If you play RPGs, particularly D&D. Unless you live in a remote cave in Tibet with no internet, it will have been particularly hard to have missed the big controversy going on with D&D at the moment.

I’m not going to go over the whole OGL/Hasbro/WotC vs everyone thing. Others more informed have covered the subject much better than I ever could.

Let’s face it does the world need to hear yet another white, middle aged, male opinion/analysis on the subject?

Not really. But here we are anyway with a post by me touching on how this all effects me and the games I run, and will run.

I’m not going to stop running D&D 5e.

That includes when OneD&D gets an official release.

OneD&D I think will be heavily tied in with D&DBeyond and the unreleased virtual tabletop. Which will I have no doubt also be monetised in every way possible. WotC have admitted as much recently to investors.

I have no interest or desire to go digital and open myself up to being held to ransom to get access to content. Which we are now in reality.

I know WotC only bought D&DBeyond last year. When you buy a physical book (which I prefer) do you get it free on D&DBeyond or even a discount? Nope. You have to buy it again. However we know they can do this as they did it with the Essentials Kit (and that was before they owned D&DBeyond). But we’ve seen WotC be that cheap over in MtG and buying physical booster packs and precons and Arena. And we all know what I think of their nickel and dime piss poor ingame economy in Arena.

WotC believe in squeezing as much out of you as they possibly can. So it’s no surprise they have started/plan to use lessons learned from MtG Arena and the video game industry to D&D and its digital incarnation.

So I’m going to remain with 5e and my physical copies I own. WotC can’t take them away from me, or stop me using them. But I bet they wish they could.

I have enough official D&D books to run my own campaigns for years without buying another book.

Add in third party books I own like Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts, the Lazy DM books, Sly Flourish’s City of Arches, Ptolus source book, plus others.

Plus I can house rule any OneD&D rules into my 5e game, such as the new exhaustion rule, that I like.

A quick aside. Let’s face it official WotC books have been a bit disappointing (especially the source books) the last year or two. Spelljammer was light on content for DM’s, Dragonlance was an adventure not a source book. For me Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft set a gold standard for 5e D&D sourcebooks, but Spelljammer was not even close.

Even with the current money grabbing, WotC crapping where they eat events. I’ll still play 5e.

It may impact whether my favourite independent 5e content creators such as Sly Flourish, Arcane Library (they have stopped) write adventures/source books for 5e. And that will be a great loss for 5e and future versions. And I’ll try and support them as much as I can.

This blog won’t be effected. It’s way, way too small. Plus it comes under fan content.

For the record I hate what WotC are trying to do. It stinks. I’ll support any effort to try and stop it.

Right I have a megadungeon to update.