See You Tomorrow

Okay, it’s been a really intense couple of days. I have got a lot of weird anon hate over this, and I’ve seen people get super worked up with me. I’ve also seen people spread lies and weird takes, trying to say this is not concerning, so let me add some information on why is the OGL very worrying, based on corrections people have made and to clarify against some posts I’ve been seeing circling around.

Let me preface this: I am one of the many people that could get potentially affected by the OGL, as a creator aiming to work in the TTRPG industry. I have been able to get a bit of money from giving people usage rights over some images (and I haven’t officially started freelancing), all of which came from third parties that are at bigger risk of this OGL. I have been planning to get into battlemap making, specially aimed at FoundryVTT. So, let’s get to it:

To start with, I’ve seen people say this whole thing is a “dnd hate agenda” and some other takes that borderline conspiracy theories. I can’t stretch this enough: DnD is one of my two main hobbies. It’s what has inspired most of my art. Go to my sygdomthings tag if you’d like, I have spent so many hours at this hobby. However, I can enjoy media and be aware of the problems from the company behind it, and it’s very important to talk about these.

I’ve seen claims that you “can’t really say anything because the leak may not be real”. There has been confirmation from big companies, like Kickstarter, that the leak itself is real. The OGL has already been sent to several big names, including Griffon’s Saddlebag (a fantastic source of homebrew content), which have confirmed this is not a draft, and that they have been sent contracts to sign already (they have refused.

So, about VTTs (Virtual TableTops, like roll20, Foundry, etc)

VTTs are probably getting hit. The new OGL would give WOTC the right to retire anything-dnd from VTTs, including roll20 and FoundryVTT. WOTC and Foundry have never got to reach a license (as of now), and they are not willing to work with them, because their goal is to release their own VTT in DnDBeyond. And I can’t stretch this enough: WOTC having the only VTT with access to DnD would be very, VERY bad (and this OGL would allow them to do so!)

It’s bad for a plethora of reasons. It means they can charge anything they want for the VTT. Which will be a subscription service, according to their CEO, who has said the hobby is “undermonetized” and they want to put more “recurrent spending” (aka subscriptions and microtransactions)

They may put basic stuff behind paywalls. Roll20 has a subscription to have light sources and extra storage. They can put these behind a subscription, as they may put any sort of quality of life tool, and literally anything else they want. If they have the only VTT with DnD, they can do anything. Monopolies are bad for the consumer. 

They may also let you have temporal access to sourcebooks in exchange for a subscription, which leads to this horrible idea of you not actually owning what you pay for. You stop paying? You don’t have access to it.

Think about how DnD refuses to have PDFs, and instead forces you to be on DnDBeyond to access that content online. Think about how that could be a subscription service instead. I don’t know how likely it is to happen, but if they have the monopoly, they can do that.

They can fill their VTT with micro-transactions. They can make you pay extra to have a more comfortable sheet to fill. They can shove skins in it. They can shove exclusive “minis” (3d models) you’ll need to pay for if you want to use. 

They want to use UNREAL ENGINE 5 and it’s not going to be based on 2d battlemaps you can easily make, buy or download for free. Which means you may need to pay to make a custom mini of your character there, because you may be unable to import a lovely commission you got. You may need to pay for a battlemap. 

(This also hurts people who do minis, like Heroforge, people who do battlemaps, people who do commissions, etc!)

Also Unreal Engine 5 is a very heavy tool that may not be accessible for many lower-end computers. If they have the only VTT that gives support to DnD, and it’s one that consume heavy resources, anyone with a bad computer won’t be playing DnD in a VTT. Simple as that. 

No word of what will happen with people who have DnD campaigns in other VTTs that may get their access to DnD revoked. I DM a +90 sessions campaign, I play a +50 sessions campaign. We could potentially lose support for it before they finish. We can’t realistically input all of 5e’s content by ourselves now. Think about your campaigns, too.

Again: Monopolies are bad and don’t benefit the consumer. Speak against this.

