Good. WotC is wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Good,
WotCHASBRO is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.FIFY
Either way, the money grab is why I didn’t get back into MtG recently.
I considered sticking my toe in and was told “oh yeah, just buy a $90 commander precon and hop right in.”
Yeah, no thanks.
Impossible to find without a markup of at least 40% if a final Fantasy commander
WotC did some shady shit before, too. Certainly right improve since the acquisition though.
Aren’t Hasbro the villain moreso than WotC?
People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.
I organized pen and paper RPG conventions back when D&D 4 came out. We banned D20 based games even then as a boycott of WotC.
From what I’ve read WOTC has been a bad employer for a long time.
From my understanding, they used to basically be the same as Games Workshop is today: If you talk to people who work there “off the record” (or they are pushing the equivalent of a youtube channel… shout out to Rogue Hobbies) you’ll either get outright condemnation or LOTS of vague posting of a culture of theft and abuse.
But recent years have seen people get annoyed enough at the products that they now care about labor and we start to see a LOT more complaints.
Depends on who you talk to. I always thought the atmo was pretty chill. When I was there around 2010 as a contractor for a couple years they had a strange work schedule: 9-hr days Mon-Thurs and half day Friday - which was almost universally regarded as a screw-around day, along with at least half of Thursday.
Thanks for providing your view! I had only read the mostly negative reviews on job sites when I was thinking of applying around 2015ish.
WotC+D&D is like ~30-40% of Hasbro. The only other brand they have that’s worth a similar amount is (ironically enough lmao) Monopoly.
The problem for Hasbro is that, right now, the company doesn’t have that much in non WotC moneymakers and hasn’t had it for years. There have been attempts by activist investors to push for having WotC demerged from Hasbro so WotC isn’t subsidizing the rest of Hasbro. The across-the-board cuts were Hasbro leadership trying to placate investors, but they cut muscle and bone from WotC for some reason instead.
I mean, sure, but it’s like pulling the WotC mask off a Scooby Doo villain.
And Crawford is an incompetent smartass. I honestly don’t know what any TTRPG would have to gain from including him in the team.
If they hope to chase 5e’s success by following in its footsteps - piss poor adventure modules, nonexistent DM support, unbalanced player options, and a game designer that contradicts himself on Twitter every other post while attempting to explain why he isn’t wrong - then good luck to them, I guess.
I very much doubt that 5e became the juggernaut that it’s now because of Crawford. If anything, it’s despite of him - mostly because of the free publicity granted by things like Critical Role and Stranger Things, and DnD being the default option for anyone who develops an interest in roleplaying for the first time.
How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.
I would put money on the downfall of WotC being exclusively due to being owned by Hasbro and their executives forcing their greedy practices onto the team.
WotC was already pretty awful before the Hasbro acquisition, as I recall.
Internally, yea, but I was speaking more towards the decline of their products, not the treatment of staff, that was being discussed in the top comment.
Yeah, I guess that’s pretty subjective overall. In any case, they’re not so great now.
Crawford worked on Blue Rose, Warhammer Fantasy, and Mutants & Masterminds outside of WotC.
Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?
Why?
Sending The Pinkerton’s off to intimidate a YouTube reviewer
Everybody who was passionate about games have left and been replaced by money-grabbing opportunists who only want to inflate the stock value, bail out and get their severance pay.
I don’t have links to it at the moment (I’m prepping dinner… so excuse the laziness 😅) but if you search “D&D controversy” or “OGL” you’ll find plenty of discussions and analysis.
In short: they tried (but are still attempting to) bring micro-transactions and loot box mechanics to tabletop games.
I love Christ Perkin and Jeremy Crawford. Who is even running D&D now? They are literally the only people I knew still on the project. They are both great. Were they forced out of WoTC?
Chatgpt probably
ChatGPT give some pretty generic DnD advice. I can’t wait until they make a terrible automated DM. I can’t wait to play the most generic DnD of all time.
Every single game is just the plot of Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
That would be fun. Every game would just be a series of different fetch quests with a rotated list of the same enemies. Like a MMRPG but worse and more expensive
“the corporation” is running it now. It’s not about people any more, it’s all procedural and goal oriented operations now.
Gross. I was really excited for 5.5 for a while but don’t really want to get it anymore. I liked the PHB class upgrades when I read it but don’t own anything from it yet
5.5, in my opinion, is a very corporate edition of the game. There wasn’t any actual change or reason for a new edition other than Hasbro wanted D&DBeyond and the money it got, and the way to do that was make a “new edition”. But people liked and were playing 5e so, make a backwards compatible system that’s totally the same thing.
The 2024 version of D&D, in my eyes, doesn’t fix any of the actual issues with the game. They change some wording and change some abilities but none of the core issues are dealt with. So to me, it’s a pointless cash grab.
