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Orca
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### Weis & Hickman sue Wizards of the Coast

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Post by Orca » Tue Oct 20, 2020 4:57 am

Filing for trial here.
There's a fair bit to unpack in that. Weis & Hickman think love potions are a fine subplot, Dragonlance must now be too dead to resurrect as of this filing, Wizards has some extraordinarily creepy people working for them. Is there anything else interesting there that strikes you?
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking » Tue Oct 20, 2020 5:25 pm

For people who don't want to read the filing, there is an article in Polygon describing the substance of the dispute.
Short version: Weiss and Hickman are suing because they provided the first novel for a 3-book deal, and WotC pulled the plug on the project, potentially in violation of contract.
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The Adventurer's Almanac
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Tue Oct 20, 2020 9:19 pm

I don't speak legalese, but it looks like they're suing for upwards of $10 million? I just hope Kaelik or some other Den lawyer can give us the highlights.
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Wiseman
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Post by Wiseman » Tue Oct 20, 2020 10:33 pm

Shame, and I was looking forwards to those books. Would have been called "Dragons of Deceit" and "Dragons of Fate" but it looks like they'll never get released.
Keys to the Contract: A crossover between Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Kingdom Hearts.

> RadiantPhoenix wrote:

> > TheFlatline wrote:Legolas/Robin Hood are myths that have completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a bow".

> The D&D wizard is a work of fiction that has a completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a book".

> hyzmarca wrote:Well, Mario Mario comes from a blue collar background. He was a carpenter first, working at a construction site. Then a plumber. Then a demolitionist. Also, I'm not sure how strict Mushroom Kingdom's medical licensing requirements are. I don't think his MD is valid in New York.

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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Wed Oct 21, 2020 6:44 am

The summary so far seems to be mostly accurate.
They contracted three books and they decided it was better to terminate the contract than to keep trying to get rewrites to make the material worth publishing.
It seems like the same people were extremely racist and sexist and bad in an unrelated scandal were also asking for extensive rewrites in part because this book was too racist and sexist for them. Which, combined with how the complaint calls out sensitivity rewrites as if they are an absurd thing instead a reasonably common practice makes me think the drafts were in fact really bad.
But the legal insight I would provide that might not be common knowledge is that when you enter into a contract you are in part defining who bears the financial risk for different things, and this contract seems to reasonably contemplate that wotc bears the financial risk if hickman and weiss cant produce a work that doesnt damage the d&d brand more than its sales are worth. It is perfectly reasonable for wotc to decide to not perform and it is perfectly reasonable for hickman and weiss to sue.
As to the damages, you always plead a number that is the most you could possibly conceive of the breach costing you times three or whatever just in case. The plead damage amount is mostly meaningless except for whether it qualifies you for diversity jurisdiction which this easily does. Proving damages would be a much later step that happens at trial with no doubt hickman and weiss showing previous dragonlance profits and current profits from fantasy series of "comparable" fame and interest from fans and wotc retaliating with their lowballed estimate of profits and sales based on other tie in works from old and done authors and commentary about how bad the manuscript was for 2020.
Realistically wotc has some figures about how much they expected to sell and talked about it with weiss and hickman before the contract was signed and they will settle for some fraction of that amount of profit based on how much each parties legal costs are and how personally offended Weiss and Hickman are.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Grek
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Post by Grek » Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:34 am

I'm not a lawyer, but I CAN produce the highlights:

