Slaying the Gold-Hungry Dragon

D&D’s openness is reflected in the innovative licensing system enshrined in 2000, which allowed anyone to use the core game rules in their own projects, even for profit. While you couldn’t swipe certain content, including specific places or storylines, the Open Game License (OGL) essentially let the community share a common gaming language and use it to create an endless variety of games. The OGL made it possible for players to begin making and marketing their own D&D content, ranging from ideas for simple new items like a ​‘catnip amulet’ or ​‘dragon tamer’s lance’ that could be used in a D&D campaign to entire games complete with their own sets of rules, stories and characters. For instance, Miller says he’s recently purchased independently developed supplements for the WotC-published adventures he’s playing — materials that add content, like creatures and encounters, to parts of the map that WotC ​“never fleshed out.” 

In addition to ensuring that there was always new D&D content to keep players engaged, over time the OGL enabled WotC to profit from a uniquely lean business model by turning third-party creators into an ​“army of pseudo-contractors,” explains Noah Downs, a gaming intellectual property lawyer who works with independent D&D creators. Instead of hiring more staff and producing more content to satisfy the increasingly ​“voracious” gaming community, Downs says WotC effectively outsourced content creation to community members; new content ​“in turn generated interest in the core [D&D] materials, leading to sales for WotC.” 

But in light of its concerns about D&D’s undermonetization, Downs says, WotC saw an opportunity to ​“squeeze even more blood from that orange” by simply changing the terms of the OGL so many third-party creators suddenly owed WotC money for selling their own D&D content. (Hasbro’s PR team did not respond to an email request for comment.) 

On January 4^th, a developer leaked the full text of a new OGL to Linda Codega of io9. The update eliminated what journalist Matt Ford refers to as the game’s ​“user-friendly, power-to-the-players open license,” replacing it with what Macaulay describes as a far more ​“medieval” licensing system requiring third-party creators to tediously register every new piece of D&D content with WotC. WotC also wanted reports on all third-party creators’ earnings, and a 25% cut of all revenue over $750,000 (20% if funds were raised on Kickstarter), meaning that even creators whose expenses exceeded their earnings could owe WotC tens of thousands of dollars. Macaulay, for example, estimates that under the new royalty requirements alone, before even considering the additional costs of registration and citation practices, he would be left just about breaking even.

Even if they didn’t earn enough to pay WotC a cut, third-party creators’ content would still be at the mercy of WotC. Where the OGL gave perpetual, worldwide rights to creators, Macaulay explained that under the new license WotC would claim rights ​“to everything that you made, forever.” As Codega reported, the new license meant that many third-party publishers would have to overhaul their old content to comply with the onerous new requirements. (WotC originally planned on giving creators seven business days to comply.) 

The new license ​“flew in the face of what we’d been told for 20 years — the collective agreement and the community that we’d built out of it,” Macaulay explains. ​“It was a real betrayal.” ​“You relied on these people to help popularize the game, make it more enjoyable” Miller says, ​“and now you’re taking it all away.” 

All of this would’ve been a great way to make money, Downs says, ​“if you take the human element out of it.”

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Unfortunately for WotC, the human element is D&D. Players quite literally make the game what it is, and many of them were extremely upset at what they saw as WotC’s plan to shortchange independent creators for profit. ​“In this game, even your average dungeon master or player is a creator in their own right. You create your character, you create encounters,” Miller says. ​“There’s a lot of sympathy for creators.”

Some creators and influencers, including Macaulay, began working together to turn the raw anger into a cohesive movement. “[The D&D community] fight a lot amongst ourselves,” Da Conceicao says. ​“Stuff like, ​‘The second edition is better than the third edition.’ But the moment that someone tries to shit on us? Forget it.” 

For a community as diverse and digitally dispersed as D&D, the process of organizing was remarkably quick. Creators used their existing followings — some of them hundreds of thousands strong — to disseminate information about the new OGL and what it would mean for everyone even as more WotC insiders risked their jobs to come forward with details about the new business plan. Downs and other lawyers helped creators refine the language they used in public comments and in their demands, the most prominent of which was the cancellation of the new OGL. 

Over the next fortnight, tens of thousands of people signed an open letter calling for this cancellation. Tens of thousands more used hashtags #OpenDnD and #DnDBegone (a pun on WotC’s recently-acquired site D&D Beyond). Millions watched and shared content criticizing WotC and the new license across the internet; creators funneled fans into Discord servers where they could organize more efficiently; some helped organize a mass boycott, with so many canceling their online D&D subscriptions that the page crashed. ​“At that point,” says Taron ​“Indestructoboy” Pounds, a D&D creator and YouTuber, WotC ​“started shitting their pants.” 

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WotC were probably expecting some kind of backlash, Downs says, but not one with such speed, ferocity, and unity. He says the organized resistance ​“led to real, tangible financial consequences for WotC” as angry players began turning to non-WotC content. ​“Our immediate reaction,” Da Conceicao says of one of his D&D groups, ​“was ​‘screw WotC. Let’s just choose a different game system.’” Competing game publishers soon began posting record profits. For example, Goodman Games, which produces the Dungeon Crawl Classics game, reported their best ever month in January, something they directly attributed to the uproar over the new OGL.

On January 13, WotC walked back some of its more egregious changes, but it was too little, too late. The community of what Pounds affectionately calls ​“chaotic shotgun goblins” continued their tremendously effective rampage. In a January 26 tweet, Alta Fox Capital — one of Hasbro’s largest shareholders,which had previously criticized Hasbro for a total board compensation exceeding that of Apple — publicly lambasted WotC’s decision, calling it ​“leaderless.” Overnight, Hasbro’s stock plummeted by more than 6%.

The next morning, WotC made a bombshell announcement. It was completely canceling the new OGL. ​“The feedback is in such high volume,” WotC admitted in a statement, ​“and its direction is so plain that we’re acting now.” To widespread surprise, the company then dumped the entire roughly 400-page System Reference Document (a D&D encyclopedia) onto a Creative Commons license, something it couldn’t revoke even if it wanted to.

The community had organized and won more than they even set out to ask for. But the victory does not spell an end to the organizing. ​“This is like someone held a gun to our head,” Pounds explains, ​“and pulled the trigger — but it didn’t go off, and now they’re trying to fix it. We can stand here and let them, or do something.”

Helped by Downs, creators are working on creating an organization of third-party creators that hopes to eventually provide benefits beyond a formal organizational structure — a legal fund, insurance, accounting, community partnerships and more. ​“Every single class of workers starts out as a community,” Downs explains. In any industry, ​“before there was a union, there was a community. It’s these galvanizing events that lead to an increase in labor awareness — that potentially lead to more organization and a better understanding of worker’s rights.”

“We want to make a United Federation of Planets, but for creators,” elaborates Macaulay, ​“where you say that the Tabletop Content Creator Association stands for this, doesn’t stand for that — believes in a standard freelance wage; being a collective force for good. Under a banner like that, if WotC or some such tries anything funny again, we will have a larger foot in the door.”

The diverse party of adventurers came together and slew the gold-hungry dragon — this time. Now they’re organizing to ensure they never find themselves trapped in the dragon’s clutches again.