It Could Happen Here - A War For the Soul of Dungeons & Dragons

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Robert sits down with Jason Bulmahn, creator of the Pathfinder role-playing game, to talk about the war for D&D's future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....

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Starting point is 00:01:21 Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, everybody. Robert here. I recorded this with Jason about two days before Wizards of the Coast put out an announcement completely backpedaling on everything they had been planning to do to the open gaming license. 89% of a survey of 15,000 fans said they were not happy with Wizards deauthorizing the 1.0 open gaming license. And I mean, what it looks like is a lot of people unregistered from D&D Beyond and a lot of people called in complaining, and the numbers folks at Wizards panicked.
Starting point is 00:02:09 And as a result, they are completely folding on the plans to rescind or deauthorize the open gaming license. And in fact, have announced that they are making it, the exact terms they use are irrevocable. And yeah, that's good. Yeah, and they put everything under an irrevocable Creative Commons license. So this is all just breaking, but I think it's broadly good news. Anytime a giant company chooses to do something kind of crummy with a piece of what I would say is actually pretty meaningful intellectual heritage, and then they
Starting point is 00:02:46 get slapped down and panic and reverse course, that's a good thing. It shows a number of things, one of which, probably the most important of which, is that the community of people who recognize the value in these kinds of games, in this pastime, this recreational activity, also fundamentally value the essence of what is open source ideology, which is nice. It's nice to know that the open source folks, we can still throw a punch every now and again, even if it's just a punch at Wizards of the Coast.
Starting point is 00:03:22 So happy ending, everybody. Happy ending. Also, the good folks at Paizo sold out of eight months' worth of Pathfinder books in like two weeks. So that's nice, too. Ah! It Could Happen Here is the podcast that you are listening to right now. I am Robert Evans.
Starting point is 00:03:45 This is a show about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. And today we're taking a little bit of a different tact. In recent weeks, you've listened to us cover a wide variety of issues from conflicts in places like Myanmar to conflicts here at home in the city of Atlanta to deep dives in history and all that good stuff that you know and love us for. Today, we are talking about a subject that is unusually close to my heart, Dungeons & Dragons. Now, I'm going to guess, just given the nature of our listenership, a decent chunk of you grew up playing D&D, a decent chunk of you grew up playing D&D and just because of how really shockingly suddenly it's become much more popular than it ever was previously and much more mainstream. A lot of you may have encountered it as an adult. There's a lot that's actually been written kind of sociologically on what Dungeons & Dragons is. And one point that some people will make, is that it's kind of the first new game
Starting point is 00:04:45 that we had that human beings made up since chess, by which I mean you have had war games for a very long period of time, but the concept of a role-playing game and the way that D&D is, where you're essentially sitting down with a group of people and engaging in an act of collaborative storytelling that's kind of buttressed by a system of rules. That's actually a pretty new idea. Now, elements of this have existed forever. And in fact, kind of an interesting fact you'll run into is that in the late medieval period, a lot of jousts had role-playing elements, including ones where like rulers and their
Starting point is 00:05:23 court would dress up as the knights of the round table and act in character as those knights. So elements of all of this stuff have existed for a while. But when Dungeons and Dragons kind of came together as a game for the first time, it is kind of worth seeing it as something really new and valuable in the history of play and the history of human creativity. So as a result of that, I do kind of think, I personally think there's something a little bit sacred about that basic idea. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about the industry that grew up around Dungeons and Dragons is that there have always been a lot of people in it who I think feel the same way. And I think one of these people was a guy named Ryan Dancy.
Starting point is 00:06:08 And Ryan Dancy was vice president in charge of Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast for a while. And he helped actually negotiate the sale of the Dungeons & Dragons property to Wizards of the Coast when the company that had been distributing it fell apart. And Dancy was a big part of the institution in the year 2000 of what became known as the Open Gaming License. And basically what this meant is that the set of rules that D&D worked by at around 2000, which was I think you would call it like 3.0 was the system in place, basically got elements of the mechanics got effectively open sourced. And so Wizards of the Coast went from what had been the previous move of the people who'd owned
Starting point is 00:06:53 D&D, which was kind of to oppose people trying to make third party content using the ruled source, to embracing it and allowing it to do that freely. And now I'm going to introduce our guest who is one of the people who is kind of the, one of the most influential folks in what happened after this, because once the open gaming license came into effect, there's suddenly this galaxy of new games and supplemental materials that people start making, which,
Starting point is 00:07:19 you know, wizards is not profiting from directly, but which the hobby profits from. And one of the people who has, who has been most influential in that is our guest today, Jason Bowman. Jason, you are the lead game designer at Piazzo and the creator of Pathfinder, which is the, I mean, it's not Dungeons and Dragons, but it uses as its base that kind of open gaming system. And it's what I play when I get the chance to sit down and play a role playing game.
