The History of D&D Hasbro Refused to Learn From

don't let the genuinely good time that is the Dungeons and Dragons honor Amongst Thieves film complete with Chris Pine's dreamy blue eyes fool you dear viewer in the beginning of 2023 the owners of Dungeons and Dragons could not stop rolling Nat ones on their persuasion checks with fans first a new copy of their open gaming license leaked with some scary legal Clauses then they promised a press release that came and went then they tried to explain that feedback was always the plan and I'm sure there's been a few dust UPS since we wrote this episode but then the fan and Creator Community spoke up and after Brave adventurers like Ryan Dancy Ginny D know it down and many many many more made their voices heard cleared the area of disinformation goblins and the dust had settled at least for now something hit us like a fireball in a very tiny room d d has had both legal and fan problems all throughout its history and those issues actually helped to shape the entire RPG industry So today we're going to take a deep delve into that decades-long dungeon foreign episode is brought to you by nebula where you could have seen this and all of our videos early and ad-free subscribe for a point of inspiration now the idea for this episode all started when our RPG expert and Resident wizard Eddie Webb noticed a really odd pattern with DND editions odd numbered editions of Dungeons and Dragons were more permissive and did better as a whole while even numbered ones were more restrictive causing fans and the cash to start walking away now you know we love a good historical story here so we thought we'd get a party of adventures all kitted out for an epic-sized EC episode through the actual chronological business history of the Dungeons and Dragons IP our quest to help everyone better understand how the legal issues around this single game helped chart the course for all ttrpgs and maybe even get a glimpse at where one of our favorite games could be heading history repeating itself and all that but to start our journey we knew we needed to travel back through time that's when we realized unfortunately that the time conduit spell disappeared sometime around a d second edition but Eddie told us no not to worry he remembered the location of some different ancient canonical Magics of old so we spent weeks traveling through creepy forests battling strange monsters Romancing every minor NPC we could possibly find and eventually we came to find the much-lotted time machine like literally the OG one alright Eddie fire up this bad boy or put your hat on it or whatever okay our first stop of time travel tourism is 1974 which was a groovy time for Alpha nerds Gary gygax and Dave arneson Avid wargamers who got a cool idea rather than having Miniatures represent abstract military might as was common in tactical military games of the era what if there were a game that told the stories of the individual soldiers they toyed with the idea at various conventions and soon they had created the very first edition of Dungeons and Dragons and seeing the potential of this new game Gary decided to form a company to publish it along with Don K and Brian Bloom wait where's Dave huh anyway thus was born tactical studies rules more commonly known as TSR at first the game sold slowly but by 1975 things were getting big in a hurry this led to the two-headed giant at the heart of a lot of tabletop RPG companies first there's the design team making decisions they think make a great game people would want to play and then there's the corporate side doing everything they can to sell the game and make money which is important if you know you want to be able to do this sort of thing for a living oh and it turned out there was a lot of money to be made tsr's gross sales in 1975 were fifty thousand dollars which grew to three hundred thousand dollars in 1976 600 000 in 1977 nearly one million dollars in 1978 and over two million dollars in 1979. AKA TSR had created a whole new industry almost from scratch and this rapidly growing company offered licenses to just about anyone that asked though you might be wondering why would TSR even allow other people to make stuff for their game if it was so popular well think of it like mod tools for a video game if passionate players are making even more content for your game that means there's more chances for Curious folks to find and check out said game and the same definitely worked for ttrpgs So Not only was TSR making licensing money off books they didn't have to invest in or produce but these third-party products also acted as advertising for the game books that TSR was making and selling one such agreement was with Bill Owen and Bob Bledsoe these two originally approached TSR about creating supplements based on Owen's home campaign notes as part of TSR rather than a separate license but gygax and his team thought the idea of that kind of supplemental material wouldn't really sell because you know DMS could just make up whatever they wanted instead of paying someone to do it for them but undeterred on July 4th 1976 the two instead formed the company judges Guild to convert Owen's campaign into licensed D D supplements something that had never been done before and turns out this Flagship product city-state of the Invincible Overlord was a huge success for the new company even more noteworthy was in agreement with three folks in London in Livingstone Steve Jackson and John Peake who had formed the company Games Workshop in 1977 TSR gave them a license to print and distribute d d in the UK starting them on the road to becoming the Warhammer wielding Juggernaut that they are today truly blood for the blood God sorry there were also a lot of Publishers who produced unlicensed support materials as well particularly once companies saw the potential that supplements had one noteworthy example was Bill Fawcett of Mayfair games who put out a line of unlicensed rolaid supplements that even used the DND trademark something they were not supposed to do but largely TSR ignored them because they still felt that making the core