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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9410699" data-attributes="member: 8461">You asked me where I was making "my point," though, and that's it.Well, I do, so there we are.This viewpoint seems to conflate the economic aspects of what's under discussion with the creative aspects, in that if something is good for the former then the latter doesn't really enter into things. "Business as usual" is often bad for artistry, innovation, and imagination. Which is really my point; if those other options end up distracting from the options which haven't (or cannot be) given bells and whistles, then it's not unthinkable to say that the creative aspects of the hobby as a whole suffer for it, even if there's more money to be made.I'm still not clear as to why you think that means that there's no problem. Yes, engaging with standardization is something that the consumer has to voluntarily enter into as a consumer; that doesn't negate the potential for the constriction of imagination that I outlined, voluntary though it may be.I question how significant that is, as well as the surety of your assertion that it will remain significant. We keep hearing how D&D's player base is getting younger all the time, even as more people play the game, while grognards and older players in general are a shrinking minority. To declare "a significant portion of the base will never use the VTT" strikes me as aspirational. I certainly hope you're right, of course (I don't use a VTT either), but I think that what we've glimpsed paints a different picture.This is also something I'm less certain of. The entire point of creating so many bells and whistles is to encourage people to use their platform, which includes bringing in users of other platforms, and in this regard WotC has a much greater capacity to act than other VTTs. Integrating character sheets from DDB, for instance, as well as rulebooks and supplements, makes for an attractive package alongside interactive features and physical/digital bundling. WotC is, in other words, well-positioned to make themselves the market leader in this regard.To be honest, this strikes me as an example of why using statistics in hypotheticals tends to be a bad idea. While it's one thing to discuss what may or may not happen, putting quantifiable metrics to areas that are necessarily uncertain (i.e. the future) encourages concrete thinking where I think abstractions work better. Obviously there are some areas where this is contextually routine, but this discussion isn't one of them.And again, this draws a conclusion from numbers that are essentially pulled out of the ether. It might be half of the total D&D player base, it might be more or less, but we don't know. My concern is that if it's any sort of significant percentage (or grows into one over time), then the issues I articulated above could become more likely; none of this would happen instantaneously, after all, as it's a matter of inculcating a particular outlook, where the boundaries of play are implicitly accepted as being inviolable to the point of not being questioned (very much, since none of this is an absolute).If the issue here is why people would use the VTT in the first place, that one's going to be up to every individual user, and so speculating as to the viability (or other areas of efficacy) in trying to lure people in likewise doesn't strike me as being a particularly germane way of saying the issues I'm concerned about won't happen. It's entirely possible that a large number of users won't particularly care about the VTT, but will sign up anyway simply because the rest of their group is, and they don't want to be left behind. Or perhaps because they're just that eager to play (i.e. "looking for group") and that's where the most potential players are. Or because they were gifted a physical/digital bundle for their birthday and are giving the VTT a try completely blind, etc. The point is that WotC is going to be bending over backwards to try and lure people in, and however they do it, there's a decent chance that they'll succeed in drawing in some non-negligible portion of the player base over time and retain them for a not-inconsiderable period, during which time the constraints of the digital medium, combined with how engaging it makes the areas where it functions best, serve to slowly discourage moving beyond what the VTT does well.I'll certainly agree that WotC will never have 100% of the player base, if for no other reason than them not having you and me. But they can still capture a large enough portion of it to essentially sway how the hobby as a whole thinks about the course of play, specifically via what their VTT does well versus what it doesn't.There's no "somehow" to it, as I outlined quite extensively the issues wherein players are encourages to stick to what the VTT does well simply because that's what it does well, and stay away from what it doesn't go out of its way to facilitate because those are areas that it doesn't go out of its way to facilitate. People who engage with a product tend to use it for what it's designed for, and don't use it for things which it isn't designed for (I'd say all the more so when it's a curated digital product, but that might just be because I'm not tech-savvy).Again, this is a realm of speculation, so questions of evidence are misplaced here. We're essentially playing a guessing game, which isn't evidentiary.Which might very well be a large portion of the player base, as that's what WotC is going to be striving for, using all of the muscle than an 800-pound gorilla can bring to bear.And you're right in that some people who use the VTT will push back against the restrictions that it necessarily entails. But as its functionality becomes more expansive and more integrated with DDB, I suspect that this will simply occur to fewer and fewer people as a matter of course. If you have to take three or four steps to accomplish a particular thing, and something judged to be roughly as good can be done in one step, then I foresee a lot of people choosing the latter over the former as a matter of course. (Recently a friend of mine, almost twenty years younger than me, laughingly told me that nobody bothers to text with their thumbs anymore; nowadays they apparently all use "swipe texting," which I'd never heard of.)See above. I agree that such a thing isn't particularly onerous, but even mild inconveniences are quick to be abandoned when a less-burdensome alternative is presented, and I think that a lot of VTT users will fall into that mindset over time.There will, but manual options strike me as being less popular than automatic ones (I still don't understand the appeal of video games which play themselves, for example, but my friends all have them on their phones). And this is just for minor things like substituting a given damaging effect for something else. If you want to create a custom spell, for instance, that's even more difficult, to say nothing of creating/using a new sub-system for some aspect of play that the VTT doesn't support.Well, that's your opinion and you're welcome to it. Furthermore, I hope that you're right and I'm wrong; it's not a future I'd like to see. I just think it's a consequence of the future WotC wants to see, and which they're trying very hard to make happen.I disagree; I think even minor changes can have unexpectedly large impacts on the nature of play with respect to the core game, at least in terms of how it'll function in a digital environment that's highly interactive in nature.</blockquote>

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