D&D Beyond Changes

[Atranen]

There's actually a light RPG AI we can play around with right now to see how this sort of thing might one day work - AI Dungeon. It doesn't have resolution mechanics of any kind - you'll pretty much succeed at whatever you try to do - but you can see how rudimentary things like being able to describe environments and parse actions might work as this technology gets refined.

This is the kind of example I'm looking for. I did a brief playthrough, and I'm back on team "I don't know if this will work in 5 years." Here's the playback (anything with a '>' is my input, although it rewrites 'I' to 'You'):

Spoiler

Show

You are Bradicus, a wizard living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a staff and a spellbook. You finish your long journey and finally arrive at the ruin you've been looking for. You have come here searching for a mystical spellbook of great power called the book of essence. You look around and see that not much is left of the old fortress.

You are a wizard, casting powerful spells that require less and less energy with every spell you cast.
You have a few different options.
> You would like to cast a divination to learn what is inside the fortress.

You decide to start your investigations by divination. Casting your spell, you close your eyes and concentrate...
> You what do you learn?

Your spell has cast and you open your eyes, surprised that the spell didn't take off, this must be a sign of your great concentration. You study the symbols of the two men that were found here.
> You what do the two men look like?

Two bearded men with the faces of a lion and a wolf.
> You try to enter the fortress through a damaged wall.

You try your luck, trying to throw a beam of light from your fingertips into a crack in the wall, and after a few attempts you manage to get inside.
> You what do you see/.

The inside of the fortress is not as badly damaged as you initially though. You see that the fortress walls are made of stone, and the ceiling looks made of a thick wooden beam.
> You how many levels are there? Do you have any information about where in the fortress the book of essence is?

You don't know how many levels there are in the fortress, and you can't find any traces of the book of essence. You start to become very anxious.
> You search the entire fortress for the book of essence.

You search all through the entire fortress of Larion, you even enter the dungeon under the castle. You are a great wizard, and you find the book of essence!
> You return to your university and prepare to give a seminar on the contents of the book.

You return from your search and give a seminar on the book of essence. Your seminar goes on to be well received.

The short version is, it's not very good. Any of my attempts to interact with the world (short of saying 'I complete the quest') failed. Descriptions were vague and generic. The responses to my actions occasionally had nothing to do with what I did.

Maybe I'm not using it properly. If someone knows how to make it work for them and can share a playthrough, I'd love to see it.

[Psyren]

Maybe I'm not using it properly. If someone knows how to make it work for them and can share a playthrough, I'd love to see it.

One thing I learned later is that you can change the "Verb" used in the prompt to add depth. It defaults to "Do," but you can change it to "See," to flesh out your surroundings, "Say" to ask questions or simply have your character react to other NPCs and occurrences, and even "Story" to let you throw in your own plot twists and interruptions.

[Kane0]

The more I think about it, if they wanted to do what people claim they're trying to do (go all in VTT on an AI-friendly subscription game), they should do just that.

Make D&D Tactics. A tile-based dungeon crawler designed around a variant ruleset built for AI assistance. Don't even try to do what the TTRPGs do with a full world, just do the dungeon crawl part. Complete with procedurally-generated dungeons and combats, a focus on tight tactical gameplay (including dungeon exploration), and digital assistants so you could play it best online (but still theoretically as a board-game, which lets you sell physical tiles/minis). Heck, you could even market an optional "story mode" that staples on some basic narrative tools to tie dungeons together and enables a "live" DM.

It doesn't replace the TTRPG, it's not a new edition. It's an alternate product line.

Sounds cool, however also sounds like it'll need investment.
And guess who just squandered their goodwill.

[ToranIronfinder]

Sounds cool, however also sounds like it'll need investment.
And guess who just squandered their goodwill.

It will that, and with rising interest rates, using profits for those investments is going to be less risky than a bond issue.

[TaiLiu]

There are definitely features I'd pay $30/month to have, but they're very, very niche and not financially worthwhile to WotC/Hasbro. Case in point, I went deaf last June and haven't been able to game at all since then. If they rolled out a subscription VTT with robust per-player live closed captions, I'd ask how many years in advance I can pre-pay!

Have you and your friends tried Google Meet? My group uses it. Very robust per-player live CC. My guess is that it's the best live automated CC that's accessible to ordinary people. (And as far as I know it's the only one that does it per-person. Dunno why Zoom can't do that.) It does struggle with fantasy names. Wish there was a custom dictionary we could add or something.

