By Nelson Schneider - 12/14/24 at 07:24 PM CT
The social downfall of Hasbro Wizards of the Coasts continues. Not merely satisfied with filling its last 4 years of book releases with enough DEI pandering to choke a hippogriff and purposefully alienating its core audience, the corporation recently released a 50th anniversary coffee table book with a foreword that included disparaging comments about the game’s co-creator and community folk hero, Gary Gygax. These comments weren’t anything surprising, of course: Simply more 2020’s accusations of misogyny, and the like… The types of basic insults the Woke crowd has leveled at pretty much EVERYONE in the last decade (including each other). However, something about these Social Justice platitudes appearing in an official product that was supposed to be a celebration of half-a-century of tabletop roleplaying really shook the hornets’ nest.
And when you shake a hornets’ nest hard enough, eventually the Queen will show up. In this case the “queen” in question is a swollen-headed billionaire, riding high on the smell of his own farts after participating in the winning side of a presidential campaign. Yes, Elon Musk, the self-described culture warrior, in response to the doubling-down by the Hasbro Wizards staff writer who penned the offending forward, asked “How much is Hasbro?”
The last time Musk asked “how much” something cost, he ended up (accidentally) buying Twitter – the source of so much corruption within modern media journalism – and basically set the place on fire, sacking half the staff, airing the company’s dirty laundry with The Twitter Files, renaming the platform to “X” (because he loves that letter, for reasons only he understands), and allowing all of the people who had earned bans under the old regime to return to their regularly-scheduled shitposting.
Now, just imagine what a similar purchase of Hasbro would entail.
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In so imagining, I truly can’t decide whether to be optimistic or start writing Dungeons’ & Dragons’ eulogy. In a best-case scenario, a Hasbro owned by Musk would go back to making traditionally-gendered toys, probably with plenty of non-rainbow-colored guns, non-trans Transformers, and a G.I. Joe who isn’t afraid to confront Islamism AND Communism as its greatest foes. I could easily imagine Musk handing full control of Dungeons & Dragons back to the Gygax estate and the direction of E. Gary Gygax Jr. – who unsuccessfully tried to reboot his dad’s company, TSR, with a completely new game – but only after changing the ampersand into his favorite letter, X. We would most likely see all of the recent lore changes struck down as non-canonical, and see a true 6th Edition that caters to actual DXD fans and players, rather than people who have only experienced tabletop roleplaying vicariously by watching “content creators” like Critical Role (who have parted ways with Hasbro Wizards already, in order to pursue their own game systems that will appeal directly to the narrow slice of the total tabletop audience that Musk and Gygax Jr. would intentionally ignore).
In a worst-case scenario, though, we could see Musk continue down the rapacious path of monetization that Hasbro Wizards began with the creation of the One D&D Live Service. As a self-proclaimed futurist, Musk might see physical books and meatspace tabletops as archaic, preferring to charge ahead at full steam toward the precipice of expensive proprietary hardware (perhaps augmented reality) and perpetual subscriptions. Furthermore, instead of catering to long-time D&D fans who have kept up with the ebb-and-flow of evolving game mechanics and prefer a mix of new-school rules with old-school lore, Musk might very well hand over full gatekeeping privileges for Dungeons X Dragons 6th Edition to the self-described Grognards, who are still fully invested in the Byzantine and Gygaxian rules design and methodology that went out of style with the advent of 3rd Edition. Under such crusty overlords, the game loved by so many could be rolled back to a primordial state, with inscrutable rules, excessive random tables, and opaque math underlying everything, undoing so much of the truly important and excellent progress made in the tabletop gaming space over the course of 50 years.
Regardless of outcome, I can’t help but feel that, best case or worst case, a Musk buyout of Hasbro Wizards of the Coast would be better than allowing the company to continue on as-is. The Open Game License debacle was an eye-opener that revealed to many just how deep the corruption runs at Hasbro Wizards, and since then, it’s just been one public relations disaster after another. Even if Elon just walked into the Hasbro Wizards office, took a dump on the president’s desk, then burned the building down, it would ultimately be better than letting the current trajectory for the company play out as its current leadership intends.