A War For the Soul of Dungeons & Dragons

in complaining and the numbers folks at Wizards panicked. UM. And as a result, they are completely folding on the plans to uh rescind or de authorize the open Gaming License UM, and in factive announced that they are making it. Uh. The exact terms they use are irrevocable and UH yeah, that's that's good. Yeah. And they put everything under an irrevocable creative comments license. So this is all just breaking UM.

But I think it's broadly good news. Anytime a giant company chooses to do something kind of crummy with a piece of what what I would say is actually pretty meaningful intellectual heritage. UH, and then they get slapped down

and panic and reverse course, that's a good thing. Um. It shows a number of things, which one of which probably the most important of which is that the community of people who recognize their value in these kinds of games, in this uh, this pastime, this recreational activity, um also fundamentally value the essence of like what is open source ideology? Which is nice, Like, it's nice to know that the open source folks we can still throw a punch every now and again, even if it's just a punch at

Wizards of the Coast. So happy ending, everybody, Happy ending. Also, the good folks at Pizo sold out of eight months worth of Pathfinder books in two weeks, So that's nice too. Uh, it could happen. Here is the podcast that you are listening to right now. I am Robert Evans. This is a show about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. And today we're we're taking a little bit

of a different tack. In recent weeks, you've listened to us cover a wide variety of issues, from conflicts in places like me and mar two conflicts here at home in the city of Atlanta, UM, to deep dives in history and all that all that good stuff. That that you know and love us. For today we are talking about a subject that is unusually close to my heart,

Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I'm gonna guess, just given the nature of our listenership, a decent chunk of you grew up playing D and D UM, and just because of how really shockingly suddenly it's become much more popular than it than it ever was previously, and much more mainstream a lot of you who may have encountered as an adult, Um, there's a lot that's actually been written, kind of sociologically

on on what Dungeons and Dragons is. At one point that some people will make is that it's it's kind of the first new game that we had that that human beings made up since like Chess, Um, by which I mean you you have had war games for a very long period of time. But the concept of a role playing game and the way that that D and D is, where you're essentially sitting down with a group of people and engaging in an act of collaborative storytelling

that's kind of buttressed by a system of rules. That's actually a pretty new idea now. Now, elements of this have existed forever, UM and In fact, kind of an interesting fact you'll run into is that in the late medieval period a lot of jousts had role playing elements, including ones were like rulers and and their their court would dress up as the Knights of the Round Table

and act in character as those nights. So elements of all of this stuff have a existed for a while, but when Dungeons and Dragons kind of came together as a game for the first time, it was it is kind of worth seeing it as as something really new and valuable in the history of play and the history of human creativity. Um So as a result of that, I do kind of think I I personally think there's something a little bit sacred about that that basic idea.

And one of the things that's really interesting to me about the industry that grew up around Dungeons and Dragons is that there have always been a lot of people

in it who I think feel the same way. Um And I think one of these people was a guy named Ryan Dancey, and Ryan dancy Um was vice president in charge of Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast for a while um and he helped actually negotiate the sale of the Dungeons and Dragons property to Wizards of the Coast when the company that had been distributing it fell apart, and Dancy was a big part of the institution in the year two thousand of what became

known as the Open Gaming License, and they basically what this meant is that the set of rules that that D and D worked by, and at around two thousand, which was I think you would call it like three point oh, was the system in place basically got elements

of the mechanics got effectively open sourced. UM. And so Wizards of the Coast UM went from what had been the previous move of the people who had owned D and D, which was kind of to oppose people trying to make third party content using the ruled source, to

embracing it and allowing it to do that freely. UM. And now I'm going to introduce our guest, who is one of the people who uh is kind of the one of the most influential folks in what happened after this, because once the Open Gaming License came into effect, there's suddenly this galaxy of new games and supplemental materials that people start making, UM, which you know Wizards is not profiting from directly, but which the hobby profits from UM. And one of the people who has who has been

