D&D Beyond Changes

[Aimeryan]

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

The grid is an optional rule - on a VTT they could just use absolute distances, like BG3 does.

Edit: Also, did anyone consider what I put in my last post? I was hoping for a discussion on it! It is at the bottom of the last page.

[Segev]

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?

I doubt 20% of groups are made up entirely of people willing to pay $10/month each. I would believe about 40% of groups have at least one player who'd pay that much, though I also doubt that D&D Beyond's VTT will be feature- and performance-competitive with other, cheaper ones, based on the dual factors of lack of demonstrated skill by WotC in the area and lack of incentive (as far as the money-men are concerned) to invest the kind of resources necessary to bring it up to par, since they will assume that their IP-exclusivity means they don't need to provide a quality service, only a bare minimum one, to compel players to pay for and use their inferior technical product.

I think that the number-crunching money-men are making WAGs that have enormous assumptions of unchanging usage behavior by existing customers despite the price shifts they're planning, and it's going to wind up with a lot of internal reports about how piracy and other bad-customer-behaviors are costing the company lots and lots of money when it doesn't work out the way they expect it to (but was entirely predictable if you remember that people are not sims).

[skyth]

. Compared to scrawling something on a wet erase map and being able to modify on the fly? It's still friction.

What I do with Maptools is usually just that :)

[Psyren]

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

The grid is an optional rule - on a VTT they could just use absolute distances, like BG3 does.

AI can go further than absolute distances, it has the potential to recognize the drawn-in gridlines present in a lot of maps and snap the grid to them. It doesn't have to be perfect at it, just faster than I am.

Edit: Also, did anyone consider what I put in my last post? I was hoping for a discussion on it! It is at the bottom of the last page.

Sorry, I did miss that:

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?

$30 is going to be a hard sell as people can easily compare that to the likes of Prime or Playstation Plus etc. Still, it could be worthwhile if it meant not needing to buy adventure modules and sourcebooks, and came packaged with a premium VTT.

Ultimately, it's impossible to say what price point is reasonable without seeing what we get. A lot of the hysteria around this newest leak is that some people are assuming they'll simply take the $6 master tier we currently have and jack up the price +400%. Even WotC woud have to see how bad an idea that would be.

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

Or even better, maps with inconsistent grid sizes. Including skewed grids. And maps that have prime numbers of pixels in various directions.

-----------

My experience with VTTs is that it's a huge barrier to entry for both DM and players, as well as requiring more prep time and generally slowing play relative to the same group in person. My prep time for my in-person game can be done entirely in my head, while getting ready for bed. My prep time for my online game requires finding, uploading, and fiddling with maps (making sure the file sizes are small enough to not crash the potatoes that some players use as computers, ensuring the grids line up, drawing the walls for dynamic lighting/fog of war, etc), finding tokens for things, creating actors (ie token-owners), handling updates, etc.

On the players' side, they have to deal with finding their abilities and doing the mechanics in ways that they don't on paper. And that's with modules that provide a lot of automation and better UIs. There's friction on all sides, and it's inherent friction. Playing online is convenient because it reduces the scheduling problem and opens the playerbase outside of your locale. It's inconvenient in every single other way.

If I weren't hosting in an AWS account (where I basically have a flat fee for as much storage as I'm likely to ever use), I'd have to worry about storage limits and forced upgrades breaking my stuff (hosted by someone else) or upload speeds and connecting to a residential ISP (self-hosted at home). Both of which are obnoxious. Hosting Foundry VTT in AWS does require technical expertise (especially to get things unstuck when it decides to go *tilt*, which is usually my fault), and ends up costing ~$15/month (because I wanted a beefier instance for better server performance). But that's not much more (if any more) than going with a big-storage plan hosted by someone else. So tradeoffs. The point being that VTTs inherently produce friction and have steep learning curves.

[Mastikator]

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?

That would be totally fair and reasonable. And a month ago I would've believed that WotC can be totally fair and reasonable.

[skyth]

Or even better, maps with inconsistent grid sizes. Including skewed grids. And maps that have prime numbers of pixels in various directions.

