WotC D&D Historian Ben Riggs says the OGL fiasco was Chris Cocks idea.

[Chaosmancer]

This is kinda something that came up with the criticisms about 4e. (I'm REALLY SORRY I am bringing this up, but bear with me.)

A lot of people saw the changes in 4e as a sort of WoWifying the game. The thing is, those criticisms aren't completely off base. They were, in a way. The reason was, the idea behind 4e is that you were going to be playing with strangers - a lot. Particularly if they had gotten their VTT off the ground back then. That was how they were going to grow the hobby - you boot up your PC, or your X-box, hunt around a bit and join a game. Kind of an ongoing organized play convention that never ends.

Which meant you needed mechanics that serviced that kind of play - very clear, concise, transparent mechanics because, well, "trust your DM" doesn't work as well when you are playing with a new DM every week.

So, we got much more rigid mechanics.

I suppose if WotC were to try to do that again, I could kinda see them building mechanics, not so much to force people to play VTT, but, to make VTT play with strangers work easier. As it stands right now, that's very much not happening with D&D24. The changes that we've seen have zero to do with this sort of play. 4e was very much the Organized Play edition and the mechanics reflect that. 5e is very much not that. There are FAR too many vague mechanics in 5e for it to work like that.

But, if one were inclined to want to see WotC as trying to force gamers onto the VTT platform, then that would be the direction I would expect the mechanics to go. Granted, this has ZERO impact on creativity, but,

And, while 4e was famous for it, we can't forget that 3rd edition had a lot of the same thoughts. My copies of 3.5 came with CD's to download the digital character creator. Computers and computer games were HUGE, and they wanted their game to be compatible with that style of play.

I bring this up, because everyone will point to 4e as being horridly designed and ruined because of that thought process... but that same thought process went into 3.5 which is often lauded as the best version of DnD to ever exist. Digital integration isn't a problem for the game. It never has been.

 

[Hussar]

But it isn't new? Rules for everything and everything being tightly defined existed in both 3rd and 4th edition. And both times they had automation/digitization of the rules in mind. This is a design tension, sure, but it isn't a NEW design tension. It has been with us for as long as WoTC has made DnD rules.

And, really, the only reason it wasn't a thing for, say, 1e D&D, is because 1e largely predates ubiquitous home computers. Or, at the very least, sort of occurs at the same time. I can't be the only one to remember that Dragon magazine included programs for automating stuff for D&D.

 

[Chaosmancer]

"Track it"? Are you under the impression that this custom content will be utilized once, apparently during play, and then removed from the system? Because that seems like a rather odd idea, as opposed to writing something and uploading/posting it to their account, at which point WotC can view it at their leisure.

Or, you know, they could just look at what you've written in your account. Yeah, you might be able to get away with it under the principle of "needle in a haystack," but that's just you hoping to be overlooked, rather than some sort of technical limitation.

This just further highlights that you have no idea what you are talking about. You expect us to believe that a significant number of people will use this VTT. Let us say that this is going to be 20% of the DnD Beyond user base. DnD Beyond sees 14 million people visit it and numbers in 2022 said they had 10 million subscribers. So, we will call this 2 million people using WoTC's VTT, 20% of their 2022 numbers.

Some people will have multiple accounts, but that doesn't matter. Let us say that WoTC hires 100 people whose sole job is to read the details of every single VTT user to look for bad content. To go through every single person's account once a year, they would need to look through twenty thousand accounts each, or 77 accounts a day. Checking every character, every campaign note, everything to look for content they want to remove. And that is to go through once a year.

Oh, and by the way? Roll20 currently has a user base of 15 million people, so this 2 million number is a failing VTT. TO get the numbers you want to say they will have, they would need millions more people, which makes this job even more impossible.

Now, you have likely broken this single point into two dozen lines of text to attack each sentence, and in the course of that told me that OBVIOUSLY they would use computers and AI to flag this content, not have individual people looking for it. Well... that is what I was talking about originally. For that to function, you would need to flag specific keywords from the text, and their variations. You would need to flag "psychic, psy, psykic, psych, p," ect and that doesn't actually make this process easier, because the fact that they used a word doesn't mean anything, and computers are stupid. You tell a computer to flag all uses of the word psychic in the text of a character sheet, then it will do so, even if it is flagging legitimate content. So you would STILL need a crowd of IT people whose sole job is to police this. And this all costs a TON of money. It likely costs far more money to track down the ten thousand or so people who copied in an ability from the physical book they own instead of buying the virtual book, than they could actually make if those people instead were forced to buy the book.

