How to Fix a Broken Relationship #OpenDnD

Last week, I wrote letters to Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro, Dan Rawson, VP of D&D at Wizards of the Coast, and via the Wizards of the Coast support form.

After taking some time to process and listen to others about their announcement Friday, I wrote this follow-up message via the support form.

Hello. Please send this message to the extent of your ability to those in charge of making decisions regarding the future of the OGL, and thank-you for the extra work you have to do because of all this:

Hi, I’m a dad and a commercial OGL content creator dedicated to using TTRPGs (usually 5e so far) to help you make lives better.

This weekend, I spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the OGL and our company’s ability to continue our work to improve disability inclusion and accessibility at the tabletop and the rest of the world. And I worried about what it meant for my ability to continue to feed my disabled children.

As our family was cleaning the house over the weekend, I was having trouble keeping my kids on task, and the combined stress eventually led to me yelling at my kids. Especially given my wife’s sensitivity to loud noises, yelling only made things worse.

So I sat down, had a cup of tea and a cookie, and apologized to my family. I could’ve made excuses and claimed I wasn’t really yelling or justified my behavior, but none of those would make things better. My family already knew how I was acting and that it was hurting our relationship. The only way to reconcile was for me to apologize.

I’ve been happily married for 28 years, so I can assure you that a sincere apology goes a lot further than excuses to restore relationships, especially when I demonstrate sincere contrition and change my behavior.

You have hurt the D&D community worse than any past action in its history.

Lies won’t fix things. Don’t say you were looking for community feedback by sending OGL 1.1 to 20 people under NDA. Don’t say you’re concerned about D&D NFTs when the OGL already prohibited that, but you’ve announced Power Rangers NFTs. Don’t say you’re trying to keep people from producing harmful D&D content after the Hadozee incident and an updated OGL that forbids producing content with accessibility technology. Don’t say we all won when truly, we all lost. The whole world, including your company’s future, is worse off due to your actions.

But speaking of the Hadozee incident, pay attention to what happened. You apologized sincerely. You changed the offensive content. You implemented policies to keep it from happening again. And while you broke our trust, we’re quick to forgive when we believe that you realize the harm you’ve caused. Forgiveness isn’t saying you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s specifically acknowledging that harm was done but allowing the relationship to continue in spite of that harm.

While this is worse, if you follow the same pattern you did last time, while thousands are understandably too hurt to come back, many of us will. But you need to admit the harm you caused if you want that to happen, nothing like Friday’s announcement.

You need to keep the promise you made in the OGL FAQ that was on your website and leave it alone or improve it to show you care about your fan base — add to the SRD, but the only change added to the OGL should be the word, “Irrevocable,” to show us you mean it and learned from this. That would be the policy change to keep this from happening again.

That would show that you care about our relationship even if only as customer and creator.

We as a community have a deep connection to our relationship with D&D, and we hope you want to be a part of that. But you need to show us that you actually care about D&D if you expect to be part of this relationship. We’re trying to make it the best it can be. We hope you will too.

Hopefully but skeptically,

Dale Critchley

Wyrmworks Publishing

If you’re willing to communicate your concerns to Hasbro/WotC, you can use the same feedback form.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to sign the OpenDnD Petition. While you’re at it, Ryan Dancey, the crafter of the original OGL, has written a petition of his own that’s worthy of consideration. You can read and sign it here.