Starting point is 00:07:46 So first off, Jason, thank you for several thousand hours of my childhood and early adulthood spent playing Pathfinder. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. And yeah, Paizo kind of spun off from Wizards of the Coast, you know, back in the early days of the open game license. And we were their official publishers of their magazine until that kind of came to an end. And then we started making our own game based off the open game license. And did I get all that right earlier?
Starting point is 00:08:17 Do you have any kind of clarification you'd like to add before we move further into the conflict? And there is a conflict. We're not just talking about how cool D&D and Pathfinder are. I think there's an interesting thing to note about games. Games are kind of weird when it comes to copyright and ownership. And it's kind of why the open game license is so important, right? So TSR, the company that owned Dungeons & Dragons before Wizards of the coast was pretty pretty litigious as you mentioned um but they ended up getting into kind of a bind because you know the
Starting point is 00:08:50 game itself is one that encourages people to make their own content to kind of homebrew stuff and invent their own stories and what it comes down to is that know, ultimately game mechanics can't be copyrighted. They've been long held that, that those sorts of things you cannot copyright. That's why you see so many versions of like Scrabble that aren't Scrabble. Yeah. And it's why anyone can make a basketball team or a basketball league and play basketball. You don't have to get the NBA's approval to play fucking basketball. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:09:23 Exactly. get the NBA's approval to play fucking basketball. Exactly. Exactly. So the open game license wasn't about giving everyone permission to use rules, which is something that could already kind of do. It was about giving them kind of a safe Harbor, a place that everybody involved kind of knew that this was all okay. No one was going to be filing frivolous lawsuits and that you could use kind of direct references
Starting point is 00:09:46 without having to be a copyright lawyer or retaining a giant staff. It allowed a lot of very little businesses to kind of spring up making, hey, here's my cool adventure that I ran for my group. You can buy it and play it with your group now. Little things like that. And I don't think it's for nothing that, number one, a huge thing, and this has become, as Silicon Valley has kind of turned more mercenary, this has become less of a thing but a massive thing. And the early history of Silicon Valley in the tech industry was the open source movement, was the idea that a lot of people should be able to collaboratively work and iterate on things without having to worry about who owns the basic idea, right? You know, Linux is a great example of this. And the ideology behind the open source movement was a big influence in the open gaming license. I mean,
Starting point is 00:10:34 Dancy kind of admits that himself. There's a quote where he says that like, yeah, I think we need to embrace some of these ideas at the heart of the open source movement, because I think it will be a good business decision for Wizards of the Coast. It will, on the whole, even if we're not profiting directly from every sort of like thing that people make off of this, the fact that it's going to cause the hobby to explode will benefit us. And I think he's been proven right in that, because D&D has gone from this thing that like I got bullied for in high school to there's these massive podcasts. There's been TV shows that are just people playing the game like it has reached this level.
Starting point is 00:11:11 I never really expected it would of like. Critical and mass acceptance, which has been really cool to see. It's been one of the things that I've been happiest about watching occur socially in the last couple of decades. that I've been happiest about watching occur socially in the last couple of decades. Yeah. You can't disagree that the, the business case wasn't super tight, right? Uh, the way that the OGL got all of the other game companies, many of which had their own entirely different games in the early two thousands, they all abandoned them and started making content for D and D. Yeah. And that just kind of carried forward a large swath of kind of the game industry, which is pretty cottage, right?
Starting point is 00:11:51 There's a bunch of small players. There's not a lot of large corporations in here. You know, in fact, Wizards is by far the largest. And so you got a bunch of small game companies that are seeing this as a great opportunity to kind of play in the big pool. And a lot of them followed suit. So obviously the reason we are here today is that a Paul has been cast recently over what has up until now been kind of a lovely thing. Wizards of the Coast got a new CEO pretty recently, right? Yes. Cynthia Williams is relatively new.
