Dungeons and Dragons

Don’t forget Shadowdark!

I love the world of Numenara

Larian isn't especially big though, even with the success of BG3, a purchase like this is likely would be well outside what they could hope to afford.

I just learned about that as well. I hope Larian dilutes or buys back Tencent's shares.

How is that different than now? DnD fell apart because Hasbro is a world stage corporation, they're just trading it to another world stage corporation which will kill it further until they pass it on too.

Whatever you remember liking is long long dead.

I get the spirit of the comment, but among people who often play multiple TTRPGs almost no one would call D&D their favorite. I would be worried if Tencent (or Hasbro) bought Arc Dream or Evil Hat, but in practice the John Harpers of the world leave and start another company using their corporate lucre. In fact that’s where Paizo started, from people peeling off of D&D after Hasbro acquired it.

Tabletop games are such a functionally cheap product to create and sell it’s impossible to truly stomp out competition. Tencent would have to buy Twitch and YouTube and disallow any other game, and even then every nerd convention in the world would have some guy selling stapled together zines that rips D&D a new asshole.

Tl;dr: I don’t give a shit if Tencent buys D&D.

Literally no need. Take a rule book, modify it as desired. There's a huge creator ecosystem out there, paid or otherwise, and WoC just outright doesn't matter to it.

Yeah, they absolutely can...

Next edition comes with a free camera that may or may not be recording everything you're doing, comrade!

would a federated open source d&d universe ever be reality? like have a whole world that is created by contributors, similar to openstreetmap (but not irl obviously)

Thank you kind soul for the updated information.

Honestly the original article didn't make a ton of sense... Why would Hasbro approach Larian to buy the entirety of the DnD IP? I was originally assuming it was misreporting a possible sale of rights to make video games only, not the entire IP, which might have made more sense to approach Larian about.

Great news! There are many, many tabletop role-playing games that are not Dungeons and Dragons that you can play! My favorite easy alternative is Dungeon World but there are literally hundreds out there.

Good of you to ask. It's entirely possible to play D&D without buying any official materials (and you should play it without buying anything Hasbro currently sells, but that's just my opinion).

In fact, you can find a more or less complete set of rules for most versions of D&D just by searching combinations of the version you want and terms like "SRD" or "wiki". Some of these will lead you to officially hosted sources, and some not, but the great thing about D&D is that Hasbro can't ever sell it away from players.

I'm not going to provide any links to anything because someone will accuse me of breaking the rules, but D&D isn't Hasbro, and it wasn't even really TSR. It's just collections of rules, and game rules are not patentable. Hasbro owns a copyright in the 5e PHB's written content, for example (and some trademarks on trade dress and some terms), but crucially it does not own the way people play D&D. Ergo, in a matter of speaking, Dungeons and Dragons is already open source. If you've got a pen, some paper, and a fistful of dice, you can play. Less is more.

Having said that, many folks believe that the best versions of D&D aren't in print anymore anyway, but even if 5e is your version of choice (and to its credit, it has a few marks in its favor), I'd recommend checking a used book store before getting worried about whether this rumor ever amounts to anything. Hasbro can sell D&D, or not, and millions of people will happily keep right on playing D&D every week without ever giving them a dime.

How close is Pathfinder to that?

Here might be a good start for you: https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems#Open_Game_License

Just because of the nature of those games, I would speculate that the page above is just a fraction of what is available.

D&D's 5e SRD was released under CC-BY. It only includes one subclass per class and a handful of monsters, but it's all the rules.

Tales of the Valiant and Pathfinder 2e both have SRDs licensed under the ORC license and are based in D&D-type gameplay.

FATE is a different type of TTRPG that has a SRD licensed both under OGL and CC-BY.

Powered by the Apocalypse is a different system and has a permissive, but hand-wavey license.

Of all of these, ToV is the most like 5e without being controlled by a multi-national, public company.

https://open5e.com/

I'd suggest checking out the EN World Advanced 5E. It's open source, way better than basic 5E, and the creative team is very pro-player.

I can easily think of three buyers worse for players than tencent. Blizzard, Epic Games, Apple.

This would never have been put up for sale if Hasbro had taken care of it, regardless of who buys the IP from them I doubt they can do worse. Let's says Tencent does buy the IP, they could bury it but where is the profit in that, there is also nothing to divide up and parcel off. Worse case we get what we have now and we all complain about the same things we are complaining about with Hasbro. Whoever buys the IP will want to make money, so let's hope they look at the community concerns and try to course correct the mess that Hasbro has made.