game was where the real money was so Publishers both official and unlicensed grew massively during this time which in turn also grew daddy TSR then tragedy struck Don K died in 1975 from a sudden heart attack now Gary originally had 60 ownership when the company was formed but at this point he wasn't able to come up with his share of buying out K's estate so his control dropped to 30 and in the end the company was restructured to be run by Gary Brian and Brian's father Melvin Bloom who invested some additional Capital now Eddie says this corporate structure drama matters later in our timeline and we really should continue through our Quest through RBG history though a small problem at this point our time machine which did get a sweet New Look by the way did figure out what capitalism was due to all of the business dealings that we were talking about before and now is demanding to be paid for our next trip come on man what the wait so where'd you get that Platinum heck yeah sneaky cat okay everyone Pile in we're 80s bound foreign [Music] the year is now 1982. and DND has expanded into a couple branches basic set DND as well as advanced Dungeons and Dragons the jam on top of that there were now a wide variety of official and unlicensed supplements for both games which started to introduce rules inconsistencies and loopholes as a completely unsurprising result players argued loudly and frequently about what was official and what wasn't our unlicensed supplements even okay to use in d d heck it wasn't even obvious to the Casual player what was actually official remember at this point in time tabletop RPGs were still seen as an outgrowth of the miniature wargaming scene which had very specific rules to make each game as Fair as possible which meant determining official rules was in the Hobby's blood some fans would even appeal the decisions of their personal dungeon Masters to TSR and Get Back official written rulings but the products that TSR had no control over were undermining That official Authority and causing design team headaches further the gravy train was about to end TSR had been spreading into new areas like toys movies and cartoons hey wait what you were talking about again and while they had a few successes most were Financial failures in a June 1983 employee meeting the executives announced they'd lost 250 000 in the last six months it was time to make some hard decisions and fast so the folks at TSR spent a lot of cash to summon a few familiars AKA lawyers and put the pressure on their former partners the licenses with judges Guild and Games Workshop were pulled and companies like Mayfair games were told to cease and desist the use of the d d trademark or they would be slain in the legal sense of course and not wanting to be slainer you know sued Mayfair reached an out-of-court settlement in 1984 which we will also Circle back to later because that is also important now in many ways this legal pressure formed the RPG industry that we have today multiple Publishers realized that due to this mood swing from TSR making d support products was a quick way to get legally rules lawyered into Oblivion and so they made their own games instead some created different Fantasy games in an attempt to be better than d d While others experimented with new genres like superheroes science fiction horror military games or even a combination of all of those things oh riffs I love you so much great world terrible system sorry getting carried away my point is the industry was now a lot more than just Dungeons and Dragons ah but now our last time machine is out of plutonium or whatever it takes so our party is now stuck with no way to get to our next jump in this RPG tale but wait seems like Jeff has made friends with a couple of wild stallions from California who have just agreed to take us along on an excellent trip to 1991. thanks dudes wait whoa what happened in the last seven years TSR looks real different from when we left it in 1984 yo hold on let me burn all my sorcery points because someone forgot to take the identify spell today and I'll figure out what the hell happened okay I think I got it turns out the glut of competing RPGs derailed the aforementioned gravy train leading to sales being down across the board and TSR was losing cash as fast as they were making it but due to the success of their cartoon and comic book Enterprises the company had also shifted to a more family-friendly image a direction that Gary seemed to be against at the time things were changing rapidly then in 1985 Lorraine Williams was brought in as their vice president of administration to deal with the various creditors they'd acquired during the market slump meanwhile and I'm skipping over a lot of company Intrigue here the TSR stock options have been bouncing around between the blooms and gygax in the end however Brian Bloom was able to acquire a majority share of the company before he sold all of his stock to Williams gygax seeing which way the wind was blowing sold his remaining stock and left the company before the end of the year by this point the design team was well in the development of a more balanced and coherent ad 2nd edition Williams throughout Gary's original notes told the remaining designers to finish the work with their own ideas and accelerated the team's release window it was clear at least two Gary gygax that his legacy was being intentionally and systematically stomped out of TSR but under Williams leadership the lawsuits kept it flowing first they sued Gary gygax's new company new Infinities Productions forcing gygax to bleed money on legal fees before he declared bankruptcy then TSR sued Mayfair games again saying they were in violation of the 1984 settlement though this could have been due to Mayfair putting out a line of supplements about demons which went against tsr's new family-friendly image or maybe it was because Mayfair asked Gary to write a forward for one of their new books but you know whatever the reasons the two companies finally reached an agreement sometime in 1993 where TSR could buy the entire roll age line and bury the offending