D&D in the Sandstorm

The owners of D&D, by all indications, would like it to reinvent itself into a game that makes heavy use of digital tools, often including during play. Moreover, they'd like these to be digital tools they control to some extent, and which give them money. Additionally, they want added control over 3rd parties; something much less permissive than the open license of the current era.

In hindsight, I think this was inevitable.  And not because of corporate greed (though corporate greed set the timetable and the demand list, and did it early),  but because of the collaborative folk tradition of gamers.

I enjoy OSR stuff; lots.  Also indie stuff and…. Uh, basically a bit of everything in gaming.  But the OSR stuff especially applies here.

Over the last couple of decades, the era of the OGL, not only has publishing at the small scale gotten trivially easy, but there has sprung up a massive list of D&D-likes, hacks of it, and basically anything you want.

Complete games in the same conceptual space exist in absurd numbers and high quality, many inexpensive, some free.  With a day to search around and another to read and make some notes, you could smash together a dungeon adventure game that suits your tastes passably from just parts of stuff people have thrown out there for free.  Kitbash D&D is easy, and the array of options improves every year. 

What D&D has is the brand and the network of players.  It’s like Facebook; people are mostly there because their friends are there, even if there are better options.

Now, all those smaller bits are not competition with D&D proper at this point, and might never be (there are a couple, much smaller, competitors in the space, but those aren’t really to be feared in and of themselves for Hasbro).  Those smaller bits, though, are trouble on an existential level; they’re folk tradition moving back into the space where business says competition occurs, not solely as a business property, but heavily as an incoherent mass that, while it does commerce,  doesn't do business properly from a corporate viewpoint, because that's not what it's primarily about.  They don’t draw business to competitive centralization and keep it there; they dissipate and erode it.  They can outproduce even the leanest team because they’re often doing it for free.

To repurpose an old line from Clay Shirky: Bloggers and influencers and social media didn’t compete with newspapers, but they started to render the institutions of journalism incoherent, and those institutions are still eroding now.

Or, to get all analogous:

The caravan can weather a good bit of blowing sand; it is not competition.  But as the wind picks up for yet another go at dumping grit down his tunic, the caravan owner isn't thinking about getting up on top of a hill to get a better view.  He's thinking, god, this is annoying.  And the forecast say it's never, ever going to improve.  It’s just going to slowly, slowly get get worse, forever.  At some point, it’ll be a sandstorm that’s going to start doing real damage.

Time to build walled gardens, new stops, places the sand only gets in after it's mixed up right to build the walls higher.  More control, and look for something that the sandstorm can never reach. Much as a fortune has been made trading across this ridiculous desert, time to shut it out.

DM's Guild, D&D Beyond; keep going until you get something the blowing sand can't get into, that costs too much for them to reproduce, then center the business there and make that D&D.

Of course, that means it has to stop being folk art.  But nobody really cares about that, right?

…Right?