D&D General Interview with D&D VP Jess Lanzillo on Comicbook.com

[LordEntrails]

If they started publishing book-equivalent products online I could maybe see an issue if and when that happens. It's not happening now, there's no indication they will and it doesn't seem like it would make sense from a profitability standpoint.

see text after Reynard's quote...

They have done a few full adventures -- things designed specifically to get you into the ecosystem. They want to seel you physical books, sure, but they also want to sell you a sub and some extras.

The "Beyond Trilogy" specifically Storm Lord's Wrath, Sleeping Dragon's Wake, and Divine Contention. But note that these are also available on Fantasy Grounds. I don't know about other digital outlets.

I'm not sure, let me explore.

How good are those sources as references? I can not assume that every DM I play with will use my tools of choice, nor that both now and over time they would be my preferred VTT. How good are they as references for doing things like prepping for a session that will not be run on them? Including finding monsters based on criteria like CR, not just looking up things I know the name of. Are they easy to copy and paste to another document, in a text (not image) format?

So both are created to be used with the VTTs. Different than how DDB was created as an online reference. I know FG intimately but not Foundry so I will just speak about FG from here.

I think FG is good for prep work for use outside of FG. Not stellar because export is difficult. Taking your example of finding monsters. I can open an FG campaign and load in the "books" or resources I own. Open the NPC list and you can sort by CR and Type, and search by name. There is a community extension that adds all the other fields to the sort list, but I don't use it.

You can then turn them into encounters that will tell you the XP total and rate them (hard, deadly, etc) based upon the characters added to the party sheet. It does other things if playing in the VTT world, but not for external prep.

Export as non-images is the challenge. You can export them to XML, but then you have to convert the xml to a formatted manner. Not hard if you do that kind of thing, but challenging if not. They do provide an XML to html converter (which I then convert to Word) for characters and campaigns. But it's really a beta tool for developing your own exports. I have it working pretty well and have shared it with the community, but it may be too many steps for your preferences.

You can also create some pretty impressive maps as well, even with animation etc. But again the export is second hand. Because they are designed to be used in the VTT. You can export into XML, but not a overall image. You have to screen capture that.

Since one of the hard requirements was that they cannot take it away, do they have a policy that if they are closing their doors that they will provide the data in a downloadable way to people who have bought it? And that they will continue to support 5e for the rest of my gaming life? You said these meet my criteria, I just want to make sure it actually does.

Speaking for FG, yes. All content is downloaded directly to your computer. FG's licensing agreement with WotC specifically says that purchases are irrevocable and that SmiteWorks can keep them on their server for purchasers to re-download indefinitely. They can't be taken away.

If SmiteWorks were to go out of business, the two things that would be lost is the optional (preferred) connection brokering provided by SmiteWorks for FG games (you would have to know IPs and do port forwarding etc like the old days) and Ultimate licenses are validated against the FG server when free users connect. Though SmiteWorks has said they would remove this check if they ever do go out of business.

Do note, that the 'books' are encrypted and in an FG proprietary format, so you can't use them outside of FG. But they can't be taken away and are yours for life.

 

[LordEntrails]

It's not anything dramatic, fwiw, this is the way contemporary subscription-based services work across many areas of our lives. But it doesn't mean that people who are in or adjacent to those digital ecosystems have no basis for interest or concern in how they are made available.

Good thing there are at least 4 different digital ecosystems you can buy current D&D through!

 

[Micah Sweet]

How dare you accuse me of using something as lowbrow as sarcasm when discussing perhaps the greatest iteration of the best RPG ever made. It's got everything any player could want. Tons HP. Great (and multiple) saves. A million powers to choose from! Heck, you might even forget you have half of them on a regular basis! Never having to worry about things getting to dangerous that some cool ability or spell or simply resting fo r8 hours can't fix. The DM gets to tell a great story or perhaps use one of many of WotC's official adventure book options that seem to get better one after the other.

D&D 2024 looks to be the best yet and I for one cannot wait to run my friends through the brilliantly written 5th ed Dragonlance campaign book.



Pistols at dawn?

I stand corrected.

 

[HomegrownHydra]

I think it is safe to assume that WotC will do that which is most profitable for them, which I personally think means that books will get more expensive and become less universally considered necessary. They'll become Vinyl.

The new core books have the same price as the 2014 core books despite having substantially larger page count and there being significant inflation over the last 10 years. So this notion is contradicted by WotC's actual behavior. Further, there are numerous major reasons why it's not likely that WotC will turn physical books into a purely limited, premium product:

1. In order to continually grow profits new players need to be continually drawn into D&D and physical books are great at doing that because a) people see their friends with the books and think they look cool and b) they see the books on the shelves at stores.
2. They provide a clear entry point into the game. Companies understand that offering a cheap and easy way to start buying their products is a great long term strategy because once someone becomes a customer the company can then push more products on them (such as digital offerings). Trying to maximize the profit of the first purchase is rarely a good strategy.
3. Lots of people will buy both physical and digital products which will make WotC more money than those people only buying digital.
4. With the standard offset printing used for books, the larger a print run the cheaper it gets for each book made which has a huge impact on profit. So there is a major incentive to maximize demand for print books because it not only means selling more books but it also makes more money off each book which is a massive boon. This is certainly why the new books can keep the same price as the old ones because while the cost of publishing has gone up a bunch in the last 10 years the popularity of D&D today is also far greater now which means they they can do far larger print runs that bring down dramatically the per unit costs. Doing limited print runs of premium books is a nice way to supplement the money made from the mass market books by giving the big spenders something to blow their money on but that can't replace the the mass market approach because limited print runs mean disproportionately more per unit costs that really eat into the profit.
5. WotC wants game shops to be successful because that is where Magic is played which is their gargantuan cash cow so they want those shops to have plenty of print products to make money off of so they stay in business. That's why WotC gives them special privileges like letting them sell the books before the official release date and having them be the only place you can get the books with alternate covers.