Starting point is 00:12:27 Yeah, and there is basically murmuring coming from the company that's like, we don't think D&D is properly capitalized. We believe that we are leaving money on the table here. And kind of in the wake of some of that stuff coming out, they announced a series of changes to the open gaming license. And if you kind of want to take it from here and explain, because I've read and listened to a number of different folks,
Starting point is 00:12:51 some saying like, well, it's not as bad as people are fearing. And some folks saying like, this would effectively kill a huge chunk of the hobby and a bunch of the companies that have grown up in the wake of the open gaming license. And I'm interested in your take on what Wizards is doing here and what actually kind of is at risk so yeah i think you you you've clued into the start of this which was in uh uh early december
Starting point is 00:13:16 of last year uh hasbro earnings call uh cynthia basically came out and said D&D was under-monetized. And they had been spending the entire previous year really proliferating Magic the Gathering, which is their other giant brand, and kind of really making a lot of money, like talks of like, it is a billion-dollar brand. And as a result, you know, there was kind of some murmurings and some rumblings going through December talking about a new version of the OGL. Wizards themselves came out on December 21st, so just a few days before Christmas, and said that a new OGL was coming and that it had notes in it about royalty reporting and, you know, mentioning that folks won't need to pay until later. And, you know, mentioning that folks won't need to pay until later and that, you know, really this new license is only going to be to make books and PDFs. So they said this on December 21st. And the royalty part of that was really quite challenging because it said if you make over $750,000 a year, you might have to pay a sizable percentage of your your your gross profit like 25 percent
Starting point is 00:14:28 and that's terrifying which when you're talking about a business and and this is not the gaming industry does not run on huge margins um no no unless you're like making warhammer models that you're selling for 120 for a piece of plastic that's tight. Yeah. The margins are pretty tight. So saying past $750K, your company with however many employees has to give a quarter. That'll sink people. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:57 I think a lot of companies, the larger ones, couldn't sustain that. I mean, I think saying pay 25% of your gross over 750K just basically means make sure you only make $749,000 that year. I do think that that is a real, real dangerous thing to a lot of these businesses. Now, for a lot of the content creators, this is never going to matter. But I do believe that part of this was seeing seeing gigantic multimillion dollar Kickstarters happening and kind of going, where's our cut? Yeah, we want a piece of this. Yeah. And the answer to that is that, like, you know, it's problematic just crediting the creation of D&D solely to Gary Gygax. and made dnd a thing and then the people who iterated and changed and evolved it from you
Starting point is 00:15:45 know the original game to adnd um in the years of thaco to to 3.0 like like morally outside of like what i think is justifiable in corporate law and stuff like morally i think it's fucked up to say that like some company forever gets a piece of that when what it is is like human beings coming together to try to figure out the the most efficient way to run an engine for storytelling um i don't know it's it's it's it's fucked up to me to think about it this way welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,
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Starting point is 00:19:11 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So they announced this alteration to the open gaming license and i'm gonna guess those were some dark days at uh at the pso offices so so yeah uh you know uh most of us at paizo at that point in time we're kind of on vacation and uh we kind of just filed it away and we're like okay well it's a draft and they're just talking. So, um, you know, we get to back, you know, from our break and it's the beginning of the year. And this is now January 5th is when a bombshell article drops on Gizmodo by, uh, and they really laid out kind of what was in this proposed license, uh, apparently having had portions of it linked to them. license uh apparently having had portions of it leaked to them and um you know it confirmed a 25 margin but maybe only 20 for for kickstarters which then got confirmed by someone at kickstarter on twitter um and it also included a bit in there that there was a clause that said, Watsi could, Wizards of the Coast,
Starting point is 00:20:26 could use any of the content you create under the license for free, never having to make, pay royalties to you, never having to give you any credit. They could just take your work. And, and they, they phrased it in such a way that it sounded like it was, you know, well, just in case we make something similar, we don't want to get sued. But yeah, and we're talking about just to clarify it for people. We're not talking about like if you introduce mechanics, because again, that that's not what this is. We're talking about if you create characters, if you create or if you build stories, they
Starting point is 00:20:59 have a right to utilize that story that you've made. Things that are actually copyrightable right stories ideas and expressions are copyrightable um uh you know but rules aren't so that yeah that drops on the fifth and on the ninth the full draft document leaks and you've got streamers and influencers reading it live on YouTube. Yeah. And this thing just starts to snowball. Um, and from the ninth forward, things start moving very quickly. Um, on the 10th, a number of major kind of third-party publishers.
