As humans we have a great tendency to not see the things that make us wrong. Listen to any adult who has made a point. If they are presented with evidence in conversation that directly refutes their claim, commonly they just keep going like they never heard it. Then, some time later, they might realize that they were mistaken. If the point is brought up again many will say something like, “well why didn’t you say that”. Of course someone did, and both people come away from that second conversation somewhat frustrated.

It very much seems that the same thing is happening over at the Wizards/Hasbro mothership as we ramp up for D&D 4e. Wizards has been somewhat perturbed, but also oddly happy, by the explosive growth and then implosion of the DDL* market over the course of the last few years. They saw similar trends within their own business model too. So while they have generally been ignoring evidence to the contrary, people have been telling them for some time that they are wrong. I expect them to jump up and screech, “why didn’t you say so” sometime in the next six months. Here’s the deal.

D&D 3e was the biggest selling RPG of all time. Not because it was fantastic, well planned, brilliantly executed, and pretty. All of those things were true, at least up until 3.5 debuted. The reason D&D 3e was so great was the OGL renaissance, and it was intentional. The crew at Wizards decided that D&D 3e could be good for the entire industry and set about writing the OGL and D20 licensing agreements. As D&D 3e took off there was an amazing amount of support material available. More and different material than had ever been available in the adventure games hobby. There were untold books covering the same ground, sure, on elves and dwarves and things we expected. There were also books that no one expected. I don’t think anyone expected Nyambe, Big Eyes Small Mouth D20, or any of a legion of other products that really took D&D in new directions.

All of these myriad products took D&D somewhere else to be sure. Even more than the breadth of support, it also showed what incredibly good design the core D&D rules were. From this design just inside Wizards came D20 Modern and Star Wars, from outside a frightening variety of other games from other people. Traveller T20, Call of Cthulu D20, and the absolutely amazing Mutants & Masterminds are only a few examples. From a different perspective the Open Game License also gave us ideas like Action! System, which I was fortunate to work on. The idea that by being compatible with other published products gave you a vastly larger and more familiar audience was really awesome. Of course, there were downsides. It was a magical and doomed time, with 77 books on dark elves vying for shelf space at your local retailer.

Local retailers just bought everything because people were buying everything. It was a bad move on everyone’s part, and no one was keeping up with even the basics of editing and quality control. A lot of companies should have quit much sooner than they did, but they never bothered to notice that the retailers were the only people buying. So eventually everything imploded. This implosion was accelerated by a lot of very foolish publishers who were publishing proprietary IP owned by Wizards and not reading their licensing agreement. Wizards had no choice but to sue those people, and a lot of product got pulped. By the time 3.5 debuted it was clear that the gold rush was over. Still, all the players kept looking around for the next big wave. I think that the next big wave could be D&D 4e, but Wizards is doing nothing to help.

There was a thread over in the forums entitled D&D 4e too Setting specific?. Basically the principals had decided that the way D&D was presented was increasingly setting-specific. While I see their point, I think they were missing a lot of the evidence.

Actually I think there may be another way to present this. I think that the presentation of 4e may seem more setting specific, just like 3e did. However I think that is much more a function of editing and marketing than the actual rules process. Knowing what I know about individual designers and about some of these designer’s other games I think it will look setting specific in each different setting, but will actually be the same core information simply presented differently.

Which brings us back to the new, evidently secret OGL. Wizards have said there will be one, and not much else. No one I contacted has any information and no one has said, “we were told but we can’t say”. The seminar ostensibly scheduled for manufacturers at GenCon was attended by a lot of fans, and not a lot of business information was communicated by anyone. This was a huge red flag to a lot of very smart people, and it should be to the rest of us too.

So that leaves us back at square one. Any viable business concern producing RPGs at this point is going to need at least a year of notice to produce RPG materials of any quality, and they aren’t getting it; at least not as of this writing. It is possible that I’m wrong, next week things could be different. However evidence leads me in a different direction of assumptions.

No one at Hasbro was incredibly pleased that the OGL basically created a market they couldn’t control. Money was being made, and Hasbro didn’t get any of it. No royalties, no licensing, nothing at all. Never mind the free advertising and free support that they were reaping the benefits from. There were some licensing deals, with White Wolf and Paizo, but none of them was lucrative for Hasbro. Added to this Hasbro is nowhere near as altruistic as the core management at Wizards was when 3e came out. A good argument could be made that with few exceptions Hasbro management is all about malevolence. Generally, the people at Hasbro want all of the money, and all of the market, and they want it now.

So while I have heard lip service about a new OGL, and about a vetting process, royalties, and all of that nonsense. It is all smoke and mirrors. None of it will likely happen, or it already would have. No one at Hasbro sees a percentage. What Wizards and Hasbro forgot in this new equation is the amazing amount of sales that the OGL and D20 agreements generated for them. Wizards was the cool big brother, the fondly thought of wise uncle, and the patron that we all looked too for guidance. Hasbro looks like our alcoholic stepfather in comparison.

Hasbro is very aware that the sales of 3.5 are likely to tank in the face of 4e, if they haven’t already. There are people still producing and supporting OGL products, though most of the smarter players have either hedged their bets completely, or just stopped and moved on. Still, if everyone else stopped today and announced Hasbro wasn’t going to have a new OGL, D20, or licenses then there would be a huge backlash. So no one is talking, and to the smart players their silence is all the more telling.

I think the silence is telling us, the RPG community, that Hasbro doesn’t need us at all. What they will shortly be missing is all of those extra sales that the OGL and D20 realized for them. I think a few months or a year after 4e comes out everyone at Hasbro will be jumping around screeching “why didn’t you tell me!”