Thursday, January 26, 2023

My Path Forward as a FLGS Store Owner, a Blogger, and a Fan Post-WotC Apology




I've taken some time as a store owner, a blogger, and a fan to really look hard at what WotC has done to the rest of the industry in the past month and I've reached a decision on how I plan to go forward this year.

As a store owner, I've restocked Savage Worlds, Deadlands, Savage Pathfinder, Savage Rifts, Numenera, The Cypher System, GURPS, Complete Champions, Call of Cthulhu 7E, Fallout 2d20, RuneQuest, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Transformers RPG, Starfinder, Pathfinder 2E, Modern AGE, Scion 2E, and Vampire: the Masquerade. Sales have been stronger than  expected and I'm glad. I won't lie, I still stock the full line of DnD 5E but I am only giving it about 10% of the face-out space it occupied before this whole fiasco. I am not telling anyone to abandon 5E, but if someone asks me about the OGL situation I will answer them with my personal opinion while emphasizing that is all it is a personal opinion. 5E is a very good game and you should play what you like. I hope the right people are put in charge of WotC and I hope they stick to the plans they announced last week, but we'll see.

As a blogger I'm going to switch over to Savage Worlds and The Cypher System for the time being. Maybe adopt some "Old School" ideas for both. I've published for both of them before so maybe I'll do that again. Either way, I'm taking a break from the OGL and DnD. I mean how many "skill systems" or "thief classes" can I keep coming up with? Most of its been covered at least as well as I have.

As a fan, I don't want to say I'll never try One DnD or I'll never run DnD again, but I was bored with it and this just gives me an excuse to move on. I'm in a Curse of Strahd campaign and another of our DMs is planning a City of Brass campaign so I'm sure we'll be playing it. We like 5E and will always have it to use if One DnD isn't our jam. I'm sure at some point I will miss it and maybe I'll go back? At the same time, I think Shadow of the Demon Lord is a better game overall and maybe I'll just use it for dungeon fantasy since I like horror in all of the games I run and really love the "Old World" Warhammer vibe it has.

I am very interested in Kobold Press' Black Flag and will playtest it. In my opinion, Kobold and other 3rd party 5E publishers have been doing the coolest stuff for the last couple of years. Their monster books are used by all of the DMs in our group. I hope what they do is just as cool.

I don't think WotC will miss me as a fan or a blogger and they are a large part of my professional life so they will continue to deal with me. At the same time, I rarely deal with anyone at WotC and have great reps at several distributors that make my life easy. I would like Hasbro and WotC to learn from this situation but I doubt they will. Lets be honest, if the new DnD movie is a hit and the playtest numbers for 1DnD aren't too low they will eventually segment their section of the industry, a substantial segment, behind some pay wall. Its inevitable in my opinion.

I will add that I really enjoyed the most recent trailer for the new DnD film and will probably see it within the first 2 weeks of release. I hope it's fun because DnD is fun. Maybe if DnD is successful we will get a Deadlands movie! Right? I can't be the own one who wants it, right? Right?


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