#6e

[daarka]

Actually fucking nuts. Capitalism ruins everything.

Push back against this. Be loud. Use #OpenDnD liberally.

Staying in 5e and ignoring 6e/"OneDnD" is not an option. I'll try to summarize below the cut, but I'm not an expert, so please seek out resources that aren't me for full info. This link is a good start. This is the full deep-dive I read up on a few days ago. Listening to the community is also worthwhile to understand from the voices of those affected most. To be more involved in the discussion yourself, a lawyer has set up a Discord server for the community to gather and converse in regarding this issue.

Again, for full context and information from more knowledgeable sources than me (including actual professionals), please go to the links I included above. If you don't have the time/patience/spoons to read those articles, scroll a twitter feed, or poke around a Discord server though, here are the things that made the most potent impression on me and why you should care about this issue.

As mentioned, staying in 5e and ignoring 6e/"OneDnD" is not an option. While OGL1.1 was made for 6e, the extensive parts of the document that have been leaked make it clear that with OGL1.1 going into effect, OGL1.0a (which has been the OGL for the past decade) will no longer be functional. 3rd party creators must choose to either sign the OGL1.1 and comply with it's insanely restrictive and predatory terms, or face legal repercussions for publishing the content they have made their livelihoods off of the past decade.

Per the leaked document, all 3rd party creators must register themselves and their creations with WotC. - 3rd party creators making over $50,000 USD per year must also report their earnings to WotC. - 3rd party creators making over $750,000 USD gross per year must also pay WotC a 25% royalty. This means it is not 750k in profits, it is 750k before any expenses that they are taking the royalties from. Anyone whose profit margin was 25% or less would be financially invalidated by this royalty, and can even end up losing money. Furthermore, the nature of Kickstarters for example is that there is no upper ceiling on earnings, so a KS for a 3rd party sourcebook will suddenly be facing a massive expense they may not have planned for if their campaign exceeds the 750k mark, potentially destroying their ability to deliver on the rewards when they otherwise could have. While currently only a small number of creators are known to make over 750k/year (gross, not net), that does not mean this will not affect you. It creates a very dire argument for why 3rd party creators should not even make the effort in the first place, especially with crowdfunding where too much success can suddenly ruin them.

Remember how those who make over 50k have to report their earnings? Well, the 750k threshold is one WotC says they have the right to change at any time in OGL1.1. This means they can see what people are making when creators are forced to report their earnings over 50k, and use that data to lower the threshold of income for their royalty fee, and they can do this at any time, however much they want. Per OGL1.1, they are telling you that they can decide on a whim that actually, anyone making over $5,000 USD gross a year has to pay the 25% royalty.

D&DBeyond / OneDnD are working towards creating a VTT to host OneDnD/6e. While Roll20 is licensed by WotC if I'm not mistaken, virtually no other VTT is. Platforms like Foundry VTT (my personal favorite and most beloved VTT) will not be able to host the D&D system on them under OGL1.1. What does that mean? Hard to say. But it will objectively become much harder to play D&D outside of WotC-approved spaces in the near future, and that is by design. They want to monopolize how this game is played, and that means making it difficult, inconvenient, or even illegal to play the game outside of their personal playground.

Under OGL1.1, WotC claims full and complete ownership over any and all 3rd party content created for D&D, and the rights to use it however, whenever, and wherever they want without paying you royalties. You made this? Hasbro made this.

