Bad Dragon or Bad Owner? 🐉

People often make buying decisions based on more than just the price and quality of a given product or service. We often base our buying decisions on other factors, including emotion and our sense of right and wrong and how that product or service makes us feel. You can see proof of this in the form of consumer boycotts and advertising designed to appeal to our emotions and our sense of belonging to a community that we like and respect. And if a company is seen as not being ethical or if its leadership is suspected of holding morally abhorrent views, watch out!

Wizards of the Coast, the publisher and current holders of the rights to the Dungeons & Dragons franchise, has been digging a hole for themselves of late with tabletop roleplaying game creators, tabletop roleplaying game designers, and Dungeons & Dragons players and fans. I have posted about one such kerfuffle regarding the Open Game License or OGL on a couple of occasions on this blog (see links below)

https://gregorymaness.wixsite.com/website/post/the-citadel-is-under-siege

https://gregorymaness.wixsite.com/website/post/score-one-for-the-barbarians-i-mean-fans-and-third-party-creators

Some of these gripes appear to have merit. As a former player of Dungeons & Dragons and someone planning to resume playing tabletop roleplaying games, I think that it is interesting and even a little concerning to speculate where Dungeons & Dragons will be five or ten years from now if things continue. Dungeons & Dragons is loved by its players, but players don't have to support Wizards of the Coast financially by continuing to purchase gaming products, merchandise, and services. They can just keep playing and designing campaigns, scenarios, and rules for their own games with the gaming materials that they already own. While Wizards of the Coast has the rights to Dungeons & Dragons, they don't own the game. The players past and present do.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check out the videos linked to below. Personally, I would have no reservations about playing Dungeons & Dragons with the products that I already own. Would I purchase more gaming products, merchandise, and services from Wizards of the Coast? I suppose that depends on where things go from here.