On the 25% tax cut 

The 25% tax cut is MASSIVE. It’s not applied over net benefits, it’s applied over gross income. A company making $1,500,000 would have to pay 25% of the 750,000 bit, which is $187,500. The usual benefit margin for TTRPG companies is of 12%, which would be $180,000 in this case. Which means that a company making that income would be LOSING MONEY because WOTC’s cut outweights their benefit. The higher the income, the bigger the loss is.

I know 1,5millions sounds like a lot, but these companies are paying a lot of people, and the actual benefit margin (as mentioned) is quite small. These millions mostly go towards keeping workers… Fed. Making a living. 

Which also brings me to this: Third party companies have a lot of people working for them. A lot of them are freelancers. If you are starting in the TTRPG industry, you will probably start on a third party company or in a small TTRPG (a lot of which are also based in the OGL). This is hitting the very same small creators you love to see when you search for “dnd art”, because commissions rarely pay for a full income, and a lot of artists do TTRPG industry work on top of them.

Btw, I saw someone say they “don’t make anything out of DM’s Guild”. Plain untrue, they take 50% of every sale there!

On registering work using the OGL: (Source: https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634 )

Anything you make, regardless of your income, has now to be registered. Which means they can just tell you “no” if they don’t agree for whatever reason. Do they think you are a dangerous “competitor”? You can get stopped before you start. Or when you’re mid-project, too. They don’t agree with it on a moral level? You can also get kicked. 

(They have mentioned they won’t be allowing bigoted content under the OGL, which is nice in theory, but given how WOTC released the Racist Monkey Race in fucking 2022, I don’t know how much to trust this actually. Also as a Roma-descended person, I’m still waiting for an actual overhaul of the Vistani in Strahd, but oh well.)

They have censored people over extremely arbitrary things, like a DM’s guild module named “Eat the Rich”, which WOTC deemed too offensive for containing the word “anti-capitalist”. The idea behind this module is adventurers facing mega-corporations. Y’know, standard cyberpunk setting. But WOTC, being as they are, found that to be too much.

This is bad. This is really bad. Some people say this is “usual IP standard protection”, but now if you are registered under the OGL (and you’ll need to be), WOTC can just word-per-word copy whatever you make and sell it as their own. THIS IS BAD. I don’t want people to be like “but they probably won’t”, the important thing is that they can, and this gives them free reign to take whatever competitors make. Which, again, is giving them a monopoly. 

And this is also VERY, very bad. They can change any terms, which means anything you make under this new OGL is subject to their whims, and 30 days notice is a very small one, given most TTRPG projects can take years to come to fulfilment. Creators are scared of this, of course, because WOTC can change the terms at any point and destroy your project. Don’t like the 25% cut? They can change it to 50% instead. The old OGL was supposedly irrevocable, as confirmed by the writer, but this new one can change at any point.

It’s still unclear if they will be able to get away with revoking the old license. 

What about podcasts?

This is a more confusing area and I can’t give good advice. Some say they may be exempt from this because it’s “transformative” work, but any sort of homebrew content a podcast may release, is now also subject to this. 

I think the bigger podcast (CR) is probably not going to suffer from this, because they’ll get a special license with WOTC. CR is WOTC’s biggest advertising tool atm, and CR benefits from DnD’s widespread popularity. I doubt they’ll speak against this new OGL. I find it weird people want them to speak about this. CR is very, very closely tied with WOTC at this point. 

I REALLY don’t know what may happen with D20. Their content being behind a paywall may make this much different, since d20 isn’t as much of an effective advertising tool as CR is.

Smaller streamers are the ones getting hit the hardest. There are many of them who are getting ready to move systems or create their own. These streams often also employ artists and creators, so jobs are getting lost here, if this goes live.

I don’t know where this misconception came from, but no, the grand majority of streamers don’t have an agreement with WOTC at the moment.

Why “playing Pathfinder” is not a bad idea in this mess?

One of the wildest points I’ve seen in the post trying to dismiss the new OGL’s danger is that “people who tell you to try Pathfinder (or other systems) don’t actually want the best for you”. I am recommending people to try other systems because playing DnD (specially online), if the OGL goes live, may become very expensive. 

Pathfinder 2e is actually probably going to be safe about this, according to Paizo itself. I am not recommending you to jump into a sinking ship. Pathfinder 1e (which is not really active anymore) and Starfinder (this one is) are affected under this new OGL, but PF2 is an actual safe bet, even if it’ll give them a headache to update stuff.