material never to see the light of day and at this point no one escaped the reach of tsr's legal team of shadowy Assassins for instance as the internet grew fans posted articles about their favorite games online or shared files from their home campaigns Williams who had never really been in touch with the Gaming Community treated these the same as Publishers violating tsr's trademarks and summoned more legal Vengeance sending cease and desist orders to fans even General RPG groups unrelated to d d were hit with this chromatic spray of legal red tape fans started calling TSR T dollar sign R both to avoid online searches and as an active Defiance before leaving in droves to find other games to play ah but fan discontent was only one head of the Hydra TSR had to slay before it could get back on top collectible card games like magic the Gathering published by up-and-coming company Wizards of the Coast were encouraging people to spend their recreational money elsewhere this new lack of revenue from the RPG genre was putting Distributors out of business and making it harder to ship the books that were still being produced not to mention since TSR focused on business over design at this point it led them to put out out their own glut of advanced DND supplements that horribly unbalanced the game all these factors encourage fans to vote with their wallets and wouldn't you know it TSR sales plummeted again and they declared bankruptcy in 1997. soon after those Plucky Wizards of the Coast swooped in and bought TSR with the huge but undisclosed stacks of cash they got from people buying magic cards instead of DnD books so now we have a new player in the game wait how did we end up at a Circle K and where did our most excellent time traveling companions go great now how are we going to get to the year 2000 I mean we could just wait or [Music] foreign oh excuse us sir oh wow looks like Wizards of the Coast was just bought by Hasbro for a cool 325 million dollars dang oh and would you look at that there's a brand spanking new Third Edition of Dungeons and Dragons for fans to see but wizards of the Hasbro did have a lot of animosity to overcome both from fans and other Publishers and that was something that Ryan Dancing yes the same Ryan Dancy from our extra politics show over on our twitch Channel had to address as the business head of wizards RPG Department aside from making sure that the Third Edition was well designed and produced he came up with two legal initiatives to help rebuild the Gaming Community the first of which was the D20 system trademark license this was a license that allowed Publishers to use some of dnd's trademark terms as well as a distinctive D20 System logo so Publishers could show that their products were fully compatible with Dungeons and Dragons this required Publishers to exclude specific rules like character creation mentioned that buyers needed the core rulebooks published by Wizards of the Coast and had them adhere to a con content policy so D20 books were in alignment with the DND brand more importantly however was the creation of the open game license or ogl which allowed anyone to modify copy and redistribute key rules text from DND in their own products this meant that you could use the exact same rules as DND in making your compatible material without having to coordinate with watsi first of course while legal precedents have historically ruled that you can't truly copyright game mechanics these licenses were an olive branch to win back fans and Publishers who had been turned away by tsr's litigious path in the 90s and it worked this was the time we now call the D20 boom anyone Publishers and fans alike could release DND related products as long as they followed the terms of the ogl and the D20 license if they wanted to use the trademarks so now after two whole additions and companies later RPG books were back to the Heyday of basically printing money for about five years okay gang what time period appropriate method of Pop Culture time travel could be used to get us to 2005 now nope nope nope nope nope nope you can seriously doubt my commitment to Sparkle motion all you want we are walking keep in my stupid mansuit faster than I thought anyway 2005. oh life was good if you were a nerd pop culture had become mainstream with rebooted hits like Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who heck even Hasbro is having big success with Transformers and their first live-action movie was blowing up on the horizon thank you Mr Bay so naturally they wanted D to be a big brand in the same way of course not with a live-action movie or anything that would be totally ridiculous box office poison I mean we can't even imagine what would have happened if they actually released a deity movie before 2023. wow I don't even want to think about that Darkest Timeline but do try to move them in that direction they felt they had to get more control over D and D again rumors started to circulate that the D20 trademark license would be rescinded then Publishers got nervous and removed the trademark from their products preemptively getting ahead of any possible incoming legal meteor swarm but it turned out to be worse than that a new fourth edition of d d was announced that not only would be a radical rules departure from the previous Edition but also wouldn't use either the ojl or the D20 trademark license instead they presented the GSL or game system license that required an upfront fee of oh wow five thousand dollars in order to print books compatible with the new edition that is a lot of money for small Publishers probably more than some of them would ever expect to make back from any profits further agreeing to the GSL contract stipulated that Publishers could never again use the ogl in any future products yikes by this point however a loophole had been discovered okay so the official D20 system trademark license didn't allow Publishers to reprint character creation rules because they wanted to keep people buying the core rulebooks but the ogl or d d rules minus their trademarks just said that you couldn't use D and D's full character