D&D General Is D&D Beyond Exclusivity Bad for D&D?

[saviirkad]

Because entities other than WotC exist? This goes right back to my "bad for D&D, the brand/product" vs. "bad for the community around D&D" post.

I fully agree with the idea that archival of old materials matter, but I'm not sure I understand the argument about it's failing to be upheld, or rather that I haven't seen an explanation as to how D&D Beyond exclusivity impacts the ability for archivists to access and maintain a record of it?

I have a personal archive of it right now. What prevents an archivist from doing so?

 

[saviirkad]

I do mean it that way. I just don’t think Beyond is anywhere near cornering the market in the way you have described those other companies, when there is also Foundry, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, Owlbear Rodeo, hard copy books and character sheets and by all accounts millions of home users.

I think there's a sunk cost aspect to it, that applies to D&D Beyond for sure but is also a near universal trait from what I can tell. If I've spent my money on DDB, it's really hard to countenance getting off of it to a different platform regardless of their respective perks. But I've heard that same feelings expressed by Roll20 users, Foundry users, physical pen and paper gamers, etc. There are walls to this garden but every other garden is walled as well from what I can see.

And I've felt this myself as well outside of D&D Beyond, when we made the switch to Demiplane/Roll20 for our Fallout 2d20 game. Some other VTTs had tools that looked a lot better than what we were using, but not so much better as to pay for it all again.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

I can empathize if that's been your experience with D&D Beyond, but for me it's been the opposite. D&D Beyond lets me play D&D, not "guess what the hell this smudge means." It's sped up play by making abilities and actions more accessible and orderly. Searching for what to do on D&D Beyond has been faster than on paper, with outliers that can be more easily explained as D&D Beyond reminds me of what I would have forgotten on paper.

I haven't had a single aspect worsened by D&D Beyond, up to and including personal archival. I've got younger character sheets on paper than on D&D Beyond that are beyond repair or legibility, for some reason or another. I've also got older sheets that are still legible; not making a blanket statement about the failings of paper, just an observation about some.

I had a similar experience to yours before wizbro bought the site, at first it was minor inconveniences, but when 5.5 was dumped into the site things got worse fast, I regret every penny I spent on that website. I pop by the site every now and then hoping they have turned a corner sadly it appears they are doubling down. I can't sell or even give my account away without violating the tos which they can change at will regardless how it damages the users. At this point I'm left with disappointment and regret. Lesson learned I will not buy into anything like DDB again.

 

[AlViking]

I had a similar experience to yours before wizbro bought the site, at first it was minor inconveniences, but when 5.5 was dumped into the site things got worse fast, I regret every penny I spent on that website. I pop by the site every now and then hoping they have turned a corner sadly it appears they are doubling down. I can't sell or even give my account away without violating the tos which they can change at will regardless how it damages the users. At this point I'm left with disappointment and regret. Lesson learned I will not buy into anything like DDB again.

Worse how?

 

[Maxperson]

Books go out of print as well but I can still access my book online, even if they did apply errata. As far as lore, I get to decide what the lore is or is not for my home campaign. They've always decided what errata to apply or not, if I was concerned about it I'd make a backup.

@SlyFlourish wasn't talking about your home game. He was talking about the digital content itself. You have no ability to dictate what gets kept or doesn't get kept in the digital content you purchased on DDB. Only WotC does, and they could change it to, "Neener neener!" tomorrow if they really felt like it.

 

[Professor Murder]

(I can only speak for myself so this is anecdotal evidence, which is the worst evidence.)

I don't hate 5.5 D&D, and point of truth 5.0 felt like the best version of the game I have played in my 40+yrs in the hobby. But I'm also just not super inspired by it like I felt when 5.0 dropped. I am just wrapping up a 3 yr game so that may be a part of it, and that game did transition from 5 to 5.5 as the books released. Maybe its just burnout.

But.

I worry that I am feeling like I did with 4e. Indifferent. Underwhelmed. Bothered. Willing to play it, but in the back of my mind looking off over the horizon for the refresh that a 6e might promise.

Again, could be campaign burnout. The various controversies surrounding WotC over the last few years, Ensh*tification being a business model that seems to be a real possibility. I am looking for a change. Call of Cthulhu is likely my next big ongoing campaign. Maybe when the Victoriana 5e I kickstartered ships I will feel refreshed by the numerous rules changes in it.

But yeah. 5e is over 10 yrs old. Hindsight being what it is, WotC may have missed a trick with the fence sitting and just have wrecked this version of the game beyond the ability to draw me in for a while. But this isn't my first crawl. I have been around for many edition changes for many games. The hobby endures. Dungeons and Dragons will endure.

Death spirals can take a very long time, so I dunno why it would have happened already, but my point is that 5.5E does not seem (and we can only go with "seems", sadly, we just don't have figures, but this is a discussion of opinion, not hard facts, so I think that's okay, right?) to be attracting new players nor particularly bringing back a lot of lapsed players (not zero but not significant numbers), and in fact D&D seems to be slowly losing players at this point and to have been doing so for a while.

