Paradigm Shift: Botched Initiative: The Dungeons and Dragons Story

Bethanne Patrick:

Welcome back to Missing Pages. This is the podcast where we examine some of the most surprising, industry-shaking controversies in the literary world and try to make sense of them. 

In this series we’re looking at how the social media age has created new opportunities and challenges for publishing. We began with Colleen Hoover, and moved onto the Omegaverse fanfiction lawsuit between Addison Cain and Zoey Ellis. In this episode, we’re discussing Dungeons and Dragons. 

Adventure Zone Podcast:

Sit back and enjoy the McElroy’s playing Dungeons and Dragons in a project we are tentatively calling The Adventure Zone

Critical Role:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first episode of campaign three of Critical Role where a bunch of us nerdy ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons and Dragons. 

Dark Dice:

Our tale is a harrowing collaborative one set in a world of Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons Trailer:

Everyone is raving about Dungeons and Dragons, it's the kind of fun you’ve been waiting for

Stranger Things:

Mom we’re in the middle of a campaign!

Bethanne Patrick:

You’re probably thinking: “What does D&D have to do with book publishing?” The game is actually based on a user’s manual that is updated annually, and those manuals used to be published by Random House. And also, D&D has a rich world of storytelling and world building all published in volumes of books. D&D is just as much a literary endeavor as it is a game. 

Not to mention the game has by some estimates had more than 50M players since it was released in the 70s, and estimates show that well over 1M copies of the latest 5th edition game book have been sold since it was published in 2014. 

For our fan fiction episode, we interviewed Ben Riggs, author of “Slaying the Dragon, A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons” and host of the podcast Plot Points. While the interview didn’t fit into the episode, we couldn’t NOT publish this for you all to hear. 

D&D’s history is long and tumultuous. It includes bad business deals, Christmas eve layoffs, and a whole host of bitter interactions with fans. So how did all of this lead to the rise of one of the most popular role playing games? Well… it all begins with a guy named Gary GyGax, and we have Ben Riggs here to tell us all about him. 

Bethanne Patrick:

Ben, could you tell us a little bit about the evolution of Dungeons and Dragons?

Ben Riggs:

D and D are difficult to put into context because its almost a cliche story at this point. Guygax was a part-time cobbler. He'd been fired from his job, uh, selling insurance. Uh, he, he was so poor that his sons would talk about how they would wear holes in their shoes and put cardboard in their shoes to make it to spring. Um, and when. Gary Gek started a company to publish Dungeons and Dragons. He and the game's co-creator for the first few years they were again working out of Gary Gaga's basement under these naked light bulbs on, uh, two by four hobby horses, personally, putting together components to ship off to people who were ordering Dungeons and Dragons, uh, through mail order.

Bethanne Patrick:

So how did this small self-published game fan out into a multi-million dollar franchise?

Ben Riggs:

Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop role playing games are a radical and revolutionary new medium. Because of that, people are still struggling with how to really make money off of it, and. There was a huge boom of D and D in the early 1980s. Um, and during that boom, TSR signed an agreement with the Random House that said  that TSR would receive payment from Random House, not when Random House their distributors sold their products, but rather when TSR products arrived at Random House's Warehouse.

Bethanne Patrick:

TSR, or Tactical Studies Rules, was the name of the company created by Gary Gygax and Don Kaye, so GyGax could self-publish D&D.

Given that this was the first tabletop roleplay game and appealed to the fantasy genre, it had all the trappings for instant success. Random House saw an opportunity here. 

By paying TSR to make products, they could distribute and make profits off the game’s huge popularity. And then TSR didn’t have to think about that side of things – they could just keep putting out new elements for their game.

But this approach only worked for so long…

Ben Riggs:

Then there came a crash and a slow slide, uh, into terrible sales. And by the early nineties, the way TSR was using that, uh, distribution agreement with Random House was just to cover basic costs. Uh, they would overprint product and ship it to Random House just to generate loans, uh, to keep the lights on in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where TSR was based.

Finally, Random House returned a ton of TSR products to TSR, which was a way of saying, look, You're these, these, these products are not going out to, malls. You're not gonna be getting sales from these products.