Starting point is 00:21:36 These are folks who print with the OGL, um, announced that they were not going to go with that. And one of the largest ones, you know, you know announced yeah i'm not doing that at all i'm going to create my entire brand new game i'm leaving all of this behind yeah and the fervor on social media turned into basically a firestorm yeah um it and it's really a sign of how how much more how many people both love and play versions of this game that there was so much media attention from like major media organs. Like this,
Starting point is 00:22:09 this was not just, you know, those of us who are into gaming, um, you know, freaking out over this change that wizards of the coast has made. This was like, I mean,
Starting point is 00:22:18 I was seeing it everywhere. Very few things have like broken as widely in my media ecosystem as, as this. There was an article, there was a story about it today on NPR. So there was another one, there was one other important aspect in the leak that I think is really important. One is that the new OGL could be canceled at any time with 30 days notice. with 30 days notice.
Starting point is 00:22:49 And they were claiming that they were deauthorizing the previous OGL, which up to this point, everyone kind of assumed was irrevocable, right? It had, it has clauses in it that say, if we ever put out a new version of this license, you can ignore it and continue to use this one right but it uses this word in there that says you can continue to use any authorized version of the license yeah never minding that the contract doesn't mention how you might de-authorize a license um so the they're this draft of the ogl says that they're de-authorizing the previous version which puts all of the work of the past 20 years into doubt.
Starting point is 00:23:25 And at this point in time, the fans are revolting, right? There are a lot of folks canceling their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, which is kind of their in-house character generation tools that you pay a monthly subscription for. And things really start spinning out of hand to the point where D&D actually has to respond to it and pull back and kind of retreat from this and saying, hey, we're going to answer your questions. What you saw was just a draft, you know, and that was never supposed to leak. But it was at this point in time that we actually launched our own license. We had been talking to some of the other publishers, and by that I mean we, Paizo, to create a brand new safe harbor for folks to publish under. Now, it's not going to be owned by us. It's going to be owned by a law firm that actually drafted the first OGL. But you started to see this giant fork happening um where a lot of folks are just abandoning ship and i mean what
Starting point is 00:24:28 do you think this means because obviously wizards has already announced a a new version of the of the ogl beyond like the one that got leaked and i i think are kind of in damage control mode do you think this is something that like there is any way for them to pull back from? Or do you think that kind of the inherent instability of the OGL now that they're kind of making these claims that, well, we can actually change the deal anytime we want? Has that sort of irrevocably altered the ground? I think that they've damaged a lot of people's trust in them right uh i think over over the past few weeks especially when they went silent and then frankly the first retraction was really kind of awkward and filled with kind of like well we didn't lose we won this was great now we learned how to make
Starting point is 00:25:18 a better license right they're clearly stepping back stepping back stepping back and their most recent step back which just happened uh you know, on the 18th. So, you know, a week ago or so basically said that they were going to release the core of the game to Creative Commons and their new license was going to be irrevocable and last forever. But it still contains a lot of kind of poison pills, things like we are still deauthorizing the first version of the license and uh we have this morality clause that says if we find your content offensive we can just kill your license without yeah which is fucked up because i mean i don't think i need to explain why that's fucked up um that that puts and that puts a lot of the most creative kind of projects to at risk. Like I got,
Starting point is 00:26:08 that's, that's ugly. I mean, I don't think anybody in this industry wants to see any, you know, deeply offensive, problematic content. Um,
