Our Statement About the Wizards of the Coast OGL1.0a Revocation

There seems to be some misunderstandings among the management and higher-ups at Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro about their role in the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game. This statement is meant to help them understand what role they play, and what role the community will play moving forward.

I've read a lot recently about Wizards being the "Stewards of D&D". That's your first mistake. You are not the stewards of D&D. You are not the Gods of D&D, nor are you D&D's champions, or even its owners. 

You are D&D's captors.

Sure, you own the name, but that and copper piece will buy you an ale. You see, the executives at Wizards of the Coast (or WotC) don't understand something vital about their customers: we don't need you. Sure, we bought your books and we used your sites. It was the least we could do. But we also bought tons of 3rd party books and adventures that were frankly 1000x better than your increasingly terrible releases.

You claim that you want to revoke OGL1.0a because it's important for you to be able to combat hate speech and intolerance. This is laughable because the community have been the ones to combat those things in YOUR products, not the other way around. What do you think makes you qualified to police us? What do you think gives you the right?

Let's be completely honest for once, this has nothing to do with policing hateful content. This is because you think it'll be easier to remove any competition than it would be to make your product good enough to be competitive. If it was truly about hateful content, then why does OGL1.2 have a single small subsection about hateful content and an entire separate document and ruleset for Virtual Tabletops? This is about making sure no one else can compete with your new videogame, since you're pouring a fortune into developing it.

The simple fact of the matter is, we don't need you. At all. D&D is unique in that it is a product that can be legally used without paying its "owners" a dime. When we play D&D, we can find all the rules through a quick Google search. When we play Pathfinder, many of us still call it D&D even though it doesn't use any of your rules. Anytime people sit around a table with a set of roleplaying dice to tell a story together, that's D&D. And it's free.

If you don't want to play ball anymore, that's fine. We'll take our ball and go play somewhere else. We just won't go quietly.

To those who are outraged that WotC is being immoral and trying to take away your rights, remove the ability of 3rd party publishers to make content, and find a way to charge you for every little thing they can through subscriptions and microtransactions, I urge you to fight back. Help us FreeDnD.

First of all, delete your DnDBeyond subscription if you haven't already. Refuse to accept DnDBeyond character sheets from your players. Do NOT buy any official D&D content from Wizards of the Coast. Boycott their new movie and television show. Refuse to use their new virtual tabletop when it releases.

Don't stop playing D&D, it's ours and we've earned the right to enjoy it, whether that's through the books you already own or by moving to new systems like Pathfinder 2E or the upcoming Black Flag system. Make purchases from small 3rd party creators, not just us but some of the thousands on DriveThruRPG and Patreon. Just don't let WotC have any more of your money.

Encourage others to follow suit. Remember that WotC is owned by Hasbro, so refuse to buy any other Hasbro products. Don't buy new Magic the Gathering cards, Monopoly, or Transformers toys. Let's make WotC so unprofitable they have no choice but to reverse this overreach and make D&D fair and open again. It may take time, but we did it before with 4th Edition and we can do it again.

People have said that the revocation of OGL1.0a is WotC's line in the sand. This is ours. 

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