WotC Anybody a little worried about how useful their paid VTT library will be in a year+?

[LordEntrails]

Nope. I have never paid a nickel towards VTT specific rules. I run Foundry (prior to that, it was D20 Pro).
These are comments not directed at "VTT libraries", but to Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds.

I too disagree. Roll20 and FG already have licenses. OGL 1.1, imo, is aimed directly at VTTS that do not have a license.

But I certainly agree. It seems like WotC has agreements with Roll 20 and Fantasy Ground and that's it.

YEp. And FG's agreement with WotC includes the ability to keep and distribute copies of WotC materials perpetually. They might revoke new sales (like they did with Volos and Xanathar's), but anyone who has bought anything onFG will always be able to access, use and download them.

For D&D I tend to use DnDBeyond and the Beyond20 browser extension rather than futzing with Roll20's character sheet.

And as others said, this is exactly what OGL 1.1 is aimed at stopping.

I'm not sure they can shut down that extension, as it doesn't actually use the OGL or contain any copyrighted text. It just tells one window on your browser what is happening on another window, and adds an overlay on your screen allowing you to roll. It's independent of any license and as hard for WotC to stop as an "ad blocker" extension.

Oh, I think with the ~100 developers they have brought on board, this is exactly what they will be working towards doing. One way to throw a wrench in Beyond 20 would be to start rendering the DDB webpages as images instead of text. There are other more aggressive things they can do as well.

It's another to ban thousands of users and take away the books they paid for.

No, they don't intend to take away anything. They intend to stop people from using DDB purchases on platforms other than DDB (or other licensed VTTs).

 

[Rabulias]

One way to throw a wrench in Beyond 20 would be to start rendering the DDB webpages as images instead of text.

I think that will ill serve the visually impaired who use screen readers, so I doubt they will do that.

 

[FormerLurker]

Oh, I think with the ~100 developers they have brought on board, this is exactly what they will be working towards doing. One way to throw a wrench in Beyond 20 would be to start rendering the DDB webpages as images instead of text. There are other more aggressive things they can do as well.

As someone else said, that would mess with screen readers.
It would also make the site unusable on mobile devices (tablets and phones) that rely on other resolutions. And you couldn't zoom in or out to change the font size.
And it would be harder to update as you'd need to make and upload a new image each time you wanted to fix a typo.
And having it based on images and not text would make the content harder to search, and less likely to show up on Google searches, unless the coders spent a ridiculous amount of time adding alternative text keywords.

I'm sure there are other ways, but as long as the extension can read the text and is being run on the user's browser not a lot is visible on the dndbeyond side. The best thing they could do is just launch their own extension that connects to the Foundry and Roll20...