Hello Hasbro! Hello Wizards! I am writing this on January 29, 2023, during what I hope is the denouement from the drama over the Open Gaming License. I am recommending that you invite Felicia Day to help develop a way of understanding your brand. It might also be wise to invite her to join the board, or to become the new Chief Executive Officer of Wizards of the Coast.
Understanding Dungeons and Dragons as a brand, and as a business model, is not straightforward. D&D is radically different from most 20th century business models, especially in the diffuse and extended community of customers who are also participants and substantive contributors to the brand.
First, what it is not: D&D is not a board game. Producing and marketing board games normally involves almost no interaction between the company and the customer. Magic: the Gathering fits this model fairly well, so perhaps the misunderstanding arose from assuming that both Magic and D&D had the same model.
Second: the profit in D&D had been primarily from publishing books, from 1980-2020. Core rulebooks and supplements were famously expensive in the 1980s at around $30-$40. Today they are only slightly more expensive (~$50). Adjusted for inflation, that must be much less profitable. But the market for books has declined generally, so it remains extraordinary that players buy hardbound books for D&D at this price. We love the artwork. And we love that you pay artists, which is a policy we want to continue supporting. But my guess is that book publishing is becoming increasingly unprofitable, and that Wizards has to think beyond publishing as its business model.
We appreciate that D&D is also struggling with the ideologies and assumptions embedded in the game in the 1970s. The Paladin class is modeled on medieval Christian Crusaders, and yet the Roman Catholic Church itself has rejected and sought to repent from that past. The different humanoids in the game have been called different races, but ‘race‘ has become a toxic term as Americans struggle with our own history. More fundamentally: the old D&D gameplay of ‘kill the Others and take their loot’ is now clearly understood as a re-enactment of colonization as it has actually been practiced for the past 500 years. Furthermore, in the 21st century ‘new gilded age’ of extreme inequality, players are much more sensitive to labor practices: how artists and writers are paid, and how they are credited with their work.
We applaud the creators at Wizards for publicly wrestling with all four of these issues. However it is we, the players, who are most active in redeeming this brand from its past. D&D remains a structured way to enact roleplay, to collectively develop stories. Role-play gaming as a mechanic can be–and is–used very differently by younger generations of players. Wizards should pay close attention to how the game can be used by youth to help work out challenging questions of identity. Handled with compassion, the game could save lives and help form healthy identities.
Players also took extraordinary measures to keep the game viable after the COVID-19 lockdown began. I started a campaign on March 4, 2020, at Victory Point Cafe in Berkeley. Within a week, we had to figure out how to play online. Within two weeks, the party was completed with players in Los Angeles, Colorado, and New Hampshire. I hated losing the fun of in-person roleplay and improvisation, but on the other hand it opened whole new possibilities of a geographically dispersed circle of friends. Reddit and Discord channels are filled with similar accounts of groups trying to figure out how to use software to maintain their groups.
Since we used a mixture of software to play and remain in contact, we also had become organized in an extended community with tens of thousands of other players who watch live-play gamers and video essayists; cosplay convention participants; and makers. I ended up creating a book out of the materials for our campaign and publishing it on the Dungeon Masters Guild, as have many other game masters. Through conversations with authors, editors, and writers on Discord servers, I had crossed over from being a customer to being an active participant in this brand. The mechanism that made this deeper involvement possible was the Open Gaming License 1.0.
We all suddenly realized the double-sided quality of being a participant in the organized roleplaying movement on January 5, 2023. No need to re-hash the details of the proposed revocation of OGL 1.0a and the potential terms of a successor OGL. Fundamentally the problem was that none of us–not Hasbro, nor us players–understood the nature of the roleplaying movement now. Critical Role, Ginny Di, and Dimension 20 were outstanding promoters of the D&D brand, and Wizards probably should have been paying each of them hundreds of thousands per year for their outstanding marketing and promotion of the brand reputation. Wizards and Hasbro also should have understood the massive value-adding from hundreds of minor developers contributing thousands of different supplements. Threatening the existence of this extended community of creators and contributors made us all immediately reconsider our reliance an ‘open’ license that might be revoked.
Nobody wanted this, nobody expected that as participants we would suddenly organize against your proposed change of license policies. We do want Wizards to be profitable, and we do appreciate their game-testing to develop a new edition of D&D. The controversial legacy-features of D&D are sufficient justification in themselves for developing a 6th edition to the game.
However, it seems imperative to understand the nature of the business-model and the D&D brand after January 2023.
Yes, an online interface that facilitates character-sheet management makes sense. Integration of voice-chat and a virtual tabletop also makes sense. Charging a small subscription fee to players, as well as game-masters, also makes sense, as does the option of charging micro-transactions for bonus features. But attempting to impose these new revenue-streams by excluding the other community practices that have emerged over the past 23 years would destroy the entire brand. Many of us look forward to returning to face-to-face tabletop play, using homebrew rules, but still buying and referring to hardbound campaign-setting manuals and other supplements. We are also brand-ambassadors, but if we are denied this role by Wizards, we will shift to promote the rest of the roleplaying environment where we remain welcome.
At the beginning of this note, I proposed that you heed the advice and leadership of Felicia Day. Why? because all that I have written here only diagnoses that D&D is a unique business model. But I don’t understand what that model is, nor what it is becoming. However, I have seen Felicia Day create a media business out of The Guild video shorts, then Geek & Sundry, which then launched Critical Role. Day has repeatedly seen emergent opportunities for role-players, years ahead of others. Perhaps assisted by Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, and Brennan Lee Mulligan, you would get solid advice on the nature of this truly extraordinary brand.
I truly wish you good fortune in working through this crisis.
Dr. Pietro Calogero