WoTC wants to make money. Policing this costs too much money to be worth the level of effort you keep insisting they will spend on it. Meanwhile, it will alienate people who will instead leave the VTT and cost them EVEN MORE money. TO make money? They leave this alone.

That said, the concern I'm proposing is simply a specific application of the medium being the message, at least in part. It doesn't necessarily need to happen for "every single person," or to the same extent, or over the same period of time. I'm just noting that the potential is there and should be recognized, if for no other reason than simple awareness of it helps to ameliorate the effect (and the discussion is quite intriguing to have).

Except every single person with any experience in the VTT space has told you that your are wrong. That the medium in this case does not become the message. Your "noting the potential" has consistently been met with people telling you it is false. And all you do is keep insisting that you are correct and that we are wrong.

Again, you're speaking in absolutist terms ("all," for instance) that don't match the tenor in which I've presented this, for reasons that I'm still not clear on.

That's one of the reasons (the other being that your caricature of my point was that all expressions of personal creativity would be affected). WotC isn't those other VTT companies, and they aren't WotC. Their goals, resources, Q Score, and relationship to the game (i.e. they own it and so can modify it to their satisfaction), among many other things, are all different.

Thank you, I accept your apology.

In terms of what we're discussing, yes, I believe that this is far more salient with regards to WotC's VTT for the reasons outlined above. Though again, you've unnecessarily universalized "any possible creative action" (e.g. your mention of songwriting and drawing comics) as opposed to "imaginative play."

Hence my concern that said fundamental core will be minimized in favor of the monetization efforts which WotC's VTT is in service of.

I'm not sure what you mean by eroding the game itself, as opposed to imaginative play.

More correctly, that they're written to work in conjunction with the VTT as much as possible, which has technical limitations that incentivize what it does well and disincentivize the areas of creative play which it is ill-equipped to handle.

And sound effects and all sorts of other audiovisual attention-grabbers.

Yeah, your continual infantalizing of players who are going to be wowed by colors and sound effects is almost reaching parody levels. No, WoTC's VTT will not have anything close to the effect you are "noting the potential of". You are wrong. You don't seem to understand the market, the product, the challenges, or the incentives at any reasonable level.

 

[Alzrius]

This just further highlights that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Which is a fairly ironic statement, as that perfectly sums up your own position far more accurately than mine.

You expect us to believe that a significant number of people will use this VTT.

So you're saying you don't believe that a significant number of people will use WotC's VTT? I mean, that's certainly possible, but I'm not sure I'd take that as a given, at least for the premise of this discussion.

Let us say that this is going to be 20% of the DnD Beyond user base. DnD Beyond sees 14 million people visit it and numbers in 2022 said they had 10 million subscribers. So, we will call this 2 million people using WoTC's VTT, 20% of their 2022 numbers.

I'll point out again that throwing around statistics in a hypothetical showcases the weakness of hypotheticals, since it presumes multiple levels of specificity without really justifying why such exacting specificity in any of the regards presented are warranted. Any of the numbers can be tweaked to (almost) any other value with equal validity under this thought-experiment (notwithstanding reaching for extreme outliers in a given value).

Some people will have multiple accounts, but that doesn't matter.

I'd say this entire digression doesn't matter, as it's being carefully constructed out of nothing just to prove your point, but go ahead.

Let us say that WoTC hires 100 people whose sole job is to read the details of every single VTT user to look for bad content.

So we're at how many underlying assumptions now, none of them making any pretense of the level of justification being provided?

To go through every single person's account once a year, they would need to look through twenty thousand accounts each, or 77 accounts a day.

Or they can set up a program to review accounts at random and flag things they want it to look for, or allow for users to report on other users, or literally any other way of monitoring accounts.

Checking every character, every campaign note, everything to look for content they want to remove. And that is to go through once a year.

Honestly, the real hypothetical we should be asking is if it's plausible that WotC will decide (as you're suggesting) that curating their walled garden will be too difficult, and so will simply allow people to effectively hop the wall as they please (presumably because they're just good-natured like that?).

Oh, and by the way? Roll20 currently has a user base of 15 million people, so this 2 million number is a failing VTT.

Cool, at least now you're sticking to a number with some basis in fact instead of making stuff up out of nowhere.