 

[jerryrice4949]

If WotCs new digital tabletop turns out to be super successful and rakes in those MTX dollars, that will inevitably result in focus shifting to digital D&D, publishing books will become an afterthought.

I don’t think that is true and I find these predictions to be unproductive. There is no indication they plan to abandon print. Furthermore doing so would open a large door for competitors and I am sure they are aware. Of course moving people online may be their preference but books will continue to be available in the printed format for the rest of my lifetime.

 

[Malmuria]

Good thing there are at least 4 different digital ecosystems you can buy current D&D through!

For now!

 

[Mistwell]

That reads A LOT like an intentional shift toward digital play as the primary venue.

Reads the opposite to me. Reads like they plan to continue to support both books and digital. Just like they've been saying all along.

 

[Mistwell]

"I was probably one of the last migrators to the D&D Beyond character sheet, because I am an artist, so I just draw all of my stuff, and I want to do it in this very bespoke fashion."

This is an outright and known lie, and therefore cannot be anything but intentional. They have numbers how many people play, and they have numbers about how many people make characters on DnDBeyond - they absolutely know that she's not "one of the last migrators" to the DnDBeyond character sheet.

Why would they intentionally lie about that? Doesn't make sense, with how transparent it is to call them out.

EDIT: Corrected gender, thanks for the heads up.

Come on man, Jess is talking about in their group, not in the world!

When accusing an actual person of being a liar, wouldn't it be wiser to read the comment with the benefit of the doubt first, before making the accusation? And if you're thinking "WOTC lost any benefit of the doubt" WOTC is a fictional entity known as a corporation, not a human being. Jess is a human being. Jess hasn't done anything to lose the benefit of the doubt. Others at WOTC may well have done things to lose your benefit of the doubt. But it's kind of important to treat humans like humans.

 

[Mistwell]

I'm seeing a lot of people miss the

"I'm a big fan of being able to provide play experiences to people any way they want to play them," Lanzillo continued.

part.

I don't think it's intentional. I think it's one of those instances of "if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Some folks are really quite committed to a view of "How Things Are" and if something runs contrary to that view, your brain automatically finds ways to spin it as not contrary or inconsequential.

 

[SlyFlourish]

People keep raising the mysterious abstract fears, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of explanation for or justification of those fears. They have DDB and people subscribe to it which give them a known and relatively stable income stream. It works well for a lot of people because of how we can share products with everyone. For others it's not a great solution, but they can stick with books like we did for decades.

This is a really good question. What are the actual practical fears?

First, they could abandon it when it's no longer popular like they did with all the 4th edition material. You could spend a lot of money on it, both as purchases and subscriptions and they could take it away. This isn't hypothetical. They did so with all the 4e tools. They did so with Dragon+. They killed all the articles they had posted on dnd.wizards.com. Granted you didn't pay for that stuff but clearly WOTC doesn't care very much about preserving old material.

The whole system can degrade as more sources get added. I argue it's doing so now. You can't, for example, filter out sources in the character builder if you have access to those sources. Everything shows up. Yes, I know it has those checkboxes to allow certain content in a campaign but they don't prevent options from showing up in the builder. This got worse and worse over the years leading to the huge criticism of Silvery Barbs, a spell that otherwise should only matter if you're playing Strixhaven yet everyone seems to have it and it's the bane of many a GM just because its in Beyond and unfilterable.

The whole system can degrade in other ways too. Search becomes harder to use because you're searching everything – including things you don't have. There's no way to search on just a single source. The more you add new products, the worse it gets and yet adding products brings in revenue so its likely prioritized over fixing core features.

We have no idea how they're going to make 2024 and 2014 material work side by side in the character builder. Are they going to abandon 2014? Are all 2024 options going to be listed alongside 2014? Will there be two different character builders? Whatever they choose, you're stuck with it whether it's your preferred way or not.

They can change their business model – moving from purchases to subscriptions. If that's profitable enough, maybe they stop selling sourcebooks on DDB and only rent them to you.

They could remove ways to pay for content like they did for buying individual class features instead of a whole book.

They could downsize the staff which means the platform you've invested your time and money begins to degrade even further. Bugs keep popping up. New bugs show up. No new features get added. Old features break.

Right now we're in the honeymoon phase of D&D Beyond. Profits are up. Attention on the brand is great. Executives love to charge rent. What happens when things go down? How will they behave then? What will they do with the platform?

Whatever they decide to do, you're along for the ride.