Starting point is 00:26:16 but there's a lot of stuff that is frankly a lot more marginal and, and explores, you know, issues of the human condition that folks might want to explore in a game. And who's to say that someone at Wizards might go, well, sorry, that's offensive to me. You don't get to make it. I don't think anybody wants to invest their creativity and risk their business on what someone they will never have met thinks of their work. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:42 The problem is not that, like, want as the most offensive role-playing games i can get the problem is like well who determines what offensive is and it's a bunch of lawyers and businessmen at wizards of the coast at least that's the worry right like not necessarily that that's how it would work out but you just you get no guarantee and this stuff this stuff evolves over time right you know what what is fine today may be problematic tomorrow. We learn those things, and we evolve from them, and we change. But I don't think anybody wants to have this axe hanging over our head of like, well, sorry, that's now offensive, so we're going to kill the entire license. so where are we where are we now like it looks like paizo yaller are moving forward with the orc along with a number of other people can you give me an idea of what that's going to look like because one of the things that that does concern me is um and this is a very selfish concern but like i grew very comfortable with you know 3.5 which is essentially the machinery that underpins
Starting point is 00:27:42 pathfinder and um it's one of those things, if I didn't play again for 20 years, I could probably sit down with the material in my head and run a campaign just because so much of that stuff is burnt into my brain. Are we, like, what is the mechanics kind of underlying the ORC, and how is it going to be different from what we've gotten used to? So I'll say this. We're in the very early days on this. And what's happening right now is we are, you know, in coordination with a number of other publishers working with Azura Law, and they are the people who wrote the original OGL and had, you know, fully intended for
Starting point is 00:28:18 it to be a perpetual license. And we're working with them to create kind of a rules-neutral license that the entire game industry can use to share work. Because there's like a lot of nuance that was in the OGL that allowed different companies to share creative work together. And a lot of companies used it as kind of a bridging license, even if they weren't using Dungeons & Dragons at all. They would just use the license as a framework to kind of exchange ideas. And that's what we want the Ork to be. The Ork needs to be a license that allows everybody in the game industry to open up their content and share work with each other
Starting point is 00:28:55 and iterate and expand and grow. That's our real goal. And ultimately, we are not going to own it. No one's going to own it. We're actually going to try and find a nonprofit to administer the license going forward so that we don't ever have to worry about this again. Nobody wants to go through what we've been going through for the past three weeks. So that's kind of one half of it. The other half is what happens to Pathfinder. And obviously, you know, when it came to Pathfinder 2nd Edition we rewrote the game from scratch and it is now fully our game. It's something we own and we control. So we feel pretty confident that we're just going to keep on rolling with Pathfinder.
Starting point is 00:29:36 And ultimately, you know, we don't actually believe that the previous version of the OGL even can be rescinded. So I guess we'll see how that plays out. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by I heart and Sonora, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.
Starting point is 00:30:17 From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. filling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
Starting point is 00:30:51 Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,
Starting point is 00:31:27 we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite
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Starting point is 00:32:41 Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I can see this having an overall positive outcome just in that if we get this new kind of thing that creators can use as a core point to branch off from when they're making games that's actually under solid legal footing, that isn't kind of reliant upon the whims of a publicly traded company, then in the long term, you know, that is, in the long term, it's better for creators because it's more like the way things were for the first 20 years of the ogl um do you i mean like what do you see as kind of some pitfalls and sort of trying to
Starting point is 00:33:32 trying to make this this happen trying to move things in this kind of more productive direction well i think you can always you know kind of fracture you know balkanize the the market to the point where where everybody has such a small slice of it that you know, balkanize the market to the point where everybody has such a small slice of it that, you know, no one can really get the kind of numbers they need to succeed. Because you're right, it is a pretty small industry. The margin on, you know, printed media isn't exactly great. But I think a lot of these companies do have the numbers to survive, but I think that right now everybody's trying to figure out how to replace parts of what has just been lost. Everybody's trying to kind of go in their different directions right now.
