the thing is to maximize profits. The rules are there to facilitate the profits.
It’s not difficult to see which group is going to be more fun to work for.
(And I know this is simplistic, that CR is a business also. But there’s still a very different emphasis between the two businesses).
I’m torn on this. Not that Crawford and Perkins went to CR but that they created a new game. Maybe I’m jealous that I don’t have enough time to play all of these different games. I have two weekly games but we stick to fantasy most of the time, so 5E, Level Up, PF1/2. A few times, we might do a Shadowrun game.
The thing I do like about this is that maybe my players, who know CR, might be interested in playing a game like this. Most of my players would not play something like this before now. I tried.
It’s pretty clear WotC is having some regrets about the OGL. They managed to create their own competition in the form of Pathfinder and other games. It’s as if they’ve created their own golem.
True. Competition forces them to be innovative to keep people. Although, as we have argued here, they have the momentum and name recognition.
My apologies for not being clear. I didn’t mean to say that Crawford and Perkins made Daggerheart or had anything to do with it. I meant CR made the game. I’m disappointed they made a new game rather than using something that exists. I get why. They don’t want to be beholden to another company again. I do hope it does well for them.
I don’t doubt that’s part of it but, honestly, tons of people in the RPG space feel compelled to dabble in RPG creation at some point. Whether it’s homebrewing classes or rule shifts or whole new systems. I know multiple people who made their own games and I took a stab at it myself back in college. It would be kind of weird if a group of people as invested in TTRPGs as them didn’t eventually try to make their own system.
Fair points. Maybe I should say I’m surprised they made a system that is so different from 5E. I would have expected them to make a 5E clone so their audience doesn’t have to learn something new. Of course, I watched CR to learn 5E and stopped after I understood it well enough without reading it. I was interested in the mechanics more than their world. Their stories weren’t interesting to me. Probably just me.
That might be part of it, but from all I’ve seen, a big part of it is a ruleset that is roleplay-forward not combat-forward, much better suiting their improv troupe-y story-centric collaborative-worldbuilding style of play.
The 2-dice Hope/Fear mechanic is the core of things and on the face of it looks like it might do a good job at that.