I like the changes with weapons properties and I like some of the updates with various classes for some improvements to the weaker subclasses and feats. I overall enjoyed the majority of the changes.
However, from what I have heard and seen I did not enjoy the changes to the Monster Manual and statblocks.
Shoutout to Chris Perkins! I got to help playtest parts of 5E back in the day and he was the DM. Getting paid to play D&D is nice work if you can get it!
I pick crit role every time, those goddamn Wizards lost the plot. They got Rincewind at the damn helm.
I really hope they’re not putting their weight behind Daggerheart long term. That whole hope and fear system is so unappealing.
long term
If you can remember THACO, tabletop games have survived needing to change a few systems in the past
I don’t need to remember it. I’m in the middle of replaying Baldur’s Gate 1. But that was more of a complicated math formula to derive something that we can do much more simply. The hope and fear thing not only reminds me of that scam curriculum in Donnie Darko, it also doesn’t feel like an interesting tactical layer; it does the opposite by interfering with initiative in a way that I’m not a fan of.
It’s interesting and it seems like a good change for people that have done a lot of d&d but it’s probably not going to be a complete replacement for 5e. It seems good for short campaigns but it only has one book out for now.
I’ve never ran it, but what don’t you like about it?
It’s rooted in the light/dark side of the force from Star Wars tabletop, and kind of inherent to Star Wars is making out everything in the world to be light or dark as though it’s that simple, but hardly anything in life is.
I have never seen hope/fear described as light/dark from star wars, and I’ve read the Daggerheart rules.
It came from here.
I can see why the comparison to Genysis would exist now but I don’t think it’s a very worthwhile comparison to make in how they play out and are used in each system.
I don’t think any designer has ever said it is from Star Wars, and it most definitely does not use them as Light Side/Dark Side or imposed morality. It’s inspired by the Genesys rpg system of degrees of success/failure and has narrative effects like “Yes, but” and “No, however”.
I’d seen it written up in other articles as coming from Star Wars, so perhaps it was that writer that was mistaken. I’ve watched them play, heard the rules explanations and such, and “yes, but” and “no, however” to skill checks aren’t solving some problem I’ve had in other systems.
It comes from the FFG Star wars RPG system and its method of creating multiple success/failure conditions. It’s an entirely independent system to the light/dark side force mechanics.
That’s fair if it’s not solving a problem for you, but it does add something new that resonates with a lot of people (at least it did for me). I’m speaking from the Genesys side so I don’t know how daggerheart handles it, but I absolutely loved it. I found it made skill checks more collaborative, my table would suggest ideas for how to interpret the roll, and having more to ‘explain’ got people more descriptive in how they talk about their actions. We went from ‘I take a swing. Nope, that’s a miss’ to ‘failure with advantage, ok I go in with my axe but I can’t get through this guy’s defenses. For my advantage, I want to hook this guys shield with my axe so the next attacker gets a boost die to hit’.
It does make checks more involved, but I prefer fewer, more impactful checks as a general rule anyway.
Sure, it’s not solving anything, but IMO it’s fun giving the GM a tokenified response currency even though you pull off a success. I’ve seen a fair amount of backlash, but just feel portraying the dice mechanic as Star Wars is miles off base, when it adds a narrative prompt for success/failure (D&D does this with nat20/nat1).
I’ll grant you I’m not typically the GM. From your perspective, do you see it making things more interesting as a GM? Because as a player, it’s less up my alley, and the GM’s response currency without that system is whatever they want it to be, because they’re the GM.
It does, I think. It powers “lair actions”, gives powers like interrupting turn sequence, making multiple moves in sequence. When the GM has a pool of currency players can see, there’s an unsaid acknowledgement things are going wrong/badly, which helps fuel collaboration in the storytelling aspect. I can say that someone fails an attack, but on a fail with fear they miss the attack AND leave themselves open to a harsh counterattack, or perhaps lose their weapon. I can do all of this off the cuff in D&D because ‘GM said so’, but then the players can feel an adversarial relationship instead of collaborative, which is so much more encouraged in Daggerheart.
All entirely subjective, and at its core it’s still heroic fantasy same as hundreds of other systems and if you are put off by rolling two dice for metacurrency, it’s likely not for you.
Hopefully they fix Daggerheart’s open-license. Last I looked it was problematic to say the least.
Same. I tried looking through it and was extremely confused by what I was reading.
I just searched for updates on the matter and found a Lemmy post with a youtube video.
Perkins is the GOAT !
It’s when I started watching Acquisitions Inc that I realized how much I could improve as a DM 🤣
I picked up so much tricks and techniques just watching him run these games
Ok now do Magic
They got the good ones
