D&D 5E Licensing so far....

Zaukrie · Oct 27, 2014

Gale Force 9 is late with all products, and there are issues with the cards. Dungeonscape is vapor ware. The two modules are good, but not great. And, imho, if you are not running the big arc, there are no other licensed adventures. How would you rate WotC and their partners so far? I would give them a C or D.

Paraxis · Oct 27, 2014

I have not ordered anything from Gale Force 9, so no comment except the whole "concentration" thing on the cards would have been a good idea they sorta dropped the ball there.

Dungeonscape is FAR from vaporware, I am in the beta and so far so good. Is it perfect, no but it is still being developed and from what I have seen the company has not once failed to deliver on a promise or date, and they are very open with the public about all that is going on. You can not ask for more when they are delivering and being this transparent in their process.

The two adventures from Goodman Games are very well done, and were updated to use Monster Manual stats as soon as that book was released, I have run both of them and thumbs up all around.

As far as Horde goes, well it is not my kind of adventure but I am playing through it and having fun despite the fact it is not a great flagship adventure path.

So no grade for Gale Force 9, Solid A for Trapdoor Tech and Dungeonscape, A+ for Goodman Games and the two adventures, and a C for Kobold Press and the Horde adventure.

WoTC gets a B+, I wish somethings would be done differently but in the end I am having fun playing and running 5e.

wrenofwar · Oct 27, 2014

What are the issues with the cards?

JesterOC · Oct 27, 2014

Dungeonscape is buggy at the moment and not even a true alpha (it is not feature complete). I would have hoped that the cards would be out by now, I don't know much about the minis but what I have seen does not interest me. The first module is OK but a little too much railroading IMHO.

So for D&D 5e itself I would give an A+ while the partners would get the following
Dungeonscape: D
Gale Force 9: C-
Kobold Press: C+

Umbran · Oct 27, 2014

JesterOC said:
Dungeonscape is buggy at the moment and not even a true alpha (it is not feature complete).

Of course it is buggy! It is under development!

Feature complete for alpha is an old, waterfall-style concept. In the modern, agile development world, you don't wait to be feature complete before putting things in front of users.

JesterOC · Oct 27, 2014

I'm curious Praxis what are you running Dungeonscape on? I have run the net and Android version on an older tablet and both are troublesome. Perhaps the iOS version has more features and is more stable.

Paraxis · Oct 27, 2014

JesterOC said:
I'm curious Praxis what are you running Dungeonscape on? I have run the net and Android version on an older tablet and both are troublesome. Perhaps the iOS version has more features and is more stable.

Just the net version, and I at first was overly judgemental about the program, but took a step back and realized they are doing a great job at listening to the playtesters and they never said we would get something and not delivered. So sure it has some issues and doesn't do everything I want it do do at the moment but I am giving them a good grade based mostly on public relations.

JesterOC · Oct 27, 2014

Umbran said:
... In the modern, agile development world, you don't wait to be feature complete before putting things in front of users.

The modern agile development system still calls an alpha an alpha*. One of their own people said it is more alpha than beta so why not call it alpha?

Perhaps the problem lies with Android playing second (or third) fiddle to iOS. But they are talking about being almost ready to deploy iOS, but I would hazard a guess that the Android version is about 1-2 months off.

At the moment the only way I find it useful is to quickly look up spells for my character. It is far easier to use a real character sheet at the table. Perhaps when they implement the printing of character sheets it will become more useful. Once they fix the crash bugs and laggy input.

*
http://learnaccessvba.com/application_development/agile_development.htm

Astrosicebear · Oct 27, 2014

WOTC - D&D has a very, very tumultuous relationship with digital tools.

I am excited to see how far Dungeonscape can go before either blossoming into a useful tool, or being sidelined. When 4e was announced there was a massive amount of hype over the online 4e tools. And it fizzled completely and really dejected people. Dungeonscape has proven proof of concept to me... now I wait.