TO get the numbers you want to say they will have, they would need millions more people, which makes this job even more impossible.

Not really. As I pointed out, you're assuming that there's only one way to do what you're talking about, that the limits you've outlined cannot be overcome, and that the result is that WotC will take a laissez-faire attitude to the whole thing. That's a far greater number of assumptions than anything I've put forward.

Now, you have likely broken this single point into two dozen lines of text to attack each sentence,

Can it really be called an "attack" when all I'm doing is pointing out all of the unfounded assumptions?

and in the course of that told me that OBVIOUSLY they would use computers and AI to flag this content,

You keep mentioning AI, when in fact a simple program would be able to get this done.

not have individual people looking for it.

Yeah, no kidding. I mean, I'm sure there'll be some level of human element to the process, but the idea of that being all there is comes entirely from you.

Well... that is what I was talking about originally.

And the flaws of which I pointed out originally.

For that to function, you would need to flag specific keywords from the text, and their variations.

So your entire idea here is that WotC can't write a program which looks at the text of rules which are part of the VTT/DDB and compares that to the "custom content"-tagged portion of user accounts to see if there's anything that's similar to said content on there? In other words, what programs have been doing for some time to detect plagiarism, AI-generated content, etc. Don't get me wrong, they very well might not be able to (I've said before that I'm not impressed with their technical prowess to date), but it won't be because such technology isn't feasible; you don't need AI to do what I've pointed out here.

Of course, the problem with your entire line of thinking here is that it's entirely predicated on the idea that custom content is a panacea to the issue of the VTT's disincentivizing things which it doesn't do very well. This despite my repeatedly saying that's not the point. The point is that custom content is more work to generate, both in terms of technical application and game engine integration, for less payoff under the VTT system (and you can't even claim that the former is too small to bother with, when you yourself have found it too onerous to format links into text or properly paste an emoji in this very thread). That's not going to be much of a draw, and so works to act as a subtle "gravitational" pull away from said content...especially if it goes beyond an easy "substitute X for Y" change in things like spell damage types (which doesn't exactly push the boundaries of imaginative play anyway; it barely scratches the surface of custom spell creation).

You would need to flag "psychic, psy, psykic, psych, p," ect and that doesn't actually make this process easier, because the fact that they used a word doesn't mean anything, and computers are stupid.

See above for why you're overstating the technical limitations (though it's worth reiterating that if this becomes too much of a challenge for them, it's not implausible that WotC will simply clamp down on custom content altogether).

You tell a computer to flag all uses of the word psychic in the text of a character sheet, then it will do so, even if it is flagging legitimate content.

False positives are part of any search system, so that's not exactly a fatal issue as you're putting it. Likewise, you've ignored that simply telling people such a system is in place can have a chilling effect, like a sign that says "this property is monitored by video camera."

So you would STILL need a crowd of IT people whose sole job is to police this.

Which isn't exactly some sort of massive burden; there's a reason why companies outsource entire tech departments to low wage countries, i.e. because they want to have crowds of IT people who do non-critical jobs.

And this all costs a TON of money.

Which is all the more reason why WotC would just throw their hands in the air and scrap the entire custom content aspect altogether.

It likely costs far more money to track down the ten thousand or so people who copied in an ability from the physical book they own instead of buying the virtual book, than they could actually make if those people instead were forced to buy the book.

Hey, maybe WotC would just give away their books for free since it's completely impossible to stop people from using their contents at no cost by slipping them in under "custom" content which WotC is powerless to police?

WoTC wants to make money. Policing this costs too much money to be worth the level of effort you keep insisting they will spend on it.

No, that's not what I'm insisting. I'm insisting that WotC wants to make money, and does not see quality as the primary path to that. Which means that, even if something is bad for customers, there's still a reasonable chance they'll undertake it.

Meanwhile, it will alienate people who will instead leave the VTT and cost them EVEN MORE money. TO make money? They leave this alone.

They really don't. Remember, this is the same company that sent the Pinkertons to retrieve a single deck of cards that had been legally acquired (since an embargo isn't a matter of criminal law, and would apply to the store owner rather than the customer). Cost-benefit analysis has a habit of not being part of the equation in certain circumstances, and even then their definition of "benefit" isn't the one you're using.

Except every single person with any experience in the VTT space has told you that your are wrong.