most influential in that is our guest today Jason Bollman. Jason, you are the the game a lead game designer at Piazzo and the creator of Pathfinder, which is the I mean, it's not Dungeons and Dragons, but it uses as its base that kind of open gaming uh system, and it's it's what I play when I get a chance to sit down and play a role playing game. So, first off, Jason, thank you for several thousand hours of of my my childhood and early adulthood UM spent playing path Fighter. Yeah,

well thanks for having me. And yeah, PISO kind of spun off from Wizards of the Coast UM, you know, back in the early days of the open game license, and we were there official publishers of their magazine until that kind of came to an end, and then we we started making our own game based off the open game license. And did I did I? Did I get all that right earlier? Do you have any kind of clarification she'd like to add before we move further into

the conflict, And there is a conflict. We're not just talking about how cool d Pathfighter are. I think there's a There's an interesting thing to note about games. Games are kind kind of weird when it comes to copyright and ownership, and it's kind of why the Open Game

License is so important. Right. So TSR, the company that owned Dungeons and Dragons before Wizards of the Coast, was pretty pretty litigious, as you mentioned, um, but they ended up getting into kind of a bind because you know, the game itself is one that encourages people to make their own content, to kind of homebrew stuff and invent their own stories. And what it comes down to is

that you know, ultimately, game mechanics can't be copyrighted. That that's been long held, that that those sorts of things you cannot copyright. That's why you see so many versions of like Scrabble that aren't Scrabble. Um. Yeah. And it's why anyone can make a basketball team or a basketball league and play basketball. You don't have to get the NBA's approval to play fucking basketball exactly exactly. So the Open Game License wasn't about giving everyone permission to use rules,

which is something that to already kind of do. It was about giving them kind of a safe harbor, a place that everybody involved kind of knew that this was all okay, no one was going to be filing frivolous, frivolous lawsuits, and that you could use kind of direct references without having to be a copyright lawyer or retaining a giant staff. It allowed a lot of very little businesses to kind of spring up, making, Hey, here's my cool adventure that I ran from my group. You can

buy it and play it with your group. Now, little things like that, and I don't think it's for nothing. That number one a huge thing. And this has become as Silicon Valley is kind of turned more mercenary. This has become less of a thing, but a massive thing in the early history of Silicon Valley in the tech industry was the open source movement. You know, was the idea that a lot of people should be able to collaboratively, work and iterate on things without having to worry about

who owns the basic idea right, you know. Lennox Is is a great example of this, and the the ideology behind the open source movement was a big influence in the open gaming license. I mean Dancy kind of admits that himself. There's a quote where he says that, like, Yeah, I think we need to embrace some of these ideas at the heart of the open source movement, because I think it will be a good business decision for Wizards

of the Coast. It will on the whole, even if we're not profiting directly from every sort of like thing that people make off of this, the fact that it's going to cause the hobby to explode will benefit us. And I think he's been proven right in that because D and D has gone from this thing that like I got bullied for in high school too. There's these massive podcast there's been TV shows that are just people

playing the game like it has reached this level. I never really expected it would of like critical and and mass acceptance, which has been really cool to see. It's been one of the things that I've been happiest about

watching occurs socially in the last couple of decades. Yeah, you can't disagree that the business case wasn't super tight, right, Uh, The way that the O g L got all of the other game companies, many of which had their own entirely different games in the early two thousands, they all abandoned them and started making content for D and D UM, and that just kind of carried forward a large swath of kind of the game industry, which is pretty cottage, right.

There's a bunch of small players. There's not a lot of large corporations in here. Um. You know, in fact, Wizards is by far the largest, And so you've got a bunch of small game companies that are are seeing this as a great opportunity to kind of play in the big pool, and a lot of them followed suit. So obviously the recent we are here today is that a paul has been cast recently over what has up

until now been kind of a lovely thing. Um, Wizards of the Coast got a new CEO pretty recently, right, Um, Cynthia Williams is relatively new. Yeah, And and there is basically murmuring coming from the company that's like, we don't think D and D is properly capitalized. We we believe that there's we are leaving money on the table here.