-----------

My experience with VTTs is that it's a huge barrier to entry for both DM and players, as well as requiring more prep time and generally slowing play relative to the same group in person. My prep time for my in-person game can be done entirely in my head, while getting ready for bed. My prep time for my online game requires finding, uploading, and fiddling with maps (making sure the file sizes are small enough to not crash the potatoes that some players use as computers, ensuring the grids line up, drawing the walls for dynamic lighting/fog of war, etc), finding tokens for things, creating actors (ie token-owners), handling updates, etc.

On the players' side, they have to deal with finding their abilities and doing the mechanics in ways that they don't on paper.

You don't have to fiddle with the maps like that if you just draw them with a drawing tool - Same as if you were drawing them on a wet erase map in person. Though, I liked drawing out the entire dungeon ahead of time and adding in the monsters and sight blocking ahead of time so that less time was spent on this sort of thing during the actual game, making the game itself run smoother.

Yes, setting up tokens can take a bit of prep time, but the trick is you keep those tokens so next time you need one of those critters you can just drag and drop onto the play area.

Using the abilities, that depends on how intuitive the macros, etc are set up. Personally, when I was running Pathfinder online, I coded everything about the framework. I even had macros that would help create monsters and level up PC/NPC's. I think everything ran pretty intuitively and I know my players were impressed with it.

Yes, there can be plenty of prep time needed ahead of running, but that's true for in-person games as well. But the VTT allows the time you spend playing with your friends to be better and more efficiently spent with less time spent doing administrative tasks/pausing to prep something/look something up. It's nice being able to mouse over a token and have the AC/Touch AC pop up so you don't have to ask. Heck, I started putting in descriptions of the rooms for the PC's to read when they entered an area onto the maps themselves.

[Segev]

I do agree that one strength VTTs could lean into would be the ability to do "wargaming-like" map movement rather than grid-based. Warhammer and other wargames have used battlefield movement with rulers and templates for decades, longer than D&D has ever used grid-based combat. The grid is a time-saver, not a necessity. VTTs that support routing already exist - roll20 does it for routing through grid squares, though it has the 4e "square circles" thing going on where it counts a diagonal as the same distance as a horizontal or vertical movement from square to square. Straight-up distance calculations square-to-square would not be difficult to code. Coding topological mapping to incorporate 3D movement up and down would not be too much harder (though coding the maps for that would be immensely more complicated than just drawing a top-down view). A further step would be incorporating obstacles and difficult terrain.

You could go a step further in convenience features and allow some sort of toggle or hold-down button to indicate range circles. Who is in melee range, in short range, within long range? Slight increase still: enable this tool to show you, by clicking on a particular token or location, where you'd have to move a different token to be in those ranges of the target.

Exploring techniques for having 3D information without exploding the memory and rendering requirements would be quite the challenge; once you go 3D, maps and images become a lot chunkier in computer processing time. At least for displaying purposes. If you kept it to top-down display, though, you might be able to get away with more, as long as you don't require graphical rendering of the 3D positioning to be real-time.

In any event, VTTs are way, way better for doing away with grids and just running on actual distance calculations. Technically, there's still a hidden grid being used, of course, but it's so fine-grained that humans won't notice it, and the calculations for off-axis distances will be accurate to far too many decimal places for it to matter.

[Aimeryan]

I doubt 20% of groups are made up entirely of people willing to pay $10/month each. I would believe about 40% of groups have at least one player who'd pay that much, though I also doubt that D&D Beyond's VTT will be feature- and performance-competitive with other, cheaper ones, based on the dual factors of lack of demonstrated skill by WotC in the area and lack of incentive (as far as the money-men are concerned) to invest the kind of resources necessary to bring it up to par, since they will assume that their IP-exclusivity means they don't need to provide a quality service, only a bare minimum one, to compel players to pay for and use their inferior technical product.

I think that the number-crunching money-men are making WAGs that have enormous assumptions of unchanging usage behavior by existing customers despite the price shifts they're planning, and it's going to wind up with a lot of internal reports about how piracy and other bad-customer-behaviors are costing the company lots and lots of money when it doesn't work out the way they expect it to (but was entirely predictable if you remember that people are not sims).

Does your mind change on the willingness of people if the new edition is digital-only and they keep it out of competitor VTT's hands? I.e., a walled-garden approach?
I could easily see people paying $10/month to play a new edition. I'm completely against it, but I can see it. More importantly, I think WotC/Hasbro can see it - which is the problem.