And because of all this titanic pressure that TSR was under, the Friday before Christmas in 1996, they fired dozens of people. One person told me “sheer murder.” People were told to stay in their cubicles and just wait for a phone call. A certain number of lucky staff were ushered into an office where they would remain safe and not have to watch the ugliness going on. But the people in that office, hey were overlooking the parking lot, so they got to watch everyone fired march out of the company.

Bethanne Patrick:

TSR was deep in debt to Random House. Its employees were out of jobs. That’s not a Christmas anyone wants. But an unexpected hero introduced a bold rebrand.

After the Christmas day layoffs, a company called Wizards of the Coast, who also owned Magic, the Gathering, a hugely popular fantasy card game, bought TSR in 1997. A lot of the people laid off were brought back and there was a lot of speculation and concern over what was going to happen with the game.

Ben Riggs

We nerds fear change and people were like, are they just gonna make d and d into a card game? Uh, you know, how are they gonna alter our beloved intellectual property? Uh, luckily for everyone, when Wizards of the Coast purchased Dungeons and Dragons, for the first time in over 10 years, a D&D fan gained control of the game in the company. Peter Atkisson, the CEO of Wizards of the Coast initially formed Wizards of the Coast to make products for fantasy, role playing games. So when Wizards acquired Dungeons and Dragons, it was being acquired by people who knew the product, knew the game and we're gonna take and do some amazing things with it.

Bethanne Patrick:

In 2000, they published the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons with something called an Open Game License.

Ben Riggs:

The third edition really resolved a lot of issues with the rules, made the fans happy, the open gaming license, however, uh, was revolutionary and visionary. And it's difficult to quantify how much it helped Dungeons and Dragons, but I think it has been a massive help to Dungeons and Dragons because what the Open Gaming license said was the following, you as a D&D fan you can write and publish products for Dungeons and Dragons with a few like carve outs that you can't use. It's akin to Disney purchasing Star Wars and then saying, you know what? We know we just spent a ton of money on this, but anybody can make a Star Wars film. You just can't use Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and the Death Star. And the result of Wizards of the Coast, setting the intellectual property free in that way, um, has been a fantastic blossoming of creativity, fandom, uh, and, and, and just a burst of creative juice.

Bethanne Patrick:

This may seem crazy from a business standpoint – why would you give away your property, even if it was just ideas? I mean, there’s probably 10s or 100s of millions of dollars sitting in lawyer’s bank accounts just debating which billion dollar film studio gets to publish Spiderman, so why would anyone just give their IP away like this?

The thinking was that everyone using the Open Gaming License would become evangelists of the game, helping to spread the word to new players. The more publishers and the more support the game got, the longer life it would have. And at the time it really did work.

So how did players run with this new freedom? 

Well, for one thing, they leaned into their preferences.

Ben Riggs:

You have some fans that want fantasy horror. You have some fans that want space fantasy may, maybe you even have some people that want to, to, you know, uh, play games, riding giant hamsters, who knows?

Bethanne Patrick:

Openness was a big part of the culture, and Riggs says the company embraced this… at least at first.

Ben Riggs:

They spent tens of millions of dollars buying D&D and then they were like, “Hey, other people can make money off of it too, not just us.”

Bethanne Patrick:

People crafted and sold figurines, health potions, adventure bags, custom journals, engraved horns, dice accessories, and fancy talismans to accompany gameplay. 

But they also wrote extensive PDFs that were rooted in the D&D world and provided extremely in-depth “campaigns” for players to experience the game. 

This IP was coming straight from the players, even if they were using rules from an existing world. And people were paying actual money for them. 

Were there people doing this as a full-time job? 

Ben Riggs:

People built livelihoods on it and it really just became a, uh, almost an industry assumption that we were all cooperating, not competing. You would hear people say, I hope Dungeons and Dragons does the best it can because they're the best emissaries for the tabletop role playing game hobby.Just the idea that like you weren't looking at other companies thinking, I'm gonna take you down, but rather I'm gonna look at your stuff. I'm gonna see what I like. I'm gonna take it, maybe I'll incorporate it into my things and improve them. And you just had this really amazing cycle of iteration and design because people were more interested in cooperating and sharing than competing and suing each other for supposedly stealing ideas.

