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leidensygdom · 1 year

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So, what is the OGL and why are DnD creators thoroughly screwed?

Tumblr has not been doing a great job at talking about this, but:

With OneDnD, Wizards of the Coast has decided to update the Open Game License (OGL). Said license is what allowed people to create homebrew DnD content and sell it, and even larger companies to use certain sorts of content. Pathfinder, for example, is built on said OGL. This also allows streamers and artists to exist and benefit from said content.

With OneDnD (sometimes called “dnd 6e”), WOTC wants to create a much more restrictive OGL, which will, amongst other things:

Make WOTC take a cut for any DnD-related work (according to Kickstarter, a whole 25% of the benefits)

Let WOTC cancel any project related to DnD up to their discretion

Let WOTC take ANY content made based on their system, and re-sell it without crediting you, or giving you a single cent

And most importantly, revoke the old OGL, which will harm any company or game system that used it as a base, such as Pathfinder. And it means they GET ownership over any homebrew content you may have done for 5e in the past!

It’s important to note that OGLs are supposedly irrevocable. They were planning to use it for OneDnD initially, but they want to apply it retroactively to 5e, somehow. Which is illegal, but lawyers have mentioned there’s a chance they may get away with it given the wording.

This means that anything you make based on DnD (A homebrew item? A character drawing? Even music, according to them?), can get taken and used as they deem appropiate.

These news come from a leak of the OGL, which have been confirmed by multiple reputable sources (including Kickstarter, which has confirmed that WOTC already talked with them about this), and was planned to be released next week.

So, what can we do?

Speak against it. Share the word. Reblog this post. Let people know. Tumblr hasn’t been talking much about this matter, but it’s VERY important to let people know about what is WOTC bringing.

Boycott them. Do not buy their products. Do not buy games with their IP. Do not watch their movie. CANCEL your DnD Beyond subscription. (Btw, they ARE planning to release more subscription services too!). They do not care about the community, but they care about the money. Make sure to speak through it.

And maybe consider other TTRPG systems for the time being, Pathfinder’s Paizo has been much nicer to the community, their workers are unionized and are far more healthy overall

#dnd #wotc #wizards of the coast #open gaming license #ogl #dnd5e #dnd 5e #homebrew #ttrpg #pathfinder #dungeons and dragons #d&d

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regal-bones · 3 days

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A blade of swirling smoke and reddened eyes 💨🍃

This started as a joke but I think I committed to hard - happy 420 😎

you can support me on Patreon for £1 and help me keep making art!

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grendel-menz · 2 months

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My ttrpg mini book Frumunder will contain old and new art, a homebrew pantheon, premade npcs, and world information available for personal/non commercial use in your own campaigns!

#art #my art #digital art #character design #ocs #original characters #ttrpg #rpg #dnd #dungeons and dragons #frumunder #homebrew #cw blood

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germanich · 4 months

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Made for myself a holiday present. I started playing Pathfinder so I decided to make an in-game portrait with my OC Xallergh

#oc #oc artwork #artists on tumblr #original work #oc stuff #original character #dnd tiefling #tiefling #pathfinder #dnd #dungeons and dragons #dnd5e #ttrpg #homebrew

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cerinslair · 9 months

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Oath of the Courier

A paladin subclass for 5e

Liberty. Reason. Justice. Civility. Edification. Perfection.

MAIL.

Tenets of the Courier

The Tenets of the Courier embody a paladin's commitment to delivering the mail with utmost integrity and professionalism.

Handle with Care: Treat anything entrusted to you as preciously as you would your own possessions.

Discrete Delivery: When others confide in you, do not betray their trust. Let none but the intended recipient pry upon what you carry.

Swift Postage: Do your best to fulfill your promises as promptly as possible. Punctuality is a virtue.

To the Letter: Strive to fulfill your oaths exactly as you pledged them. Your word is your promise.

Oath Spells

You gain oath spells at the paladin levels listed.