[Aimeryan]

You don't have to fiddle with the maps like that if you just draw them with a drawing tool - Same as if you were drawing them on a wet erase map in person. Though, I liked drawing out the entire dungeon ahead of time and adding in the monsters and sight blocking ahead of time so that less time was spent on this sort of thing during the actual game, making the game itself run smoother.

I wish one of my DM's did this; he insists on drawing them out in realtime, which significantly cuts into the session. Sure, ad hoc locations I can understand not being prepared for, but for prepared locations... Many VTTs have the ability to reveal parts of the map in realtime and to have drawn the map beforehand - which also allows for far nicer maps than a rectangle for the area and some circles for trees.

[PhoenixPhyre]

You don't have to fiddle with the maps like that if you just draw them with a drawing tool - Same as if you were drawing them on a wet erase map in person. Though, I liked drawing out the entire dungeon ahead of time and adding in the monsters and sight blocking ahead of time so that less time was spent on this sort of thing during the actual game, making the game itself run smoother.

Yes, setting up tokens can take a bit of prep time, but the trick is you keep those tokens so next time you need one of those critters you can just drag and drop onto the play area.

Using the abilities, that depends on how intuitive the macros, etc are set up. Personally, when I was running Pathfinder online, I coded everything about the framework. I even had macros that would help create monsters and level up PC/NPC's. I think everything ran pretty intuitively and I know my players were impressed with it.

Yes, there can be plenty of prep time needed ahead of running, but that's true for in-person games as well. But the VTT allows the time you spend playing with your friends to be better and more efficiently spent with less time spent doing administrative tasks/pausing to prep something/look something up. It's nice being able to mouse over a token and have the AC/Touch AC pop up so you don't have to ask. Heck, I started putting in descriptions of the rooms for the PC's to read when they entered an area onto the maps themselves.

Except the drawing tools...suck. Horribly. Obscenely. Even in the good VTTs. Even relative to my crappy horrible artistic abilities using a pen and paper. And my experience is that because you lose all the in-person cues and have to deal with the serial nature of voice chat (having two people talking breaks everything, no sidebar conversations are reasonable), you need much higher fidelity maps online than in person. Because the online maps have to bear a lot of the load that could be covered by other channels when in-person. And high-fidelity maps are expensive, both computationally and overhead getting right. And require even finer grid alignment, especially if you're using the walls/LoS functionality. People get stuck on walls, things don't line up exactly on grid, etc.

But the core point was the extra overhead. Doing anything in a VTT costs extra time on everybody's part. It's a net friction compared to the same group running locally, at least in my experience. For me, it's roughly an order of magnitude more ongoing work, for a lower-quality game. The only substantial benefits it has is non-locality and eased scheduling (because no one has to drive anywhere).

[Yakmala]

Netflix is $7 a month, Disney Plus $8, HBO Max $15. That's $30.

Is D&D Beyond going to provide me as much content per month as Netflix, Disney Plus and HBO Max combined?

If not, they need to seriously reconsider that $30 price point.

[Segev]

Does your mind change on the willingness of people if the new edition is digital-only and they keep it out of competitor VTT's hands? I.e., a walled-garden approach?
I could easily see people paying $10/month to play a new edition. I'm completely against it, but I can see it. More importantly, I think WotC/Hasbro can see it - which is the problem.

Actually, I see that driving down the participation even more. The "hook" for new players has always been, "Just show up; I have the books and dice and stuff and can help you out." The line and sinker have always been, for those who liked it well enough to keep playing beyond a session or two, "It's easier for me to look up what I need with my own PHB, and to level up and plan my character," etc., "if I have my own stuff." And that's how you get more people buying into the game, buying the books, etc.

The walled garden approach will put the paywall right up in front of people's faces before they can try it out. And if they aren't willing to pay, they can't give it a shot. The relationship changes when you tell them "it's a free trial; give us your credit card info and we'll only charge you at the end of the period," vs. "You can borrow my books during the game/this week." When the choice to buy one's own books is something one proactively decides to do once more interested, rather than being something they worry - from the outset - they'll be conned into accidentally buying if they don't remember to cancel the automatic subscription soon enough, the barrier to entry FEELS higher.

Maybe I'm weird, but I am much more hesitant to do "free trials" that require me to give information to the company - especially information they could use to bill me - than I am to try something out that a friend wants to show me.

