The tabletop roleplaying game industry has grown significantly over the past decade, fueled by blockbuster franchises, mainstream exposure, and the popularity of series like Critical Role. But this explosive growth has come with a price, particularly the loss of longtime fans who feel alienated by the companies they once supported.
Nowhere is this tension more evident than with Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons.
WotC’s decisions in recent years can be charitably called … misguided. Intended to broaden their audience and capitalize on the growing popularity of D&D, their calls have frequently backfired, leaving their core fanbase frustrated and disillusioned.
While the company has achieved impressive financial success, a closer look reveals a pattern of PR missteps that have sparked backlash and helped fuel alternative movements like the Old-School Renaissance.
The most notable blunder was WotC’s controversial Open Gaming License (OGL) revision. The original OGL was a key reason for D&D Third Editions’s success, allowing third-party publishers to create original material with WotC’s system. The proliferation of new content in turn strengthened the brand’s reach and influence.
But in 2023, WotC attempted to introduce a new version of the OGL that imposed tighter restrictions on third-party creators and sought to claim more control over user-generated materials. The move was widely seen as a cash grab and sparked immediate outrage from the user base, which viewed it as a betrayal of the collaborative spirit that had made D&D a cultural juggernaut.
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The backlash was swift and severe. Players, creators, and even prominent figures in the TTRPG industry criticized WotC’s move, which culminated in a massive public relations disaster. WotC was eventually forced to backtrack, but the damage had been done. Longtime fans were reminded that the company’s focus had shifted from supporting creativity to maximizing corporate profits, often at the expense of the players on whom the empire was founded.
That wasn’t the first time WotC found itself in hot water with its fanbase. From tone-deaf product launches to tin-eared DIE initiatives, the company’s quixotic pursuit of the conjectural “modern audience” come off as ham-fisted. Nor does it help that their frequent backtracking makes their actions look performative and cynical.
For example, Wizards’ revisionist approach to longstanding D&D lore was called out by OG players as woke pandering. The company’s clumsy attempts to cover its ass not only failed to redress actual fans’ grievances, they outraged true believers in the activist crowd.
Related: Wizards of the Coast President Resigns
Amid WotC’s repeated blunders, many disaffected fans have gravitated toward alternatives that emphasize the gaming fundamentals the big publishers have abandoned. Chief among these movements is the Old-School Renaissance, which seeks to restore the simpler, more flexible gameplay of classic D&D editions from the 1970s and 80s.
The OSR emphasizes mechanics over story gaming but keeps those rules to a streamlined minimum. And it champions the DIY spirit that characterized the early days of tabletop gaming. For many longtime D&D fans, the OSR represents a triumphant return to form for the hobby—a rejection of corporate-driven IP cycles that have become the norm. The result is more stripped-down, customizable play.
While the OSR initially gained traction as a niche movement, years of poor decisions by WotC and its fellows have accelerated alternative gaming’s growth. The rise of small publishers and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter has made it easier than ever for creators to produce and distribute their own TTRPG systems, many of which explicitly cater to fans seeking an alternative to mainstream products. As a result, the OSR has grown from a fringe movement to a thriving parallel market that offers a viable alternative for the forgotten gamer.
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Wizards of the Coast’s success may look impressive on paper, but the growing rift between the company and its longtime fanbase tells a different story. While they have managed to attract new audiences and generate more revenue, their repeated missteps have left a bad taste in the mouths of many veteran players. As WotC continues to chase growth, it’s unclear whether they can mend fences with their core audience, or if the OSR and other indie movements will continue to siphon off disaffected players.
In the end, WotC’s struggles highlight a broader issue facing many major TTRPG publishers in this era of corporate-driven gaming. The success they strive to achieve has come at a cost, and if they can’t find a way to balance growth with their most loyal fans’ expectations, they may cede the future of tabletop gaming to a golem of their own making.
The deep lore of Tolkien meets the brutal struggle of Glen Cook in the dark fantasy prelude to the acclaimed Soul Cycle.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention this latest entry into the tumult:
gamers4harris.org
Are you really surprised?
Surprised by the presence of such a thing? Not at all; this is the third election running that they’ve done this. I just thought it was an excellent example of the kind of thing you were calling out in the original post.
There have been three major ways to be fans of roleplaying games:
-RPG as wargames: The game is a game that you try to “win” by having your characters be successful in universe and triumph over any obstacles in their way (including other players.) Best supported by OD&D and 1st edition.
-RPGs as a fantasy universe: The game is about exploring an imaginary universe and having fun, without any victory condition. In theory the DM acts as storyteller while the players just provide backstories and go along with his plots, in practice this often means using lots of campaign supplements and pre-made modules. This was the environment of 2nd edition AD&D, and what most people today claim to be doing.
