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The drama about the right to publish game rules and third-party content under a scam license for everyone’s favorite power fantasy game seems to be over. It appears Wizards of the Coast backed down, for now, and the other players have navigated around the threat of a revoked OGL. However, we should keep our eyes on the ball; WotC is trying to redefine our hobby by building a walled estate around its customer base. We must act now to protect our community. We need to #BoycotOneDnD.

WotC is changing to a subscription business model under the aegis of One D&D. WotC will update the game rules incrementally, instead of by edition. That means the digital version, accessed on a proprietary app, is always up-to-date. Players and GMs all buy access to the app, thus capturing money from the whole table. That revenue recurs yearly and is recession resistant. Microtransactions unlock additional content, all of which is kept on a digital shelf behind WoTC’s wall. The subscription business model locks in hobby spending; why buy other RPG products when you already have a subscription to One D&D? The proposition becomes all-or-nothing; either you are in the One D&D hobby, or you’re out. Third party content plays no role in this model. Most new content comes out in the form of digital assets, like a new skin for a character or a collectable or unique weapon “card”. For new campaigns and scenarios. WotC can tap into the DM’s Guild; a huge resource of scenarios for which creators ALREADY signed away perpetual, irrevocable and exclusive rights to WotC for use in any way WotC desires.

WotC does not care about print media competitors. They do not care if you or I create a PDF of a d20 game with elves, dwarves, orcs, and dragons. They care about clearing out the digital space. Hence, the sloppy and ill-conceived attempt to revoke of the OGL.

With One D&D, we cannot participate in that digital space unless we buy into the subscription model and give WotC ownership of all that we craft. There is no competition. There is no table-top RPG hobby; there is only the D&D hobby.

You may say “Fine. I will still always buy books. What do I care about this model?” If that’s your question, then understand that you are not WotC’s target customer. The target customer loves the D&D brand and wants access to all official content. That’s not new to our hobby, right? We all know people, whole gaming groups, who want to use official splat books to power game. Splat books and officially blessed add-on rules make power gaming possible. This is hard baked into D&D, and now that experience will be easily digestible inside a walled-off area, only accessible on an app.

This is not what we call roleplaying. This is not a hobby in which players and GMs come together to create new worlds. This is a poisonous inter-passivity hoisted onto the largest segment of the hobby, a corporate manipulation of the way we play our games.

If you believe that roleplaying is an activity about letting people make their own stories, then we need to stop WotC. We don’t need to let WotC know we are not happy; they don’t care. Our focus cannot be about influencing WotC. They paid over $100 million on their new plan already, led by an executive team that are not gamers.

We need to advocate for the complete boycott of all One D&D digital products. This needs to be shouted far and wide. The worlds we create with our imagination are not to be trivialized down into a digital asset cash grab. Of equal importance, we must take every opportunity to show younger, newer players that roleplaying gaming is not just D&D.

One final, and important comment. The OGL was always, at best, a farce, and at worst, a form of corporate extortion. It’s a license which gives nothing in return for a hollow promise that WotC would not sue others for innovating on-top of non-copyrightable game processes. Our community mistakenly gave this document and others like it respect, but forgot about what makes our game worlds great. The best games in our hobby are based on fiction developed from collaborative inception and public commons mythology. In this spirit, open gaming licenses should not be used to build walls around game systems. For the future of the hobby we love, the open license should focus on growing and sharing the stories at the heart of our RPG adventures.