96: Why I no Longer Play D&D¶

Back in the 80’s and 90’s, I played Dungeons and Dragons. Like most gamer/computer nerds of my era really. It was published at the time by a little company called TSR and was a fairly niche game. This was also around that time that a ton of Christians tried to outlaw it as being “Satanic”.

I was in college at the time, and without any kind of familial support, had to get creative with how I earned money. Hustle hard to stay fed and housed. One way I did so was by printing the types of postcards and flyers that realtors would use to sell houses at the time. (They used to put paper flyers in boxes on the front lawn of houses for sale, describing the amenities, before the Internet rendered paper obsolete.) The money was good, and easily made. Once you had a few realtors that would come to you, you’d get a lot of orders in a day and they didn’t really care about the price so much as the convenience. To keep things legal I had a proper home business for this, paid taxes, etc.

The other way I made money was by selling “Magic: The Gathering” card singles. It was another niche game, and I’d preordered it from my comic shop. I may have been one of the insanely lucky souls who got an Alpha Black Lotus in my first few boxes of MTG cards. So when some stranger at a convention offered me $50 on the spot for a single card, which is more than I’d spent on the entire game at that point, I instantly went from playing MTG, to selling MTG. Owning the printing company meant I already had all the tax licenses for such. I was a slut with bills to pay.

Combine these two hustles, and fast forward a couple years. I’m at my first big gaming convention: Origins. (The year was 1994.) I’m at the convention, selling enough MTG singles to cover all my hotel and convention bills and walk out of the con with more money than I walked in with. All good, right?

Nope.

A couple weeks later I got an angry letter from TSR’s lawyers saying that I was a very bad man using the word ‘Dragon’ without their consent. Cuz apparently on the basis of their game, they owned the entire word ‘Dragon’ on “Anything printed on paper”. They also had some idiotic notion that my business entity was a gaming company, not a printing company for real-estate flyers.

When I hopped online to vent about this stupidity, I found there were already chat rooms dedicated to this. Apparently TSR was on a mad spree, suing or threatening to sue almost anyone who had every put anything online about games. Colleges were being sued because some server in their computer science department had a list of “Elvish sounding names”. TSR claimed that all these things, which they didn’t write or publish or have anything to do with at all, were “derived works” from Dungeons and Dragons, and so they owned all of it. According to their lawyers.

This led to probably one of the largest boycotts and piles of hate ever directed at a company at the time. This eventually led to TSR losing so much money that they got bought out by Wizards of the Coast, the people that made MTG. Now this bit of history is mostly forgotten, but it was a big deal at the time. And the animosity of it is what led to WOTC coming up with their “Open Gaming License” as means of both apology, and promise to never do anything like that again.

TSR cease and desist — What it looks like when an overzealous lawyer says they own the word 'dragon'.

In the end I had to pay a lawyer to explain to them what I’d already tried and fail to make clear: I printed real-estate flyers. I certainly wanted nothing to do with their products. He went on to explain to them that many local realtors are of Asian heritage, who have been been using and having positive associations with the word ‘dragon’ for 4,000 years or so. Slightly pre-dating their trademark on the word.

TSR agreed to fuck off and leave me alone if I signed a settlement saying I’d never have anything to do with their games, and especially never print anything to do with their games.

I signed.

While technically this doesn’t mean I can’t play their games, I cannot legally print my own character sheets. Sure, they wouldn’t know, and Hasbro who now owns it all has no idea who I am, but fuck them and their game. I’m holding a grudge.

Plus I like Pathfinder better. 😆