-RPGs as a lifestyle brand: You buy lots of products to show how much of a gamer you are and talk about sometime eventually having an epic campaign, but in reality you rarely go through actual play sessions. This is the demographic that modern D&D targeted. It started in earnest in 3rd edition, though 3rd edition was an actual game at the same time (just a different one than 1st and 2nd edition.)
The first approach is the one that is the easiest for hobbyists to follow, since all it requires is a good set of rules and then the rest is done by the playgroup. Who cares about what the main company says about “lore” when the lore at your table is determined by the actions of the players? But this is the same reason why you can’t market for this technique.
So that leaves pumping out endless supplements (as TSR and later Wizards did for 2nd and 3rd edition) or pumping out lots of related merchandise (as Wizards has been doing more recently.) The trouble is that nerds can get the same experiences without dealing with role playing games. For example, if they play a computer RPG from an established franchise, they’ll get just as much lore and related merchandise, but they won’t have to deal with the drama of getting people to meet in the same location at the same time (not to get into the ridiculous fights over what should or should be included in each adventure that modern RPG groups get into.)
From where I’m standing, those three ways boil down to:
1) Wargaming
2) Roleplaying
3) Popcultery
I confess that I can’t understand the appeal of Approach 1. How do you “win” D&D? You go around killing goblins and amassing soldiers until you are a King? And fighting the other players just seems like an invitation to chaos and bad feelings all around. In any case, this seems near-indistinguishable from Approach 2, the only difference is that you have a more concrete goal. You absolutely can have a concrete goal in roleplaying, except that you seem to arbitrarily define it as wandering about aimlessly, or on the DM’s rails. So is the thing you really care about player agency, a system where the players drive everything and the DM just referees as if it were 1970 and we were playing Braunstein? To that point, why is the goal of amassing power and wealth given special privilege as more worthy and laudable than other goals?
I have to be honest, the best system I’ve found for the “player-driven RPG” experience that so many seem to glorify is Dungeon World, even though it’s a Filthy Evil Casual PBTA Game That Only Art Majors Like.
If you look at what people did in classic wargaming, or the types of shenanigans that people got into in MMRPGs like EVE Online, how approach 1 works will become clearer.
You don’t “win” in the sense that the game ends and you are declared the winner. You win in the sense that you find goals you want to achieve and you achieve them, exploiting everything you can in terms of the game world, the rules, and your relationships with other players to do so. This could mean ruling a large empire, becoming ridiculously wealthy, ascending to godhood, becoming the most feared wizard in creation, etc. (all things very possible to do in OD&D, 1st edition and BECMI.)
What separates this fundamentally from approach 2 is that there is no preset story that anyone has. There is a story, but it comes about from the interactions of the plans of the DM and the players. Think about after action reports for things like collaborative Dwarf Fortress sessions or grand strategy games. You can get compelling narratives pretty easily in those games, but it’s not like they were designed.
Discussions about what the “best” system are are annoying because they usually ignore that different systems have different purposes. Dungeon World is more collaborative storytelling at the cost of “realism” (i.e. having an established world.) That’s fine if that’s what you’re after. Similarly there are systems like Teenagers from Outer Space or Toon that could never be used for any long lasting campaign, or anything where “balance” mattered, but they work fine for just wasting time for a group of friends. Basically the RPG equivalent of Apples to Apples.
By the way, if you want a good example of approach 1 in action, read up on “The Head of Vecna” (assuming you don’t know that anecdote already.)
The campaign described is definitely following the first approach, and if you read the original account on the Steve Jackson Games website it is clear that the DM was serving only as a moderator, not a storyteller.
It’s strange that the anecdote is so famous to this day but hardly anyone thinks about the type of game that would have let it happen in the first place.
Games Workshop isn’t *quite* as bad as WOTC (they have to keep the Death Cultery at least a little subtle to keep the anti-progressive Golden Goose that is 40K laying eggs), but they’re even worse at price gouging their customers (it’s not called plastic crack for nothing). What’s interesting is that their shitty behaviour is breeding a similar phenomenon to the OSR, made easier by the growth of 3D Printing. Stuff like OnePageRules (greatly simplified miniature-agnostic wargaming) has been going for ten years now, and they lost a lot of ground to Privateer Press (Warmachine, Hordes) – or at least they did until PP shat the bed and made a series of calamitous business decisions that culminated in them being bought out by a third party not long ago.
I still have my AD&D hard cover books from the late 70s/early 80s. The only reason there ever was a set of thick “rule books” like those is for tournament play, so everybody at GenCon (back in the day before it sucked) had an even playing field. Oh– and to sell product, of course!
But if a group and a DM didn’t like the way the game as TSR codified it in the manuals, they were always free to make their own rules that suited them better. There was really no reason for 2nd edition, 3rd, 3.5, etc…..other than to sell product, I guess.