- Back in March of 2019, Weis & Hickman convinced Wizards to let them write another Dragonlance trilogy and have it published through Penguin Random House. Wizards would get a cut of the profits and W&H would get both royalties and an advance from the publisher. They go on to claim that Wizards tried to call the book deal off in a way that the contract doesn't allow them to do, and so they're suing for the ten million dollars which they claim the book deal is worth in total.
- According to the filing, part of the book deal agreement was that Wizards (as the owner of the IP) would get some creative control over the works, manifesting as the right to demand changes if they had a problem with the content of the novels and the duty to provide "reasonable detail" as to what changes to the novel drafts would make them acceptable to Wizards for publishing. In other words, Wizards can only refuse a draft if there's an actual problem with the contents of the draft itself - if there's no problem, they have to let Weis & Hickman send the draft to the publishers so the novels can get sold and everyone can get paid.
- In August of 2020, Wizards informs Weis & Hickman and Penguin Random House that they're not going to be accepting any new drafts, regardless of content - effectively trying to back out of the deal without using the termination clause which would leave Wizards on the hook for breach of contract. It should be noted that this isn't speculation by W&H, they heard it direct from Nick Mitchell (one of the in-house lawyers for Wizards) that "We are not moving toward breach [of the contract], but we will not approve any further drafts." Needless to say, W&H sued. It is unclear how much of that ten million dollar figure is real losses and how much of it is them trying to spook Wizards into settling, but we can safely assume it's in the right order of magnitude - somewhere in the millions, not 'hundreds of thousands'. (Insert meme here.)
- Weis & Hickman go on to allege that Wizards is only trying to break things off with Dragonlance this because Hasbro is leaning on them to avoid anything even vaguely problematic in the aftermath of the a bunch of bad decisions made by Wizards. In particular, they call out the hiring of Nic Kelman (author of "Girls: A Paean" which is a sexually explicit novel about pedophilia) and Terese Nielsen (an alleged white supremacist and general QAnon goon) as decisions Hasbro might be upset at Wizards over. While these are certainly an issue for Wizards/Hasbro from a public relations standpoint, wanting to avoid media attention is not a valid reason under the contract to pull out of the book deal.
- Kaelik suggests that Wizards might actually be rejecting the drafts on the basis that Weis & Hickman kept sending in books that were way too sexist/racist for Wizard's tastes. The filing addresses this by pointing out that Wizards had already approved the overall plot for the trilogy and a mostly complete draft of the first book by the time they decided to pull out of the deal. But it's also the case that Wizards switched out the team in charge of approving the Dragonlance drafts part way through the book deal. I'm not a Dragonlance fan, so I couldn't tell you how plausible the idea of a Dragonlance novel being too problematic for WotC is. But I'm pretty sure Nick Kelman wasn't the voice of restraint in that particular discussion.

Last edited by Grek on Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:59 am, edited 4 times in total.

> FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.

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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Wed Oct 21, 2020 12:09 pm

No but a person who signed off on hiring Nick Kelman probably was.
The complaint itself seems to contemplate that being a big part of the problem, decrying the sensitivity rewrites requested before the change, and listing all the scandals WotC is involved in. If Wotc isn't holding back Dragonlance books because they are worried about the potential scandal from releasing them then the list of previous scandals would be irrelevant information.
The complaint explains that Weis and Hickman believe that Wotc is cancelling the deal because they are worried about the content.

> Plaintiff-Creators are informed and believe, and based thereon allege, that a decision was made jointly by Defendant and its parent company, Hasbro, Inc., to deflect any possible criticism or further public outcry regarding Defendant’s other properties by effectively killing the Dragonlance deal with Plaintiff-Creators.

But the point I was making is that "cancelling the deal because WotC is concerned about content damaging the brand" is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and that the contract seems to contemplate that if this is necessary, WotC is who bears the financial risk. The complaint lays out a legal case that is substantially correct pending evidence supporting it's claims which seems relatively simple to provide.
The part that makes me bring up the possibility of Hickman and Weis being mad effecting the settlement is that at every level of the complaint it pretends that breaching the contract is a moral crime and an act of bad faith instead of a financial decision. People breach contracts all the time, and the appropriate remedy is compensatory damages. WotC will pay compensatory damages in something that approximates the amount Weis and Hickman were likely to make from the deal discounted by the fact that they didn't have to write three books and that pursuing legal litigation is costly. (Unless they go through trial, in which case just the former but Weis and Hickman will have to have paid lawyers for everything.)

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Sunwitch
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Post by Sunwitch » Wed Oct 21, 2020 11:02 pm

I can see arguments for an alternative hypothesis that Hasbro, Kelman et al are so incapable of understanding how oppression works and why people are taking issue with them that they're trying to shelve anything with a large profile that hasn't been meticulously audited by the team of variously marginalized people they keep around to act as diversity experts without compensating them for their expertise. This isn't mutually exclusive with the idea that even the (WOTC-approved) final manuscript for book one still had a lot of content that could backfire on them - it would be interesting to see what's actually in it, because I'm not familiar enough with Dragonlance to say whether there's a precedent for believing it would still be full of racist crap or whatever after a stated 70 pages worth of rewrites under WOTC's direction. But I do think it's worth considering that Hasbro and WOTC are so out of their depth when it comes to handling anything remotely political that they are scrambling to nix anything that has the potential of making things worse than they already are.
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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Thu Oct 22, 2020 1:03 am

> Sunwitch wrote:I'm not familiar enough with Dragonlance to say whether there's a precedent for believing it would still be full of racist crap or whatever after a stated 70 pages worth of rewrites under WOTC's direction.

