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Is that how this kind of thing usually works?
Fire all of the talent that made the brand great and THEN sell the brand?
Wait, I guess it makes sense. Fire everyone, sell to another company, then that company can try to rehire at a reduced salary.
Wait, I guess it makes sense. Fire everyone, sell to another company, then that company can try to rehire at a reduced salary.
Nah. They’ll sell in a leveraged buy-out, which will give the shareholders at Hasbro tons of money, cost Tencent nothing, and put the new D&D LLC in tons of debt. Then they’ll piecemeal out any IP or assets that can make them any money before letting D&D LLC go bankrupt. See what happened to Toys R’ Us for a past example.
Can you share some companies that Tencent has done this to?
Fair enough.
The name is all they are after.
Sell the rights to the name to existing smaller companies who will want to buy it.
DnD will never be what it was, but its name will live on.
ah the toys r us and kb toys model
Well, it seems the news was fake, originating from a Chinese news site. Both Wizard of the Coast and Larian (cited as the intermediary between Hasbro and Tencent) denied any interest in selling the brand.
Thank you kind soul for the updated information.
Honestly the original article didn’t make a ton of sense… Why would Hasbro approach Larian to buy the entirety of the DnD IP? I was originally assuming it was misreporting a possible sale of rights to make video games only, not the entire IP, which might have made more sense to approach Larian about.
Roll for a wisdom save.
Happy 50th Anniversary, D&D!
I struggle to think of a buyer that would be worse for the players than Tencent.
On the bright side, Hasbro’s last big D&D blunder prodded the community into developing alternative gaming systems and licenses, so I think we’ll be in good shape to carry on without the brand if this happens.
I can easily think of three buyers worse for players than tencent. Blizzard, Epic Games, Apple.
Damn, imagine if Larian took over… Also I didn’t know they’re Tencent’s lol
Eh, minorly. Swen and his wife still have massive majority control of Larian.
If tencent buys DnD I am quitting, full stop.
There’s no way Tencent are as bad as Hasbro
Great news! There are many, many tabletop role-playing games that are not Dungeons and Dragons that you can play! My favorite easy alternative is Dungeon World but there are literally hundreds out there.
Pathfinder 2nd edition is a great alternative for players who prefer a simulation style of play with detailed rules. There is a big learning curve but it can be worth it.
Dungeon World is great for players who enjoy less complexity and collaborative storytelling. Getting new players stated with Dungeon World was easy, fast, and fun my group.
Tons of great alternatives!
So nothing Hasbro has done up to this point turned you off of D&D? All corporations are evil, some just have more power than others.
Everything about that is absolute cancer.
Everyone’s favorite TTRPG going world stage corporate. Fucking yay…
I get the spirit of the comment, but among people who often play multiple TTRPGs almost no one would call D&D their favorite. I would be worried if Tencent (or Hasbro) bought Arc Dream or Evil Hat, but in practice the John Harpers of the world leave and start another company using their corporate lucre. In fact that’s where Paizo started, from people peeling off of D&D after Hasbro acquired it.
Tabletop games are such a functionally cheap product to create and sell it’s impossible to truly stomp out competition. Tencent would have to buy Twitch and YouTube and disallow any other game, and even then every nerd convention in the world would have some guy selling stapled together zines that rips D&D a new asshole.
Tl;dr: I don’t give a shit if Tencent buys D&D.
How is that different than now? DnD fell apart because Hasbro is a world stage corporation, they’re just trading it to another world stage corporation which will kill it further until they pass it on too.
Whatever you remember liking is long long dead.
But now it’s being bought by a global corporation that’s run by non-white people, and that’s scarier for reasons that I refuse to interrogate further.
Something about the way you worded the first paragraph makes it read as if you are stating your opinion and not mocking the reason most people go “Tencent bad”. I had to re-read a couple times to understand it. I do agree with your critique.
Nobody was trying to make this about race except you my man. That was the very first place your mind went. Which probably isn’t a coincidence because, in my experience, the people screaming look at me look at me I’m not racist usually turn out to be the most racist motherfuckers you will ever deal with.
