Quick question: does the prohibition on online play affect your playtest?

[Chris_Nightwing]

You are a pretty high profile guy, and clearly have been involved up to this point; I would bet you could get a written exemption if you asked for one.

My guess is he's collecting evidence that we should all be allowed to play online? I find it especially odd that he could previously but can't now.

 

[Transformer]

I am NOT affected,

But this does not bode well for the future of Wizards PR. Wizards needs to get its act together and tell its lawyers to shut up. Half of 5e's failure to maintain market share had nothing to do with game design; it was Wizards' horrible, antagonistic legal policies and public relations.

If 5e is going to succeed, Wizards needs to unequivocally leave behind the old days of royally screwing the pooch. No more draconian, one-sided license that drives away third party publishers. No more trying to pass off a fan site kit license that forces the user to sign his soul away as an actual reasonable fan site policy. No more refusing to actually communicate with your fanbase. No more terrible customer service giving conflicting answers to very common rules questions.

That **** has got to stop, Wizards. There's a reason why even people who like 4e are not anywhere as near as proud to support you as the Pathfinder people are to support Paizo. Because you pull antagonistic nonsense like this.

But, *sigh*, here we are again, with a totally pointless limitation on access to the playtest docs which serves no purpose except to make people who are experiencing technical problems really mad. And you can't even run the game online. Seriously, Wizards? Tons of groups play online. Does not their feedback and experience matter too? Don't you want to make the happy so they'll give you money? But no, you go out of your way to exclude them from the playtest. And for what? What are you even protecting yourself against?

You will fail, miserably, Wizards, if you don't stop acting like the corporate equivalent of a schoolyard bully playing catch with the scrawny kid's lunchbox. Let the damn people play.

~ please note - this isn't the place for ranting about it, this is the place for meaningful discussion : Plane Sailing, Admin ~

 

[Minigiant]

Yes. It really halts my playtesting as my only real life roleplaying at the moment is with powergamers, rules lawyers, and noobs (aka my family). Most of my D&D for a while has been online so I have to create written scripts for the playtest PCs.

 

[dkyle]

I might consider playtesting online, so that I can legitimately give feedback. But the current playtest packet doesn't exactly inspire me to try it out with my group, where it would be taking time away from ongoing campaigns.

But since online isn't an option, I'll probably be sitting out this round, at least.

 

[Li Shenron]

It might.

We currently have 2 players only that are surely coming to playtest, while other gaming friends don't seem to be interested or are too busy in the next couple of weeks. I hadn't thought of gaming online because I thought I had at least 3-4 players, but now that I see it won't be easy I would have considered going online and inviting some long-distance friends to join.

 

[Janaxstrus]

Not even a little. I can play with my friends in person.

 

[Umbran]

Let us be honest - as a practical matter, this policy does not stop anyone from playing the playtest. It is right up there with the, "you can't print it out for your players, they must also register," policy in how foolishly unenforceable it is. GMs *will* run games online. GMs *will* print it out for their players. If they keep their mouths shut, WotC will never know.

And that's the problem - this is a playtest. The one thing they don't want is for GMs to keep their mouths shut! GMs will be afraid to reveal what they gleaned from such sessions, for fear of revealing they violated the terms and thus be shut out of future materials, or otherwise acted upon.

Thus, WotC doesn't limit play with the rules, but limits how much feedback they can get on the rules. That's just silly.

 

[erf_beto]

I suspect (hope) that they may open the playtest to online play in a couple of months, once they get whatever feedback they want from face-to-face groups.

 

[jshaft37]

Yes very much so! I have highschool friends in Philly, New York, London, Chicago and across the street. We all want to play together and playtest but can't. This is 2012 afterall. In the Kobold Quarterly article, Mearls even said they used G+ Hangouts to develop the materials!

 

[Matchstick]

Yes. This affects my plans for playtesting.

The most viable option for my group to playtest was to do it via Google Hangouts and TableTop Forge. Partially because one of our former group members was interested in playing 1000's of miles away. The other due to our schedules. We would have been much more likely to work in a virtual game.

Our group is pretty well established and have played various iterations of D&D since Basic D&D. So a good amount of experience to draw on and receive feedback from.

There would have been potentially 6 folks in our playtest including DM.

This is almost exactly our group too except it would have been five people. Long time group of experienced players who play online weekly with participants from every U.S. time zone.