It would.
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fbmf
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Post by fbmf » Thu Oct 22, 2020 4:27 pm

Kaelik (or someone else who is a lawyer): Do you foresee this being settled out of court and the general public never really knowing how it ended (other than the books weren't published)?
Game On,
fbmf
Last edited by fbmf on Thu Oct 22, 2020 4:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Thu Oct 22, 2020 4:38 pm

> fbmf wrote:Kaelik (or someone else who is a lawyer): Do you foresee this being settled out of court and the general public never really knowing how it ended (other than the books weren't published)?
> Game On,
> fbmf

I suspect that settlement will come after some document exchanges in discovery but before depositions, and that the settlement will be confidential such that we never know the amount (as basically 100% of settlements are).
I am not involved in the practice of selling books so I have no idea how much it will settle for in concrete dollars, but I would estimate somewhere around 50-70% of what WotC estimated royalties would have been to Hickman and Wies for selling the published books when they initially requested them.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Dean
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Post by Dean » Fri Nov 20, 2020 4:31 am

Weiss and Hickman have always had pretty wild beliefs. They've basically always been 1 step away from writing those crazy christian propaganda cartoons you see. I would not be surprised if during the hard right wing christian shift in america of the last 12 years their writings have become TRULY buckwild. I am very excited for whatever abomination they've made and look forward to one day getting to read whatever thinly veiled pro-life story they wrote that was so bad that Hasbro was willing to just light money on fire to not have to print it.
Just think how often in Dragonlance people shout at someone about how the gods of light are coming for those who doubted their faith's and shit, add the obama era, and I bet you get something truly extraordinary. I hope they sell it separately.

> DSMatticus wrote:Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I am filled with an unfathomable hatred.

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Thaluikhain
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Post by Thaluikhain » Fri Nov 20, 2020 4:35 am

> Dean wrote:Weiss and Hickman have always had pretty wild beliefs. They've basically always been 1 step away from writing those crazy christian propaganda cartoons you see. I would not be surprised if during the hard right wing christian shift in america of the last 12 years their writings have become TRULY buckwild. I am very excited for whatever abomination they've made and look forward to one day getting to read whatever thinly veiled pro-life story they wrote that was so bad that Hasbro was willing to just light money on fire to not have to print it.
> Just think how often in Dragonlance people shout at someone about how the gods of light are coming for those who doubted their faith's and shit, add the obama era, and I bet you get something truly extraordinary. I hope they sell it separately.

Actually, yeah. I lost interest with Dragonlance ages ago, and I'm not sure that I wasn't interested in Dragonlance in the first place because it happened to be big when I was young, but I sorta want to see what's happened there,
I'd feel bad about actually paying for it and thus giving them money, though, and it might be a bit much to actually wade through.
EDIT: I hope White Dragons get to do something cool and they finally develop the continents beyond Ansalon and properly explain their relationships.
Last edited by Thaluikhain on Fri Nov 20, 2020 4:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Orca
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Post by Orca » Fri Nov 20, 2020 9:00 am

And now a company I know less about has filed a similar suit against Wizards. Gale Force 9 sues WotC. Since there isn't creepy and/or religious baggage here but Wizards is doing the same thing, that implies to me that creepy and/or religious baggage wasn't their reason for backing out of the Dragonlance deal. Not a certainty of course but the common factors look more like a push to get their business in-house.
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The Adventurer's Almanac
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Fri Nov 20, 2020 3:03 pm

I hope this leads to WotC getting the rights to a bunch of settings that they release one book each for and sit on for the next decade or so until they get mentioned in a board game that nobody plays.
After all, writing content is hard, especially if you work in the D&D department.
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...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me » Fri Nov 20, 2020 4:23 pm