“If no one explicitly mentions that their feelings are about race, then they’re not about race!”
So like… what’s it about then? Can you explain why Tencent is worse than Hasbro?
Its in general about their properties and how they handle them. I seriously doubt most of the people here, other then race obsessed people like you, could even tell you where tencent is based. Could even tell you who the nationality of the people in charge are. I sure as fuck can’t. I have heard the name several times in the past but, honestly, until now until I saw you posting this I thought they were an American company.
Because, you know, I don’t obsessively check the race of everything before I make a decision about it.
You didn’t explain what about Tencent was bad in any clear way, and you didn’t compre it to Hasbro, so you haven’t answered the question.
And last time I saw Tencent brought up it was about their investment in Epic, and there were loads of comments about social credit and winnie the pooh. It’s not hard to notice the problem.
Contrary to what a lot of racists would like you to believe, noticing racism is not the real racism. But do go off about how much I’m virtue signalling.
The big issue is they are just another huge shitty corp that will bring no value, and more importantly will 100% be sitting on this property for a very long time. If it got sold people would hope it would go to someone good, someone who would bring something positive too the property, people who might turn things around and put real heart and soul into it.
Ok so…YOUR TURN! You are defending tencent so hard, making it so clear anyone who doesn’t like the poor company is only against them because of racism. There has to be something amazing about them that you know that will change all of our minds? Because, honestly, right now I’m reminded of all the ‘if you didn’t like the movie it means your sexist’ crap we got with girl ghostbusters.
Who’s saying Tencent owning D&D is worse than Hasbro owning D&D?
Hasbro has thoroughly fucked D&D over. My expectation is that Tencent will find different and novel ways to fuck D&D over. I doubt Tencent will be significantly better or worse for D&D than Hasbro. But then D&D (and WotC more generally) was mostly beyond redemption before news that Hasbro was trying to sell it off.
Have you read the comments? Like, actually read them? For understanding? For tone?
The comment I replied to was asking that exact question, and I was pointing out that the only reason to think they are any different is probably rooted in racism, as a lot of the panic surrounding tencent has been in my experience.
Delete this.
I genuinely can’t decide if this is being downvoted by people who think I’m being sincere, people who don’t like their racism being called out, people who think I’m defending a global corporation, or people who think I’m a tankie. Maybe it’s a mix of all four.
I downvoted it because it’s racism out of nowhere. Whether you’re being pro-racist or ironically anti-racist hardly matters, it’s just an unwelcome and unwarranted jump to this subject that nobody cared about.
What reasonable person could read your post as anything but sincere racism? An “/s” goes a long way.
(Though I’m not sure in this case that would have been enough to keep you from getting downvotes. Would have made your post sound like you thought everyone who thought Tencent owning D&D was a bad thing thought so for racist reasons.)
And you misused the word “interrogate.”
A reasonable person might read the phrase “for reasons I refuse to interrogate further” and realise that’s far too self-aware for an openly racist person to say.
But you apparently noticed that I said “interrogate” and you think I… used it wrong? I am genuinely curious what you think that word means in the context of that phrase, and what you think the phrase itself means.
Have an upvote for scarcasm
Well they can’t handle it any worse
Yeah, they absolutely can…
yo fuck hasbro this is why critical role branched out
Pretty much. Their Candela Obscura game has already been used to make thousands in charity for Doctors Without Borders and there’s more to come.
We should petition the government to invalidate the copyright on D&D and send it to the public domain.
Literally no need. Take a rule book, modify it as desired. There’s a huge creator ecosystem out there, paid or otherwise, and WoC just outright doesn’t matter to it.
Headline was so confusing because I never see it stylized like that. It’s always D&D or DnD, never DND - that’s ‘Do Not Disturb’.
Definitely gonna get enshittified
I despise Tencent and the general business model of just buying up shit, but worse than Hasbro? Tencent played quite the part in BG3‘s making (By buying 30% of Larian years ago to keep cash flowing) and everyone loves it. They usually let western companies do as they please. If anything Hasbro selling it is yet another proof of why they shouldn‘t have it in the first place. And if WotC had anything left of a spine they would try to buy themselves free but that sure as hell is not going to happen because they do not care.
