A Few More Tidbits About D&D Beyond From The Developer

Adam Bradford, the senior product manager of upcoming D&D digital toolset D&D Beyond has answered a few questions about the product over at the Tribality website. You can read the full interview at the link below, but here are the highlights. Nothing major, but a few bits like filtering content, roadmap features like initiative trackers, color-coded tabs, etc.

• Alpha testing is finished.
• Beta testing emails go out "very soon".
• The software has table with colour codes (see images above and below) to make it easy to tell where you are.
• Adam has played D&D for 20 years.
• Additional features later will include "encounter builder, combat/ initiative tracker, dice rolling and automation, stream integration, and much more".
• There will be easy ways to filter content - for example "Want to see every spell that requires a Charisma saving throw in the game? Or every healing spell? Every spell that does force damage?"
• Their license does not restrict them on delivery mechanisms. They "are fully aware of the offline capability concerns and are working to mitigate those concerns". A few days ago, WotC's Greg Tito confirmed "D&D Beyond will work without an internet connection. That's a big deal for the devs!"
• You an read the full interview here.

 

[Dire Bare]

We are not excited about the idea of paying for the same content a third (or fourth) time

[SARCASM]You know, I purchased the Star Wars trilogy on VHS. I was pretty cheesed off when Lucasfilm made me pay AGAIN for the SAME movie when they released the films on DVD. And now, if I want the SAME movies AGAIN streaming, I have to pay full price a third time!!![/SARCASM]

I'm only partially responding to ddaley, but more responding to this general idea that comes up every time we discuss a new digital tool. Folks have the same complaint about Fantasy Grounds.

If you pay money to access D&D 5E content on D&D Beyond for books you already own in one form and/or another . . . . you AREN'T paying for the same content twice. You are paying to access the content through a different medium or service. It either will or won't be worth it to you, but criticism of "paying for the same content again" is unfair. WotC and Curse have to make money, and they also have a right to make as much money as they can out of their customer base, it's what all for-profit businesses do. Nothing announced so far smacks of being "unfair" or "money-gouging".

I'm excited about the beta and will be participating. If the tool proves awesome enough that I want to switch from Fantasy Grounds, or use both programs, then I'll have to weigh price and total investment. Price is most certainly a concern, but it's premature to worry about it now and I'll never complain about "paying for the same content again".

 

[Olaf the Stout]

The problem I have with these various digital tools is that they charge full book price for the content. It's digital, the cost should reflect that. Plus, you should be allowed to add your own content so that people who already own the books can just add it.

I don't see why you have a problem with them charging full book price for digital content.

This digital tool may make use of the same content that a book does, but it does it in a completely different way. It's not like your book can do something as simple as give you a list of spells sorted by duration or casting time or range. Nor does it sort monsters by size or alignment.

That's just the simple things. Obviously there will be a lot more things that these digital tools will allow you to do that you can't do with just the books.

Just because the product is digital doesn't make the coding costs disappear either. Those costs need to be recouped.

Now obviously if they charge too much for their product, many people won't buy it as they won't see the value of it for the cost. However, it's silly to suggest that the cost of the item should be solely limited by the cost of the book price.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

It's amazing how Wizards really tries to get D&D involved in the digital age and yet they still will not do the most basic thing such as release their books in PDF at a lower price like Paizo.

Why are you always so negative when it comes to anything to do with WotC? I don't think I've ever seen you post a positive comment when it comes to WotC.

 

[mflayermonk]

I took a time machine back a few hundred years and met up with Napoleon. I warned him about the folly of starting a land war in Asia.
He told me "Stop worrying, its not like we are trying to create digital tools for Dungeons & Dragons."

 

[unnatural 20]

And this is why we can't have nice things..

 

[Mercule]

A subscription model or a one time purchase model would have to be built into the application. They know more than they are telling us.

Only if they suck as developers. The ability to control access to content would have to be built in. The exact way in which that access is controlled should be externalized into an infrastructure component which is injected into the the application's core logic from the composition root (DIP, FTW). They could literally have five different modes sitting around, tested, and make the decision a week before going live with the only change being a single line of code or configuration.