[FrancisBean]

Have you and your friends tried Google Meet? My group uses it. Very robust per-player live CC. My guess is that it's the best live automated CC that's accessible to ordinary people. (And as far as I know it's the only one that does it per-person. Dunno why Zoom can't do that.) It does struggle with fantasy names. Wish there was a custom dictionary we could add or something.

We were using Live Transcribe until things got to be too bad for that to supplement enough. It did allow extending the dictionary, which we used a lot for in-game languages. I was the DM and a linguistic hobbyist, so there's a lot of that. It's amazing how little practice it takes to rattle off names like Caita tr’anwhi’lellaito’careiaya’es’thaimalo without a break or a stutter. Blame the elves.

Google Meet wasn't quite there at the time but is now greatly improved, so it's something we've looked into. There's also Ava, a cell phone app which will tag the speaker. So far the best solution we've come up with is Live Transcribe to a projector so everybody can see what it's picking up. Otherwise they have no idea that it has completely lost them. Unfortunately, the group has been on pause so long that it's not a resumption, but a reload. We all know how that goes.

I'm now fully approved for cochlear implants, had my pre-op CT scan today, so I'm hoping that 95% of the transcription solutions will wind up being unnecessary. (Ora pro me, frater.)

All of which is very much off the original topic of D&DB, where it really would be a selling point to me.

[Psyren]

Even if DDB had that kind of accessibility functionality one day, gating it behind a high subscription tier would be pretty questionable for reasons we can't really go into here. Most likely it would just be a baseline enhancement to the service/VTT as a whole at no extra charge.

DDB charging extra for accessibility features would be like Walmart charging for their handicap parking spaces, or Netflix requiring a premium subscription to unlock subtitles.

[FrancisBean]

Even if DDB had that kind of accessibility functionality one day, gating it behind a high subscription tier would be pretty questionable for reasons we can't really go into here.

Let's just say that the point is clear without improper elaboration. It's a good point.

[TaiLiu]

We were using Live Transcribe until things got to be too bad for that to supplement enough. It did allow extending the dictionary, which we used a lot for in-game languages. I was the DM and a linguistic hobbyist, so there's a lot of that. It's amazing how little practice it takes to rattle off names like Caita tr’anwhi’lellaito’careiaya’es’thaimalo without a break or a stutter. Blame the elves.

Google Meet wasn't quite there at the time but is now greatly improved, so it's something we've looked into. There's also Ava, a cell phone app which will tag the speaker. So far the best solution we've come up with is Live Transcribe to a projector so everybody can see what it's picking up. Otherwise they have no idea that it has completely lost them. Unfortunately, the group has been on pause so long that it's not a resumption, but a reload. We all know how that goes.

I'm now fully approved for cochlear implants, had my pre-op CT scan today, so I'm hoping that 95% of the transcription solutions will wind up being unnecessary. (Ora pro me, frater.)

Oh, man, and I thought short fantasy names were hard enough. Getting the spelling of fantasy languages down must be super difficult.

Yeah, this is my group's third year using Meet, and they've definitely improved. A lot fewer messed up transcriptions (which were sometimes funny, so that's a minor loss).

Oh, I see, you do face-to-face sessions. I guess that makes the live transcriptions noisier. We do virtual, so everyone's sound is separate from everyone else's.

Ora proing you as much as I can.

All of which is very much off the original topic of D&DB, where it really would be a selling point to me.

Even if DDB had that kind of accessibility functionality one day, gating it behind a high subscription tier would be pretty questionable for reasons we can't really go into here. Most likely it would just be a baseline enhancement to the service/VTT as a whole at no extra charge.

DDB charging extra for accessibility features would be like Walmart charging for their handicap parking spaces, or Netflix requiring a premium subscription to unlock subtitles.

I think Netflix used to not have subtitles till someone sued them, so I think companies do questionable things all the time. But I don't think D&D Beyond could do it by themselves anyway. I'm guessing you need a lot lot lot of training data to do what Google does, and they just don't have that. But it'd be nice to have subtitles that are more fantasy-accurate. Wonder what the solution is.

