A History of Wizards of the Coast

HerderOfCats writes "Shannon Appelcline has written up an excellent independent history of Wizards of the Coast, the company that brought us Magic: The Gathering, eventually acquired TSR and D&D, transformed the paper RPG game industry with d20 and the Open Game License, and eventually was acquired by game giant Hasbro." From the RPGNet article: "Overall, Hasbro was looking to make Wizards meaner and leaner, and thus a better profit making machine. In 2001 and 2002 Habro also divested themselves of their conventions. Origins went to GAMA and GenCon to Peter Adkison. Around the same time they also outsourced their magazines by licensing Dungeon, Dragon, Polyhedron, and Amazing Stories to Paizo Publishing, who continues to publish the RPG magazines today. Two years later another pruning would come. Wizards had also been running 85 'Game Keeper' and 'Wizards of the Coast' retail stores, but in early 2004, Hasbro shut them all down. Together with selling the conventions, this relieved any concerns that Wizards might be developing a vertical monopoly, like that controlled by Games Workshop in the UK--and really such a monopoly wouldn't have made sense given the d20 strategy. "

Re:Kevin Siembieda is a jackass

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing about Kevin Siembieda's self-aggrandizing history of his own company is that it's so provably incorrect.

On the generic front, Chaosium's BRP was out and supported by three very different systems (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer) around the time that Palladium was publishing its first book.

His claims to being the first cyberpunk game because he had cyborgs and robots are laughable. If you want to go via that (ridiculous) definition of cyberpunk, Champions was out in 1981, three year's before KS's own superhero game.

On the modern horror front, Chill beat Palladium's unsupported Beyond the Supernatural out the door by 4 years.

And his sales numbers of 165k and 100k lifetime for a core rulebook just aren't that amazing, even for the RPG industry.

A little bit of irony

[phantomlord]

From the article:
By most peoples' reading of laws, game companies can protect the actual text of the games via copyright, and they can protect the use of their system names for marketing via trademark. However, they can't actually protect the game systems themselves unless they file patents for them as inventions ... and very, very few game companies do. By that reading, a book like The Primal Order can be produced without permission from the original publisher, as long as care is taken in the use of the trademarks.

Back in 2000, Ryan Dancey, the D&D Brand Manager for Hasbro, and to a lesser extent, Peter Adkinson himself, were involved in a rather large [google.com] multithread [google.com] debate [google.com] on rec.games.frp.dnd (there are a lot more threads), the TSR/WotC website, etc where Dancey pretty much explicitly stated that any creative work players produced in their AD&D games were derivative works of TSR/WotC and thus wholly owned by TSR, automatically invalidating any copyright that the actual creator had on the work and granting full copyright on their material to TSR/WotC even if the majority of the work was generic and made little reference to AD&D.

At the time, I immediately pulled all of the material about the campaign world I created off the net. It basically only used the AD&D rules and involved new character classes, monsters, maps, new worlds, etc. Dancey went so far as to claim even using the rules (which weren't patented and even if they had been patented, would have already expired) made the work of campaigns like mine derivative of AD&D and thus the sole property of TSR/WotC.

Needless to say, I never moved on to 3E and flat out refused to participate in anything like D20/OGL due to Dancey, because I refused to legitimize any of his stance. I have an entire three foot shelf of TSR books but I haven't bought anything in the last 6 years mostly because of what they tried to pull then. I find it rather ironic that when WotC was the small guy startup, they nearly died from the bigger fish suing them over the idea derivative works and less than a decade later, when WotC was the big fish in the sea, the same people took the exact opposite stance that got them off the ground.

Re:Kevin Siembieda is a jackass

[Bieeanda]

I never heard about the C&D's sent to magazines, but I do clearly remember Palladium threatening to sue the pants off of some outfit (the folks making Talislanta?) for daring to suggest that their supplements were compatible with the Palladium RPG. White Wolf had an interview with him, wherein that was touched upon, and he came off as the most amazingly whiny and arrogant prick in history.

Re:Without a Future?

[StarvingSE]

I think its because every once in a while, WotC comes out with a "stand alone" expansion pack. Its basically works out to a starting point for new players. Instead of playing with the core set where you'll get pwned in tournaments by people who have 15 years worth of cards collected you can play in a, lets say "Ice Age" only tourney (I use ice age cuz thats when I got off the crack^h^h^h^h card game). This works to help reduce the cost of entry, and allow new people a chance to catch up, or just play from that point on.

Re:A little bit of irony

[damiangerous]

The Open Game License does not require the Player's Handbook. You're confusing it with the d20 System Trademark License, which is the license to use the d20 System name and logo and requires the text referencing the PHB. There are Open Game Licensed products which have absolutely nothing to do with D&D or d20. The Action! System [action-system.com], for example.