Its always fascinating to me when people like this cast creators as "competitors", as if it were actually about Kobold Press/Paizo/etc. Its a bit silly. WOTC wanted to kill off _everything_. That included things like Fantasy Grounds, Arkenforge, Heroforge, Dungeon Draft, even open-source projects utilizing SRD+OGL docs for things like character creation via PCGen, etc. Basically all the tools that make it actually possible to play D&D in a modern web-based ecosystem where you can't be physically at the same table. Could WOTC have done some of these things themselves if they hired and kept devs? Maybe; they certainly never have before, and were always happy to let the community fill in the gaps in their expertise. OGL enabled and supported this, so it was a big slap in the face to see WoTC seeking to up-end those projects and send D&D back to the books+pen+paper+greaseboard days of the 1980s.

Ideally, no, they shouldn't be able to retroactively kill your 3/3.5/4/5e tooling just by releasing a new license that kills the old one. Unfortunately, they seem to think they can and that's exactly the problem we're all pissed about -- this is the crux of the "perpetual" vs. "nonrevocable" debate, and why its original authors like Brian Lewis and Ryan Dancey are getting interviewed about how it being deauthorizable was not the original intent.

My players and I just want to be be able to play D&D the way we always have. This involves lots of third-party tools, content and FOSS that can't continue to be useful under OGL1.1. Wizards explicitly wants to kill those things off and make 6e/OneDND a thing that can only be played on their future inhouse VTT, so its kind of forcing us to switch regardless of our opinions on the corporation itself.

Its not about "hurting" WoTC somehow, that's a weird outlook. We just want to play RPGs. More like we're just trying get something else set up to be able to continue have those same kinds of RPG experiences that we've always had under the terms we've always used -- whatever content we want on whatever VTT we want, using characters created and maintained in whatever software we want.

Again, its not intended for WoTC; Paizo et al will be using it to publish content for Pathfinder, Black Flag, and whatever other systems people make that choose to adopt it and release corresponding SRD-equivalent documents. I highly doubt WoTC would want to pick it up for D&D, as it would mean people could create and use content out of the closed ecosystem they're going for now with DDB/OneDND. At this point people's concern is _replacing_ D&D in a legal/trademark sense and cutting out WoTC, not coaxing WoTC into not fucking with it; that clearly went nowhere after the OGL1.1 leak.

Probably would have died off post-TSR if not for the OGL and SRD, yeah. Wizards never released their own tools or accessories for anything. Everything good came from other people. PCGen never could have existed, or would have been useless. Lots of monsters have never had official minis, and even for the official ones there's never been a way to buy the ones you actually wanted. Fortunately we have Heroforge now, but that couldn't have existed (or at least used D&D-compatible races, monsters and items). Hell, even DDB probably wouldn't have existed as WoTC would have had to do it themselves rather than buy it after the fact. And for sure we wouldn't have actual play groups like Dimension 20 and Critical Role or TheVaktare out there creating the content they do.

Without the freedom afforded by those licenses around format conversion, we never would have had the great experiences playing remotely enabled by VTTs like Fantasy Grounds or Roll20 or Foundry. Or at least we wouldn't be able to play D&D on them.

So maybe someone out there would still be playing it with paper and pencils and a greaseboard, but I don't think it'd be the TTRPG cultural touchstone it is today if it'd never been opened up for third party creators and tooling. I assume it'd be more like what the AD&D community is today -- a small group of dedicated diehards keeping to 30-year-old content like Tomb of Horrors.

I mean, it'd be nice if I didn't have to worry about it. D&D is how my circle of friends relax and have fun, and a sudden drop that a short-sighted corporation might be killing off my favorite hobby because they're confident they can make 10x more revenue with 1/10th of the subscribers in pay-to-play schemes was not what I needed to start off this year.

