#HASBRO

[1980sactionfigures]

Tomax and Xamot - G.I. Joe (Hasbro)

#gi joe #gijoe #hasbro

[dduane]

And to think I wrote for these folks, back in the day. Never again.

#Hasbro #Dungeons & Dragons #layoffs

[blueskyscribe]

guys Hasbro is making toys that transform from d20s to D&D monsters

guys

they're more than meets the die

#dnd #owlbear #beholder #Transformers #dragons #Hasbro #dicelings #I need all of them

[ashesfordayz]

Binged the new Earthspark eps today!! I'm sobbing up a storm

#starscream #megatron #megastar #transformers earthspark #earthspark #earthspark spoilers #transformers earthspark spoilers #fanart #ashesfordayz #my art #robots #artists on tumblr #hasbro #maccadam #art #drawing

[aleksgivanov]

I’m excited to finally post my pieces for the To Be Gentle and Peace Through Tyranny zines from @allsparkzines ! These were so fun to work on and connect together. Check out all the other amazing art these zines have to offer!

#transformers #maccadam #megatron #optimus prime #g1 transformers #soundwave #bumblebee #Starscream #I wanted to do something that could easily be the plot of a g1 episode #just a peaceful little bbq where everything’s ok #to be gentle #peace through tyranny #maccadams #robot #mecha #sci fi #Hasbro #80s cartoons

[softichill]

#cricket chirping #poll #polls #monster high #ever after high #my little pony #mlp #barbie #polly pocket #transformers #beanie boos #beanie babies #pokemon #pokémon #digimon #strawberry shortcake #bratz #mattel #hasbro #I get curious about people's childhood toys!!

[natsumipocket]

#idog #colorful #frutiger aero #frutiger metro #sega #hasbro #cute

[90s-2000s-barbie]

I-Dogs (2005 – 2009)

#idogs #ipod #hasbro #apple iPod #apple #2005 #2006 #2007 #2008 #2009 #y2k #2000s #2000s nostalgia #2000s kids #2000s style #y2k nostalgia #00s #y2k aesthetic #y2k style #2000s kid #2000s music #00s music #y2kcore #cyber y2k #00s kid #00’s #00score #00s core #2000 #00s aesthetic

[mckitterick]

Hasbro, owner of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, lays off 1,100 workers

The corporate owner of Wizards of the Coast (maker of D&D and Magic) announced it will lay off 1100 employees just two weeks before Christmas. Hasbro had already fired 800 workers in January of this year.

At the time, CEO Cocks trumpeted the new corporate plan: focus on fewer and larger brands, increase digital development, and invest in direct-to-consumer and licensed deals like Baldur's Gate 3, demonstrating his disconnect with customers.

Cocks first became Hasbro CEO in February 2022, and now gets an annual salary of $1.5 million. While the company's income dropped and 800 workers went jobless, this one executive received $9.4 million in total compensation last year, an amount that could have saved many creative jobs if even slightly trimmed. Instead, 1100 more actual workers will go.

No reduction in executive salary, bonuses, or additional compensation was announced.

#wizards of the coast #hasbro #layoffs #corporate greed #fire more CEOs #compost the rich

[cardboard-crack]

#Layoffs #WotC #Chris Cocks #Hasbro #Magic: The Gathering #MTG #Cardboard Crack

[cherrycreamfairy]

the princesses and SOME of the villains (yes there's gonna be more)

these were fun to do :3

#my little pony #my litte pony friendship is magic #princess celestia #princess luna #nightmare moon #discord #queen chrysalis #hasbro #character redesign

[prokopetz]

Proposals to refer to One D&D as "6th Edition" in order to spite Hasbro marketing don't go far enough. We should retroactively assign full edition numbers to every major core rules revision for which the game's publishers declined to do so, as follows:

White box OD&D is now 1st Edition

Holmes Basic is now 2nd Edition

AD&D 1st Edition is now 3rd Edition

BX/Moldvay Basic is now 4th Edition

BECMI/Mentzer Basic is now 5th Edition

AD&D 2nd Edition is now 6th Edition

The Rules Cyclopedia is now 7th Edition

The AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook redux with the infamous "This Is Not 3rd Edition" foreword is now 8th Edition

Player's Option is now 9th Edition

D&D 3rd Edition is now 10th Edition

D&D 3rd Edition Revised (3.5E) is now 11th Edition

D&D 4th Edition is now 12th Edition

D&D Essentials is now 13th Edition

D&D Next (later informally rebranded as "5th Edition" due to consumer pressure) is now 14th Edition

Finally, this means the forthcoming One D&D is 15th Edition.

