I know this is a bit of a delayed reaction, but quite frankly, it's taken me a bit of time to get my head back on straight after all of the OGL drama.
We survived a hell of a month. The TTRPG community survived an almost disastrous January.
For those who don't know all of the details about what happened with Wizards of the Coast and the OGL, I'm so jealous. The info is out there, and I'm really not interested in re-litigating all of it, so I'm not going into it in this post.
Obviously, as members of the community, each of us needs to figure out where we stand, and how we feel about supporting WotC. I'll probably write up more info about my thoughts in the coming weeks (short version: glad they changed it, still don't trust them, not sure what I will or won't buy from WotC in the future, definitely gonna learn some new systems soon).
But for today, I just want to take a minute and appreciate where we are.
For a good chunk of January, I was struggling to pull together a ton of energy to work on projects and to work on my channel. I definitely fell behind my (self-imposed) productivity goals for the first few months of this year. The only time I got a surge of energy back came when I actually got a chance to play some games - each game I played gave me a nice surge of energy that I was otherwise lacking.
(It's also absolutely wild to me that the OGL drama really lasted less than a month - it felt like it took a thousand years, but in reality it was fully contained to the confines of January. That's bizarre.)
But the fact that we got what we wanted - we got WotC to back down from their plans - is a huge victory. We didn't just go back to the status quo; we got a better deal than we had before. That is absolutely unheard of. I've never, ever seen a giant corporation give up as much ground as WotC did after this debacle. They've severely weakened their negotiating power for any further action they want to take with (or against) the community.
There are some aspects of this situation that still frustrate me. For example, I think the way Will from DnDShorts was treated by the community was actually really shitty, and we'll probably also talk more about that in a future blog post.
And true, my February also looks like it's going to be pretty stressful, due to the fact that I got laid off at the end of January.
But for right now, I just want to savor the moment. I don't want us to lose sight of the fact that we actually, truly, told a company what we wanted... and we got it. These days, that feels so incredibly rare, and we need to keep celebrating it.
Good game, y'all :)