D&D 5E D&D Lead Editor Job Posting Mentions "TRPG digital tools licensee"

I thought this was interesting.

A recent (5/28) job posting on the WotC jobs site mentions, among its major accountabilities, the following:

"The Lead Editor manages the relationship with the TRPG digital tools licensee, providing new TRPG content for the tools, and approving new tools features. (20%)"

Is this the first we've heard of a plan to license the creation of D&D tabletop digital tools for 5e (along with what is essentially confirmation that 5e will have official digital tools), or am I just out of the loop?

Credit to the Morrus/NewbieDM Twitter chain for noticing the posting.

Not sure if it's new or not, just wanted to say I'd love if the licensee were Fantasy Grounds, for the vtt.

I guess I just thought it was obvious that they'd have to do something.

I'm more interested in what they've lined up for a full-fledged 5e online RPG - seems like they take too long to get to that point normally. I'd prefer an adventure-based RPG over an MMORPG, but that's me.

Might just be a cut and paste from when they advertised that spot before.

But this doesn't sound like either Savage Wombat. This sounds like DDi style tools.

Color me very excited. I SO hope they open things up for independent developers to produce RPG tools.

I definitely read this as a position for a liaison between WotC and 3rd party(ies) for digital tools.

There's a broad pool of app and software designers out there; too broad to justify WotC trying to do themselves, IMO. Division of labor FTW.

As to what those tools might be, we'll have to wait I suppose. I'm sure we'll still have DDI, but I'm not sure what they'll do with it.

The need for a super robust character creator is much less this time around, so it will probably exist, but be much less of a selling point. The core rules will be downloadable for free, so there's nothing special required there. Dungeon/ Dragon will almost certainly be delivered digitally, but again, no serious software requirements.

That leaves mobile apps, which are highly probable, and a perfect thing to connect with DDI. Character creator and character sheet for sure. Possibly a Dungeon/Dragon delivery system there because of the prevalence of reading on mobile devices.

There's also a possibility of some sort of online campaign interface, a la Obsidian Portal.

Finally there's the VTT question. I couldn't even begin to guess whether they'll try to get their own going, or be content with letting people keep using the quality options that are already available. If they do want a proprietary VTT, I wonder if they would contract it out to someone with experience like Fantasy Grounds or Roll20, and if so, how would that impact what those companies do independently?

However it shakes out, I tend to believe that they'll have to come up with some good stuff this time around for DDI, or drop the price point.

SkidAce said:

Might just be a cut and paste from when they advertised that spot before.

Click to expand...

It could also refer to legacy 4E era tools that get still handled by subcontractors.

Texicles said:

I definitely read this as a position for a liaison between WotC and 3rd party(ies) for digital tools.

There's a broad pool of app and software designers out there; too broad to justify WotC trying to do themselves, IMO. Division of labor FTW.

As to what those tools might be, we'll have to wait I suppose. I'm sure we'll still have DDI, but I'm not sure what they'll do with it.

The need for a super robust character creator is much less this time around, so it will probably exist, but be much less of a selling point. The core rules will be downloadable for free, so there's nothing special required there. Dungeon/ Dragon will almost certainly be delivered digitally, but again, no serious software requirements.

That leaves mobile apps, which are highly probable, and a perfect thing to connect with DDI. Character creator and character sheet for sure. Possibly a Dungeon/Dragon delivery system there because of the prevalence of reading on mobile devices.

There's also a possibility of some sort of online campaign interface, a la Obsidian Portal.

Finally there's the VTT question. I couldn't even begin to guess whether they'll try to get their own going, or be content with letting people keep using the quality options that are already available. If they do want a proprietary VTT, I wonder if they would contract it out to someone with experience like Fantasy Grounds or Roll20, and if so, how would that impact what those companies do independently?

However it shakes out, I tend to believe that they'll have to come up with some good stuff this time around for DDI, or drop the price point.

Click to expand...

I suspect this is another indicator of the intention to have someone else manage a store for them. While Dungeon/Dragon will likely be delivered digitally, I'd be very surprised if that was the only delivery method given that Ebook penetration has essentially plateaued at about 20-25% in 2013, reading on mobile devices is clearly still the minority. I'd expect it to be an option, but I expect paper to be a primary focus given that it seems digital only means you lose 75-80% of the market. TBH, in D&D's current demographic, I suspect the penetration is a good deal lower than 20-25%. Once you get over the age of 40, casual use and acceptance of computer tools starts dropping off a cliff, and D&D does have a substantial portion of the player base >40 years old.

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/ebook-growth-slows-to-single-digits-in-u-s-in-2013/

I think we have indications DDI is going to be 4th edition only, as they keep stating they'll keep the character builder up as long as enough people are subscribed to it. If DDI and the Character Builder are a single product, then we can safely assume that 5th edition will be using something else, because otherwise the statement about "Enough people subscribed to the character builder" makes no sense. Especially since 5th edition's design really has no need of digital tools as 4th edition did, so what would be the draw to DDI for 5th edition? As I said above, Ebook penetration at best is very low, I'd be exceedingly surprised if their plan was to produce Dungeon/Dragon for only a small fraction of their market and leave the majority of the money on the table. I suspect any digital version of Dungeon/Dragon will be through some third party like DriveThruRPG, with a print option, and they'll keep DDI up for as long as there's enough people subscribed to it for the 4th edition tools.

I do believe that Hasbro has someone in R&D playing with virtual tabletops, it's very obviously the future of boardgames and a prime component of table top games like RPGs. I'd imagine they already have someone with a LED touch panel lying horizontally, programming Hasbro's board games into it as we speak. I'd imagine someone also showed them the CMU video of the Surface (The table sized one) running an RPG by now as well.

So it could very easily be that they're contracting out the software development for a virtual tabletop.

dd.stevenson said:

It could also refer to legacy 4E era tools that get still handled by subcontractors.

Click to expand...

It mentions adding content and features, which doesn't happen with the 4e tools anymore.

I don't really agree that 5th edition would not benefit from digital tools. Especially when you take into account additional options that will be offered in the printed core rule books. I suspect that many people would be pretty disappointed if there were not digital tools offered in a relatively short amount of time.

I agree that they might not be as critical in this edition. But that isn't the same as not being useful. But I guess we'll see.

AD