That's not an accurate statement. If you think it is, and the WoTC is going to discontinue selling books (despite what they've said), you should probably provide a citation in which WoTC has announced that they are going to discontinue selling books- because that would be quite the news!
More importantly, unless this is foundational to what you want to actually discuss, you might want to consider not starting your post with the statement.
Fair enough.
1. The traditional model of TTRPG is that D&D players are onboarded there and then "filter out" to other games when they get bored/discover them.
2. I follow the news quite closely. D&D has been working since mid 22 towards an online heavy presence. As referenced in the piece, (although, admittedly, a separate essay, which I won't make you read
) the "Beyond" character sheet doesn't translate at all well to paper. And by that I mean the information is there but it is extremely user-unfriendly. (Part of what I wrote about character sheet design being the user interface for the game, again a referenced but different bit of writing).
3. I am concerned that because 2 is true that D&D players who are part of the Mind Bogglingly large expansion of the hobby since 2014 and the subsequent explosions of popularity aren't learning the skills that they need to play games without using D&D Beyond. If someone wants to play D&D they are set!
4. However if someone does
not want to play D&D then this is a big problem. Because they can't parse non-D&D character sheets and this increases the difficulty in getting people out of the Walled Garden that Hasbro is constructing. Unless someone is working on an app for cool indie and other games, then it becomes much harder to get people to consider playing them.
5. Therefore the non-app having, non-giant website having, part of the TTRPG community needs to stop assuming that the new players who make up the lifeblood of our community will have the correct mechanical skills to engage with unfamiliar games and improve their experience.
6. Part of this will be user experience. I wrote about that already but if people cannot navigate your games character sheets they are less likely to enjoy the game, IMO and indeed IME.
7. Part of this will be empowering players to actively learn and take an interest. The older generations of Gen X and Millennials are used to working things out. Computers were buggy, command line prompts were a thing. For many, many non-traditional gamers they have computers that just work and aren't used to the struggle to get past wonky, unintuitive interfaces. Think of it as an exercise in empathy that benefits everyone.
Curb cut effect - Wikipedia backed up by the science and all.
8. I favour teaching players to learn the rules and their characters, mostly because I'm lazy and partly because that encourages them to independently run games.
But I can see you feel differently and that's OK.