3rd Level: Expeditious Retreat, Illusory Script 5th Level: Animal Messenger, Arcane Lock 9th Level: Sending, Tongues 13th Level: Legally Distinct Secret Chest, Freedom of Movement 17th Level: Dream, Teleportation Circle

Channel Divinity

When you choose this Oath at 3rd-level, you gain the following two Channel Divinity options:

Postage Stamp: As an action, you mark an object with a magical postage stamp. When creating this stamp, you choose a creature you or an adjacent ally are familiar with to be the object's recipient. This stamp persists for a number of hours equal to twice your paladin level, until the stamped object is delivered to its chosen recipient, or it is dismissed as a bonus action. While holding the stamped object, you can spend an action to magically detect what direction its recipient is in, and approximately how far away they are from you. If the recipient does not want to be located by you, it can make a Wisdom Saving Throw to elude this detection. If you are relying on an ally's familiarity, they get Advantage on this save. If they succeed, they are immune to this effect for 24 hours. You may only have one magical stamp at a time. If you place another, the previous one is immediately dismissed.

This Side Up: As an action, you can use your Channel Divinity to ward a creature or object against toppling. One creature or object within 10 feet becomes immune to the Prone condition. If the target is an object, it must be light enough for you to carry. If the target is an object, it gains Resistance to bludgeoning, force, and thunder damage. If the warded creature or object falls, it may ignore the first 10' of the fall when determining fall damage. These effects last for a number of minutes equal to your Charisma score, minimum 3.

Aura of Determination

Neither rain nor sleet nor hail will stop your delivery of the mail. Starting at 7th level, you emit an Aura of Determination. You and allies within 10' cannot have their speed reduced to less than their base speed when walking, crawling, jumping, or flying. This includes anything that would halve movement, such as Difficult Terrain or Exhaustion; or impose any other fraction-based penalty to speed. You cannot grant any of these effects while you are unconscious.

At 18th level, the range of this aura increases to 30 feet.

Return to Sender

Starting at 15th level, if you are targeted by a spell that targets only you, you may use your Reaction to instead have the spell target its caster. Use the original caster's Spell Save DC, Spell Attack Bonus, and Spellcasting Ability where applicable. If the spell required a Spell Attack Roll, re-roll the attack versus the caster. Once you use this ability, you must finish a short or long rest before you can use it again.

Pen Pal

At 20th level, you can assume the form of a celestial courier. Using your action, you undergo a transformation that grants you the following benefits for 1 hour:

Wings sprout from your back and grant you a flying speed of 60 feet.

Allies who begin their turn within 30' of you gain a 10' bonus to their speed that turn.

Add your Charisma bonus to your Initiative Rolls.

Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest.

Go forth, swift and trustworthy courier! You are the glue that holds society together!

#D&D #dungeons and dragons #homebrew #paladin #5e #Oath of the Courier #cerinsposts

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the-fluffy-folio · 10 months

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Gooze – Small ooze, chaotic evil

…and thus, a new horror was unleashed onto Falbheim’s already more than hazardous substructures. Tisdor Dwindleteeth III’s joy was immeasurable when he finally managed to merge magically condensed consciousness with one of his many specimen of ooze. Of course, even the slightest bit of joy for the infamous necromancer meant trouble for everyone else – great trouble to be precise. After a short period of pondering, the gooze – as this monstrous abomination was later named – instantly assumed the most destructive shape it was able to imagine…just to wreak havoc wherever it waddles.

🔮 If you like my work, kindly consider to support me on Patreon to gain access to monster pages, tokens & artwork of 200+ of quirky creatures, items and potions. Plus, I released my first Foundry VTT modules – 70 creatures, 5 huge ones and 20 potions are done already, many more are in the making!

#dnd5e #5e #dnd #dungeons and dragons #dnd monster #dnd creature #digital art #dungeons and drawings #dnd homebrew #worldbuilding #dnd community #dnd campaign #digital illustration #digital painting #ciritcal role #ttrpg #monster art #fantasy art #artists on tumblr

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anim-ttrpgs · 25 days

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Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

Try showing them this post.

If that doesn’t work: Make them. Put your foot down. This works especially well if you are the DM. Tell them you won’t run another session of D&D5e until they agree to give what you want to do at least one try instead of always doing only what they want to do. This is, like, playing 101. We learned this in kindergarten. If your friend really wants to play something else, you should give their game a try, or you’re not really being a very good friend.

If that doesn’t work, find another group. This doesn’t even mean that you have to leave your existing group. A good place to start would be the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club which will be mentioned and linked below. You can also go to the subreddit of any game you’re interested in and probably meet people there who have the same problem you do and want to put together a group to play something other than D&D5e. You might get along great with these people, you might not, but you won’t know until you try. Just make sure to have a robust “session zero” so everyone is on the same page. This is a good practice for any group but it is especially important for a group made of players you’ve just met.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

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