Starting point is 00:34:14 And some of that is going to be really good. Cause I think we're going to get a lot of really great games and I'm excited to see them. But I do think that I think one of the worries just for the industry is that they kind of all had one flag they were rallying around and now everyone's running in different directions and hoping that after all of this shakes out, everybody has kind of enough gamers to support a community. I think it's going to work out. I think that there's a number of standouts happening already. Um, you know, MCDM and Kobold are obviously racing to do things. There's a bunch of kind of
Starting point is 00:34:46 known players in the industry, us, Kobold, Chaosium, Green Ronin, all of them are pretty big companies positioned to kind of have good player bases with great games and mechanics underneath them. So I think the big loser here is frankly wizards of the coast they you know up up until you know the end of this year or the the end of last year they were undisputedly the largest uh game company in the entire tabletop role-playing game industry and that's still true today but there's a lot of cracks in that armor and it does make me wonder how it's going to fracture out over time and how many of their fans many of which never heard of pathfinder never heard of you know these other game companies call it cthulhu and stuff are now suddenly exploring these games and you know frankly the wealth of
Starting point is 00:35:36 smaller indie and zine games that are out there there's so much to play right now and watsi has just told their fan base hey go check it out it's interesting because it it kind of speaks to something that i've i've always loved and and also found kind of sociologically fascinating about tabletop gaming which is you just brought up call of cthulhu which is a game that is i i don't believe is under the control of the original company that it was made under people have been playing versions of call of cthulhu for a very long time. Dungeons and Dragons has gone through multiple owners. Shadowrun, which happens, even when those companies go under, the games keep going. And that's,
Starting point is 00:36:29 there's something I think unique there that is, it's not the case even like, you know, there's versions of it that happens in PC gaming, but there's also this thing that happens that a lot of gamers I know complain about, which is that like periodically
Starting point is 00:36:43 shit will get removed for whatever reason. A company goes under, a game is not supported, and that game is just gone. That little piece of culture is just gone. And it seems like so far, I'm not going to say in every case, because obviously there have been games that have, you know, people stopped playing and stuff in the tabletop space. But it's, there's this continuity, you know, even in the face of of changings of the guards in terms of like what companies are successful of like people keep playing these the same games and iterating them and changing them. And I don't know, that's that's always one of the things I found most inspiring about the way tabletop works.
Starting point is 00:37:28 most inspiring about the way tabletop works yeah i i mean i do think the legacy of tabletop role playing games is one of cooperation it was there from the start right you know the the moment gary and his uh and dave and folks you know got together and started turning their you know miniatures war game and giving characters to them. And everyone started building a story together. That spark was the start. Yeah. And it's carried through in a million different ways in a million different tables. And even if, you know, the companies go under or disappear, people with those books are still playing those games. There's plenty of people still playing AD&D first edition, right?
Starting point is 00:38:01 You know, they never left and they're fine with that. And I salute them. Yeah. I think about, and again, this is one of the reasons this has such a place in my heart. I started playing AD&D, but my friends and I would play at Cub Scout campouts, and we didn't have access to dice. So we had the rule books, we had the monster's manual and the player's guide, and we used those as jumping off points. And we would bring like a bunch of nickels, and we would figure out ways like, okay, for this action, you got to get three heads out of five flips or something like that. And that's a success in this. And like, so many people have stories like that, have variants of that, because it really is fundamentally what you need for any of these games, which is what makes them so durable, is a group of people to want to sit around a table and tell a story together, which is rad. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing else like it, right? There really isn't.
Starting point is 00:38:56 And that's why I think you're seeing so much fervor over this, because for a lot of people, this is very deeply personal. Gathering together with your friends and telling a story together. That's something you and your friends built. And, you know, uh, if you happen to find a way to make some money off of it, great. That's, that's your creativity coming to life. And frankly, kind of having a big giant corporation come in and say, Hey, where's my cut is, is not really very fun. No. come in and say, hey, where's my cut is not really very fun. No, and my heart goes out to you and your colleagues over how stressful this last three
Starting point is 00:39:32 or four weeks has been. And I hope that we're past the worst of it. It certainly seems like what's going to come out of this is going to be pretty exciting. So I'm hopeful. And it sounds like you're hopeful. Yeah, I think, you know, over the past couple of weeks, there's been a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of emergency meetings. But frankly, I feel more excited and energized about the future of Paizo, about the future
Starting point is 00:39:57 of gaming than I have in quite a long time. So buy Paizo's games, pick up some Pathfinder books, go to your nearest game store and pick one up or two or three. Jason, anything else you want to plug at the end here? Yeah, you can learn more about Paizo and our games. That would be Pathfinder and Starfinder at Paizo.com. We have a blog there talking about the Orc and we'll undoubtedly have more to say about it here in the coming weeks. As for me, you can find me on all the various social media platforms at backslash Jason Bowman. B-U-L-M-A-H-N.
Starting point is 00:40:34 Thank you, Jason, both for sitting down for this interview and for all of all of the many, many countless hours I have spent playing games that you had a hand in making. Thank you, Robert. We'll have to get together and roll some dice together soon. I would love that. Alright, everybody. That's a sowed. See you tomorrow. It could happen here in the production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website
Starting point is 00:41:01 coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral.
Starting point is 00:41:51 We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
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