I've only ever played 5e. But this link I put up above was very informative about prior editions and the drama surrounding them. 3e had an OGL, and the community began to flourish with 3rd party content. WotC didn't like that people who weren't them were making money off a passion for D&D, and they regretted the OGL--but that OGL was irrevocable, and could not be cancelled, removed, or in any way undone. So they put together 3.5e. They promised 3.5e would be backwards compatible, and all your resources for 3e would still work for it. So people jumped to 3.5e, only to find all their 3e content was now worthless, because that hadn't been true. And 3.5e, of course, did away with that open and welcoming OGL from 3e. Sound familiar? "OneDnD" is touted to be backwards compatible. And yet also comes with crushing restrictions in their OGL1.1 that make it impossible for the D&D community to exist as it has been. It is transparently clear that for WotC/Hasbro, an ideal world would be one where all the money people have spent on flourishing this community over the last decade would have gone exclusively into their pockets. D&D makes hundreds of millions every year, but it's "under monetized" according to their new CEO. It doesn't matter if "Honor Among Thieves" flops at the box office, WotC has already green-lit the production of multiple D&D movies. It's not about fanservice, it's about fan exploitation. Because they can't fucking stand that the game they made can be played obsessively and passionately for decades with only the one-time purchases of the DMG and PHB. And instead of fixing the apparent "under-monetization" problem by publishing more official content, they choose to poach 3rd party creators. The very lifeblood that has caused D&D's success. Because capitalist greed is a soulless poison to whatever it fixes its attention on.

The only way the community has any shot in hell to fight this is if the pushback is intense and loud. WotC has released statements mentioning an openness to listening to the community and revising their choices based on feedback; whether that proves to be lip service or not remains to be seen, but either way: the only thing they seem to care about is money. Fine, let your money do the talking, then. Wholeheartedly support the boycott. Proclaim your support of it loudly. Let Hasbro know that their attempts to milk more profits out of this franchise will be the very thing that kills it if they don't ease the fuck back and allow OGL1.0a to persist. They apparently didn't learn shit when this happened in 3e/3.5e. They can either wise up now before they fuck up beyond repair, or they can be fully destroyed by their own greed. Time will tell.

Edit:

Good catch, thanks! You're right, I must have had some wires crossed when writing that bit. They couldn't revoke it, but they did publish new content for 3.5e that made 3.0e content feel worthless; this is not something I personally lived through, but is based on the reporting from this second article I linked. Likewise, that article explains how 4e did not have an OGL and was consequentially a bit of a wasteland, presumably prompting WotC to bring the OGL back for 5e. Which flourished. And now we're here.

Edit II:

I'm Super not the best source of information for this because I'm absolutely all over the place, but 2 things.

Please check out OpenDnD.games for full, proper info and a place to give your signature in support of the community's pushback.

Something else I failed to mention above: OGL1.1 has a "poison pill" clause. Anyone who signs it permanently forfeits their right to publish under prior versions of the OGL, even if they are unable to take down those prior versions. DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING FOR OGL1.1. Even if the community pushback yields results, you may have trapped yourself. "Predatory" does not even begin to cover it.

[digital-meat]

summary of 5.5e / 6e / dndone

[toutplacid]

Balzac par Rodin, boulevard Raspail, Paris 6e – mine de graphite, carnet n° 125, 13 mai 2019

[trans-rites]

WOTC filing off the cultural serial numbers for 5.5e (changing monk archetypes from 'Way of' to 'Warrior of,' Totem Warrior to Wild Heart, etc) falls flat to me, mostly because they aren't actually changing the core of it all.

Like, whether or not you think it was racist in the first place, can we agree that rephrasing a couple things but ultimately using exactly the same tropes doesn't change whether it's racist or not?

[starkwillendurestone]

i'm shaking they aired her whole pussy out like that!

[fightingchancestudio]

What class is cracked and what class needs buffed in the next edition of D&D?

[i-am-venomancer]

Getting something off my chest

Don't trust Wotc cause you enjoy the produce.

Wotc is motivated by money, and now they look to be eyeing the 3rd party market as a money pig.

They have already shown that they want major brand control. They already talked about brand monetization

Your fav writers and creators in Wotc? They have no say

This is the faceless heartless money worshipping side that lose their jobs if they don't make money ticker go Up

They will fuck you over in an instant if they imagine it will make money go up

They are a company motivated by number up, and no number of good honest folks in the company will change that (no realistic one at least).

Rumors and leaks tell some sort of truth: and that truth is that they are testing the water to see how much money they can poach from the third party. Motivation money up.

It's going to hurt the hobby as a whole if this comes true.

But there is something we can do

We can be outraged at the very mention of such a thing

We can fight bite and make them enforce their unenforceable rules

We can drain their coffers and go bandit

Make the money grubbers hurt and lose their jobs for threatening us

Companies aren't your friendly Uncle's. They are dragons, and what do we do as adventurers when faced with evil dragons?