Bethanne Patrick:

Up until this point, the D&D community hadn’t seen anything like this. The sharing of material was embraced and even conversational at times, with fans referencing other D&D story lines within their own…sorta like jazz music. 

But as it goes, perfect harmony doesn’t last forever. 

Solo authors who venture out might turn to copyright to ensure their profits. 

And Wizards of the Coast had a similar tune up its sleeve. In 2007, Dungeons and Dragons was gearing up to release their fourth edition. And the group who ran their magazine, Paizo Publishing, kept asking for updates on it.

Ben Riggs:

Finally, it gets to the point where Paizo has to ask itself. If we wait any longer to get answers about what's gonna happen with Dungeons and Dragons fourth edition in this new license, we might not hit our publishing deadlines. And Paizo decides, I guess we can't go with D&D anymore.And the thing they figured out was a game called Pathfinder, which is using the Open Gaming license. It's an iteration of the third edition rules of Dungeons and Dragons. And they begin publishing at about the same time that Wizards is publishing the fourth edition of D&D. 

Bethanne Patrick:

To really bring this point home: Wizards of the Coast was in charge of the rules and mechanics of how the game was meant to be played. Paizo Publishing was in the business of making D&D campaigns that players could buy – i.e. you fight a dragon in this one, you sail across an endless ocean in that one – but Paizo didn't have time to do that if the new rules/mechanics weren't shared by Wizards of the Coast. So Paizo was forced to do its own thing...and they created a new game called Pathfinder, an RPG in its own right. It's like D&D, but it’s not owned by Wizards of the Coast.

And then when Wizards of the Coast finally DID release their fourth edition…

Ben Riggs:

Now, the fourth edition of the game is not well received by fans.

Bethanne Patrick:

Basically, Wizards of the Coast decided that they didn’t want to release the fourth edition under the open gaming license, and instead it was released under a more restrictive one, which really affected those third party publishers who had been making and selling adapted game content.  

Think about it this way: historically with the OGL, The Podglomerate, the company that makes this podcast, could write and publish their own version of a D&D campaign. They could be credited as the author and even receive money when people decide to buy and play their version of the game. But when Wizards of the Coast published the fourth edition, they decided they didn’t want to use this licensing system anymore, and suddenly those third party publishers – like this hypothetical Podglomerate campaign – suddenly saw their creative outlet and income stream dry up. 

Disappointed in Wizards of the Coast, a lot of the fanbase either kept using the previous edition or played Pathfinder instead, which had a more robust and popular set of rules than the fourth edition of D&D. 

Ben Riggs:

If you looked in that moment, you would say the open gaming license was a huge mistake. Uh, it allowed the creation of the greatest rival to Wizards of the Coast in the company's history and the biggest threat to D&D in the game's history.

Bethanne Patrick:

Between 2011 and 2014, Pathfinder was actually a more popular game than Dungeons and Dragons, in large part due to the unpopularity of D&D’s fourth edition. Over time, the Wizards of the Coast realized their mistake and their slipping market share and fleeing community, and put out a fifth edition of the game. The fifth edition was released in 2014 and returned to the Open Gaming License. 

Ben Riggs:

My understanding is that Wizards had to be convinced that the OGL would be worth it for a 5th Edition. And, and thank God they did. Cuz I think it's one of the reasons that D&D exploded under fifth edition. D&D has become so popular that some of these third party publishers have multi-million dollar Kickstarters. People's livelihoods, uh, are being made with these multimillion dollar Kickstarters, and you at the same time have like critical role, uh, which is a huge YouTube sensation and has expanded into a television show on Amazon Prime. 

CRITICAL ROLE Announcement:

Okay, guys. We are so incredibly stoked to be coming to you from our new studio. Which will serve as the brand-new home of Critical Role and in this place, we will be able to experiment with new things, try new endeavors with our shows and of course that means, lots of cool new stuff from us. 