And kind of in the wake of some of that stuff coming out, they announced a series of changes to the Open Gaming license and if you if you kind of want to take it from here and explain because I've i've i've I've read and listened to a number of different folks. I'm saying like, well, it's not as bad as people are are fearing, and some folks saying like this would effectively kill a huge chunk of the hobby and a bunch of the companies that have grown

up in the wake of the open Gaming license. And I'm I'm interested in your take on what what Wizards is doing here and what actually kind of is at risk.

So yeah, I think you you you've in plued into the start of this, which was in uh early December of last year, Hasbro earnings call uh Cynthia basically came out and said D and D was under monetized and they had been spending the entire previous year really proliferating Magic the Gathering, which is their other giant brand, and kind of really making a lot of money, like talks

of like it is a billion dollar brand. And UM, as a result, you know, there was kind of some murmurings and some rumblings going through December, UM talking about a new version of the O g L. Wizards themselves came out on December twenty one, so just a few days before Christmas and said that a new O g L was coming and that it had notes in it about royalty reporting and um, you know, mentioning that folks won't need to pay until later um, and that um

you know, really this new license is only going to be to make books and PDF. So they said this on December twenty one. And the royalty part of that is was really quite challenging because it said if you make over seven thousand dollars a year, um, you might have to pay a sizeable percentage of your your your gross profit. Like and that's terrified, which when you're talking about a business and and this is not the gaming

industry does not run on huge margins. Um. No, unless you're like making Warhammer models that you're selling for a hundred and twenty dollars for a piece of plastic that's tied. Yeah, the margins are pretty tight. Um. So saying like past you know, seven k, your company with however many employees, has to give a quarter like that, that'll sink people. Yeah.

I think a lot of companies, the larger ones, couldn't sustain that, right, I mean I think saying your gross over seven just basically means make sure you only make seven hundred dollars that year. Um I I do think that that is that is a real, real dangerous thing to a lot of these businesses. Now, for a lot of the content creators, this is never gonna matter. But I do believe that part of this was, you know, seeing gigantic multimillion dollar kickstarters happening and kind of going,

where's our Yeah, we want a piece of this? Um And the answer to that is that, like you know, and it's problematic just crediting the creation of D and D solely to Gary Gygax, but like the people who came up with and play tested and made D and D a thing, and then the people who iterated and changed and evolved it from you know, the original game to a D and D um and the years of thacco to two three point oh like like morally, outside of like what I think is justifiable in corporate law

and stuff, Like, morally, I think it's fucked up to say that like some company forever gets a piece of that when what it is is like human beings coming together to try to figure out the most efficient way to run an engine for storytelling. UM, I don't know, it's it's it's it's fucked up to me to think about it this way. So they announced this alteration to the Open Gaming License, and I'm gonna guess those were

some dark days at the office. So so yeah, you know, uh, most of us at PISO at that point in time, we're kind of on vacation and we kind of just filed it away and we're like, okay, well it's a

draft and they're just talking. So um, you know, we get to back, you know, from our break and it's the beginning of the year and this is now January five is when a bombshell article drops on Gizmoto by CODEGA and they really laid out kind of what was in this proposed license, apparently having had portions of it linked to them, and um, you know, it confirmed a margin but maybe only for for kickstarters, which then got

confirmed by someone at Kickstarter on Twitter. Um. And it also included a bit in there that there was a clause that said watsy could listen to the coast, could use any of the content you create under the license for free, never having to make pay royalties to you, never having to give you any credit. They could just take your work, um, and and they phrased it in such a way that it sounded like it was, you know, well, just in case we make something similar, we don't want

to get sued. But yeah, and we're talking about just to clarify it for people were not talking about like if you introduce mechanics, because again that that's not what this is. Kind we're talking about. If you create characters, if you create, if you build stories, they have a right to utilize that story that you've made things that are actually copyrightable, right, stories, ideas and expressions are copyrightable.

Um uh, you know, but rules aren't. So that that drops on the fifth and on the night the full draft document leaks and you've got streamers and influencers reading it live on YouTube, and this thing just starts to snowball. Um.

