D&D General Is DnD being mothballed?

[Kurotowa]

Honestly @mamba, and this isn’t directed at you, it’s the never ending stream of negativity. It just never, ever stops. Nothing is ever just ok. Everything has to be a mistake.

It just gets so tiresome after a while. You’re right and I shouldn’t have pointed at you for this. You just happened to be the fifteenth caller so you won.

It is all just so exhausting after a while. Ever since 4e was announced it’s been a constant mosquito whine in every single conversation regarding anything WotC does.

While I've usually been slow to deploy the Ignore function, I've recently taken that step for the worst of the broken records. The ones who never have anything positive to say, never have any constructive criticism to offer, never have any new complaints to make, and are always quick to read malign motives into anything and everything WotC does. Sometimes they admit they haven't bought a book or even played the game in years, but they can't let go and stick around to complain about how it isn't being designed exactly to their personal tastes.

It makes a lot of threads a bit odd, when half the posts are arguing with thin air. But I don't find it nearly as exhausting to read the forum anymore. Heck, I'm reading and posting here more regularly that I have been in years. And the fact that it took so few additions to my list says a lot, to me.

 

[Hussar]

Heh. I wonder how many folks feel that way about me?

Reading the forum on my phone vs my computer is sometimes eye opening.

 

[Umbran]

It needs to say, "Dungeons & Dragons" on it to compete. Sadly, that's it.

No. Your negative, seemingly cynical attitude towards folks who like the current game notwithstanding, it needs more than that. A crappy VTT will flop, hard.

The VTT needs to ultimately be at least as good as what is out there already, with a pretty seamless integration with the content in D&D Beyond.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No. Your negative, seemingly cynical attitude towards folks who like the current game notwithstanding, it needs more than that. A crappy VTT will flop, hard.

The VTT needs to ultimately be at least as good as what is out there already, with a pretty seamless integration with the content in D&D Beyond.

Ok, I'll compromise on that. But that should be pretty easy by today's standards (feel free to correct my layman's opinion). What they're boasting is far more than is necessary, and IMO far riskier than is necessary too.

 

[Oofta]

Ok, I'll compromise on that. But that should be pretty easy by today's standards (feel free to correct my layman's opinion). What they're boasting is far more than is necessary, and IMO far riskier than is necessary too.

So when WOTC doesn't make drastic changes, they're being too conservative, a complaint we hear pretty frequently around here. If they do a VTT that will stand out, they aren't being conservative enough? They can't win.

I think they need to do something fairly radical to stand out from the crowd. The goal is not to have just another VTT in a crowded market that already has plenty of entrenched fanbases, they want to up the game in ways other companies likely can't afford so they can potentially dominate the high end VTT market. Will it work? Heck if I know. But that understand why their doing it, if you want to hit a home run you have to swing hard.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Or perhaps they have been serving the general TTRPG market rather than pursuing niches...?

They can't be serving it that well, the only people who don't seem to use 3pp or homebrew are people who play the game ultra-casually enough that they have a rulebook sitting around from when they played back in 2018 and maybe some of the psuedo-OSR 5e types-- even casual games that were just put together by high school kids immediately feature someone showing up with something they found online, and asking how to transfer a particular homebrew is maybe like the #3 question I end up running into when someone switched from 5e to PF2e.

But to be honest, I'm pre-emptively a little worried this line of questioning is going to devolve into amorphous allusions to a silent majority that by definition, isn't speaking, with any that do speak, clearly too invested to be counted.

 

[darjr]

They can't be serving it that well, the only people who don't seem to use 3pp or homebrew are people who play the game ultra-casually enough that they have a rulebook sitting around from when they played back in 2018 and maybe some of the psuedo-OSR 5e types-- even casual games that were just put together by high school kids immediately feature someone showing up with something they found online, and asking how to transfer a particular homebrew is maybe like the #3 question I end up running into when someone switched from 5e to PF2e.

But to be honest, I'm pre-emptively a little worried this line of questioning is going to devolve into amorphous allusions to a silent majority that by definition, isn't speaking, with any that do speak, clearly too invested to be counted.

I'm not sure a personal anecdote can be taken to represent everyone, even if you have a lot of players.

The non core books sell better than most entire LINES of rpgs so somebody is using them. I'm not sure they are all that silent either.

but I do agree, I think the majority of folks do homebrew

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This started to happen with 4E too, before it imploded.

Not really, to be fair. (Nor did 4e implode, it got shelves for about equal parts reasonable and stupid reasons)

4e, even stuff like the Hero’s of The Feywild options were fine outside of CharOp discussions, and the most powerful stuff was mostly PHB1. The Vampire was janky unless you used it as a Hybrid platform, would be the closest to actually poorly balanced.

Some people claimed that essentials and “E+” stuff wasn’t balanced, but they were wrong.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I'm not sure a personal anecdote can be taken to represent everyone, even if you have a lot of players.

The non core books sell better than most entire LINES of rpgs so somebody is using them. I'm not sure they are all that silent either.

but I do agree, I think the majority of folks do homebrew

Yeah, I mean among other things, I just had someone entirely new to the game show up to a library DND program with a character sheet for a Blood Hunter in hand, but yeah, that's anecdotal.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yep, and that art was THE reason I picked the game up.

There's been cases where you can spend pages in a RPG book talking about a place and have me yawning. Or show me 3 pictures and having me falling over myself to want to run a game there.

Hell, one of the biggest selling points on the MM to me is that it has a picture of just about every creature in it. I've run across other game systems/publishers where their "Monster Manual" is nothing but stat block after stat block with no pictures, and they sit on my shelf unused or in storage.

For me, a picture truly is worth a thousand words.

Damn near the only appeal to me of the world of Numenera is the art. The Cypher system is growing on my, but if the art sucked I would never have even paid any attention to it.