creation rules so if you made your own character creation rule system a company could put out an entire game book using the rest of the ogl and have a game that used 99 of the DND rules but didn't require any official d d books whatsoever and that's just what Lisa Stevens and Eric Mona did previously their company paizo had been published publishing two official d d magazines for five years called unsurprisingly dungeon and dragon however Wizards didn't renew their license in 2007 so in 2008 they released their own game Pathfinder which was an evolution of the Beloved Third Edition rule set true Hasbro eventually released a final version of the GSL that removed both the upfront fee and the requirement to stop using the ogl but by that point the damage had been done which again is feeling like it's hitting pretty close to home with the early 2023 D kerfuffle but 2010 paizo was loving it Pathfinder was outselling DND something that hadn't been possible since the declining days of TSR now in the Dungeons and dragon space I think you won't find a more contentious argument than whether 4th edition was good or a Scourge created in order to try and capitalize on the popularity of MMO mechanics Eddie doesn't think it's bad and is quite fond of it whereas I may have already played my Pand in that particular department but regardless the combination of business mismanagement and the misreading of the community resulted in a game that both failed to connect with its core audience and led to the creation of a direct competitor that the RPG Community seemed to like more no Eddie we are not going to argue this again I already told you that fourth edition is a load of War what is happening has our nerd rage opened a wormhold of 2016 quick let's dive in before we remember that we're friends did we make it quick everyone check your phones for the date oh oh yeah this is definitely 2016 all right hey nice shiny catch SVP by this point Hasbro buried fourth edition and the GSL what was originally called DND Next was eventually christened as the fifth edition we know and love today and also critically Hasbro revealed that they would release fifth edition under the original ogl license and shocked Pikachu face here between that and the fact that 5e was the cleanest most mass-market-friendly version of the game to date 5th edition turned out to be the best selling Edition ever no Foolin according to Hasbro 5e has sold better than any other Edition in the history of Dungeons and Dragons actually better than first through fourth editions combined and lots of Indie Publishers got back in on the action with the rise of PDF and print on demand publishing anyone could make an ogl product and the combination of that with the increase in popularity of streaming platforms like twitch and YouTube allowed for gamers performers and of course nerdy-ass voice actors to turn the their games into actual plays that everyone could enjoy but Hasbro actually went a step further here creating the DM skill to allow people to use certain parts of the DND intellectual property in their products and sell them on a centralized website where they cut going to Mama Hasbro of course and once again everyone made a lot of money which is why what happened in January of 2023 is surprising in a lot of ways but also kind of exactly what you might expect if you look at the constant legal back and forth throughout D D's lifetime because it turns out major corporations either don't have great institutional memory or whatever company owns DND always fails their modify memory save and they repeatedly make the same mistakes again and again every time DND opens their license to other people everyone does well including the company that owns it but every time the owners of DnD get litigious wanting to squeeze out more profits for the dark Powers Erp shareholders they end up botching it people leave D behind and the RPG industry goes in a new direction of course as of the time of this episode's release we've seen some pretty promising steps in the right direction from watsi in order to course correct and kind of get back on the right track they trashed their new Draconian ogl dropped their licensing fees moved a whole bunch of 5e content into the Creative Commons some even by accident hey there's Rod be seeing you later and they seem to have become more open to community feedback than ever before so who knows maybe they are learning from their past mistakes and finally realize that if they do put long-term design over short-term profits spoiler alert profits still come but if the owners of our favorite game don't learn their lessons and won't let it Thrive then maybe we as the community have to do what all good adventuring parties do we Gear Up protect our community and rebuild it into something exciting that allows us to keep telling stories together with our friends and at that point no amount of pining over Chris Pine is gonna save them thank you so much everyone for watching this gargantuan size episode of extra credits we had an absolute blast putting it together for all of you it was a labor of love and I'm so psyched that it's out in the world and if you liked this lengthy experiment there's actually something no use the link in the description below and subscribe to nebula our creator owned and operated streaming service here let me explain how this is all connected so what you just watched obviously took way more time and resources than a regular 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Channel: Extra Credits

Views: 238,503

Keywords: game development, game industry, games, gaming, animated, animated stories, games industry, rpgs, ttrpg, role playing games, gary gygax, steve jackson, pazio games, pathfinder, mayfair games, games workshop, warhammer, wizards of the coast, hasbro, DnD, dungeons and dragons, tabletop games, 5th edition d&d, David Arneson, war games, TSR, tactical studies rules, controversy, judges guild, supplement, RPG industry, rifts, T$R, magic the gathering, d20 system, OGL, open game license, GSL

Id: paEGFYSBZTE

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023