While I'd love for WoTC to be like "yeah this was a terrible idea , the more time I spend looking into this, the less confident I get that'll happen. When the news dropped, my first thought was "Wow this is like what Microsoft would do if they suddenly came into owning D&D". Sure enough, turns out Cynthia Williams, made head of WoTC last year, is an ex-Microsoft manager...

I run two tables as well as AL and play in another. Maybe we just run in different circles (my tables+AL are all fully remote), but it seems like _everyone_ is talking about this and worried about the future viability of the game. Everyone is concerned that we can't continue to do what we do now into the future. Actual-play groups, r/dndhorrorstories reader channels, the communities around VTTs like Fantasy Grounds, the people who take your commissions for character references and token art. It has literally been my entire timeline on my DM account for the past week and a half.

Its even grown beyond the TTRPG community -- channels that cover legal issues are looking into the OGL are interviewing its original authors regarding "perpetual" vs. "non-revocable" and such.

Judging by how Wizards was forced to change their approach (albeit very poorly) twice in response to the community outrage, first with their response to the leak itself and then later when Paizo co-opted their "Come on, its not gonna be thaaaaaat bad" announcement slot, it seems to be bigger than you think.

Those new open systems--ORC from Paizo/Black Flag from Kobold Press--aren't for WoTC to license their own content under. That'd be pointless for them; they could just keep the original OGL unchanged if they wanted to keep the system open, but that'd ruin their plans to make a closed walled-off environment where "D&D" becomes a thing you can only do on DDB for $30 a month. ORC/Black Flag are for the rest of us who want to share and play with each others content, or use the VTTs we already have without worrying about a player not being able to play anymore because they couldn't afford to pay Wizards that month.

ORC in particular has the added advantage that they're planning to have it held in trust by a third-party community foundation, which would prevent any future bad actors at Paizo from pulling a WoTC and doing what they're trying to do with the OGL.

Member of Parliament.

That's interesting! We're pretty close (I'm in Maine), but all our construction is gas; mini split heat pumps are usually an upgrade made afterward to add air conditioning.

Most places up here in my part of Maine have propane delivered to tanks outside the house. Heat pumps ae getting quite popular for the warmer parts of the winter as the gas prices have rocketed up faster than electric costs have.

That's wild. Up here when you want a tree gone people pay you for the opportunity to cut it down, split it, take it away and have near-free firewood for themselves for six weeks of the winter.

Manual transmissions don't appeal to me at all because it'd just be an anxiety nightmare. I'd be constantly trying to super-optimize every aspect of its operation, getting rev-matching perfect, worrying if every shift was at the right time or off by some amount that would add wear to something...

Yeah, its definitely coming. They already show up at pride events to wave guns around and call us "groomers", actual violence driven by some misinformation/agitprop campaign like this is a distressingly short step away.

You only need one. I've been using the same cotton tote for store runs for almost a decade now.

Banks want you to, basically. Credit scores in the US incentive you to have multiple active accounts. For reasons beyond me, they interpret more credit accounts and debt as a sign of responsibility and ability to manage credit; these make your credit score higher, which makes your overall cost of living lower as it lets you pay less interest and fees, qualify for your own lease versus needing to get in with a roommate, etc. Its basically impossible in the US to get your credit score high enough to qualify for a house or even qualify for a decent apartment until you've had at least 2-3 accounts for a couple of years. If you never get one, any financing available to you (used cars, phones, etc) is going to be ~20% interest and you're going to be a renter forever, always subject to rent increases that may or may not be affordable.

Of course, if you get rid of one--say, to save having to pay the $10 monthly + $39 annual fees--that hurts you, so you generally don't unless you have to.

Actually, there's caps on federal student loans; you get 23k subsidized and another 34.5k unsubsidized (different interest rates). After that, you're on your own.

These caps also used to be a lot lower. Especially in 5-year programs like RITs where you have the 4 regular years plus an extra year of being an intern while paying tuition, plenty of people like ended up having to leave when we hit those caps early due to tuition increases starting to skyrocket while in school and not having access to cosigners for private lending to make up the difference.