Roll for resistance: How a fantasy game defended the commons

In 2023, the world’s most popular role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), faced a rebellion. This wasn’t brought on by imaginary goblins or dragons, but by its players.

Despite its corporate branding, D&D has always thrived on shared ownership and collective creation (you can find everything you need to access source material online, for free). From the earliest days of hand-drawn maps and mimeographed zines to today’s community-built platforms and open-source campaigns, D&D is fundamentally a collaborative ecosystem and creative commons. It is a commons, not just in the sense that a great deal of content and the rules are “free”, but in the sense of collective stewardship and development by the community.

When Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the corporate publishing company behind D&D, published the original Open Gaming License (OGL) in the year 2000 with the release of its third edition, it cracked open the ruleset of the game and sent a clear message to the community: go ahead, use our content to create your own spells, stories, classes, and systems. And they did. Countless creators emerged, creating not just new content for the game but entirely new systems like Pathfinder and Old School Essentials. These alternatives flourished as the community took some of their favourite things from past rule sets and updated them into new systems. Online platforms, such as the DMs Guild, allowed players to sell adventures, settings, and supplemental materials, providing a pathway for creators to earn income from what they made. For most, this did not constitute a full-time livelihood, but rather a form of supplementary or portfolio income, often combined with subscription-based support through platforms like Patreon. These small, distributed revenue streams supported creative continuity without requiring scale, growth, or corporate mediation. While most didn’t get rich, they were still making some income from the worlds they were making or were able to share them freely.

This peer-to-peer production was governed by norms of attribution, adaptation, and play. Players gathered around tables to imagine better worlds, to create stories, and to imagine messy and beautiful realities, together as a community. This is what scholars like Silke Helfrich and David Bollier call commoning: sharing both resources with one another and shared rules, shared care, and shared imagination. In the world of D&D, commoning was thriving.

“Commoning amounts to a kind of ‘relational dance’ with other people and the Earth, not a blueprint for utopia. It is a set of practices and values that must be lived and performed. In this sense, commoning is more like an art or a craft than a science. It requires creativity, improvisation, play, and adaptation to ever-shifting circumstances.”

—Silke Helfirch and David Bollier, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons

The enclosure spell fizzles

Then came January 2023. WotC announced that they would rewrite the OGL that had allowed creators and imaginators to publish homebrewed content that collectively expanded the D&D universe. The company sought greater control and higher royalties, arguing that the game was being under-monetized. They also claimed that revisions were necessary to prevent third-party publishers from producing “hateful and discriminatory products”.

Addressing racism and harm within the game was both necessary and overdue. D&D itself has a long history of racialized tropes and essentialist fantasy races, and meaningful reform would require sustained engagement with those structural issues. What troubled many in the community was not the stated concern about harm, but the way anti-discrimination language was mobilized alongside expanded corporate control and monetization. For many players and creators, this framing felt less like an ethical reckoning and more like a justification for enclosure using moral authority to legitimise the consolidation of power over a shared cultural commons.

WoTC claimed there were three main intentions behind the new OGL. The first was to address the “exploitation” of the D&D’s IP. WotC aimed to address the ways big corporations were allegedly exploiting D&D’s intellectual property. The second was to prevent unauthorized use. The update sought to prevent the use and commercialization of D&D content in things like NFT’s, and blockchain games. And third, to prevent the inclusion of D&D content in products deemed hateful or discriminatory. However, the new draft also contained many restrictive provisions, including the proposed de-authorization of the original OGL, mandatory revenue reporting by all third-party users, income caps on what individual creators could receive, and clauses granting WotC broad rights to use creator content without compensation. These elements suggested that the revision was not only about preventing harmful content, but about reasserting corporate control over a decentralized creative ecosystem.

The community’s response was immediate and an incredible display of the power behind cultural and creative commons. They did not sit idly by and comply. There was a mass exodus from D&D Beyond, the main WotC D&D distribution website. Tens of thousands unsubscribed overnight. Hashtags like #OpenDnD and #cancelD&DBeyond trended widely as fans organized boycotts and protest actions. Major creators like Critical Role, MCDM, and Kobold Press all spoke out. Fans organized and wrote manifestos while Dungeon Masters developed alternatives for their players. The blacklash from the community wasn’t just about one document, it was about who owns shared culture and who gets to control imagination.