And, with the "walled garden" approach, again, I have less faith in the quality of the actual product they'll be offering. Why play with a clunky and frustrating interface that I am required to pay for and use, when I could be playing 5.0, 3.5, PF1, PF2, BESM, GURPS, RISUS, White Wolf, or even 4e without needing anything more than a GM who knows the system and is willing to teach it?

They're obviously trying to strangle out all earlier editions of D&D, but they won't be able to eliminate all RPG competitors, and by locking it behind an expensive paywall, they make their competitors that don't do that far, far more attractive.


Actually, it just hit me how incredibly stupid this approach is: D&D has always been the "gateway drug" of TTRPG gaming. It's the one almost every gamer cut their teeth on, by being the most ubiquitous. If WotC walls access to D&D off behind a $10 / month (or any other non-zero dollar amount) paywall where you have to give subscription information, etc., just to try it out, D&D becomes the "premium" option. Other game systems become the introductory path. This is how you not only undercut your sales, but actively surrender market dominance.

[EggKookoo]

Netflix is $7 a month, Disney Plus $8, HBO Max $15. That's $30.

Is D&D Beyond going to provide me as much content per month as Netflix, Disney Plus and HBO Max combined?

If not, they need to seriously reconsider that $30 price point.

No, even better. They're providing you access to your own imagination for $30.

[stoutstien]

Actually, I see that driving down the participation even more. The "hook" for new players has always been, "Just show up; I have the books and dice and stuff and can help you out." The line and sinker have always been, for those who liked it well enough to keep playing beyond a session or two, "It's easier for me to look up what I need with my own PHB, and to level up and plan my character," etc., "if I have my own stuff." And that's how you get more people buying into the game, buying the books, etc.

The walled garden approach will put the paywall right up in front of people's faces before they can try it out. And if they aren't willing to pay, they can't give it a shot. The relationship changes when you tell them "it's a free trial; give us your credit card info and we'll only charge you at the end of the period," vs. "You can borrow my books during the game/this week." When the choice to buy one's own books is something one proactively decides to do once more interested, rather than being something they worry - from the outset - they'll be conned into accidentally buying if they don't remember to cancel the automatic subscription soon enough, the barrier to entry FEELS higher.

Maybe I'm weird, but I am much more hesitant to do "free trials" that require me to give information to the company - especially information they could use to bill me - than I am to try something out that a friend wants to show me.

And, with the "walled garden" approach, again, I have less faith in the quality of the actual product they'll be offering. Why play with a clunky and frustrating interface that I am required to pay for and use, when I could be playing 5.0, 3.5, PF1, PF2, BESM, GURPS, RISUS, White Wolf, or even 4e without needing anything more than a GM who knows the system and is willing to teach it?

They're obviously trying to strangle out all earlier editions of D&D, but they won't be able to eliminate all RPG competitors, and by locking it behind an expensive paywall, they make their competitors that don't do that far, far more attractive.


Actually, it just hit me how incredibly stupid this approach is: D&D has always been the "gateway drug" of TTRPG gaming. It's the one almost every gamer cut their teeth on, by being the most ubiquitous. If WotC walls access to D&D off behind a $10 / month (or any other non-zero dollar amount) paywall where you have to give subscription information, etc., just to try it out, D&D becomes the "premium" option. Other game systems become the introductory path. This is how you not only undercut your sales, but actively surrender market dominance.

Yea I'm with you here. I think even if they are able to get a sizable subscription pool at first the fact they are walling off will quickly stagnate that pool and will drop rapidly after a short time.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Actually, I see that driving down the participation even more. The "hook" for new players has always been, "Just show up; I have the books and dice and stuff and can help you out." The line and sinker have always been, for those who liked it well enough to keep playing beyond a session or two, "It's easier for me to look up what I need with my own PHB, and to level up and plan my character," etc., "if I have my own stuff." And that's how you get more people buying into the game, buying the books, etc.

The walled garden approach will put the paywall right up in front of people's faces before they can try it out. And if they aren't willing to pay, they can't give it a shot. The relationship changes when you tell them "it's a free trial; give us your credit card info and we'll only charge you at the end of the period," vs. "You can borrow my books during the game/this week." When the choice to buy one's own books is something one proactively decides to do once more interested, rather than being something they worry - from the outset - they'll be conned into accidentally buying if they don't remember to cancel the automatic subscription soon enough, the barrier to entry FEELS higher.

