D&D General Hey, are we all cool with having to buy the same book twice, or what?

[MostlyHarmless42]

You: "WoTC's track record on digital services"
Me: "It's not WOTC."
You: Total lack of acknowledgment about what just happened, a complete shift to an entirely different topic, pretends everything is just peachy with that.

Everything is not peachy with that MostlyHarmless42. I don't have faith in your position or knowledge if you're willing to do that in that manner, where you just pivot and replace a name and continue on as if there is nothing meaningful in your claim about WOTC being disproven.

First of all, I knew from the get go that Curse was the company that was outsourced to make the product D&D Beyond. You assumed that I did not. So if we are going to resort to calling out logical fallacies I'll suggest you keep from resorting to ad hominem. Never once have I insulted you or your intelligence.

Second, regarding D&D Beyond, you are creating a strawman by using the shield of "It wasn't WOTC that made it." THEY own the license IP. THEY gave Curse design goals for what they wanted. THEY gave Curse the final approval of the product and likely had a hand in the price schemes. If you think for a moment Curse could've tried charging $1000 a book or $600 a month for D&D Beyond and Wizards would've let them get away with that rather than pulling their license from Curse to prevent PR damage to their brand you are deluding yourself. They may not have made the product or set the prices directly, but they sure as hell had at least some sort of input on the matter.

Third, if you really want examples of WOTC's tract record, the entire digital line of WOTC since 4 edition was lackluster at best. The failed attempt at creating the project that was supposed to be known as Dungeonscape (codnamed Project Morningstar: Wizards of the Coast fumbles the digital ball. Again.) was a complete and utter disaster; since you seem to be unable to infer the basic implications of how businesses work together and coordinate projects, I shall illuminate it: while the project was outsourced to Trapdoor studios, WOTC were the ones who okay'd the project, paid for it, gave them extra time (multiple years) despite no signs of progress AND chose a studio with ZERO history at developing software in the first place. It cost Hasbro a lot of money with nothing to show for it.

Before THAT was a failed social media project called Gleemax where Wizards was trying for nearly 18 months to create a one-stop MTG related site that also failed due to more management of the project and lack of clear goals or guidelines. It also did not help that it after launch did not gain much traction with the fans due to not living up to the expectations Wizards promised. (Gleemax, and Wizards of the Coast Declares Gleemax Site a Critical Failure - Slashdot).

Are you seeing the pattern here? WOTC has a history of announcing or mismanaging numerous products, or at best a record of poor decision making on whom to outsource their products to.

And this isn't even touching on their history of actively engaging in numerous cease and desist orders towards quite a few different websites over the past few decades. Are they legally entitled to do so? Yes. Is it good PR to be so zealousness about it? Unclear. Contrast that with other companies like Paizo or Chaosium whom not only provide fully fleshed out digital options (i.e. pdfs) with the latter half literally giving their full ruleset away FOR FREE, but whom also encourage their content being handled digitally.

Hey now. He's repeatedly stated that all corporations are evil hucksters who probably purchased your soul because you didn't read the fine print when you accepted their terms of use.

But no need to go into detail because our evil overlords are watching. Much better to go onto the deep web and download an illegal pdf copy via torrent.

Personally I welcome our corporate overlord [please be gentle with my soul!] and am willing to pay for products that I use. Even if that money does go to a corporation. Vive le capitalisme!

I have said no such thing. You are putting words in my mouth and using yet another fallacy. Again hello to the strawman. My hatred of corporations in particular is due to a history of them bullying smaller companies, corporate lobbying of politicians to blatantly ignore anti-trust laws, and the lack of accountability on the legal side. After all, what is even $100 million in legal fines or forcing a CEO to step down when a company makes billions each year in profit?

