It’s been a rough week for Dungeons & Dragons fans.
The reins have been pulled for users to create their own stories and new characters, creating legions of imaginary worlds that derive from the original fantasy RPG. They were also able to manufacture and sell products required to play or based on the game under an open gaming license agreement (OGL).
But like Gizmodo first reporteda new leaked agreement crafted by Wizards of the Coast (WoTC), the Hasbro subsidiary that owns D&D, threatens to “tighten up” the OGL that has been in place since the early 2000s. That would grant WoTC the ability to “make money off these products without paying the person who made it” and companies making more than $750,000 will have to start paying Hasbro a 25% cut of their earnings.
“I almost cried over this two nights ago,” said Baron de Ropp, who is 36 and lives in Tennessee. He’s been playing D&D since he was nine years old, learning the ins and outs of older relatives who shared blueprints, called “adventures,” which outline an overall plot for each game. While some adventures are written by D&D themselves, many others are written by individual “dungeon masters.” Under the proposed license, those planes could soon be owned by Hasbro.
“Honestly, it sounds like your grandfather paid for your college education, and now that you’re 40 and have a steady career, he says you owe him 25% of all the money you’ve been earning,” he said.
De Ropp works as a dungeon master – the person responsible for guiding a group of players on an adventure and describing various elements and encounters in that imaginary world – at corporate team-building events and runs a club for a local high school. The only word that sums up his feelings right now is “betrayal”.
“A lot of people are just leaving the game,” said William Earl, a 28-year-old YouTuber whose videos largely focus on D&D culture. He said he canceled his subscription to D&D Beyond, Hasbro’s digital gaming companion, and would never buy another WoTC product.
More than 66,000 fans signed an open letter addressed to Hasbro, D&D Beyond, and WoTC, expressing disgust at the proposed changes. They see the changes as nothing more than a cash rush and an attempt to crush small creators who don’t pose a serious threat to Hasbro. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
Fans say that the cottage industry they were able to build is what has allowed D&D to thrive over the years, and it has. There are over 13 million active players worldwide, and the game’s popularity exploded at the height of the pandemic. groups gathered remotely, assuming identities such as elves and witches, to combat lockdown-induced loneliness. Many did so using software that allowed fans to play remotely and was made by creators under the original OGL.
Players can go back through D&D history in guides and online forums to find adventures that were written 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Then they can replicate these events at their own table. “I want games to live forever so my grandchildren can use these plays too,” said De Ropp. He worries that a centralized ownership of adventures by Hasbro will put a bottleneck on the community’s creativity.
Jay Cushing, a New York-based dungeon master who has been playing D&D for over a decade, believes that the D&D “nerd community” will find creative ways to overcome any proposed license.
They already have: sites like the now-defunct Trove allowed users to download PDFs of past adventures for free, without compensating the creators. “We’re people who don’t always use the right means of sharing content, so nothing is going to stop people from creating their own content,” said Cushing.
While fans were still digesting Hasbro’s content restrictions, they were hit with the news that D&D is becoming mainstream. This week, Paramount+ announced that it will adapt D&D into an eight-episode live-action series written by Rawson filmmaker Marshall Thurber. And a Chris Pine movie set in the universe is coming later this year. But with an impending boycott and chaos among creators, will anyone watch?
Earl, the YouTuber, says it’s impossible to capture the spirit of D&D in a great TV series. “D&D is an interactive, collaborative storytelling experience,” he said. “The appeal is that you engage with the narrative and share that experience with others. Pizza, fries, Diet Coke, and laughter are as much a part of the D&D experience as dragons, dwarves, and demons.”
The dungeon masters who spoke with the Guardian said they would likely give the adaptations a chance. But in their eyes, even the most realistic CGI or special effects can’t compare to the magic that happens when friends gather around a table and improvise.
“The theater of the mind is really where this game thrives,” Cushing said. “When my players and I look back on something that happened in the game, we all see it differently in our minds. This multifaceted nature is really what makes D&D shine. Your wildest imagination can be turned into media, but you watch and you see that your imagination was better all along.”
For De Ropp, D&D media shouldn’t take itself too seriously or follow the tone of a bad-tempered Marvel blockbuster. “People want to break down the door, steal some goblins, steal some treasure,” he said. “The slapstick, over-the-top humor best suits this idea.”
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