Make sense?

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #dungeons & dragons #d&d #wizards of the coast #hasbro #branding #nameology

[dyscomancer]

can you explain what happened with larian and hasbro? why are the next 5 years going to be so bad?

So, Larian had to purchase from Hasbro/WotC the usage rights for the Forgotten Realms setting and the D&D 5e systems, among other things, to make Baldur's Gate 3. Larian self-published the game; it was not published by Hasbro or Wizards of the Coast.

However, they still had folks from the WotC D&D team help them with the integration of a setting they did not own. Having folks on hand to provide visual reference for artists designing characters, items, and architecture, having lore bible folks checking the story and dialogue for lore consistency, having rules designers help to change the 5e rules for the reality of it being a video game and not live tabletop; that sort of thing.

Thing is, since then, Hasbro has let every single one of the WotC employees Larian worked with (with whom they had a great time, by all accounts) go in their recent downsizing layoffs.

Larian owner, Swen Vicke, has been outspoken about the video game industry's quarterly profit mindset and how it has been ruining the industry. These downsizing layoffs are emblematic of this toxic business structure; by nixing employees, you can claim to your all-powerful shareholders that you got a bigger profit than you would have otherwise! Because god help you if you have to tell the shareholders that you didn't double your fucking profit margins from the previous quarter. Don't worry about how you just let all your veteran talent go, I'm sure that won't have any effects down the line.

Recent news has confirmed that Baldur's Gate 3 will not be receiving any DLC, despite previous statements that the concept was being looked at. It will not get any expansions like BG games before it did. It will not be getting a sequel from Larian. It will not be getting any expanded content outside of further updates and patches. Big extra content like that requires the aforementioned involvement from the WotC team; the team that has since been entirely fired.

Larian, as a company that generally eschews firing people for bullshit reasons and don't adhere as much to the bean counting mindset, found this firing of people to be horrifyingly unethical, as many of its staff and ownership have publicly stated. This almost certainly had something to do with the previously mentioned 'no DLC/sequels' announcement. Why would you want to work with a company that treats its people like that?

The '5 years' statement I stated was just a rough estimate. Hasbro has already started up on publishing their own video game titles in-house without the aid of studios like Larian, and 5 years is a pretty good window for titles like that to be released in the future. And judging by how their previous titles from a previous effort (bad mobile games, bad steam games) were received, I don't see any reasons to believe that this push would be different.

Had they just not fired people to please a bunch of asshole suits from some holding company doing fuck-all but sitting in meeting rooms to collect money, they'd likely have had a better chance at working with Larian on more stuff for BG3, more Forgotten Realms stuff in the future, and just generally had more chances for quality products made by a passionate and proven team.

tl;dr; Hasbro fired all their people who worked with Larian, and Larian rightly saw this as a dick move.

#asks #from the desk #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #larian #wotc #hasbro #fuck hasbro #dnd #d&d

[anim-ttrpgs]

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.

#dnd #dnd5e #dnd 5e homebrew #dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d 5e #dungeons and dragons 5e #dnd 5e #5e #homebrew #dungeons & dragons #critical role #crit role #dimension 20 #actual play #matt mercer #wizards of the coast #wotc #hasbro #ttrpgs #ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg tumblr #tabletop #roleplay #roleplaying #roleplaying games #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop role playing game #fantasy rpg

[punch-draws-comics]

Wip sketch vs further along painting!

Have I mentioned lately that I love prowl?

#transformers #prowl #tf mtmte #idw mtmte #transformers mtmte #hasbro #transformers idw #idw #autobots #maccadam

[leidensygdom]

So, it seems like WOTC hired an AI artist for their latest book (Glory of the Giants). The "artist" (in their social media) openly advertises themself as an AI "artist".

I guess the whole OGL mess and sending the Pinkertons wasn't enough, they had to reach a new low. Fantastic timing, gotta say, all while GenCon (the biggest TTRPG con) is currently ongoing.

#wotc #wizards of the coast #dnd #dungeons and dragons #glory of the giants #ttrpg #hasbro #ai #ai art #no ai #anti ai #artificial intelligence #dnd art #dnd5e #onednd #one dnd