Maybe I'm weird, but I am much more hesitant to do "free trials" that require me to give information to the company - especially information they could use to bill me - than I am to try something out that a friend wants to show me.

And, with the "walled garden" approach, again, I have less faith in the quality of the actual product they'll be offering. Why play with a clunky and frustrating interface that I am required to pay for and use, when I could be playing 5.0, 3.5, PF1, PF2, BESM, GURPS, RISUS, White Wolf, or even 4e without needing anything more than a GM who knows the system and is willing to teach it?

They're obviously trying to strangle out all earlier editions of D&D, but they won't be able to eliminate all RPG competitors, and by locking it behind an expensive paywall, they make their competitors that don't do that far, far more attractive.


Actually, it just hit me how incredibly stupid this approach is: D&D has always been the "gateway drug" of TTRPG gaming. It's the one almost every gamer cut their teeth on, by being the most ubiquitous. If WotC walls access to D&D off behind a $10 / month (or any other non-zero dollar amount) paywall where you have to give subscription information, etc., just to try it out, D&D becomes the "premium" option. Other game systems become the introductory path. This is how you not only undercut your sales, but actively surrender market dominance.

Yea I'm with you here. I think even if they are able to get a sizable subscription pool at first the fact they are walling off will quickly stagnate that pool and will drop rapidly after a short time.

Count me in on that as well. I ran a high school club where ~0 of the players bought their own books at all. Probably 30 players over the years, maybe 2 bought books, dice, or any other materials. We averaged 1-3, 1 hour games a month (due to after-school limitations). And there were other (middle school) clubs that ran during lunch. Of those, a good chunk went on to play in other contexts, with a majority of those becoming DMs. Making that a mandatory $10, online buy-in would have utterly killed it.

And even with my in-person game, we had a completely new player come in after a few sessions. Only the fact that she could borrow everyone else's materials/my D&D Beyond subscription made that possible; now she's buying her own dice, minis, and other materials. If she had to do all the buy-in and have an account...yeah. No.

[skyth]

Except the drawing tools...suck. Horribly. Obscenely. Even in the good VTTs. Even relative to my crappy horrible artistic abilities using a pen and paper.

I disagree. I can draw using the Maptools drawing tools quicker than I could using pens on a live battlemap. And with better accuracy.

you need much higher fidelity maps online than in person. Because the online maps have to bear a lot of the load that could be covered by other channels when in-person.

Not true in my experience. You can still use the 'other channels' with a VTT.

But the core point was the extra overhead. Doing anything in a VTT costs extra time on everybody's part.

Again, not true in my experience. I click one checkbox as part of an attack and attack bonus and damage are figured out for power attack. Don't have to do any computations or re-figure them every level. Same with range modifiers or a number of other things. How much time is spent in-game adding up the damage dice when it's done instantly in a VTT? Finding a map or other handout and handing it to one player when all of them can just quickly have it online? There is 'friction' in real life games as well that you are forgetting.

Add in the fact that a lot of the 'extra time' takes place away from the game session itself kind of renders things moot as it allows better enjoyment of the actual session with everyone present.

I enjoy my in-person games more than the ones I was running online, but I was actually considering have people bring laptops to the in-person game so I could use a VTT for the battlemap/combat tracking instead of the draw-on one or my warlock tiles. The automation and flexibility of a VTT, especially one that I know how to use quite well would make my life a LOT easier as a DM.

[Dr.Samurai]

It remains to be seen.

I'm in line with the few posts above this one.

But maybe there are newer players that don't know what it's like to play D&D and they buy into this new paradigm of a subscription (for DDB and, if rumors are true, an additional one for the VTT) to play something that calls itself D&D but is really more like a choose-your-own-adventure computer game.

[Aimeryan]

I'm 50/50 on whether I think it will pay off for Hasbro, but I'm fairly confident they think it will. I'm also 90% confident that I personally will not like the way they will monetize it.

[Atranen]

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.

Actually, I see that driving down the participation even more. The "hook" for new players has always been, "Just show up; I have the books and dice and stuff and can help you out." The line and sinker have always been, for those who liked it well enough to keep playing beyond a session or two, "It's easier for me to look up what I need with my own PHB, and to level up and plan my character," etc., "if I have my own stuff." And that's how you get more people buying into the game, buying the books, etc.

