On WOTCs permissive licences

On WOTCs permissive licences

Earlier this year, Wizards of the Coast, the owners of Dungeons & Dragons, bought D&D Beyond, the premiere and largest web store for the rules of D&D and they are now trialling a new version of the rules called One D&D; they are also planning to release a virtual table top solution and have a new movie in production. Also recently at a Hasbro earnings call, one of their executives stated that D&D was now a lifestyle brand and was under-monetised. This has created a sense of fear amongst 3rd party creators that WOTC will revise their intellectual property sharing agreements to the detriment of themselves and non-Dungeon Master players who have been identified as under spenders. Depending on where you look, this has created a lot of noise; I think there’s a lot of fear being generated, and it interests me to consider the issues in the context of the software industry practice. I think that software industry grew the open source models and the interaction by games vendors such as Wizards with software continues to inform good & bad practice, There's more overleaf ...

Asymmetric Games

Asymmetric Games

Dungeons & Dragons is undergoing a renaissance, possibly most visibly by the podcast postings of the team at “Critical Role”. While their youtube hosted podcasts are not necessarily particularly accessible, partly because they are not scripted, because there’s too much talking at the same time and the episodes are extremely long, they are easy to find and their DM, Matt Mercer, is a great story teller, who seemingly never forgets that the story comes first. I first followed the story of Force Grey. …