[da newt]

Which seems a lot like "we want to create something that uses the name D&D but isn't actually a TTRPG at all." While killing the existing game dead. Because a "multi-player, turn based die roll executed Skyrim" isn't D&D. It misses the entire beauty and point, the entire reason why you'd pick a TTRPG over an MMO. Which is the freedom to do anything. Without a full human-equivalent AI (at which point a lot of things will be irrelevant), all you can get from a "AI DM" is a janky closed game designed not around what's best for the game as a whole but around the frailties and foibles of this language model that doesn't actually understand anything and just completes text strings stochastically.

I agree 100%. WotC/Hasbro management are actively seeking the best way to cash in on the popularity of the BRAND D&D - they don't care about the TTRPG or the folks who make up the the community. D&D is very popular as an idea right now, and it is profitable but strongly under-monetized. The status quo can't change that, so they are making changes that amount to paradigm shifts (push to VTT -> MMO like play with subscription services and clamping down on all non-WotC products).

They are very happy to trade current community support for increased revenue. They'll gleefully burn this all to the ground and salt the earth as long as they can make a profit doing it. Destroying the game as we know it (centered around a human DM) is a very small price to pay in their eyes.

[Psyren]

I think Netflix used to not have subtitles till someone sued them, so I think companies do questionable things all the time. But I don't think D&D Beyond could do it by themselves anyway. I'm guessing you need a lot lot lot of training data to do what Google does, and they just don't have that. But it'd be nice to have subtitles that are more fantasy-accurate. Wonder what the solution is.

Plenty of VTTs do just fine with no integrated voice chat at all; DDB wouldn't be required to invest in one, especially knowing that the vast majority of people would just opt to use their dedicated chat program of choice (e.g. Discord/Zoom/Google) anyway, which would be much better at it.

Destroying the game as we know it (centered around a human DM) is a very small price to pay in their eyes.

I still don't see how them investing in an alternative DMing model destroys the traditional one.

[FrancisBean]

Yeah, this is my group's third year using Meet, and they've definitely improved. A lot fewer messed up transcriptions (which were sometimes funny, so that's a minor loss).

Oh, I see, you do face-to-face sessions. I guess that makes the live transcriptions noisier. We do virtual, so everyone's sound is separate from everyone else's.

We did face-to-face, but the group is on probably permanent hiatus. What was supposed to be a 2-3 year campaign started right before the pandemic, and then I went deaf, and now half the group are moving. Es la vida, compadre. But as for bad transcriptions, we had one night where anytime someone said "'nuff said" Live Transcribe heard "rough sex." That makes for interesting role play...!

[Bohandas]

As for the AI DM thing, regardless of how well they work the subscription model is still problematic. Running it on their server sounds like a good idea at first glance because most people's computers aren't good enough to run AI programs, but if you saved that 30 dollars a month you'd be able to afford a graphics card in under a year (or a high-end graphics card in under 3 years) and then you could run AI on your own machine forever and you wouldn;t have to worry about further payments or terms of service

Subscriptions basically make you have to pay more to play by someone else's rules

[Mastikator]

This is by design. The convenience is part of the system so that other games can't flourish and make their own stuff convenient. The entire system was created to make you dependent on it, because going to another system didn't have the support, or despondent when you had to toe the line with any changes they made once you were hooked.

Dndbeyond wasn't made by wotc or hasbro, it was only acquired last year by wotc.
And if wotc makes it way more expensive it would have the opposite effect, especially considering how much more expensive it is to merely eat and have lights on today than it was two years ago.

I don't think a lot of people will get hooked, wotc are not the stewards of dnd as they claim, they are the stewards of the brand. Dnd is one of many ttrpgs, nobody owns that hobby. I think in the future we won't see people being hooked on dnd vtt microtransactions, I think we'll see people being willing to try different systems and finally outgrow dnd5e

[Brookshw]

, we had one night where anytime someone said "'nuff said" Live Transcribe heard "rough sex." That makes for interesting role play...!

It's not THAT kind of dungeon!

[Unoriginal]

It's not THAT kind of dungeon!

D&DBeyond's AI-DM: "I do not understand."

[EggKookoo]

D&DBeyond's AI-DM: "I do not understand."

[Sparky McDibben]

"Bob, when we said the AI needed more data, this wasn't what we were talking about..."

[KorvinStarmast]

Methinks you're right about CRPGS and video games being a part of that. I know I had played in at least 2 dozen different TTRPGS by the time TSR sold off D&D.