While on the subject of capitalism though, tell me how we are doing while handling a pandemic? I sure just do love the smell of a dollar when 30% of the nation is now jobless, soon to be homeless with an impending food shortage due to our benevolent corporate leaders spending decades destroying small farmers and rampant food wastage. Got to love those stock prices rising when about a third of the nation was living paycheck to paycheck beforehand. And got to love that all our healthcare is tied to our employers when again unemployment is at all all time high. I'm sure you don't need healthcare during a full scale pandemic! I mean hell, we had 68000 people a year die from lack of it BEFORE the plague. Might as well for a 100,000k this year!

 

[darjr]

Does Curse exist anymore? Didn't Fandom absorb them?

 

[darjr]

Now called Fandom Games

 

[jgsugden]

We don't need to drag the pandemic into every conversation. Some of us come here to escape from reality for a bit.

Buy it. Don't by it. Your call. No force used. Vote with your dollar and go on.

 

[billd91]

Because I don't like the experience, I find it quite plausible that WotC has found them to be generally unappealing to their audience, certainly.

I'd be willing to bet that the spread of handheld devices like iPads and Androids have significantly changed the opinions of the audience on the appealingness of PDFs. WotC's decision to not sell rulebooks as PDFs, even with the justification of partnering with 3rd party companies, is a bad one. I can go to a PFS game or a whole bunch of other RPGs with just my iPad as my reference and not need to lug any physical books.

That judgment of mine, by the way, has nothing to do with the main question of the thread. I see nothing inherently wrong with buying from WotC and then buying the same material from DnDBeyond in order to have access to the value DnDBeyond adds. That's a completely separate question.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I don't expect to be able to get DOOM on the Switch just because I purchased it on Steam. I mean, it would be pretty nice if I did, but I wouldnt expect it.

 

[Mistwell]

First of all, I knew from the get go that Curse was the company that was outsourced to make the product D&D Beyond. You assumed that I did not.

I didn't assume it. YOU SAID IT WAS WOTC.

This wasn't a job "outsourced" to Curse. Curse bought a license.

Second, regarding D&D Beyond, you are creating a strawman by using the shield of "It wasn't WOTC that made it." THEY own the license IP.

Yes. That's not a strawman.

THEY gave Curse design goals for what they wanted. THEY gave Curse the final approval of the product and likely had a hand in the price schemes. If you think for a moment Curse could've tried charging $1000 a book or $600 a month for D&D Beyond and Wizards would've let them get away with that rather than pulling their license from Curse to prevent PR damage to their brand you are deluding yourself. They may not have made the product or set the prices directly, but they sure as hell had at least some sort of input on the matter.

You say all this based on what? And what does any of that have to do with the security issues you mentioned earlier?

Third, if you really want examples of WOTC's tract record

I do not. Because it's not WOTC. Why would that be germane to the conversation?

 

[BookBarbarian]

I got PDF copies of my Adventures in Middle-Earth Books when I bought the hard copies. But searching across PDFs to find everything related to a single topic is pretty dang hard about. Easier than searching through the hard copies but not by much.

So I think I should extract all the books into JSON and make a wiki for me and my players to use. I could limit what they see compared to what I see easy enough.

I also think I should make a AiME online character builder. It would make things a lot easier for my players.

Ultimately I decided what I really what is Adventures in Middle-Earth Beyond. So I started adding AiME stuff to my D&D Beyond account as private Homebrew. Sadly Homebrew is still a weak point in the service so it might still be easier for my to make a simple wiki and character builder but overall it proved to me the value of the service is far above that of PDFs for my needs.

It would still be nice if the option for PDFs was out there because options are good, but that's not the fault of D&D Beyond.

 

[Oofta]

First of all, I knew from the get go that Curse was the company that was outsourced to make the product D&D Beyond. You assumed that I did not. So if we are going to resort to calling out logical fallacies I'll suggest you keep from resorting to ad hominem. Never once have I insulted you or your intelligence.

