The Furor Unrelenting

 Well, after two weeks of unrelenting fury aimed at Wizards of the Coast its all sort of spiraled into a never-ending churn of youtube commentators seeking new and explosive angles to get more clicks while the actual community battens down the hatches and gets behind Paizo's Open RPG Content License. 

There is a bit about WotC stuffing the bare minimum into a creative commons license that is less useful than simply relying on existing legal interpretations of fair use. 

There is also a ton of back-and-forth about how much WotC does  (or does not) really care, or use their questionnaires and so forth. What I am getting out of this is that long before WotC by virtue of Hasbro officially went full supervillain against the community, there were a lot of people who did not like them, but also grudgingly couldn't really bitch about it because WotC left everyone alone. Now that they have turned into the Destroyer of Game Communities, this has allowed all that pent up energy to channel directly at the Goliath of the hobby.

There are people calling to boycott the upcoming D&D film. That movie has to cater to all the normies and the filthy casuals out there; it's just as likely to bomb on arrival right now for reasons wholly related to a poor quality product as it is to succeed despite the core tabletop community feeling that depriving Hasbro and Warner Brothers of some ticket sales makes a statement. It is also just as likely to be a hit, in which the crowd that loves movies and spectacles goes to see it simply because there is often nothing else fun to watch that week, and besides, we all caught the latest edition of Covid already so why not go out to the theater. What I mean is: I don't think a boycott impacts the gaming side of this equation, and harms the broader concept of the license; but the intent is in the right spirit, I suppose. 

I really have no idea how things will look in one or two years in the hobby landscape. The idea that in 2025 we could see Paizo once more at the forefront of the broader community, a champion of open game content and compatibility while WotC lurks in a walled electronic enclave preying on the tabletop equivalent of whales who can't quit D&D seems a little freaky to me, but also feels inevitable. Its that slow motion train wreck where we can see where all the pieces will end up, but have to watch for an interminably long period of time for them all to land there.