I used to not be as eager as PF2 as I am nowadays. In fact, I antagonized my DM a bit over it, because I was comfortable with DnD. I’ve been realizing I’m wrong myself. So, please, trust me as someone who used to favour DnD very heavily.

Why you should not go silent about this?

Remember the whole “monopoly is bad for the consumer”? You need to speak against this because WOTC will get even more of a monopoly on TTRPGs after this. Which means they can get away with over-pricing their products, offering bad content, whatever.

WOTC does not have the need to do this. The company has been massively profitable, with record sales in the last years. They somehow still think it’s “under-monetized”. 

This comes from Hasbro, the parent company, which hasn’t been doing as well and wants to turn both DnD and Magic The Gathering into their cash cows.

As the consumer, you are going to get hit if WOTC has more of a monopoly than it already has. You need to care. You need to worry.

Also, a multi-millionaire company like WOTC does really not need people to “white-knight” for them, specially when these moves are only for their OWN benefit.

honestly I didn’t expect people who would go as far as “it’s capitalism baybee just cope”. You can and should call out businesses on bad practises. You don’t make excuses for Amazon just because “it’s a business, y’know”, right?

This move will put a lot of people out of their jobs. Most third party creators don’t have the lawyers to push against this. Artists you’ve loved all these years are going to lose steady sources of income. Homebrew content you have been using are going to get heavily hurt. I don’t know how to tell people that you need to care for others.

Since the other post I’ve seen circulating about this seems to be really aiming at my old one, I hope this serves as clarification. It has a good bunch of sources, it’s more thoroughly informed, and more accurate than my first one. Please be aware that information has been coming up with every passing day, and a lot of what I’ve quoted or mentioned here are recent finds. 

So, again: Boycott WOTC over this. Cancel your DnD Beyond subscription. Don’t buy their books. Don’t buy their products. Don’t watch the new movie. This is coming from a creator who is directly hurt by this OGL, and I am one of many. I know some of you follow Lauren Walsh, who has also expressed concerns over this OGL (and they have worked for WOTC, CR and third parties). If you don’t want to take my word on this, at least take it from them.

My MIL is not an awful person. She’s a loving mother who carries emotional scars from having been in an abusive relationship with her minister husband for a long time, which has left her with a disabling preoccupation with “What might the neighbours say” in her life, and that often means she makes poor choices without realising it. She loves my husband no less; she didn’t withdraw love and affection from him, didn’t cut him off.

But she chose to pretend it wasn’t happening, and that sent him into a hefty shame spiral we had to work through. A few months later, a stand up routine he did about being bisexual was doing the rounds on Facebook, and despite normally sharing every single routine of his, she rang him to tell him she wouldn’t be sharing that one because “Your brother’s wedding is coming up, and I don’t want it overshadowed by people talking about you and your news.”

And again, this is not because she rejects him. That’s an easy narrative, and certainly the one you’d assume from the outside. But that, in her own way, was her attempt to protect both her children from negative scrutiny - she truly thought that people would care, and would care enough to make a scene at the wedding, and that would hurt the two of them.

Everyone already knew. He’s a celebrity in his culture. No one cared. But, that was my MIL’s fear.

And the message it sent, intentionally or not, was “This is something shameful.”

I could write a whole essay, a whole book about this experience in my family, but I won’t. It feels ungrateful to criticize the actions of people who still say they love you, and have never hurt you and will never hurt you in the big dramatic ways we see in the media. But in my case, and I think in many, it isn’t a clean, decisive cut. 

Years later, in another life, before giving a reading, the organizer asked me for my preferred pronouns. I never knew I had a choice. “He/him” I said, after a pause, suddenly unsure. But I felt a door had opened—if only slightly—and through it I had glimpsed a path I had not known existed. There was a way out.

But what if I don’t want to leave this room yet, but just make it bigger? Pronouns like they/them are, to my trans friends and family, a refuge—a destination secured through flight and self-agency. They/them pronouns allow an interface where one can quickly code oneself as nonnormative, in the hopes of bypassing the pain and awkwardness of explanation or the labor of legibility when simply existing can be exhausting. Would I, by changing pronouns, appropriate myself into a space others need in order to survive?

