Beyond the Digital Curse

Wizards of the Coast has once again launched a digital effort for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition with Curse's D&D Beyond. This is a good time to review D&D's rocky relationship with digital platforms and the opportunities where Beyond might succeed where previous attempts have failed.

A Brief History of D&D Online​

The D&D brand has always had a presence online, evolving along with the Internet. The collaborative fan community was strong in magazines like Alarums & Excursions, helped in no small part by the fact that original D&D ruleset was open-ended enough to accommodate a wide range of innovations and contributions.

Then-D&D-owner TSR changed its tune with the creation of Dragon Magazine GEnie's TSR Online RoundTable. The Online RoundTable was followed by D&D newsgroups, which TSR eventually saw as a threat, attempting to restrict content to MPG-Net, a TSR-themed American Online forum, and GEnie.

Wizards of the Coast's acquisition of D&D from TSR raised hopes of a better relationship with the online community. WOTC launched Gleemax, which was supposed to be an all-encompassing platform for WOTC's digital content. It didn't work out that way.

Gleemax was followed by D&D Insider (DDI), a five-part plan to encompass the Fourth Edition of D&D: digital versions of Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, a rules compendium, an online character builder, and a monster builder. It also included a virtual tabletop that was failed and restarted several times.

Fourth Edition D&D's chilly reception coincided with the cancellation of several digital efforts. As the company moved to Fifth Edition, WOTC threw in the towel on digital entirely. PDFs were yanked from the Internet. Dungeon and Dragon Magazine were cancelled. Citing the growth of other social media platforms, WOTC shut down their own online forums at the end of October 2015.

Fifth Edition: A New Hope?​

The arrival of Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons seemed like a restart for how WOTC engaged with digital. It didn't turn out that way.

Trapdoor Technologies promised a comprehensive platform similar to the D&D Beyond announcement, including rules, character sheets, and adventures together into a clean interface. It was codenamed Morningstar. WOTC's relationship with Trapdoor didn't last. After WOTC abruptly broke up with the company and cancelled the project, Trapdoor Technologies transitioned to Pathfinder and struggled with alternative funding through Kickstarter, eventually shutting down entirely on October 19, 2016:

On Wednesday, Oct 19th, Slingshot Capital Partners, the group who own Trapdoor decided to close our company immediately. It is now the staff and management’s sad duty to tell you that there will be no new products, product updates, Trapdoor Tuesday releases or other company functions. As you may already know, our Kickstarter campaign for Playbook Essentials on Android has also been canceled. Despite the efforts of the former staff to find a way to keep Playbook going, we have exhausted our options.

Despite Trapdoor's failure, WOTC wasn't done with the digital space. The release of the DMs Guild provided a path forward for PDFs and fan-created content once more. There were more changes to come though, and it started at the top.

A Digital Leader​

WOTC's latest CEO, Chris Cocks, has his roots in online gaming:

Chris Cocks, who most recently served as Vice President, OEM Technical Sales at Microsoft Corporation, where he led a global sales and technical engagement team. Prior to his eight-year tenure with Microsoft, Chris served as Vice President of Educational Games at LeapFrog, where he led a cross-discipline team to drive hardware planning, software design and development, marketing and channel management. He began his career in brand management at Procter & Gamble and served in product management and marketing leadership positions in Xbox and MSN, including work on hit franchises like Halo and Fable, prior to joining Leapfrog.

With WOTC's announced partnership with Curse to create D&D Beyond, Cocks is revisiting a platform where the company has yet to be successful...at least by WOTC's own standards.

D&D Beyond will include a D&D compendium (like DDI), character management (like Trapdoor's Project Morningstar), D&D forums (like the old WOTC forums), and the ability to leverage homebrew content (presumably an outgrowth of DMs Guild content). One additional and important note, as Morrus confirmed, is the ability to play offline. Notably missing is any virtual tabletop, which at this point has largely been outsourced to online platforms like Fantasy Grounds and Roll20.

With Cocks' experience and some hard-won lessons about digital initiatives under WOTC's belt, D&D Beyond seems like the company's best chance at getting digital right. Here’s hoping that the name of WOTC’s new digital partner is not a sign of things to come.

 

[Hussar]

*Fires up some popcorn and watches*