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Thread: D&D Beyond Changes
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2023-01-17, 09:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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'):
SpoilerYou 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.Last edited by Atranen; 2023-01-17 at 09:35 PM.
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2023-01-17, 10:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2023-01-17, 10:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2011
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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2023-01-17, 10:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2021
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2023-01-17, 10:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2012
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
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2023-01-17, 10:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
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2023-01-17, 10:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.Last edited by Psyren; 2023-01-17 at 11:02 PM.
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2023-01-17, 11:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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2023-01-17, 11:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
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.
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2023-01-17, 11:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2019
Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
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2023-01-17, 11:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
I still don't see how them investing in an alternative DMing model destroys the traditional one.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2023-01-17, 11:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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...!
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2023-01-18, 03:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2016
Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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 rulesLast edited by Bohandas; 2023-01-18 at 03:09 AM.
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2023-01-18, 03:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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 dnd5eBlack text is for sarcasm, also sincerity. You'll just have to read between the lines and infer from context like an animal
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2023-01-18, 07:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2013
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2023-01-18, 07:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2017
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2023-01-18, 08:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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2023-01-18, 08:17 AM (ISO 8601)
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2023-01-18, 09:13 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
I seem to recall that Rich Burlew even made a point in the Snips/Snails/Dragon Tails book about TTRPG versus digital adventure games ...
Baldur's Gate 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Baldur's Gate 4, and so on.
Like multi-player, turn based die roll executed Skyrim.
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.
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.
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.
Yep.
Beyond that, viral and virulent info campaigns are a thing in the 2020's, a thing that can smear a brand hard.
Yes, and the party is the basic unit of play.
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.
Hard to disagree with this analysis. Suits are gonna suit.Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2023-01-18 at 09:15 AM.
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2023-01-18, 09:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2015
Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.Last edited by Oramac; 2023-01-18 at 09:16 AM.
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2023-01-18, 09:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2019
Re: D&D Beyond Changes
Has anyone seen this break into the 'regular' news? The only article I could find by someone outside the community was a CNBC piece.
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2023-01-18, 09:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
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2023-01-18, 09:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2013
Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
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2023-01-18, 10:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.
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2023-01-18, 10:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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?
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2023-01-18, 10:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
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.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2023-01-18, 10:17 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
I am the flush of excitement. The blush on the cheek. I am the Rouge!
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2023-01-18, 10:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: D&D Beyond Changes
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.
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2023-01-18, 10:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2018
Re: D&D Beyond Changes
Have fun, stay sane, enjoy the madness.
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2023-01-18, 10:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
Re: D&D Beyond Changes
I am the flush of excitement. The blush on the cheek. I am the Rouge!