I just discovered Kobold Press’s Black Flag Role Playing system and Tales of the Valorant game being made. I had no idea that was a thing.
Added with the ones I did know about:
- Critical Role’s Daggerheart
- MCDM’s new RPG (Matt Colville’s company)
- And we can count the Pathfinder 2’s updates if we want
I wonder how many other RPG’s are being made as a result of that debacle.
It does seem like a lot. WotC really shot themselves in the foot spawning all this new competition, didn’t they?
I don’t think any of these were created per se from the debacle but certainly it helped grow them and maybe push timelines up.
I can’t speak to the creation of new systems, but it certainly gave me the push to try existing alternatives.
Paizo’s modifications to Pathfinder 2E are a direct response to the OGL debacle. They’re tearing out all the stuff that was only in there because they were still chained to the SRD.
Like stats only counting when you had two of them so you have to take them two at a time or else it’s a waste.
Another huge boon is for the vtt community. A ton of shit had started moving from dnd to either Pathfinder or system agnostic.
Don’t forget Kobold Press’s Black Flag and FoundryVTT’s Crucible.
Palladium also decided to re-release their TMNT modern adventure line, very recently.
I think its really shaken up the industry from top to bottom. So much of the last twenty-five years of TTRPGs has leveraged the OGL. WotC effectively killed GURPs, WoD, and Rolemaster when they put everyone on the d20 standard. And with every new iteration of their core franchise - from 3.0 to D&D One - they’ve been promising fully integrated software support that… never shows up (which has been a huge boon for Bioware and now Lauren Studios, as D&D-adjacent video games thrived in the absence of a real VTT system).
I don’t think we’re going to see how badly Matel screwed the pooch on this for another decade, at least. But they punched a huge hole in the community that was churning out half of their franchise’s best content.
Even FoundryVTT is making their own RPG? That’s hilarious, I had no idea. I’ll have to look it up. Is it also fantasy? I’m guessing they’re aiming for a tactical focused system like MCDM’s since it’ll be for a VTT?
Its broadly fantasy, although the real focus is on building a system that naturally integrates with a VTT rather than one that’s patched in under tabletop rules. Still in pre-alpha development, too. So don’t hold your breath. But it looks promising.
Lol so now I can play Crucible on Foundry hosted by the Forge. When do I get a blacksmithing certification?
WotC really shot themselves in the foot spawning all this new competition, didn’t they?
They can do that as often as they like. This is great!
I am not sure the OGL debacle is really a reason. There is I don’t know how many thousands RPG published each years. If I do a search on kicksrarter for RPG in boardgame category I get above 6000 matches.
So tons of new RPG are being published each day, most of them are forgotten, some are good enough to drag a small but existing community, and may-be a dozen of games are big enough to provide a living revenue to their authors, while one game per decade really change the way we play (Basically D&D, Chtulhu, Vampire, Fate, Apocalypse world) so not sure there is something new under the sun.
The D&D player will keep playing D&D, the non D&D player will keep not playing it, and with the marketing power of Hasbro will keep having a long time telling beginner that there is more than just D&D or that tweaking D&D into a horror games where weak humans face cosmic error takes more work than buying COC
I don’t think that’s true about dnd staying in dnd. Just that it takes time to transition away.
In both of the tables I play in, none of us are buying any new WOTC stuff. We’re finishing up existing campaigns, and we have a (fairly last minute) 3rd party 5e Xmas one shot coming because we don’t want to force anyone to have to learn a new system for it.
But we’re already branching out into PBTA and the more DM and leadership focused of us already have pathfinder 2e books and everyone is on board with trying pf2e.
Plenty of D&D players both staying and leaving. But there is definitely an impact because there are some whales leaving.
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Star wars 5e mod (i hope that’s the name) is dope as hell. They ran it for a season of Dimension 20, it looked really fun if you like the crunch.
Star wars is about sword-wielding space wizards, so it’s not exactly a force leap off from DnD
I would say they are closer to clerics both mechanically (with the spectrum of martial to magical subclasses) and flavorwise
You’re right, though paladins would make sense too. But Space Wizards is the idiomatic form.
Are you using the official Star Trek TTRPG? I definitely want to run something with the Lower Decks book for my party at some point. Maybe next First Contact Day
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What’s truly funny is that this isn’t the first time this happened. 4th edition had WotC bamboozle third party creators by fiddling with the OGL, and third party creators responded by making a rival to D&D. They called it Pathfinder.
Then you look a little further afield and you see a massive indie TTRPG community that I have to assume had an influx of new designers who only found out about it due to the OGL incident.
TSR had the exact same issues back with 2.5 edition. That’s how WotC even managed to acquire the property.
@AngryCommieKender @Susaga Eh, I wouldn’t really call TSR’s issues in “2.5”/late 2e similar to the issues surrounding the cancellation of the d20 System Trademark License, the 4e GSL, or this past January’s OGL debacle. For one thing, the game never officially had an open license before 3e came along. For another, late TSR’s woes had more to do with their reach exceeding their grasp.
They didn’t have a license, true. What I was referring to was them getting sued happy, for good reason in a lot of cases, because people were slapping “Gary Gygax’s D&D” on homebrew modules and trying to sell them. Got them a lot of bad publicity, and they ended up selling.
@AngryCommieKender As far as I’m aware, that happened far earlier than the era you cited. I’ve heard that people were calling them “T$R” and “They Sue Regularly” in the early 90s, before the general public exploded onto the Net.
