If you’re a D&D fan, then the last few weeks have been some of the most difficult to watch. Wizards of the Coast, the creators of the once all-popular Dungeons & Dragons franchise, had a very public midlife crisis in early January in the form of completely changing the way creators and the community interact with the D&D content and rules. And, like all midlife crises, it almost set fire to everything that they’ve built over the last half a decade and alienated a majority of their fanbase. Now, Wizards has finally come to their senses.
In case you hadn’t heard, the D&D OGL saga has officially ended. The D&D System Reference Document (SRD) is now permanently open source, published under a Creative Commons license. This move takes the SRD rules and the core of the d20 system and places it well beyond the reach of the money-grubbing hands of Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards of the Coast.
As a community, it’s been a tiring battle. Although Wizards of the Coast has repeatedly reiterated their good intentions, it’s impossible not to be disheartened by how much the corporate BBEG, Hasbro, fought back against what we all wanted. We won, and for those who intend to continue with Dungeons & Dragons as their primary system, you earned it. For me, the damage was too great and I’ll be slowly moving away from the D&D system.
This blog was originally created specifically with Dungeons & Dragons 5e (and any future editions) in mind. While I do have some experience with other systems like Fate Core, Pathfinder, or even White Wolf, I’ve always come back to Dungeons & Dragons. And while I’ll always love D&D, it’s no longer my default – a change that I have seen echoed by the community at large over the last few weeks.
If you’re looking to jump ship and leave Wizards of the Coast, there are plenty of resources available for getting into those systems. Here at The Dungeon Hacker, I am going to do some reworking and begin separating out the non-D&D specific topics and adding in information for other TRPG systems. My goal is to shine a light on all the options that we, as a community, tend to forget about while continuing to make it easy for players to join the world of tabletop gaming.
Dungeons & Dragons has been around in some form for around almost 50 years, and although the brand has gone through a couple of different companies and several different iterations – the core aspect of it remained the same. And while that legacy can’t be forgotten, maybe it’s time to move on. After all, the system you choose is really just the framework. It’s the people at the table and the stories you tell that make it fun and no company can give or take away that part.