D&D (2024) August 18th Tarrasque-sized D&D News (Poll)

[Ruin Explorer]

I agree, but because I don't think we're going to get a public playtest the way we did 10 years ago. Because the changes aren't going to be as big as when 4e ended.

I expect a series of Unearthed Arcana to be the public playtest for this next iteration. In fact I personally think that all of us commenting on the UA rules and using the books they've published in the last few years have all been participating in the 50th anniversary playtest already.

I suspect they're holding off playtesting of it until the VTT for Beyond is ready anyway, I think they'll release it via Beyond (albeit probably as free material) rather than UA, because that would be a great way to get people to sign up for Beyond and download the app and stuff (sadly the current app is trash - the previous one was much better for reading books).

 

[R_J_K75]

This is part of why I hang out on enworld - so I don't have to be on twitter or facebook. Someone will let me know what's going on if I watch the front page and periodically check the "New Posts" threads to see what folks are talking about.

Same here. As much as I try and check the news here, I still miss stuff from time to time.

 

[Jer]

Definitely. RPG Twitter is extremely annoying to try and follow. It's very fragmented. It's very insular/in-crowd-y. People to love to talk about things that happened (good or bad) in incredibly oblique ways, without linking or referencing the actual game/event/person. So even though I follow a ton of people on RPG Twitter, I often find out more about RPGs from ENworld.

For me it's because Twitter's design seems to be carefully engineered to raise my blood pressure. The user interface refuses to do anything but provide me a firehose of whoever I'm following along with posts it thinks I might be interested in. There's no such thing as "RPG Twitter" as far as I'm concerned - there's just Twitter. Everyone talks about everything all at once, it's impossible to have an actual conversation - nor does anyone really want one. Too many people just looking to gain clout or to scream at each other. It's just maddening - it feels less like a social media website and some kind of awful social media MMORPG and I don't think it's a coincidence that after I swore off Twitter last year my next visit to the doctor had my blood pressure no longer in the "borderline" range and had it settled back down into a normal range.[*]


[*] Note for humor impaired - this is mostly a joke. Even though it's true. It probably wasn't Twitter. Probably.

 

[Jer]

I suspect they're holding off playtesting of it until the VTT for Beyond is ready anyway, I think they'll release it via Beyond (albeit probably as free material) rather than UA, because that would be a great way to get people to sign up for Beyond and download the app and stuff (sadly the current app is trash - the previous one was much better for reading books).

I'm actually assuming that once they get their act together the plan is that the UAs will start being released through Beyond and integrated into it instead of as PDFs. I think that's also why Dragon+ went away - because it's redundant with DDB.

I also suspect that it will take longer for them to modify Beyond to be able to do this than they think it will.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

To make me sad, it's going to be Planescape.

Planescape is awesome though.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Chris Perkins comes on stage and the three guests him and bow. Then they announce that D&D is an elaborate ritual to, finally, after all these years, summon the terrasque and destroy everything.

Fade with Chris cackling.

Is it a bad sign that I honestly want this to happen?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

whoever I'm following along with posts it thinks I might be interested in

You can fix that - I absolutely hate it and find Twitter unusable without the "thinks I might be interested in" stuff on. So I have it set to only show people I follow, and show in strict timeline order, rather than a post from 7 hours ago being further down than one from a day ago like normal Twitter does.

Unfortunately I can't remember what buttons I have to press to do that lol. And it still has "might be interested" stuff on mobile, even though it's off on PC.

I also suspect that it will take longer for them to modify Beyond to be able to do this than they think it will.

Oh boy yup.

I dunno what exactly the problem at DNDBeyond is, but they went from rapidly upgrading and improving their platform, make fairly big changes at a decent rate from launch until late 2019, to gradually getting slower, and slower, and slower, and less capable, and slower from late 2019 until now. Whether it's just bad management, brain drain, underinvestment, sheer incompetence (I feel like, sadly there is some of that), bad prioritization, or some/all of those, I dunno (my guess would be all), but it's bad, it's real bad. There's stuff they literally expected to be done by early 2020 (so pre-pandemic even) that still isn't done, and that they're still cracking down on as if they were not owned by WotC, even though they're owned by WotC (their entire detailed excuse before was that their contract with WotC didn't allow this).

So I expect fixing DNDBeyond, if WotC even make a serious attempt and it doesn't suffer the "WotC curse" which has destroyed virtually every D&D-related IT project/game WotC has been close to (BG3 and Beyond being the only real exceptions, and no surprise those were the ones most distant from WotC until now), it'll be a long time before Beyond is improved to the standard I think they'd want to be encouraging mass sign-ups.

 

[Burnside]

Other - None of the above, something that will only be exciting to serious fans and/or corporate.

Am I a cynic? Re: announcements of announcements? YOU BETCHA! 100% cynical of announcements of announcements. When people have something genuinely awesome to talk about, they just come out and say it, they don't try to build hype. When they have something that only fans will be excited about, then we get the announcements of announcements in a, shall we say, "strenuous effort" to build hype (it's better than "desperate effort").

The last one turned out to be Spelljammer AND Dragonlance which tbf was a pretty respectable announcement.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The last one turned out to be Spelljammer AND Dragonlance which tbf was a pretty respectable announcement.

Well, it would have been if they'd followed up with any more details about Dragonlance. It's still very sketchy, and I'm not keen on this "Your army combat will blow chunks unless you buy our wargame competitively priced at $69.99 as well!" approach they seem to be advocating, but I will retain final judgement on that until we get more details.

If it's a setting announcement, it'll be nearly meaningless because we can virtually guarantee they'll be silent about anything beyond the announcement and a couple of bits of art until after Dragonlance is out in order not to spoil DL hype/sales.

Oh actually here's what I think it probably is:

The First World campaign setting - I.e. loads of giants and elemental junk, two of my absolute least favourite elements of D&D (I don't hate Hill and Stone giants as they feel like actual archetypal "giants" to me, but the rest feel like '80s glam rock guys who got hit with enlarge and not in a good way). Four-classical-elements stuff though is THE WORST (in all RPGs). Well, para-elements are even worse but let's not go there.

 

[Jer]

I dunno what exactly the problem at DNDBeyond is, but they went from rapidly upgrading and improving their platform, make fairly big changes at a decent rate from launch until late 2019, to gradually getting slower, and slower, and slower, and less capable, and slower from late 2019 until now.

I strongly suspect that their core software design was something that the initial devs understood quite well, those devs left or rolled off to other projects at Fandom, and the new devs who are trying to maintain/expand the system do not have the understanding of the system that the initial devs did. Also that the original system was designed to be modular and extensible in ways that the original devs thought would be important for future use cases, but in fact they guessed wrong and extending it for the directions that Wizards has actually taken D&D is harder than it should be.

Not that I have any inside info or anything - this comes from years of experience on software projects and talking with folks who have their own years of experience on software projects, because that's the story of so many projects that have rolled out in the last 20 years or so.