Source: Having done similar things multiple times over 20ish years of application development; actually applying OOP and SOLID development concepts.

 

[ddaley]

And, you can enable/disable various features based on the subscription or license level without building any of that into the application? If it is a simple all or nothing approach, then you can probably do it. But, it sounds like there will be tiers of licensing. The application will need to be able to turn features on and off based on the current license level.

Only if they suck as developers. The ability to control access to content would have to be built in. The exact way in which that access is controlled should be externalized into an infrastructure component which is injected into the the application's core logic from the composition root (DIP, FTW). They could literally have five different modes sitting around, tested, and make the decision a week before going live with the only change being a single line of code or configuration.

Source: Having done similar things multiple times over 20ish years of application development; actually applying OOP and SOLID development concepts.

 

[Koren n'Rhys]

[SARCASM]You know, I purchased the Star Wars trilogy on VHS. I was pretty cheesed off when Lucasfilm made me pay AGAIN for the SAME movie when they released the films on DVD. And now, if I want the SAME movies AGAIN streaming, I have to pay full price a third time!!![/SARCASM]

I'm only partially responding to ddaley, but more responding to this general idea that comes up every time we discuss a new digital tool. Folks have the same complaint about Fantasy Grounds.

If you pay money to access D&D 5E content on D&D Beyond for books you already own in one form and/or another . . . . you AREN'T paying for the same content twice. You are paying to access the content through a different medium or service. It either will or won't be worth it to you, but criticism of "paying for the same content again" is unfair. WotC and Curse have to make money, and they also have a right to make as much money as they can out of their customer base, it's what all for-profit businesses do. Nothing announced so far smacks of being "unfair" or "money-gouging".

I'm excited about the beta and will be participating. If the tool proves awesome enough that I want to switch from Fantasy Grounds, or use both programs, then I'll have to weigh price and total investment. Price is most certainly a concern, but it's premature to worry about it now and I'll never complain about "paying for the same content again".

It's nice to see that at least someone understands how things work in the real world.

They've already told us <i>how</i> the cost structure works, and very likely, already revealed as much as they are allowed to at this point. Once they can tell us what that pricing will be, then they will do so. In the mean time, they will let us play with it so that once we have a price, we can decide for ourselves, based on actual experience using the product, if we can afford it. Seems logical to me.

 

[Gardens & Goblins]

Unless it requires a constant link to a server to remain functional, it's going to be cracked within the week - knock yourself out, I doubt WoC will be collapsing anytime soon. So if you really, really don't want to support/pay for it, there's that.

Though if they run it as a sub, then for my lot at least, it's a moot point. We won't be going anywhere near it.

 

[Mercule]

And, you can enable/disable various features based on the subscription or license level without building any of that into the application? If it is a simple all or nothing approach, then you can probably do it. But, it sounds like there will be tiers of licensing. The application will need to be able to turn features on and off based on the current license level.

Yup. Instead of injecting a specific authorization component, you inject a factory that looks at some data to determine which component to return.

Probably don't even need to do that, though. I imagine that the authorization would be somehow role or claims based, where certain features are flagged as (pseudo-code) "if user is member of (boughtFighters) or (boughtPHB) or (boughtThePlatnumRing) then include FighterInfo". Hopefully, they aren't actually hard-coding the membership requirements in, but also linking to a data-driven list of them. It would end up with each discreet rule being assigned a key and them cross-referencing a table that listed which roles have access to which rules. Relatively straight-forward, in that regard and could, potentially, let them change pricing structures without even having to push an updated app, just a phone-home check.

So, yeah, there are some high-level variations that they need to figure out, but there's plenty of room to play around. Even the high-level bits could be tweaked along the way without too much pain/risk. It really depends on how clean they keep the code. I've seen some absolute disasters, over the years, and it's always possible for a development team to paint themselves into a corner if they're sloppy. Using what are considered "best practices" in 2017 for Java, C#, Nodejs, or other modern languages, it shouldn't be a problem.

If the back-end is COBOL, the whole project is screwed.