These do share a throughline: WotC claims that someone it is working with does a bad job, then it pulls the plug on its agreement. But in the case of Dragonlance, WotC wanted to back out because the manuscript was unsalvageable. But in the case of GF9, WotC pulled out of its agreements with GF9 over some flimsy claims that GF9's partners mishandled the D&D brand.
The first is TRPG Club in Korea. WotC said the production was low quality and that TRPG Club failed to provide "adequate customer service". GF9 says that (1) the translation was approved by WotC, (2) the customer complaints were within normal bounds.... so they're not a big deal? I don't get this one, (3) they ended their relationship with TRPG Club per WotC's request. So the matter should be settled.
The second is Black Book Editions (BBE) in France. WotC said BBE used translated content from D&D as part of another RPG called "Heroes & Dragons", which is a breach of the 2017 agreement. GF9 has a bunch of counterpoints: (1) Heroes & Dragons came out ~1yr before BBE was picked up by GF9, (2) Heroes & Dragons is a translation of OGL rules which I assume is legal, (3) The translations went the other way around -- BBE used its old OGL translation in the D&D book, (4) GF9 fired BBE, (5) WotC is responsible for taking legal action against BBE instead of dropping its agreement with GF9.
I feel like WotC is/was within their rights to back out of the Dragonlance thing, assuming the book is really bad. But the GF9 lawsuit looks significantly worse for WotC.
Last edited by ...You Lost Me on Fri Nov 20, 2020 4:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.

> Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.

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saithorthepyro
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Post by saithorthepyro » Fri Nov 20, 2020 5:46 pm

Wait, WOTC has an honest to go pedophile on their staff? Another reason not to get my own copy of Tasha's Book of Everything then.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Fri Nov 20, 2020 6:54 pm

> ...You Lost Me wrote:I feel like WotC is/was within their rights to back out of the Dragonlance thing, assuming the book is really bad. But the GF9 lawsuit looks significantly worse for WotC.

I want to stress that if "within their rights" means not having to pay for breaking the contract, then they aren't in the Dragonlance case. They agreed, effectively, to approve a book or keep working until an approved version can be created. If an approved version can't be created, then they are on the hook for some amount of damages in lost royalties for if they did approve the book that presumably has been written to at least some degree.
If they wanted a contract that let them just pull out because the book sucked, they should have negotiated that.
Last edited by Kaelik on Fri Nov 20, 2020 6:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me » Sat Nov 21, 2020 3:38 am

That's my fault for not writing properly about a legal topic. Instead of saying WotC was within their rights, I should have said that I personally thought it would be fair without actually considering what they negotiated with Weiss & Hickmann. I feel bad for WotC re:dragonlance, but I don't feel that bad for WotC re:GF9.

> DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.

> Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.

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phlapjackage
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Post by phlapjackage » Sun Dec 20, 2020 1:37 am

Lawsuit was ended recently
https://twitter.com/WeisMargaret/status ... 7690292224
Koumei: and if I wanted that, I'd take some mescaline and run into the park after watching a documentary about wasps.
PhoneLobster: DM : Mr Monkey doesn't like it. Eldritch : Mr Monkey can do what he is god damn told.
MGuy: The point is to normalize 'my' point of view. How the fuck do you think civil rights occurred? You think things got this way because people sat down and fucking waited for public opinion to change?
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking » Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:09 am

Another article
Lawsuit dropped
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:11 am

It does SEEM like they are just going to do more Dragonlance work with WOTC, but fuck if I know why this is swinging back and forth.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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crasskris
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Post by crasskris » Mon Jan 25, 2021 7:03 pm

https://io9.gizmodo.com/that-new-dragon ... 1846125826
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Zaranthan
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Post by Zaranthan » Mon Jan 25, 2021 9:38 pm

> ...You Lost Me wrote:(2) the customer complaints were within normal bounds.... so they're not a big deal? I don't get this one

A quick snippet. This sounds like they're claiming it's just the thing where you can't make everybody happy. Somebody says the elves aren't pretty enough so you make them prettier and now somebody else says they're too pretty. The kind of whiny unpleasable fanbase shit you can't let affect real business decisions or you'll never publish anything.

> Koumei wrote:...is the dead guy posthumously at fault for his own death and, due to the felony murder law, his own murderer?

> hyzmarca wrote:A palace made out of poop is much more impressive than one made out of gold. Stinkier, but more impressive. One is an ostentatious display of wealth. The other is a miraculous engineering feat.

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Post by Wiseman » Tue Jan 26, 2021 9:50 pm

Keys to the Contract: A crossover between Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Kingdom Hearts.

> RadiantPhoenix wrote:

> > TheFlatline wrote:Legolas/Robin Hood are myths that have completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a bow".

> The D&D wizard is a work of fiction that has a completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a book".

> hyzmarca wrote:Well, Mario Mario comes from a blue collar background. He was a carpenter first, working at a construction site. Then a plumber. Then a demolitionist. Also, I'm not sure how strict Mushroom Kingdom's medical licensing requirements are. I don't think his MD is valid in New York.

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