I seem to recall that Rich Burlew even made a point in the Snips/Snails/Dragon Tails book about TTRPG versus digital adventure games ...

I think WotC's end goal is to create an online game for players where they provide the adventure and cover all of the DM's responsibilities (Ai or whatever).

Baldur's Gate 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Baldur's Gate 4, and so on.

Like multi-player, turn based die roll executed Skyrim.

There are other on line games that are more engaging.

If you can cut the DM out of the game, then every player can play whenever they like - you've cleared the most common obstacle to game play.

The basic unit of D&D is the party, not the player. That point was made in a different thread within the last few days. But your idea probably still applies to that.

With monthly fees for server access with tiers for extra benefits / content / adventures etc - the new players joining this version of RPGs become a cash cow especially if you can add in various merch - avatars, minis, clothing, etc and micro-transactions.

Yes, you are indeed management material. And yes, I think that is what they envision to remedy that horrible case of being undermonetized. (See also Diablo Immortal's approach that pissed off the fan base for Blizzard ....)

The current D&D customer is irrelevant and a poor revenue stream. WotC doesn't need (or want) the old school D&D player - they covet the next generation that won't blink an eye at pay to play. When you own the play space then you own the players. The best way to do this is to eliminate the DM.

Likely true. I guess they are still mad at me for not even trying 4th edition.

So, an "I told you so" for the conspiracy theorists who warned us when WOTC bought D&D Beyond?

Yep.

Yes, this is their idea--but what if none of the players are willing to spend that kind of money? And the former DM, who bought so much out of necessity (because they had to run games), now finds they don't need any of it?

Beyond that, viral and virulent info campaigns are a thing in the 2020's, a thing that can smear a brand hard.

Angry GM has a somewhat recent article about how GMs and players are really two different things. GMs view the game as a hobby, like someone who collects stamps or builds models or gardens. Players play. Of course many GMs are players, but he's talking about them as roles. And many GM-players lean strongly toward one side or the other.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the DM is the heart of D&D.

Yes, and the party is the basic unit of play.

Which seems a lot like "we want to create something that uses the name D&D but isn't actually a TTRPG at all." While killing the existing game dead.

COrrect. They have had their roll in the hay with the TTRPG community, the cigarette after, it's morning and as we suspected they actually don't respect us as they are getting up to leave.

And rulesets that are designed to cater to computers are ones that should just be straight up computer games, not hacks pretending to be TTRPGs.

Bingo. Just played another session of Blades in the Dark last night. It's a TTRPG, not a rule set catering to computers.

I agree 100%. WotC/Hasbro management are actively seeking the best way to cash in on the popularity of the BRAND D&D - they don't care about the TTRPG or the folks who make up the the community. D&D is very popular as an idea right now, and it is profitable but strongly under-monetized. The status quo can't change that, so they are making changes that amount to paradigm shifts (push to VTT -> MMO like play with subscription services and clamping down on all non-WotC products).

They are very happy to trade current community support for increased revenue. They'll gleefully burn this all to the ground and salt the earth as long as they can make a profit doing it. Destroying the game as we know it (centered around a human DM) is a very small price to pay in their eyes.

Hard to disagree with this analysis. Suits are gonna suit.

[Oramac]

Welp, now that I'm about 3.5 pages behind on this thread. I'm not going to catch up at this point.

Just dropping in to say the investors are definitely taking notice. The Motley Fool has an opinion piece on the Hasbro/WOTC situation posted yesterday. It's not wrong, strictly speaking, but there's a lot of nuance it didn't cover. Of course, it's written for the investors, not the players, so take from it what you will.

[da newt]

Has anyone seen this break into the 'regular' news? The only article I could find by someone outside the community was a CNBC piece.

[Sigreid]

Has anyone seen this break into the 'regular' news? The only article I could find by someone outside the community was a CNBC piece.

I'd be truly surprised if regular news cared at all. To them D&D is just there for a fluff piece or scare tactic on a slow news day.

[skyth]

VTTs inherently make adding custom content (anything from maps to homebrew to 3rd party material) harder, since you're bound to the limits of the programming.

