merelymatt

Merely Matt

Creator/writer of I Need A Miracle, host of Merely Roleplayers. (Those are podcasts.) He/him.

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D&D, The OGL, And A Better Future For Actual Play Content

D&D, The OGL, and a Better Future for Actual Play Content

So this is spinning out of a post I made on twitter about how I legitimately believe the future of Actual Play (or AP for short) is in working alongside indie rpg folks

You can see that thread here, but I'm gonna recap anyway

Lets talk about the OGL and D&D first

Thanks to some great reporting from journalist Linda Codega (I know they have a tumblr somewhere and I will come back and link it when I find it), we know the general shape of the new Open Gaming License (or OGL) that WotC is running for Dungeons & Dragons moving forward. In short it sucks, I am not super interested in getting into it here, especially because Linda (once again) did really solid reporting here. Generally this spells a very bad time for a number of bigger third party creators (Green Ronin, Paizo, Kobold Press, probably Critical Role if we assume they aren't in on it which I would not assume tbh), and it also spells out specifically that Hasbro's desire to monetize even harder is in full swing.

One of the more interesting bits to this whole thing to me though, is how Wizards is looking at Fan Content, and I think its very likely this is going to be a major rub for AP Producers in the future. The OGL is now much clearer that AP work needs to fall under the Fan Content Policy, which means in broad strokes there is to be no monetization of your content. This is an old policy, but one I think a lot of folks are blithely unaware of. Specifically

You can't require payments, downloads, subscriptions, or email registration to access your content

You can't sell or license this content to a third party

Your content must be free for others to view, access, share, and use without paying you anything, obtaining approval, or giving credit.

You specifically can run things like a Ko-Fi or a Patreon, but you can't hide content behind a paywall. It also is... unclear on the ability to do things like live shows for money? I'm not a lawyer.

Regardless I think its high time people left, and that brings me to part 2 here

D&D and APs

Fundamentally D&D has always been bad for Actual Play. It's a quagmire of conflicting rules and bubblegum fixes, it crunches in weird spots, it doesn't do half the things people play it for, and its expensive to get into. Furthermore, it requires a lot of prep, it doesn't adapt well, and fundamentally it makes bad radio.

Where we see the most successes in the niche of D&D APs is hyper edited, super slick, and wildly unachievable setups; with major changes in rules, players who can make a living doing it, and entire production studios working on them (looking at you Critical Role, Dimension 20, etc). Within these (and within a ton of other APs) we also see a wild amount of homebrew to bend an inflexible and inelegant system into something that tells the stories we're interested in telling in games. Be this the wild changes to death in Dimension 20's Neverafter, full new classes and mechanics across Critical Role, magic items and homebrew in every AP I can think of, etc.

Generally also D&D is bad radio. The exacting measurements on battle maps don't make great Theatre of the Mind (certainly not as well as games designed for it), the rolls + stat modifiers + misc. shit on your sheet requires a lot of boring and frequently had to follow math*, etc.

Point here being, when we see it done well** it's less on the hands of D&D being good at these things, and more because production is changing major aspects of gameplay to make a game make good radio.

We should also talk about the messy legacy of D&D, but honestly that would be a few thousand extra words from me, and I don't have it in me. If the OGL doesn't scare you, it's worth thinking about what you're cosigning by staying around. Here's some extra articles if this is the first you're hearing about Wizards having major problems tho

Why Race is Still a Problem by Linda Codega gets into a lot of it

Wizards is still making money off of Oriental Adventures (and an article on that)

Mike Mearls still works there, this was weirdly hard to find a good article on, but here's a reddit post where its discussed

A Better Future for Actual Plays

This brings me to the point of this thread, which is that I don't think the future of Actual Plays has ever... actually been in making 5e content. This is a thing I feel pretty strongly about as a person who makes non-5e ap content (and this is a bias, sure). To me a better future has always been in indie rpgs, and in making content hand in hand with designers and producers working together.

What does this look like though? In short it rocks, and it's a thing bigger folks in the AP sphere are clearly already looking it. I'll list some examples below, and then I'll talk more about what it looks like on smaller scale, and what my experience with that has been like

So first off here's a few examples of what this looks like on the higher production end of the scale. I'm specifically looking at examples of campaign APs, working with the designer of the system, and not one shots which are doing this a bunch already.

Dimension 20's Shriek Week with Gabe Hick's Mythic System

Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast Podcast getting made alongside Possum Creek (it is a series of one shots, but also a shared universe, so I'm counting it here)

Into the Motherlands moving to their own system eventually

On the smaller end this is something I legitimately have some experience with, and this is where the thread was always heading. Let's talk about Renegade Racers, the game I made specifically for one person, what that has looked like for me, and why I think it's the future of APs to make content this way.

So a while ago I got on a Fast & Furious bend and watched all the movies. Not content to just watch movies though, I talked to some folks about if they had seen games based on it, and got linked to a video of @0sarahxfrank0 running a F&F inspired honey heist hack (I'm not gonna link it because the community it spun out of has had a lot happen and I don't wanna give them clicks tbh).

The short version of this is that I watched the game, built a system to better handle what folks were trying to do, and then sent it back to Sarah. She loved it. We made some changes, we rebuilt around the players and stories people wanted to tell, we released the game and the first AP together afterwards. Now Sarah and I do a lot of work together, we're planning bigger things like this for the future, and it's so far been a lot of fun and super rewarding for everyone involved.

We've seen some other stuff like this as well, even if not in campaign play. Offhand, Plus One Exp's home Down We Go system is a great example of working with a designer to stamp a system as the home system, and find community within it. We've been able to watch sorta in slow motion as DWG moved from a little one page OSR hack that potentially gets lost in the shuffle, to something big and exciting that both parties are happy to put a stamp on.

This is the exact future I see for AP campaign play, and not a wild dream I don't think.

What does Actual Play look like when it's tied to designers who want to help you tell your stories in the ways you want to tell them? What would it look like for a community to say "actually we've had enough"? What happens when we work with people who give a shit instead of faceless megacorps? What does it look like when we invest in people willing to invest in us?

I've seen the future and it's golden, we just have to reach for it.

*hard to follow in that if the players aren't saying out loud what exactly they're adding the numbers are nonsense **by well here I do mean "expensive and award winning" I do not mean I think they're particularly master classes in game running or production, but that's a whole separate topic

D&D, The OGL, And A Better Future For Actual Play Content

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