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Comment by TOMDM | Hacker News Reader

The only way to get companies like this to cooperate with what the fans really want is to vote with your wallet.

The DND community recently won a large battle against WOTC over the proposed open gaming license changes. Fans saw wizards taking away some of the freedom that made DND great and decided they wouldn't put up with it.

Huge numbers of people cancelled their subscriptions and paizo, DND's biggest competitor announced that they sold 6 months volume in 2 weeks after they announced their own open license as a replacement to the OGL.

All of this culminated in wizards backing off the updated license, and actually publishing the DND 5.1 SRD under creative commons 4.0.

I reckon wizards will try again with the next edition and their virtual table top, but for now the DND fans have proven they can get wizards to bend under enough pressure.

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yeah i mean this is why i stopped buying magic cards, stopped drafting, stopped doing anything related to the game. It stopped being fun. It became obviously "pay to play". Same with dnd. i stopped playing new editions. Why do i need to learn new rules, buy new books, etc.? It is a complete waste of resources. Especially given that

https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm

exists. The real fun of both magic and dnd was creating a story with someone else. You don't need new content for this, you just need some friends. This is what WOTC is afraid people will realize. Their products already exist and can be had for essentially free. You don't need them to tell you what to do.

Hi, I’ve been playing DND since 20 years or so. I never bought more than a few books. Other friends were buying other and we were lending them to each other. Of course we might also have used PDF from dubious sources …

But my question is : what are people paying from to WOTC ? Subscription? To what ?

Sorry, I’m sure that the WOTC website would happily tell me more but I don’t have the energy to go though a ton of marketing.

The mass-cancellations were to the D&D Beyond software [1]. It is the official tool to help with character creation and progress tracking, as a quick reference, etc.

I definitely see the utility, and the cost (6USD/month for the top tier) to "please keep this up" signaling ratio seems pretty good to me. I can see myself subscribing if I played even 10% of some people I know.

[1] https://www.dndbeyond.com/store/subscribe

Well, I take papers note, like our forefather had plan for us. And then I spend the session scribbling on it. It’s actually nice little artifact of long evening with friends

My understanding is that a lot of people stopped paying for WOTC's Virtual TableTop software. While it's not my personal cup of tea, VTT got quite big over the pandemic. I've seen speculation that cornering the VTT market (where WOTC's own offering was in third place) was a big driver for the OGL revision.

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