A year on (Patreon)

It's a year now since the OGL crisis hit.

It's hard to explain just how deeply it affected everyone who creates things for TTRPGs. Just how worried, angry and betrayed it made us feel.

D&D is more than just a property that a company can own. It's a folk game, and a whole community and identity built around it. It's the product of countless people, some of them working for the hundreds of publishers, or the thousands of part-time creators, but most of all it's the many players and DMs who've made this game what it is.

It seems obscene that a profit-seeking company could have control over it, and more so that they could choose to take the whole thing away.

That nightmare was averted this time, due to the speed and scale of our reaction. Executives honestly didn't expect the reaction they got - because they don't actually know anything about the players or community. Just think on that. This catastrophic course of action was taken by people who don't care enough to get to know the people it affects.

And it wasn't even smart greed. I'm used to greed - I live in capitalism the same as the rest of you. It was incompetent, self-defeating greed, that wouldn't even have served their business interests even if it had worked entirely according to plan. And those idiots are getting million-dollar bonuses now.

I'm not going to replay the events of the crisis blow-by-blow. I expect you'll see plenty of that in the next few days. I just want you to remember why it mattered.