That would be anything produced after 3.5. The brand has been going down for a long time. That’s not to say there is nothing good in the current 5e, just for me it seems like it lost its soul with corporate oversight.
I moved to Pathfinder 2e and I couldn’t be happier. The only issue I have is that one of my players is Mercer-coded (is that a thing?) and really hates any time a skill, class, or spell isn’t a 1:1 copy of DnD. He recently grabbed Bane as part of a feat for his barbarian and learned it isn’t the same as DnD Bane and had a meltdown.
Mercer as in a merchant of textiles? I guess that’s wrong but it would be hilarious if textile merchants are famous for that behaviour :D
That sounds like a miserable person to play with
I don’t understand why being mercer-coded would make them hate anything not dnd, mercer plays various systems when his friends do oneshots, and knows several systems.
He seems like an asshole though.
We’re all close friends outside of the game and we are all used to each other’s quirks. It’s a pain sometimes, but he does genuinely enjoy the game, though. He’d only played 2 campaigns of DnD before-hand (Strahd and Frostmaiden), but has listened to every episode of Critcal Role. I decided to homebrew a full 1-20 campaign for the group as an introduction to Pathfinder so we could all (GM included) get a taste for it across the entire span of character growth, and it’s been a learning experience for us all.
4e was D&D for people who would rather be playing WoW.
5e is a watered-down anemic shadow of 3.5.
That’s a common way of putting down 4e, but it’s not so. I have no interest whatsoever in WoW but I really liked 4e. 4e’s approach was to build a very consistent and rigorously-defined framework for the game, and then build its various elements (classes, monsters, abilities, etc.) strictly within that framework. I think it actually hit a very nice sweet spot; the framework was sufficiently flexible that a huge amount of interesting and distinctive content could be made, but it was also well-defined enough and simple enough to understand and apply that everything “just worked.” You could play as a fighter for a whole bunch of levels and then pick up a completely different character sheet for a wizard and you’d find that most of the mechanics worked the same. Combat was very positional, with lots of abilities that allowed you to set other players up for success, which encouraged teamwork and player interaction.
It annoys me greatly that WotC tried to set the system up to be dependent on their online tools, failed, and then tore the tools down to leave the wreckage largely unplayable. I can still play a 3.5e campaign just as easily as I did back in the day but it’d be rather hard to play 4e as easily even though I still have the books. The best tools were WotC-owned and they don’t allow third parties to fill the void they left when they decided to transition to 5e - presumably to avoid another Pathfinder situation.
I actually quite like the 5th edition, since it simplifies some of the most convoluted/boring areas of the 3rd edition.
Also coming after the 4th edition might have helped quite a bit in the perception
You say simplified, I say dumbed down.
But yeah 4e didn’t say an especially high bar.
They’re going to abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves?
That word with a very specific meaning is popping up everywhere and used as “made worse” and it’s grating.
Language is fluid. Nothing new.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t complain about the directions the fluid is flowing. In this case a specialized term for something that didn’t previously have a popular term describing it has been rapidly diluted to mean “bad change I don’t like.” So that thing doesn’t have a specialized term any more, which hampers discourse.
The thing is, “enshitification” was never defined as “abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves”. That’s merely one of the stages that Doctorow outlined as part of the enshitification process.
Enshitification, as a whole, is the process of stripping value from a product or service from everyone except for shareholders.
The perils of language in the modern age, most people are not smart, and once a new word gets popular enough the majority of people using it will resemble the majority of society, ie, not smart people.
China buying up everything
This would never have been put up for sale if Hasbro had taken care of it, regardless of who buys the IP from them I doubt they can do worse. Let’s says Tencent does buy the IP, they could bury it but where is the profit in that, there is also nothing to divide up and parcel off. Worse case we get what we have now and we all complain about the same things we are complaining about with Hasbro. Whoever buys the IP will want to make money, so let’s hope they look at the community concerns and try to course correct the mess that Hasbro has made.
