Dungeons and Drama

[AnubisXy]

They gave up for now. They made clear what their plans are and what they want to do. I think people should be careful and keep a close eye on them for the next couple of years, because I have to imagine that they only decided to temporarily pull back.

[Dataweaver]

True. That said, D&D 5.1 is now under the Creative Commons; there's nothing that they can do to take that back. As well, the ORC is well under way; I don't see that process stopping, even with WotC backing down. This is a decisive win for the community — although part of that win is that the community isn't going to be taking WotC for granted anymore.

[Knightingale]

At this point, pretty much everything WOTC do is "too little, too late".

The damage is done.

Unless WOTC have a time-travel-machine, they're fucked. They started this whole thing by saying "D&D is undermonetized" and claiming to have a plan to change that but... no matter who did what in this complicated Hasbro/WOTC-hierarchy, we ended up with D&D no longer being undermonetized, didn't we? Because a ton of D&D-adjacent content jumped ship to do their own thing and D&D as a brand lost a lot of trust, so... in other words, D&D (as an IP) isn't under-monetized anymore, it's just less valuable than before.

[Ragged Robin]

I'm a little cheered that nerd culture of all places, drew a line against the hyper consumerist mindset and its exploitive aspects. I know they'll try again but that their is some pushback feels like a small step forward for modern culture and our society.

[TwoDSix]

True. That said, D&D 5.1 is now under the Creative Commons; there's nothing that they can do to take that back. As well, the ORC is well under way; I don't see that process stopping, even with WotC backing down. This is a decisive win for the community — although part of that win is that the community isn't going to be taking WotC for granted anymore.

Creative Commons doesn't mean one thing though, there's a world of difference between CC0 and CC-ND. Without finding out what licence they're using (as it doesn't say in their blog post and I care about D&D so little I can't be asked to read the SRD) it's hard to know exactly what's irrevocable. My guess is that like Fate they're using CC-BY, but I can also very much see CC-NC-SA like Eclipse Phase is under (I should really look into getting the second edition of that).

Unfortunately they're not releasing the full core rulebook under it, which sucks. It would be lovely to be able to download and share the PhB with people, but I guess that one book is where WotC makes most of their money. But it's definitely the second best step they could have made (the best being not doing any of this in the first place).