We slay them

[gamesception]

Unlike the 'they don't read the playtest feedback' bit, the rumors/leaks here all track and I expect to be basically accurate. Thoughts below cut.

.....

Setting aside for a moment the issue of the OGL and the 3rd Party Publishing community and even the brewing legal battle between Hasbro/WotC and existing VTTs, and just looking at what all of this likely means for the upcoming new edition of D&D as a ttrpg and nothing else, things still kind of look bad.

Weekly digital releases as the primary vector for new game content, with phsyical books as collectors items, ensures that content glut will crush 6e as surely as it did 4e, while those who want to stick to physical rulebooks will have to pay out the nose for them - and if you miss the initial release you may not be able to pick up a supplement at all.

Negative impact on the game even for physical world player groups won't be limited to weekly content glut either, as the VTT focus will ensure that no 1st party rules or mechanics will be published for 6e that can't be fully implemented in the video game space, while WotC's moves to alienate the 3pp community will mean you won't have much in alternative content options for 6e to make up the difference. So you can say goodbye to esoteric, interesting rules and imaginative abilities that let you do things in D&D that just wouldn't be possible in a video game.

If you forget the tabletop roots and judge 6e as a live service online multiplayer game, then things look even worse. The WotC VTT will be unavoidably lacking compared to already established alternatives like Destiny or Genshin or Fortnight or League or WoW or Final Fantasy 14 or Guild Wars 2 - full featured video games - many of them free to play - capable of such modern marvels as real time combat, play sessions demanding less than four hours of your time, and underlying game math more complicated than a middle schooler can do in their head.

Basically, because they're making 'D&D the tabletop game the video game' instead of just a separate D&D video game, it still has to be at least theoretically playable /as/ a pen & paper tabletop game with no computers involved. As such, 6e will have all the constraints of both a video game and a tabletop game, leaving it unable to employ the unique potential of either medium. Even if they weren't also saddling it with weekly content glut, even if they hadn't made the entire player community angry going in, even if they weren't trying to carve out space in an already overcrowded 'live service' market - one where dozens of more promising and better funded offerings from more established publishers get mercilessly culled every year, even if 3rd party publishers and VTTs simply gave up the fight and quietly disappeared into that good night... even if 6e were facing none of the many other fatal roadblocks in its path, this alone would doom the entire 6e project to mediocrity and ultimately failure.

Maybe Hasbro could have turned the D&D brand into a major cash cow, but not by directly monetizing the tabletop game itself as though it were a mobile game. Rather, they needed to treat the ttrpg the way Disney treats Marvel comics or the way Nintendo and the Pokemon Corporation treat the actual main line pokemon video games - as IP farms to generate and test content that then gets spun out into a wider media and merchandising empire. Sadly they've already done enough damage to the brand that I'm not sure they could pull this off now if they wanted to.

6e, despite what I felt was a promising start in the first couple play test documents, pretty much cannot succeed at this point - not the way WotC's execs want it to, but not even as a just a stand alone game in spite of those execs, no matter how skilled and well intentioned the ground level developers are. The way I see it, we're headed towards an even more spectacular failure than 4e. Hopefully it will be quickly followed by a 7e walk back as dramatic as what we saw in 5e, and we can all start joking about odd numbered D&D editions being good and even numbered editions being trash fires.

[ailelie]

To be fair, the 25% cut is only for each dollar over $750k made on the project. Also, if you raise the money via Kickstarter, it is a 20% cut. This is still very shitty. I just want to be extra clear about it so that no one refutes that one point and calls the rest into question.

Something else I really disliked was that creators will have to report every project they make to WotC. In the post, at first it sounded like it was just a summary and expected profit, but then it sounded like you might have to send a copy of whatever you create to WotC. Either way, that's not great. Admittedly this is necessary for their other points, so it isn't surprising, but it adds an extra step to creation and is a potential thing to spam after this all gets off the ground.

So, what is the OGL and why are DnD creators thoroughly screwed?