If you increasing your focus on just pushing subscriptions to a diminishing group, we've seen what happens for decades, maybe even close to a century at this point, because this goes back long before computers or the internet. You get into a situation where you keep slowly or rapidly losing users, and aren't getting new ones, but you have a constant, and, for a long time, substantial income stream which seems worth keeping, and in a lot of cases there's just an attitude of "benign neglect" where, sure, they're making less and less money, but they're still extremely profitable. This will be particularly true as more and more people move away from physical media to digital, which has a hugely higher profit margin on it. I mean, you can probably make more money on selling 5k books at N price digitally through your own store than you can on selling 15k books at N*1.8 via Amazon. Both are profit streams and the ideal case is people buy both (or better yet, as WotC is doing, the physical book is also bought through their store, so more of the profit from that goes to them, though they have to offer deals/incentives to do this, which cuts into that potentially).

So this whole idea that they should just keep going with 5.5E indefinitely as the market slow or rapidly shrinks doesn't seem likely to work out.

And WotC aren't, say, Chaosium. I think people forget that. Chaosium or the like might be happy with an "evergreen" product which they just refresh occasionally, as CoC is.

WotC however are a significant corporate entity who are part of Hasbro (who are undeniably greedy and have a long history of precipitous actions lacking foresight, like, say, sell off allllllll their brands digitals rights, as they did in the early 2000s, for a pittance), and who have threatened to stop making D&D before (though it is to be admitted they did not make good on their threat, it was taken seriously by designers). Shareholders in Hasbro have floated the idea of selling off WotC, or even selling off D&D specifically (IIRC).

So I think if they did just stick with this 5.5E forever plan that some people have suggested is D&D's playerbase would shrink and shrink, and 5.5E would accumulate more and more and more semi-optional cruft and insane amounts of stuff it kind of had to be "back compatible" with as 5.5.5E and so on came out, but because it would likely remain profitable for a long time (esp. with a Beyond-focused approach), it would get into situation where some new WotC or Hasbro exec suddenly decided to vault the IP or sell it off or w/e. Whereas I don't think that's likely to happen if a more typical course for D&D is taken, and we continue to get actual new editions.


People said the same about every edition. Even 3E. Hell, even 2E! "< sticks thumbs in belt, adopts Old West accent > H'well I reckon there ain't many fellas out there who actually h'want to play [next edition] and thems fellas that say they does will be mighty bored mighty soon!". It's an old, old refrain. It's always been wrong so far, and always spoken with utter confidence despite that.


Again, every time that's been tried by WotC, it's been a car crash. Similar attempts haven't been very successful for other companies either.

They already have an Exodus RPG which basically no-one bought, and the fact that you're writing like they haven't tried that really highlights how that was a bad idea.

So as much as I'd love to see new high production values SF RPGs, I don't think this is a suggestion that makes much sense. Modern day D&D is always a bad idea, especially because the people who design it are always weirdly old fogies who hate anime and refuse to even consider emulating its tropes, but the main core audience for that would 100% be people who love anime and videogames (and certain kinds of Isekai particularly

 

[saviirkad]

I had a similar experience to yours before wizbro bought the site, at first it was minor inconveniences, but when 5.5 was dumped into the site things got worse fast, I regret every penny I spent on that website. I pop by the site every now and then hoping they have turned a corner sadly it appears they are doubling down. I can't sell or even give my account away without violating the tos which they can change at will regardless how it damages the users. At this point I'm left with disappointment and regret. Lesson learned I will not buy into anything like DDB again.

I'm curious to know what specifically caused it to become worse on the shift, just to understand better your side of it. I've been running a fusion of all three renditions of the 5e ruleset without issues beyond figuring out the new rules or how we want to fuse them rather than running solely with one.

 

[AlViking]

@SlyFlourish wasn't talking about your home game. He was talking about the digital content itself. You have no ability to dictate what gets kept or doesn't get kept in the digital content you purchased on DDB. Only WotC does, and they could change it to, "Neener neener!" tomorrow if they really felt like it.

If I was worried about losing anything I'd get a print copy or get an offline electronic copy.

But the "lore" that's was removed is a couple paragraphs on half-orcs and a sidebar on orcs. While I didn't have an issue with the lore apparently others did. It's not like they removed entire books.

So I'll ask again - should they have kept the original lore of the Hadozee? Because that was a clear example (once I saw it and understood the implications) of something that never should have been released in the first place.

 

[bsss]

I have a personal archive of it right now. What prevents an archivist from doing so?

Based on a legally reasonable interpretation of the terms of service (2.2. (ii)), any archivist is also violating their agreement with Wizards. While this threat of a particular interpretation being enforced, and the likelihood or not of it being enforced, is not unique to DDB, it would be moot if a physical product or transactional download was offered in addition. Trying to archive the DDB-exclusive content puts the archivist's access to the content at risk. So, the archivist's job is harder, and the community suffers.

Digital lending is a minefield, and the same terms of service lock out a library from accessing DDB-exclusive content, so again, without other options, the librarian's job is harder, and the community suffers.

Access is not binary.

 

[Maxperson]

If I was worried about losing anything I'd get a print copy or get an offline electronic copy.

Is there a legal way to do this that doesn't involve keeping a phone forever in order to read it in tiny print?

But the "lore" that's was removed is a couple paragraphs on half-orcs and a sidebar on orcs. While I didn't have an issue with the lore apparently others did. It's not like they removed entire books.

"But your honor, it was only $100 that I took from a house I broke into. It's not like I robbed a bank!"

So I'll ask again - should they have kept the original lore of the Hadozee? Because that was a clear example (once I saw it and understood the implications) of something that never should have been released in the first place.

What they should have done is have downloadable digital content along with a general warning at the time of purchase that lets people know to download the PDF as soon as possible, because any digital content on the site is subject to change.