S04 E02: WotC OGL Madness

Inspiration Point

The tabletop RPG community has been turned upside down recently (as of Jan 2023) ever since Dungeons & Dragons' owner Wizards of the Coast (and their parent company, Hasbro) were caught flat-footed when a new version of the company's previously well-regarded Open Game License was leaked to the community. Since then, it has been a war between Hasbro/WotC and the community (players/GMs/third-party publishers), as the big company tries to achieve its bottom-line goals, and the community tries to hold on to a well-fostered ecosystem that has delivered D&D record numbers in recent years while also creating a small-but-strong industry for third-party content creators. Let's take a look at some of the major problems surrounding OGL v1.1's release, as well as the initial interactions WotC has had with the community.

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