And from the ninth forward, things start moving very quickly. Um. On the tenth, a number of major kind of third party publishers, these are folks who print with the O jail um announced that they were not going to go with that, and one of the largest ones, you know, announced, yeah, I'm not doing that at all. I'm going to create my entire brand new game. I'm leaving all of this behind, and the fervor on social media turned into basically a firestorm.

Um it. It's really a sign of how how much more how many people both love and play versions of this game that there was so much media attention from like major media organs like this. This was not just you know, those of us who are into gaming, um, you know, freaking out over this change the Wizards of the Coast has made. This was like, I mean, I was seeing it everywhere. Very few things have like broken as widely in my media in ecosystem as as this.

There was an article, there was a story about it today on NPR UM so there was another one. There was one other important aspect in the league, um that I think is really important. One is that the new o g L could be canceled at any time with thirty days notice. And they were claiming that they were de authorizing the previous o g L, which up to this point everyone kind of assumed was irrevocable. Right it had. It has clauses in it that say, if we ever put on a new version of this license, you can

ignore it and continue to use this one. Right, but it uses this word in there that says you can continue to use any authorized version of the license, never minding that the contract doesn't mention how you might de authorize a license. UM. So there there this draft of the O g L says that they're de authorizing the previous version, which puts all of the work of the past twenty years into doubt. And at this point in time,

the fans are revolting right there. There are a lot of folks canceling their subscriptions to D and D Beyond, which is kind of there in house character generation tools that you pay a monthly subscription for um. And things really start spinning out of hand to the point where D and D actually has to respond to it and pulled back UM and kind of retreat from this and saying, hey, we're gonna answer your questions. What you saw was just a draft um, you know, and UH that was never

supposed to leak UM. But it was at this point in time that we actually launched our own license. We had been talking to some of the other publishers, and by that I mean we pizo UH to create a brand new safe harbor for folks to publish under. Now it's a it's a it's not gonna be owned by us. It's going to be owned by a law firm that actually drafted the first o g L. But you started to see this giant for happening, um where a lot of folks are just abandoning ship, And I mean, what

do you think this means? Because obviously Wizards has already announced a new version of the of the o g L beyond like the one that got leaked, and I think are kind of in damage control mode. Do you think this is something that like there is any way for them to pull back from or do you think that kind of the inherent instability of the o g L now that they're kind of making these claims at well, we can actually change the deal anytime we want, has

that sort of irrevocably altered the ground. I think that they've damaged a lot of people's trust in them, right. I think over over the past few weeks, especially when they went silent and then frankly the first retraction was really kind of awkward and filled with kind of like, well, we didn't lose, we won. This was great. Now we

learned how to make a better license. Right, they're clearly stepping back, stepping back, stepping back, and their most recent step back, which just happened, you know, on the eighteenth, so you know, a week ago or so, basically said that they were going to release the core of the game to Creative Commons and their new license was going

to be irrevocable and last forever. But it still contains a lot of kind of poison pills, things like we are still the authorizing the first version of the license, and we have this morality clause that says, if we find your content offensive, we can just kill your license without yea, which is fucked up because I mean, I don't think I need to explain why that's fucked up. Um, that that puts that puts a lot of the most creative kind of projects to at risk like that. I god,

that's that's ugly. I mean, I don't think anybody in this industry wants to see any you know, deeply offensive, problematic content. Um, but there's a lot of stuff that is frankly a lot more marginal and explores, you know, issues of the human condition that folks might want to explore in a game. Who's to say that someone that wizards might go, well, sorry, that's offensive to me. You don't get to make it. Um. I don't think anybody wants to invest their creativity and risk their business on

what someone they will never have met thinks of their work. Yeah. The problem is not that, like I want as the most offensive role playing games I can get. The problem is like, well, who determines what offensive is? And it's a bunch of lawyers in business minute Wizards of the Coast.