The walled garden approach will put the paywall right up in front of people's faces before they can try it out. And if they aren't willing to pay, they can't give it a shot.

I'm of a mind with Aimeryan; the tiered system is way more plausible than $30/month for everyone. And to the "barrier to entry" point, I'd be shocked if they didn't include a free tier, with restrictions, that is nonetheless more than adequate for the "jump in and learn to play" player. Something like 1-2 characters, a limited selection of minis and dice, maybe a level cap.

I'm 50/50 on whether I think it will pay off for Hasbro, but I'm fairly confident they think it will. I'm also 90% confident that I personally will not like the way they will monetize it.

The more I think about it, the more I think they'll be successful. Without me, of course

[Kvess]

Wasn't there a leak a few months ago about the subscription fees increasing? I recall there was a photo of some PowerPoint floating around.

Someone posted PowerPoint slides back in August on r/dndleaks claiming that D&D Beyond+ was planning to raise subscription fees to $29.99 per month, while also removing access to homebrew from free accounts and locking them to SRD content. It was a hoax. The same Redditor published an additional slide which said: “Don’t worry. It was all fake. Microtransactions and subscriptions suck. Please don’t ruin D&D.” The fact that this rumour is also at $30/month per user suggests that this is either one heck of a coincidence or from someone who didn’t see that this was a hoax.

I don’t think any of this passes the smell test. WotC has a Discord assistant for rules and dice rolls, called Avrae, but even ChatGPT doesn’t actually understand… much of anything really, beyond a superficial “this is what I heard people say” level. Technologically the software is really good autocomplete, but you wouldn’t write a book using autocomplete. DMs are also the customers who buy most of the books and subscribe to their highest subscription tiers, so replacing us with AI makes absolutely no sense.

There’s a difference between Hasbro trying to take a cut of Paizo’s revenue in the sleaziest way possible and pushing their core business off of a cliff while twirling their moustaches and kicking a flumph.

[Dr.Samurai]

Well, they just put out another statement 30 minutes ago and didn't say that the subscription stuff was bogus so... not sure. I'm not linking it here since it's mostly to do with the OGL. But seems they're going to revise the OGL as per their UA method; release it, get feedback through surveys, provide results.

[Kvess]

Well, they just put out another statement 30 minutes ago and didn't say that the subscription stuff was bogus so... not sure. I'm not linking it here since it's mostly to do with the OGL. But seems they're going to revise the OGL as per their UA method; release it, get feedback through surveys, provide results.

As someone who does communications work for a living, that statement probably wasn't written 30 minutes ago. Since it's discussing legal agreements between WOTC and other publisher, they probably needed to have all of the VPs sign off on it and that rarely happens quickly in any organization.

[EggKookoo]

The more I think about it, the more I think they'll be successful. Without me, of course

Yeah. I like D&D enough, but its main selling point for me over other systems has always been its accessibility. If I have to pay for the privilege, there are better systems.

[Snowbluff]

Someone posted PowerPoint slides back in August on r/dndleaks claiming that D&D Beyond+ was planning to raise subscription fees to $29.99 per month, while also removing access to homebrew from free accounts and locking them to SRD content. It was a hoax. The same Redditor published an additional slide which said: “Don’t worry. It was all fake. Microtransactions and subscriptions suck. Please don’t ruin D&D.” The fact that this rumour is also at $30/month per user suggests that this is either one heck of a coincidence or from someone who didn’t see that this was a hoax.

I don’t think any of this passes the smell test. WotC has a Discord assistant for rules and dice rolls, called Avrae, but even ChatGPT doesn’t actually understand… much of anything really, beyond a superficial “this is what I heard people say” level. Technologically the software is really good autocomplete, but you wouldn’t write a book using autocomplete. DMs are also the customers who buy most of the books and subscribe to their highest subscription tiers, so replacing us with AI makes absolutely no sense.

ThereÂ’s a difference between Hasbro trying to take a cut of PaizoÂ’s revenue in the sleaziest way possible and pushing their core business off of a cliff while twirling their moustaches and kicking a flumph.

It is most certainly a hoax. This is the PP in question. I'm actually surprised this took off so readily given that this has already existed and been debunked months ago by the hoaxer. The only new part is the AI DM, which is an idea so infeasible that it probably wouldn't nearly approach functionality in any meaningful timeframe unless WotC were to suddenly hire more coders than they have writers for DnD.

