Search results

In the now infamous December 8th investor presentation, the example that WotC president Cynthia Williams gave of D&D being under monetized was this: "So when we think about our future monetization, we start here. Dungeon Masters, which are the people who guide you through the adventure, they...

That's not accurate. The poll in that thread asked whether or not people plan to continue playing D&D, not if they're going to continue buying stuff from WotC, and certainly not if they're going to continue buying whatever WotC puts out. In fact, if you read the thread itself, there are...

I will continue to play D&D. I just won't play, and more importantly won't buy, anything released by WotC in the future. I was a pretty early adopter of 5e. I've spent a lot of money on WotC's products (including licensed products like miniatures), and I've also gotten my players to spend a...

If that was TheSword's position, then writing, "There is plenty of recurrent spending none of it goes to WoTC though because of the OGL," doesn't seem to make sense, unless we're talking specifically about TheSword's Roll20 and Patreon subscriptions not going to WotC, or I'm missing something...

I have no idea if the email is real or not, but even if it isn't, WotC definitely uses D&D Beyond as a metric to understand their customer base. The president of the company said as much in the infamous "under monetized" presentation to investors. On top of that, WotC just paid almost $150...

Absolutely. And that's the destination for 6e. WotC spent $150 million on D&D Beyond. They're spending who knows how much to develop a proprietary state-of-the-art VTT. The end result will probably be some combination of a D&D bookshelf (although what we think of as D&D books will change)...

In the post you initially responded to, I wrote: And that was in response to TheSword, who wrote, "There is plenty of recurrent spending none of it goes to WoTC though because of the OGL." (The block quote was in my response, but I can't quote a block quote here.) I was responding to the...

I think there might be a misunderstanding about the terminology here. In the world of digital games, recurrent spending refers not only to subscriptions that recur periodically, but also to things like microtransactions, purchasing add-on content, and selling virtual currency. So, when you...

I don't use D&D Beyond, so I'm not very familiar with it, but isn't it a platform entirely built around recurrent spending? I'm not sure what benefits subscribers get, but I've seen people talking about subscriptions, so I know people do subscribe. I think that they offer D&D Beyond versions...

The presentation is about forty-two minutes long, and it mostly focuses on Magic: The Gathering. Unless I've missed something, the first question about D&D comes around 31:30, and even then, part of the question is about MTG, and several minutes of it are devoted to talking about MTG products...

Oh, I haven't really corrected you yet, but I'm about to. So, first of all I really don't appreciate you claiming that I'm "using information that is partially true in a manner to create a false impression". You're flat out calling me a liar and, as I am about to demonstrate, you literally...

It's not misinformation. In a video seminar for investors, WotC CEO Cynthia Williams said that D&D has never been as prominent as it is now, but that it's under monetized. Yes, she talked about licensing the D&D brand as part of the solution for that. But, another part of the solution was to...

Personally, I'm disappointed by a company that believes D&D is "under monetized" and wants to reshape the hobby so that they can nickel-and-dime me by "unlock[ing] the type of recurrent spending you see in digital games". And I am not merely disappointed, but incensed, that this company has...

Not necessarily true. In one of our group's 2E campaigns in the early 1990s, our wizard cast lightning bolt at some alligators we were fighting in shallow water in a sewer tunnel. The DM decided that the lightning bolt would zap the rest of us in the water and we actually had to raise our...

Depending on the series or product line, other novel sales might have been better by a significant margin. The Dragonlance novels were mainstream fantasy bestsellers and I think the same was true of some of the Forgotten Realms novels.

This isn't true. In the Mystara setting, the gnomes built the flying city of Serraine, the aircraft used to defend it, and if I remember correctly make up at least the bulk of their pilots (and possibly all of them). In the Hollow World, a sub-setting of Mystara, two different groups of gnomes...

I know that the Toys R Us closest to me carried BECMI D&D all the way through to the Immortals set and AD&D through to the late 1980s or early 1990s, when they were unloading some of the later 1st edition AD&D hardcovers at bargain basement discounts. Although I didn't have occasion to visit...

That's not accurate to how gnomes are presented in the Basic Set at all. First of all, just because something is in the monster section doesn't mean that it's intended to be a "cannon-fodder" monster to be defeated. Dwarves, elves, halflings, normal humans, mules, and traders are in there too...

I believe that the AD&D gnome was directly based on Hugi the woods dwarf from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, a novel we know that Gary Gygax read and was inspired by. In the novel, Hugi is depicted as being just shy of three feet tall, with a comically oversized nose, earth-brown...

To complicate things, I'll point out that the ability truesight (PHB, 185 and MM, 9) is worded in a similar way. RAW, it doesn't interact with dim light at all. Also, darkvision is worded similarly in the section on visibility (PHB, 183), but because its interactions with dim light are...