I think it's important to establish a few things regarding this Hasbro Wizards stuff, just because they're counterintuitive. It's simultaneously more complex and much more simple, depending on the angle you view it from.

I sort of have a fever right now, so hopefully this won't end up being too crazy. Stop me if I start talking about machine elves or something. Wait - I'm writing this before you read it. Shit. Okay. We just have to do our best, I guess.

It's true that down here where we live it's utterly incomprehensible that you would gut - or as I suggested previously, lobotomize - a profit center like Wizards of the Coast. But this is based on a misunderstanding I will elucidate for you now: we may be the customers of Wizards of the Coast, but we are not the customers of its owner Hasbro. Hasbro is a publicly traded company, and its "customers" are not people who buy products but capital markets themselves. So all the argumentation we can muster, all our unassailable cleverness, it doesn't even refer to the reality we're in. We are not rattling sabers, we're rattling those little plastic swords they used to put in sandwiches. We're shaking these:

These swords are not big. Nor are they swords, for that matter.

That isn't a reason not to say things. I mean, I say them. When a person doesn't say things about this, especially when they rest atop the space like a jewel set in a ring, I wonder. But the Ascended Plane these decisions are made on has only tenuous connections to our own - scant few bridges upon which to mount any kind of realistic assault. The referents barely align. The OGL fiasco was more sophisticated, and affected long-time partners, influencers; there was a movie coming out too, one that had a chance, and they couldn't have any of this. Such a din can be sensed by the Gods, like the smoke of an offering.

But like the OGL modifications, I suspect this tumult presages a more digital future for the product. I don't see how it couldn't. Magic makes money hand over fist, but Dungeons & Dragons has always been a sticky wicket outside of pure licensing. Imagine if you could buy one hamburger, and then you and your friends could eat that hamburger for thirty years. D&D is, for lack of a better term than I have used previously, a culture. Serving that culture is such an honor. Does such a culture survive, truly survive, lodged within a pair of digital, aggressively monetized parentheses?

(CW)TB out.