Within weeks, WotC was forced to respond publicly. In its first statement, the company attempted to frame the situation as a mutual success, writing that “you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost… they won - and so did we.” For many in the community, this framing felt petulant and dismissive, recasting a mass boycott and coordinated protest. The statement also emphasized corporate intentions and process over accountability, further inflaming community anger. Only after sustained backlash did WotC issue a second statement offering a more direct apology and substantive concessions.

The strong negative reaction from the community led WotC to ultimately abandon the new OGL and instead put the D&D Systems Reference Document under a Creative Commons license, while also maintaining the original OGL.

This was a fandom revolt and a masterclass in anti-enclosure resistance. For us avid fans of D&D, it was a real-world experience of degrowth economics and a reminder that when people care for something together, they will fight to protect it. Communities stay strong, whether it’s a close-knit hometown, or a world-wide fanbase doing what they love!

Rolling a new economy

Unfortunately for WotC, the damage had been done. While some players and creators returned after the revised license and apology, the episode fractured trust and fundamentally altered the relationship between the company and its community. Many players became more skeptical of WotC’s role as steward of the game, while creators accelerated their investment in alternative systems and platforms. The controversy demonstrated that the D&D ecosystem could survive, and even thrive, without exclusive reliance on its corporate owner.

Rather than returning meekly to WTOC, D&D players and creators turned outward. Open-source games like Troika!, Cairn, and Fate saw surges in attention. New systems like Tales of the Valiant and Shadowdark were crowdfunded within days. Patreon-funded creators published entirely new settings, mechanics, and art packs under Creative Commons.

WTOC unintentionally didn’t just create a consumer boycott, but a productive pivot. Communities began to provision themselves. In degrowth economics, this is what a post-capitalist provisioning system looks like. It is decentralized, care-based, and commons-oriented. It is relational, steeped deeply in community, and made for meaning not for scale.

Within a world where fantasy and creativity can be bought and sold, there is something deeply radical about saying: we’ll build our own.

The lesson for degrowth here is that when people build together, they defend together. The community refused the logic of privatization. They withdrew their consent, reclaimed their agency, and perhaps most importantly, they created alternatives.

Imagination is infrastructure

Tabletop games like D&D in and of themselves are potent degrowth models because they center imagination as infrastructure. Around the table, players share time that isn’t directed toward profit or output, but toward co-created meaning. They build entire worlds from scratch, test ethics in real time, navigate new identities, and play out complex questions of power, trust, and survival. Campaigns often stretch for months, or even years, because people value slow character growth, deep storytelling, and long-term relational arcs that weave together with other games they play. Players will use their turns to mend a cloak or even spare a rival as a choice to practice another way of being. These acts of care and refusal are small rehearsals for post-capitalist life, modelling cooperation, emotional labour, and mutual aid, and they serve as low-stakes arenas for players to process their own psychological complexity. Researchers have shown that narrative role-playing can improve empathy, social skills, and emotional regulation, particularly among youth and neurodiverse participants.

And then there’s the Dungeon Master.

Every D&D game relies on someone to plan the story, build the world, map the terrain, manage the rules, voice the characters, mediate conflict, create the theatre of the mind, and ensure everyone has a good time. It’s a staggering amount of unpaid, invisible labour, and people do it joyfully. They spend hours preparing so their friends, and often new players they don’t even know, can step into an adventure and feel at home. They write scripts, learn new systems, hand-draw maps, craft miniatures, create entire economies and cultures out of nothing and then give it all away, freely, at the table.

This is gift culture at its finest. A labour of love not offered for likes, content, or monetization, but simply so others can belong and play. This is a form of social reproduction that the world needs more of, and it happens in basements, libraries, online servers, and tiny apartments every single night. Every day, millions of people make time, space, and meaning together for no reason other than joy, connection, and mutual enchantment.

No one’s paying you to play D&D. No one’s paying the DM to prep for five hours on a weeknight. And yet it happens again and again. That’s non-monetary value at its absolute best!

The D&D rebellion was a defence of the imaginative play economy, a vast and vibrant realm where people create meaning, culture, and community outside of traditional markets. In the imagination economy, value isn’t extracted, it is generated through collaboration, storytelling, and shared worldbuilding. It’s where a lovingly drawn map of a fictional kingdom holds more social power than a spreadsheet. For decades, the D&D community has sustained a decentralized, participatory ecosystem of creators, players, and dreamers, providing evidence that meaningful production can occur without monetization at its center.

When that world was threatened by enclosure, people didn’t just walk away; they made better worlds. That’s the imagination economy in action: playful, political, and fiercely anti-extractive.

Photo: Gian-Luca Riner in Sunsplash

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