I just don’t trust tencent. They are to China like Facebook is to America in terms of casting large nets for data gathering. I agree Hasbro should let dnd go to a better care taker, but if it’s Tencent I don’t know if I’d be able to trust any official dnd software.
Luckily, dnd is well established as a physical medium, so the impact wouldn’t be too big, but the principal still stands
Just asking, is there some sort of “Open Source DND”?
Good of you to ask. It’s entirely possible to play D&D without buying any official materials (and you should play it without buying anything Hasbro currently sells, but that’s just my opinion).
In fact, you can find a more or less complete set of rules for most versions of D&D just by searching combinations of the version you want and terms like “SRD” or “wiki”. Some of these will lead you to officially hosted sources, and some not, but the great thing about D&D is that Hasbro can’t ever sell it away from players.
I’m not going to provide any links to anything because someone will accuse me of breaking the rules, but D&D isn’t Hasbro, and it wasn’t even really TSR. It’s just collections of rules, and game rules are not patentable. Hasbro owns a copyright in the 5e PHB’s written content, for example (and some trademarks on trade dress and some terms), but crucially it does not own the way people play D&D. Ergo, in a matter of speaking, Dungeons and Dragons is already open source. If you’ve got a pen, some paper, and a fistful of dice, you can play. Less is more.
Having said that, many folks believe that the best versions of D&D aren’t in print anymore anyway, but even if 5e is your version of choice (and to its credit, it has a few marks in its favor), I’d recommend checking a used book store before getting worried about whether this rumor ever amounts to anything. Hasbro can sell D&D, or not, and millions of people will happily keep right on playing D&D every week without ever giving them a dime.
I’d suggest checking out the EN World Advanced 5E. It’s open source, way better than basic 5E, and the creative team is very pro-player.
I prefer Dungeon World which has D&D flavor on different dicing mechanics but others have posted other systems closer to familiar D20 system.
Try DC20
D&D’s 5e SRD was released under CC-BY. It only includes one subclass per class and a handful of monsters, but it’s all the rules.
Tales of the Valiant and Pathfinder 2e both have SRDs licensed under the ORC license and are based in D&D-type gameplay.
FATE is a different type of TTRPG that has a SRD licensed both under OGL and CC-BY.
Powered by the Apocalypse is a different system and has a permissive, but hand-wavey license.
Of all of these, ToV is the most like 5e without being controlled by a multi-national, public company.
Here might be a good start for you: https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems#Open_Game_License
Just because of the nature of those games, I would speculate that the page above is just a fraction of what is available.
No. Don’t trust the OGL. WOTC tried to “revoke” the OGL last year in a way that would fuck over all 3rd party publishers. People raised absolute Cain and WOTC kinda sorta backed down (kinda sorta) but there’s no guarantee the OGL is safe moving forward. To the point that Paizo (makers of Pathfinder 2e) are reprinting all of their Pathfinder 2e materials to remove anything that could remotely depend on the OGL.
If you want something more trustworthy than OGL, look into ORC.
How close is Pathfinder to that?
Pathfinder 2e Remaster (which isn’t out yet) is the most “open source D&D” thing there will be any time soon.
And Pathfinder 2e (non-Remaster) is the clostest thing there is right now.
I think Tales of the Valiant is closer to D&D 5e and also licensed under ORC. Either is a great option for people looking to leave D&D though.
vOwOxel didn’t ask anything about 5e. Just about “DND”.
The remaster is out!
What’s the remaster do to it? I’m sure it’s a lot, but does anyone have the cliff notes?
Small improvements and cosmetic changes appear throughout, but outside of a few minor changes in terminology, the changes are not anywhere substantive enough to be considered a new edition.
Pathfinder Second Edition Remaster Project!
Don’t quote me on it, but I’m pretty sure the remaster was about removing anything licensed under OGL so they could license it under ORC.
Yes, also allowed for a very nice balance and QoL pass on a few classes.
Pathfinder 1e had a good license and would be very familiar to D&D 3e players. Pathfinder 2e has a great license but would have a bit of a relearning curve for D&D 5e players.
Tales of the Valiant is probably the closest to 5e with a great license.
Seriously… where’s the repo? Lol.