Tumblr has not been doing a great job at talking about this, but:

With OneDnD, Wizards of the Coast has decided to update the Open Game License (OGL). Said license is what allowed people to create homebrew DnD content and sell it, and even larger companies to use certain sorts of content. Pathfinder, for example, is built on said OGL. This also allows streamers and artists to exist and benefit from said content.

With OneDnD (sometimes called “dnd 6e”), WOTC wants to create a much more restrictive OGL, which will, amongst other things:

Make WOTC take a cut for any DnD-related work (according to Kickstarter, a whole 25% of the benefits)

Let WOTC cancel any project related to DnD up to their discretion

Let WOTC take ANY content made based on their system, and re-sell it without crediting you, or giving you a single cent

And most importantly, revoke the old OGL, which will harm any company or game system that used it as a base, such as Pathfinder. And it means they GET ownership over any homebrew content you may have done for 5e in the past!

It’s important to note that OGLs are supposedly irrevocable. They were planning to use it for OneDnD initially, but they want to apply it retroactively to 5e, somehow. Which is illegal, but lawyers have mentioned there’s a chance they may get away with it given the wording.

This means that anything you make based on DnD (A homebrew item? A character drawing? Even music, according to them?), can get taken and used as they deem appropiate.

These news come from a leak of the OGL, which have been confirmed by multiple reputable sources (including Kickstarter, which has confirmed that WOTC already talked with them about this), and was planned to be released next week.

So, what can we do?

Speak against it. Share the word. Reblog this post. Let people know. Tumblr hasn’t been talking much about this matter, but it’s VERY important to let people know about what is WOTC bringing. 

Boycott them. Do not buy their products. Do not buy games with their IP. Do not watch their movie. CANCEL your DnD Beyond subscription. (Btw, they ARE planning to release more subscription services too!). They do not care about the community, but they care about the money. Make sure to speak through it. 

And maybe consider other TTRPG systems for the time being, Pathfinder’s Paizo has been much nicer to the community, their workers are unionized and are far more healthy overall

[niksrpgs]

Brand new #DayAfterRagnarok #HeroEdition for #sixthedition #HeroSystem #6e, now available with FREE SHIPPING! #ttrpg #originalprint #outofprint #NiksRPGs

[diariodigitalnoticias]

Corte Suprema de EE.UU. estima que Trump tendría cierta inmunidad en caso 6 de Enero

Washington D.C. • En un fallo histórico, la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos ha extendido la demora en el caso penal contra el ex presidente Donald Trump por cargos relacionados con intentos de anular las elecciones de 2020. Esta decisión reduce significativamente las posibilidades de que Trump sea juzgado antes de las elecciones presidenciales de noviembre de 2024. Por primera vez, el máximo…

[udaipurdosti]

Indigo 6e Udaipur Reel #reel #shorts

[joriboltonpainting]

Here’s the process for the decker test illustration for Shadowrun! Just went through my photoshop saves at different stages and turned them into a gif.

insta I artstation | twitter

[toutplacid]

Couple place Saint-Sulpice (Paris 6) — feutre, carnet n° 109, 14 avril 2016 (format du dessin : 52 x 60 mm)

[jessiangravelblr]

Beyoncé - Naughty Girl

[sabrinahawthorne]

Hi! You'll be seeing a lot from me in the coming days - see, I've got a good handful of recommendations, and I want to give each of them the chance to shine.

To start, 6E by Jared Sinclair.

I've been wanting to play 6e since I first read it, and I'm frankly jealous of the design. It totals out at 11 pages, and it's the best rules-light fantasy game I've ever read.

6E has just one Move: "Do Something Risky or Dangerous." Roll 2d6, and add your relevant Ability Score. Each of the game's four classes comes with its own specific Moves and additional cool abilities.

I recommend 6E if you're looking for something with the feel of an old school game (it has light elements of spell memorization/preparation and some item management), but aren't interested in a whole lot of crunch. The entire thing is pared down to the bare bones, and stitched together beautifully.

hi hello. fantasy ttrpg recs that aren't d&d or dungeon world