As a war refugee, I know how vital a foothold as small as a word can be. And since as a cis-presenting male, I don’t need to flee he-ness in order to be seen as myself, I will stay here. Can the walls of masculinity, set up so long ago through decrees of death and conquest, be breached, broken, recast—even healed? I am, in other words, invested in troubling he-ness. I want to complicate, expand, and change it by being inside it. And I am here for the very reasons why I feel, on bad days, I should leave it altogether: that I don’t recognize myself within its dominant ranks—but I believe it can grow to hold me better. Perhaps one day, masculinity might become so myriad, so malleable, it no longer needs a fixed border to recognize itself. It might not need to be itself at all. I wonder if that, too, is the queering of a space? I wonder if boys can ever bandage each other’s feet, in friendship, without a password...

That bit a the end of one ep where he's just nailed a killer and he starts to put his coat on, and then slumps down to sit on a desk, dejected, with the coat hanging off one shoulder. I've done that. Well, found myself putting chairs away after a class trailing a half-on coat because I couldn't put my arm through sleeve 2 before my brain jumped tracks.

The calling people up in the middle of the night because a detail of the case "bothered" him so he couldn't sleep and he forgot that wasn't an everyone thing.

The car. Just: the car. (My mum has never been diagnosed as anything and actually passes as very neurotypical in most of life but you should see her car. Or you shouldn't. It once had stuff growing out of it and she decided she liked it.)

But above all this. This bit right here:

Lt. Columbo: Mrs. Peck? Mrs. Peck, I made a very poor introduction of myself to you. I know that. I'm a stranger in your house that you love and I'm here to do something that's not very pleasant so I don't expect you to like me. But I have feelings too, Mrs. Peck. Now I'm sorry about being untidy. That's something that I can't control. That's a fault of mine that I, I, I don't know, I just can't correct that. I've tried many years. I'm just very untidy, that's my nature. But I've never been un-, I've never been rude to you, Mrs. Peck. And, and if you keep on treating me like an enemy just because I'm here trying to find who killed the man you worked for for 33 years, well, then, well then I think you're a very unfair person.

So context, Columbo has just wandered into this fancy, extremely clean house where a man's just been murdered and promptly dropped cigar ash on the polished floor to the extreme distress of the victim's live-in housekeeper. Which is understandable! She's going through probably the worst moment of her life, and Columbo's soiling something that's precious to her -- something she's likely going to lose anyway. Right from the start, it's obvious Columbo not only has no motive to pretend to be "shambolic" etc where this woman was concerned, he has every motive to turn it off if he only could -- but he can't. And it clearly upsets him from the very first instance, both because he feels immediate empathy for what she's going through and hates making it worse, and also because this is making it harder to solve the case. It's And also because it's hitting a clear insecurity. "I think she hates me, I really feel that", he remarks plaintively, almost out of nowhere, (RSD sucks, but remember it passes, Columbo!) And worse, it keeps happening. He keeps apologising. And then does something else. And she goes off again -- and though her pain is obviously still real every time, she also gets meaner and more aggressive and more belittling. She calls him names. She stops him examining evidence: dude, if this was an act he would not let it jeopardise his work. If it's a disability: that's what they do.

This is not a guy who puts on a mask. This is a guy who's unlocked god-tier levels of not masking. This is a guy who figured out how to stand there and let people see exactly who he is and weaponise their inevitable failure to get it.

Columbo has done what the lucky among us do: he'd found a place where his liabilities become [enough of the time] a strength. He'd managed to turn his curse into a superpower. And yet, here it is betraying him all over again. Right in the place where it's supposed to not do that.

