Recently, Wizards of the Coast, who you may know as the company that produces the famous role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), renewed their Open Game License (OGL). If you don’t know what an OGL is, allow me to briefly explain. An OGL states that any licensed publisher can make resources, materials, and modifications to a core game or set of rules. For DnD, this means that pretty much anyone can make stuff based off of this game, publish it, and profit off of it. The reason that this specific renewal was a big deal is that they made a fairly major change: any materials that were produced for DnD by a third party would have to get it approved by Wizards of the Coast before publishing. This may not sound like such a big deal, however, this would mean that if a publisher didn’t get their content approved, they could possibly be forced to limit their content to only what Wizards of the Coast wants to produce, or worst case scenario, they wouldn’t be able to publish at all and probably go out of business.
A lot of people, myself included, were very angry at Wizards of the Coast for this change. As an avid DnD player and fan, I use and enjoy a lot of the content that these third party publishers release. If the new OGL had gotten passed, then it would have meant that a lot of them likely wouldn’t be able to produce content anymore, which would make a lot of people, including myself, very unhappy.
The Dungeons and Dragons community lashed out very hard in response to the change, thousands of people expressing their dislike for this clear error on behalf of Wizards of the Coast and their parent company, Hasbro. To everyone’s surprise, about a month after the updated OGL was announced, they canceled the new version, stating that they had seen the community was upset and decided to roll back to the original OGL. I was really happy when I heard this news about a week ago. Not only does Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro recognise when they’ve made a bad decision (a hard thing to do for a lot of companies these days), this also shows the outstanding power that is created when a community gets together with a common goal.
This got me to thinking: what would happen if this were the case on a larger scale? If we estimate that about 25% of the DnD community took some kind of action, like sending complaints to Wizards of the Coast, or making posts on social media, or boycotting DnD products, then we can scale this up. If 25% of, say, America, decided to stand up against climate change, racism, homophobia, or some other controversial issue, then we would have almost 83 million people. Could you imagine 83 million people at a peaceful protest, voting for positive change at elections, or even just sending a letter or voicemail to their local congressperson? They could ask them to make a change or vote a certain way, and we could have a really significant movement of change for the better.
However, at the end of the day, it really does come down to the individual level. If 83 million people decide that it’s someone else’s problem, or that they really don’t care enough to go through all that work, then nothing is going to get done. That’s just a quarter of the American population sitting around and doing nothing to help our society. So I’d encourage you to do something to help forward what you believe in. It could be just starting small, like posting about it on social media, or sending a short letter to your local municipality building, but helping a cause in some small way is a lot better than not helping it at all. Help your community stand up for what it believes in!