Second, regarding D&D Beyond, you are creating a strawman by using the shield of "It wasn't WOTC that made it." THEY own the license IP. THEY gave Curse design goals for what they wanted. THEY gave Curse the final approval of the product and likely had a hand in the price schemes. If you think for a moment Curse could've tried charging $1000 a book or $600 a month for D&D Beyond and Wizards would've let them get away with that rather than pulling their license from Curse to prevent PR damage to their brand you are deluding yourself. They may not have made the product or set the prices directly, but they sure as hell had at least some sort of input on the matter.

Third, if you really want examples of WOTC's tract record, the entire digital line of WOTC since 4 edition was lackluster at best. The failed attempt at creating the project that was supposed to be known as Dungeonscape (codnamed Project Morningstar: Wizards of the Coast fumbles the digital ball. Again.) was a complete and utter disaster; since you seem to be unable to infer the basic implications of how businesses work together and coordinate projects, I shall illuminate it: while the project was outsourced to Trapdoor studios, WOTC were the ones who okay'd the project, paid for it, gave them extra time (multiple years) despite no signs of progress AND chose a studio with ZERO history at developing software in the first place. It cost Hasbro a lot of money with nothing to show for it.

Before THAT was a failed social media project called Gleemax where Wizards was trying for nearly 18 months to create a one-stop MTG related site that also failed due to more management of the project and lack of clear goals or guidelines. It also did not help that it after launch did not gain much traction with the fans due to not living up to the expectations Wizards promised. (Gleemax, and Wizards of the Coast Declares Gleemax Site a Critical Failure - Slashdot).

Are you seeing the pattern here? WOTC has a history of announcing or mismanaging numerous products, or at best a record of poor decision making on whom to outsource their products to.

And this isn't even touching on their history of actively engaging in numerous cease and desist orders towards quite a few different websites over the past few decades. Are they legally entitled to do so? Yes. Is it good PR to be so zealousness about it? Unclear. Contrast that with other companies like Paizo or Chaosium whom not only provide fully fleshed out digital options (i.e. pdfs) with the latter half literally giving their full ruleset away FOR FREE, but whom also encourage their content being handled digitally.



I have said no such thing. You are putting words in my mouth and using yet another fallacy. Again hello to the strawman. My hatred of corporations in particular is due to a history of them bullying smaller companies, corporate lobbying of politicians to blatantly ignore anti-trust laws, and the lack of accountability on the legal side. After all, what is even $100 million in legal fines or forcing a CEO to step down when a company makes billions each year in profit?

While on the subject of capitalism though, tell me how we are doing while handling a pandemic? I sure just do love the smell of a dollar when 30% of the nation is now jobless, soon to be homeless with an impending food shortage due to our benevolent corporate leaders spending decades destroying small farmers and rampant food wastage. Got to love those stock prices rising when about a third of the nation was living paycheck to paycheck beforehand. And got to love that all our healthcare is tied to our employers when again unemployment is at all all time high. I'm sure you don't need healthcare during a full scale pandemic! I mean hell, we had 68000 people a year die from lack of it BEFORE the plague. Might as well for a 100,000k this year!

So corporations aren't evil, they're just ... well ... evil. Gotcha.

There are many flaws with unregulated capitalism. But I was just poking fun at the whole "stick it to the man" vibe you've got going on. If you want to rage against the machine, this probably isn't the correct forum.

Want to talk about gaming, I'm all ears. Until then, have a good one.

 

[thom_likes_gaming]

Are you seeing the pattern here? WOTC has a history of announcing or mismanaging numerous products, or at best a record of poor decision making on whom to outsource their products to.

So... WotC has a "track record" of picking unknown companies to build digital stuff for them that either never comes to life or ends up a dud or being rejected by fans....

And, since DDN was done by a well-established digital player, is alive and kicking AND solidly loved by enough of "the fans" to become a staple in current D&D world: What was the initial argument here again?

I mean, I snoozed through pages 4 -8 of comments, but what we started out with ("are we cool with buying the same book twice") looks to be long answered, and this should also settle the "was having Curse make DDB the way it is a smart business decision?" debates.