At least that's the worry, right, Like, not necessarily that that's how it would work out, but you just you get no guarantee, and this stuff, this stuff evolves over time, right, you know what, what is fine today maybe problematic tomorrow. We learned those things and we evolved from them and we change. But I don't think anybody wants to have kind of the this you know, acts hanging over our head of like, well, sorry, that's now offensive, so we're

going to kill your entire license. Yeah, so where are we? Where are we now? Like it looks like Piezo y'all are moving forward with the O r C along with a number of other people. Can you give me any

of what that's going to look like? Because one of the things that that does concern me is UM and this is a very selfish concern, but like I grew very comfortable with you know, three point five, which is essentially the machinery that underpins Pathfinder, and um, it's one of those things like if I didn't play again for twenty years, I could probably sit down with the material in my head and run a campaign just because so

much of that stuff is burned into my brain. Are we like, what is the mechanics kind of underlying the O r C And how is it going to be different from what we've we've gotten used to So I'll say this, We're we're in the very early days, yes, And what what's happening right now is we are you know, in coordination with a number of other publishers working with a Zoro law and they are the people who wrote the original O g l UH and had you know, fully intended for it to be a perpetual license, and

we're working with them to create kind of a rules neutral license the entire game industry can use to share work because there's there's like a lot of nuance that was in the O g l that allowed different companies to share creative work together, and a lot of companies used it as kind of a bridging license. Even if they weren't using Dungeons and Dragons at all, they would just use the license as a framework to kind of exchange ideas. And that's what we want the ORC to be.

The ORC needs to be a license that allows everybody in the game industry to open up their content and share work with each other and iterate and expand and grow. That's our real goal, um. And ultimately we are not going to own it. No one's going to own it. We're actually going to try and find it onprofit to administer the license going forward so that we don't ever

have to worry about this again. Nobody wants to go through what we've been going through for the past three weeks, So that's kind of that's kind of one half of it. The other half is what happens to Pathfinder. UM. And obviously, you know, when it came to Pathfinder second Edition, we rewrote the game from scratch and it is now fully our game. It's something we own and we control, UM. So we feel pretty confident that we're just gonna keep

on rolling with with Pathfinder. And ultimately, you know, we don't actually believe that the previous version of the O g l even can be rescinded, So I guess we'll

see how that plays out. I can see this having an overall positive outcome, just in that if we get this new kind of thing that creators can use um as a as a core point to branch off from when they are when they're making games that's actually under solid legal footing that isn't kind of reliant upon the whims of a publicly traded company, then in the long term, you know, that is in the long term, it's it's it's it's better for creators because it's more like the

way things were for the first twenty years of the O g l UM do you I mean, like, what do you see as kind of some pitfalls and sort of trying to trying to make this this happened, trying

to move things in this kind of more productive direction. Well, I think you can always you know, kind of fracture, you know, balkanize the market to the point where where everybody has such a small slice event that you know, no one can really get the kind of numbers they need to succeed because you're you're right, it is it is a pretty small industry. The margin on. You know, printed media isn't exactly great, but I think a lot

of these companies do have the numbers to survive. But I think that right now, everybody's trying to figure out how to replace parts of what has just been lost. Um. Everybody's trying to kind of go in their different directions right now, and some of that is going to be really good, because I think we're gonna get a lot

of really great games. Um, And I'm excited to see him. Um. But I do think that I think when the worries just for the industry is that they kind of all had one flag they were rallying around, and now everyone's running in different directions and hoping that after all of this shakes out, everybody has kind of enough gamers to support a community. I think it's gonna work out. I think that there's a number of standouts happening already. Um. You know, M C, d M and Cobald are obviously

racing to do things. There's a bunch of kind of known players in the industry, US, Cobalt, Chaos, I, UM, Green Ronan, all of them are pretty big. Company's position to kind of have good player bases with great games and mechanics underneath them. So I I think the big loser here is frankly to the coast. They you know, up up until you know, the end of this year or the end of last year, they were undisputedly the largest game company in the entire table top role playing

game industry, and that's still true today. But there's a lot of cracks in that armor, and it does make me wonder how it's going to fracture out or time, and how many of their fans, many of which never heard of Pathfinder, never heard of you know, these other game companies call of Cthulo and stuff, are now suddenly exploring these games, and you know, frankly, the wealth of smaller Indian zine games that are out there. There's so much to play right now, and Watsy has just told