For the record, a similar post to this thread has 6k karma on reddit. On something so astonishingly fake I can't even begin to describe how dumb this is. I know WotC isn't great, but if this is real, it's because people are just giving them ideas at this point.

[Psyren]

It is most certainly a hoax. This is the PP in question. I'm actually surprised this took off so readily given that this has already existed and been debunked months ago by the hoaxer. The only new part is the AI DM, which is an idea so infeasible that it probably wouldn't nearly approach functionality in any meaningful timeframe unless WotC were to suddenly hire more coders than they have writers for DnD.

For the record, a similar post to this thread has 6k karma on reddit. On something so astonishingly fake I can't even begin to describe how dumb this is. I know WotC isn't great, but if this is real, it's because people are just giving them ideas at this point.

Indeed - and even if it's somehow based on true information, it's definitely incomplete.

Yea I'm with you here. I think even if they are able to get a sizable subscription pool at first the fact they are walling off will quickly stagnate that pool and will drop rapidly after a short time.

I strongly doubt that D&D Beyond will dispense with all its free options. It would be like them deleting Basic.

Yes, there can be plenty of prep time needed ahead of running, but that's true for in-person games as well. But the VTT allows the time you spend playing with your friends to be better and more efficiently spent with less time spent doing administrative tasks/pausing to prep something/look something up. It's nice being able to mouse over a token and have the AC/Touch AC pop up so you don't have to ask. Heck, I started putting in descriptions of the rooms for the PC's to read when they entered an area onto the maps themselves.

Current VTTs shift more of the burden from running the game midstream to pre-game preparation, and the degree to which they lessen that burden is dependent on how user-friendly they are. There is a lot of room in this space to make something that is easier to use, especially from any device (phones included.) WotC has a real opportunity here.

No, even better. They're providing you access to your own imagination for $30.

I think it's actually other people's imagination, if the homebrew function being gated is identical to the current gated one. (i.e. making your own homebrew is free, publishing it for others and/or searching and using theirs is not.) But with that said, I agree that the $30 price point, if true, is overly ambitious for what they could possibly have ready to put in it, short of not needing to buy the actual books.

[Brookshw]

But maybe there are newer players that don't know what it's like to play D&D and they buy into this new paradigm of a subscription (for DDB and, if rumors are true, an additional one for the VTT) to play something that calls itself D&D but is really more like a choose-your-own-adventure computer game.

Huh, hadn't even considered new players. I think the last way I'd want to introduce someone to D&D , or any TTRPG, is through a VTT, kinda sees that without the in person energy you'd be missing out on a lot. Might be my own bias though as I don't use them.

[Oramac]

Well, they just put out another statement 30 minutes ago and didn't say that the subscription stuff was bogus so... not sure. I'm not linking it here since it's mostly to do with the OGL. But seems they're going to revise the OGL as per their UA method; release it, get feedback through surveys, provide results.

As someone who does communications work for a living, that statement probably wasn't written 30 minutes ago. Since it's discussing legal agreements between WOTC and other publisher, they probably needed to have all of the VPs sign off on it and that rarely happens quickly in any organization.

Oh yea, no way that was written 30+ minutes ago. More likely, it was written last week and just now got signed off by management.

Regardless, it's a good sign. There's still a lot of questions that need answering, but it's a big step in the right direction.

[Psyren]

Huh, hadn't even considered new players. I think the last way I'd want to introduce someone to D&D , or any TTRPG, is through a VTT, kinda sees that without the in person energy you'd be missing out on a lot. Might be my own bias though as I don't use them.

I can all but guarantee that most newcomers to D&D in 2020 and 2021 were not introduced in person, given the quarantine stuff. Improving their ability to do that (whether themselves, or empowering established players to do so on their behalf) is going to be a major strategic capability going forward I would say.

[Snowbluff]

Indeed - and even if it's somehow based on true information, it's definitely incomplete.

You're right, there's probably something to found if we engage in a little OSINT. What kind of people is WotC Hiring? Mostly artists. A lot of people for their AAA game studio(s). "Digital DnD" is getting a new head of creative. If someone knows if any of these point to a job that would intimate some connection to a new AI DM, please tell me.