Appealing to groupthink is a fairly ugly thing. Is that really the side of this that you want to come down on?

That the medium in this case does not become the message.

Four or five lay-users who keep misrepresenting/misinterpreting/misunderstanding my point does not a compelling argument make.

Your "noting the potential" has consistently been met with people telling you it is false.

And their absolute surety in something that is by definition uncertain is how you know they're wrong. When someone can say that they know how a situation (in terms of human endeavor) is going to develop with 100% confidence, that means they're deliberately overlooking the self-evident lack of certainty inherent to such situations, and so aren't engaging with the discussion so much as being argumentative.

And all you do is keep insisting that you are correct and that we are wrong.

I'm not sure why you think I'd take the word of four or five random people on the Internet as being any sort of authorities, especially after what I noted above. I've never said "I am correct and you're wrong," because I've noted from the beginning that this is an issue of what could happen. You're the one(s) insisting that it absolutely can't, no way no how, despite your lack of prophetic powers or even basic technical knowledge, which necessarily makes your position less credible.

Yeah, your continual infantalizing of players who are going to be wowed by colors and sound effects is almost reaching parody levels.

It's neither infantilizing nor parody to point out that the focus on what the VTT does well necessarily carries the potential for a not-inconsiderable number of players to focus more on that than on what it doesn't do well, inculcating a shift away from the broader areas of imaginative play. I understand that you think such a thing is impossible, but unfortunately for your sense of certitude in this area, nothing is impossible.

No, WoTC's VTT will not have anything close to the effect you are "noting the potential of".

Notice again the absolute certainty, despite any rational basis for speaking in declaratives.

You are wrong.

Ironically, you're wrong about my being wrong, because I'm not insisting that I must be right the way you are.

You don't seem to understand the market, the product, the challenges, or the incentives at any reasonable level.

And yet I've managed to point out the fundamental flaws in your reasoning with regard to each of these things, making this claim not only baseless but self-evidently false.

 

[Scribe]

And they are mentally incapable of making the VTT match the rules, to the same level that every other VTT on the market matches the rules of DnD? They MUST alter the rules to fit the VTT?

They began changing how they template cards, for a time anyway, to make it smoother in MTG Arena.

 

[Malmuria]

But it isn't new? Rules for everything and everything being tightly defined existed in both 3rd and 4th edition. And both times they had automation/digitization of the rules in mind. This is a design tension, sure, but it isn't a NEW design tension. It has been with us for as long as WoTC has made DnD rules.

I can't speak to 4e, but I wouldn't say 3e for all its complexity was designed assuming that the majority of the player base would be using automation tools, even things like spreadsheets. Whereas now it is clear that some very large % of players are using dnd beyond or a vtt. At a certain point, there's enough a % of the player base using those tools that you can design assuming that, rather than design primarily for a pen-and-paper audience. They would have to know that that was the default method of character creation and/or play however; like, if 80% of people used dnd beyond, then they could start to design around that fact.

 

[Hussar]

They began changing how they template cards, for a time anyway, to make it smoother in MTG Arena.

How do you mean? They changed how the cards looked?

 

[Oofta]

...

The fortune teller in me predicts a reply: But it could!

That makes you the very first person in this thread to say such a thing.
...

You just use a lot more words to say it.

I'll reiterate once more that no one is saying that VTTs limit people's ability to be creative, just that WotC's VTT looks like it has the potential unintended consequence of disincentivizing imaginative play.

So you're not saying VTTs limit creativity ... But it could!

 

[Hussar]

You just use a lot more words to say it.

I'll reiterate once more that no one is saying that VTTs limit people's ability to be creative, just that WotC's VTT looks like it has the potential unintended consequence of disincentivizing imaginative play.

So you're not saying VTTs limit creativity ... But it could!

Of course, the trick still is, no one is explaining exactly how it limits creativity. It's just taken as a given that it will somehow, in some fashion, make people less creative.

 

[Alzrius]

You just use a lot more words to say it.

No, I use different words to say something else.

I'll reiterate once more that no one is saying that VTTs limit people's ability to be creative, just that WotC's VTT looks like it has the potential unintended consequence of disincentivizing imaginative play.

Which is, to reiterate, something else.

So you're not saying VTTs limit creativity ...

Correct; I'm not making a blanket statement about VTTs in general, or creativity in general. Details matter.

But it could!

That's your sentiment. Own it, rather than attributing it to me (or Skippy).