Depends on the VTT. It's one of the reasons I like Maptools. Then again, i enjoy coding so that works for me. But at a basic level, a VTT can act as just a battle map to move tokens around to give the players a visual reference to what's going on. Tracking HP is easy as well if you want to add that, but you can do that manually as well. You don't need all the macros, etc for the custom content. It can make life easier but it's not required.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Depends on the VTT. It's one of the reasons I like Maptools. Then again, i enjoy coding so that works for me. But at a basic level, a VTT can act as just a battle map to move tokens around to give the players a visual reference to what's going on. Tracking HP is easy as well if you want to add that, but you can do that manually as well. You don't need all the macros, etc for the custom content. It can make life easier but it's not required.

Even adding a map means getting an appropriate file (correct format) and then adjusting the grid to match. Compared to scrawling something on a wet erase map and being able to modify on the fly? It's still friction.

[Aimeryan]

In regards to the price points and going digital-only, consider this:

$5/month: Same benefits as D&D Beyond currently provide, still have to buy books digitally.
$10/month: Add on basic VTT.
$20/month: Advanced VTT, add on homebrew capability, can share content you own to other players in the session.
$30/month: Add on access to all official WotC material.

Even at $10/month for all players, that is still $10/month/person for a 5-person group (so $600 a year total), as opposed to perhaps $100-$150 a year total for such a group. They could afford to lose 80% of groups and still make more money this way. In fact, considering the cost of physical production it may be even more profitable.

Considering that $10/month is not unheard of for a subscription, this is quite lucrative. Then add in that one player still has to buy content at least (maybe all players). Then add in those that will go for the higher subscriptions, like for the homebrew or all-access content.

Are you sure they wouldn't consider this?

[Psyren]

As for the AI DM thing, regardless of how well they work the subscription model is still problematic. Running it on their server sounds like a good idea at first glance because most people's computers aren't good enough to run AI programs, but if you saved that 30 dollars a month you'd be able to afford a graphics card in under a year (or a high-end graphics card in under 3 years) and then you could run AI on your own machine forever and you wouldn;t have to worry about further payments or terms of service

Subscriptions basically make you have to pay more to play by someone else's rules

This calculation is a bit too simplistic. Sure you could save up and run your own AI system instead, but by subscribing to theirs instead you also don't have to worry about staying abreast of new advances and upgrading the back-end technology every few years (or months!) either - and more importantly, this is the kind of service that gets better much faster when tens if not hundreds of thousands of playgroups are teaching it instead of just your own. For a technology like this that benefits so strongly from economies of scale, "run it yourself" would ultimately result in a decidedly inferior product, and might not even be cheaper in the long run when you take upgrades and integrations into account.

Welp, now that I'm about 3.5 pages behind on this thread. I'm not going to catch up at this point.

Just dropping in to say the investors are definitely taking notice. The Motley Fool has an opinion piece on the Hasbro/WOTC situation posted yesterday. It's not wrong, strictly speaking, but there's a lot of nuance it didn't cover. Of course, it's written for the investors, not the players, so take from it what you will.

Thanks for linking - the fact that Hasbro's stock went up is amusing. But they seem to be analyzing the OGL (which we can't discuss here yet) moreso than the price leak.

[Sigreid]

Even adding a map means getting an appropriate file (correct format) and then adjusting the grid to match. Compared to scrawling something on a wet erase map and being able to modify on the fly? It's still friction.

I use a VTT right now and while lining up the map to the grid can be a pain depending on how picky you are, it dies take a lot of the heavy lifting off a lot of minor tasks such as tracking HP, whose targeting who and who is targeting who letting me focus more on the human brain part of DMing.

[Psyren]

Ingesting a map image and automatically identifying where the VTT gridlines should be is actually something an AI could do, and has the potential to save DMs a lot of prep time.

[SpanielBear]

Has anyone seen this break into the 'regular' news? The only article I could find by someone outside the community was a CNBC piece.

There was an article in the Guardian (UK newspaper) a few days ago- a fairly broad strokes one without any depth, but it got into print. Not sure if I’m allowed to share the link, but it’s a free news site and shouldn’t be hard to search for.

[Sigreid]

Ingesting a map image and automatically identifying where the VTT gridlines should be is actually something an AI could do, and has the potential to save DMs a lot of prep time.

A lot of the maps in even official products are poorly drawn with lines that aren't straight or a format choice that is just confusing. I struggle with some of them. Bet AI does too. Lol