Bethanne Patrick:

Seems like a win win right? Their game is flying off the shelves, fans are making dnd their full time job which just makes dnd more popular. But inside wizards of the coast the faction that wanted their IP to solely be theirs resented the success of these people making money off their game.

Ben Riggs:

Certain people at Wizards of the Coast looked upon the success of these others and thought “That is money that should be ours.” And they took the shortsighted view that the open gaming license was bad for business because it was not allowing Wizards of the Coast to cash in on these other people making money, legitimately making money

Bethanne Patrick:

Wizards of the Coast not only wanted to profit off of others ideas, they wanted to own them--an attitude of 'what's yours is mine', from money to intellectual property, effectively stripping the value of shared storytelling from the community...all for a bigger piece of the D&D pie for the parent company.

It was this logic that eventually led Wizards of the Coast executives to make drastic plans that leaked in late December 2022. It revealed that the old open gaming license was no longer an authorized licensed agreement. 

Specifically Wizards of the Coast proposed some drastic changes: a 25 percent royalty on revenue from any open gaming license creator earning above $750,000 per year in sales; the right for WotC to use any content created under the license for any purpose; an apparent ban on the virtual tabletop simulators that helped kindle a tabletop gaming boom during pandemic lockdowns; and the de-authorization of anything made according to the previous OGL.

i.e. Pathfinder and games like it would owe Wizards of the Coast a lot of money if they would like to continue operating, and they would need to do it in a very different way than they were then doing. 

This caused huge pandemonium. They were talking about drastically altering the future of D&D, in addition to, previous editions--and the stories that creators were allowed to publish, whether for a wide audience or just their friends.

Ben Riggs:

It's a line where there's a before and there's an after and you can't go back. Because first of all, to any third party publisher, suddenly you're like, what am, what am I doing? Like, if this is true, if they're gonna cancel the old version of the open gaming license, my business is done.

Bethanne Patrick:

The community mobilized everywhere from directing public comments towards Wizards of the Coast, to arguing their case in online forums, to drumming up press around the issue. D&D communities felt like this was a knife straight in the back, no die roll needed, and they'd do anything they could to keep that from happening. And guess what? It worked.

After a period of silence, Wizards of the Coast made a statement attempting to reassure their community.

Through a series of announcements in January, 2023, Wizards of the Coast ended up recognizing the community pushback and confirmed that the Open Gaming License would, in fact, remain untouched, and that the Dungeons and Dragons 5.1 Edition would be placed under a Creative commons license. 

Ben Riggs:

Since the O G L, D&D I would say was a, um, Proof that there was another way that you don't need to be So, uh, litigious and eagle eyed about your intellectual property and that your intellectual property would survive, flourish, and even increase in value because you are letting other people use it.

I was angry because they were not only breaking one of the sacred trusts of the gaming industry, um, but they were being total dicks about it.

Bethanne Patrick:

Wizards of the Coast took their big play off the table. The fans had been heard. 

As for the company, they might never be trusted again. And that just might be for good reason. 

What I’m left with after hearing all of this is that there’s a conflict between two ideas: that ownership of a property is dependent on having sole control of the property, and that letting other people take liberties with your property actually increases its value. 

Both the stories of the Omegaverse lawsuit and Wizards of the Coast’s handling of D&D show a question of ownership: who can own a storytelling device, who can tell stories within a world, who does a story belong to…

There isn’t an easy answer, and it doesn’t seem like the legal or business world have any solid solutions either. 

Fan fiction and role playing have been around for much longer than Wizards of the Coast and the Omegaverse, and the debate over who owns what seems to be more tense than it’s ever been. But that we’re having these conversations at all is progress. 

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, Produced, mixed, and mastered by Chris Boniello with additional production and editing by Jordan Aaron.

This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz

This episode was written by Lauren Delisle

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Vannessa Ullman, and Annabella Pena. 

Art by Tom Grillo. Produced and Hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. Original music composed and performed by Hashem Assadullahi, additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate.

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Matt Keeley, Grant Irving from Mutual Friends Media, and Ben Riggs

Fact checking by Douglas Weissman

You can learn more about Missing Pages at the podglomerate dot com, on twitter at miss pages pod and on Instagram at missing pages pod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to.