their fan base, hey, go check it out. It's interesting because it it kind of speaks to something that I've I've always loved and also found kind of sociologically fascinating about table top gaming, which is you just brought up call Off Cthulhu, which is a game that is I don't believe is under the control of the original company that it was made under. People have been playing versions of Call Off Cthuloo for a very long time. Dungeons

and Dragons has gone through multiple owners. Shadow Run, which I played a lot of as a kid, has gone through multiple owners, and the rules sets change and the company that is profiting from the official licensed material changes. But no matter what happens, even when those companies go uder, the games keep going. And that's there's something I think unique there that is, it's not the case even like, um, you know, there's versions of it that happens in in

PC gaming. But there's also this thing that happens that that a lot of gamers I know complain about, which is that like periodically should will get removed for whatever reason, a company goes under, a game is not supported, and that game is just gone. That little piece of culture

has just gone. And it seems like so far, I'm not gonna say in every case, because obviously there have been games that have have you know, people stopped playing and stuff in the tabletop space, but it's there's this continuity, you know, even in the face of of changing of the guards in terms of like what companies are successful, um of like people keep playing these the same games and iterating them and changing them. And um, I don't know. That's that's always one of the things I found most

inspiring about the way tabletop works. Yeah, I mean, I do think the legacy of tabletop role playing games is one of cooperation. It was there from the start, right, you know, the moment Gary and is Uh and Dave and folks you know, got together and started turning their you know, miniatures war game and giving characters to them, and everyone started building a story together. That spark was the start, and it's carried through in a million different

ways and a million different tables. And even if you know, the companies go under or disappear, people with those books are still playing those games. There's plenty of people still playing a D and D first edition, right, you know, they never left and they're fine with that, and and I salute them. Yeah, I think about and again, this is like one of the reasons this has such a

place in my heart. I I started playing A D and D. But you know, it was my friends and I would play at a at cub Scout camp outs, and we didn't have access to dice, so we we

had the rule books. We had like the Monsters Manual, in the players guide, and we use those as jumping off points and we would bring like a bunch of nickels and we would we would figure out way it's like, okay, for this action, you've got to get three heads out of five flips or something like that, and that's a success in this And like so many people have stories like that, have variants of that, because it really is fundamentally what you need for any of these games, which

is what makes them so durable, is a group of people to want to sit around a table and tell a story together, which is rad. Yeah. I mean there's nothing else like it right there, really isn't it. And that's why I think you're seeing so much fervor over this because for a lot of people, this is very deeply personal gathering together with your friends and telling a

story together. That's something you and your friends built. And you know, uh, if you happen to find a way to make some money off of it, great, that's that's your creativity coming to life. And frankly, kind of having a big giant corporation come in and say, hey, where's my cut is is not really very fun? No, uh, And I my heart goes out to to to you and your colleagues over how stressful this last three or four weeks has been, and I hope that we're past

the worst of it. Um. It certainly seems like some what's going to come out of this is going to be pretty exciting. So I'm hopeful. Uh, And it sounds like you're hopeful. Yeah, I think you know. Over the past couple of weeks there's been a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of effency meetings. But frankly, I feel more excited and energized about the future of Pizo, about the future of gaming, than I have in quite

a long time. So by Piso's games, pick up some Pathfinder books, go to your go to your nearest game store, um, and and pick one up or two or three, um, Jason, anything else you want up plug at the end here, Uh. Yeah, you can learn more about Pizo in our games, so that would be Pathfinder and star Finder. At Piso dot com, we have a blog they're talking about the Orc and we'll have undoubtedly have more to say about it here

in the coming weeks. Uh. As for me, you can find me on all the very social media platforms at Backslash, Jason Bowman bu l M A h N. Thank you Jason, both for sitting down for this interview and for all of all of the many, many countless hours I have spent playing games that you had a hand in making. Um, thank you, Robert. We'll have to get together and roll some dice together soon. I would love that. All right, everybody,

that's a sode uh see you tomorrow. It could happen here for that's Zone Media and more podcasts on cool zone Media. Visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.