I don't just hear ADHD pain in that speech, I hear ADHD trauma. The years of straining to contain all your messy edges and not only failing but having no one believe that you tried at all. The years of begging teachers and parents to please at least believe you're trying with everything you've got to deliver what they want, so that maybe they'll find a crumb of mercy and stop hurting you so much. And I love that even though this has got to be the longest non-gotcha speech and definitely the most emotional and vulnerable speech I've seen from Columbo so far, it speed-runs a whole lifetime's journey from self-hatred to self-acceptance to pride to defiance. I've seen (uh, and been) a lot of middle-aged ADHD people who heal as they finally come out of decades of reflexive self-flagellation and it sloooooowly occurs to them that even if everything they've been told about themselves were true, maybe some of the people doing the telling had a flaw or ten worth looking at. Maybe the fact that despite our best efforts we objectively did inconvenience people sometimes didn't mean we deserved to be those people's permanent punching bags.

(TBF I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Mrs Peck and her intense need for tidiness wasn't some flavour of ND too: sometimes real needs really do conflict! And it's nice that though she probably hurts the hero more than any murderer manages to do the pair do sort of, imperfectly, figure it out, and the writing doesn't lose compassion for either one of them.)

Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg is one of my favorite pieces of art for that very reason.

Resilience is a skill. Being able to shrug things off is a skill. being able to curb your immediate emotional reaction to something, being able to process your feelings in a way that means you can do something with them rather than being consumed by them, and being able to soothe yourself til you can sit down and process those feelings? that’s a skill.

It is a skill that you can learn, and it is a skill you can get better at.

unfortunately, like foreign languages, it is a skill that is easier to learn when you are a child. just like you learn a native language from the people around you, you learn from the people around you- usually your parents/guardians- how to react to things that hurt in the moment, how to soothe yourself until you can process them, and how to process them until they don’t hurt anymore.

if you’re highly reactive, the odds are good that, for whatever reason, you never learnt resilience as a kid. The people who were supposed to teach you how to handle the weight of the world didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

if you try to learn this skill as an adult, you have to convince your brain to do things that it was never taught how to do, after it thinks it does not need to learn this anymore. in the same way that it’s goddamn hard for a native adult English speaker to sit down and learn how to speak Russian like a native, if you never learnt how to be resilient when you were a kid? it’s going to be a bitch to pick it up.

if you learnt “the world is scary and out to get you and there’s nothing you can do about it, you WILL feel EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME” (or “showing your feelings in the moment will get you hurt, you need to bottle everything up until the bottle breaks and you get hurt with fifteen years of feelings at once”, or “minor inconveniences are the prelude to The Adult In Your House Who Shouts coming down on you like a load of bricks, if things aren’t going perfectly then you’re about to suffer”, or any number of other things), trying to learn that the world doesn’t work like that any more is hard and it hurts. Unless you’re really good at figuring out what you’re thinking and why, you will probably need to get professional help.

You’re not from the wrong planet. You just never learnt something that’s as basic a part of being a human as talking or counting. You were failed, and it’s cruel and unjust that no one helped you pick up the slack.

….But adults learn Russian every day. Adults teach themselves Russian every day.

You can learn how to do this. You can learn how to get better at dealing with the stuff that hurts you. You can become more resilient and less reactive.

Cognitive behavioural therapy left me with a clear sense that rationally this creature shouldn’t be biting me, but meanwhile its teeth were deep in my arm. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) finally connected the rational reasoning to the part of my brain where the pain actually sat and holy shit has it taken certain things from a 9 on the emotional Richter scale to a 2.

In the economy here; cash is already strapped as it is. You bet your ass companies would suck the ever living life out of misc. art sites.

I don’t want it to ever come down to me choosing between groceries or purchasing a new tier package via comcast to be able to access tumblr or DeviantArt (let alone not guaranteeing I’ll even be seen by my customer base since they may not want to pay out their asses either). It doesn’t seem important to most, but I do 90% of my business online entirely.

-Morgan

 limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more

 limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more

 limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more

 limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more

This means that the American internet is going to be firmly under the control of those who have the most money. You’ll only get to see the content of those who can pay the ISPs to provide access at a reasonable speed. This means that you can expect to see skewed representation of just about everything, with those bigger businesses who can afford to pay ISPs a premium for access deciding what you can and cannot read, view and consume on the internet.

This is not something that we have in the UK. Our ISPs compete with each other to provide higher speeds, better services and lower prices, but because there’s a monopoly in the US of a few ISPs who provide services, they can afford to do this to you. You can’t go anywhere else, after all.

people are already working on it by trying to build distributed mesh networks