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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9412156" data-attributes="member: 8461">This strikes me as a faith-based statement, one which ignores that such a stance has been taken by corporations in the past, but has even actually worked.Yes, they will.A VTT whose capabilities fall in line with their recent actions to try and consolidate the industry around themselves and their product as much as possible, to the extent that they feel is practical. To say that the fanbase (i.e. the consumer market) will judge things purely on quality of what's offered alone strikes me as naive.I think that you're treating what I said much too much as an absolute. WotC wants to funnel as much of their player-base as they can onto the VTT, so that they can monetize things via a recurrent spending environment. Anything that gets in the way of that goal is something they'll want to either disallow, disincentivize, or at least put under their own oversight.To that end, if they do allow custom content, I expect they'd necessitate a level of control/oversight on their part regarding what that content is. Remember the bogus "we need to have a unilateral kill switch, so that we can kill bigoted content" clause from the OGL v1.1 and v1.2? Expect something along those lines if custom content is allowed, where they'll appeal to wanting to protect people from offense and, I'd guess, will claim that they need to disallow unauthorized recreations of copyrighted material (of themselves and others) to curate what custom content users are allowed to create. Of course, this almost certainly will be wielded in a manner that will bear only passing resemblance to these goals, allowing them to cripple custom content to the extent that they feel necessary to abet the sale of content on their platform.Yes, that about sums it up. The idea that people will be dazzled by technical glitz and drawn in by a big brand name even when the product itself doesn't beat out a smaller competitor in terms of quality is something we see large corporations subscribe to all the time. And it's not like we lack for instances of that working, either.Again, it's not a question of players "never thinking outside of the box," but a question of players being encourages not to, because what's inside the box is flashier, quicker, and easier to use. Being presented with the option of working harder to achieve lesser results will see most people not going that route, until it becomes reflexive, and imaginative play becomes constrained as a result.Misstatements and hyperbole do not constitute a form of criticism, you realize? WotC will want to funnel people to their VTT, as it's their money-maker; they themselves would be disincentivized to release new rules that are beyond what their VTT can itself handle (very well).See above, as this one has been asked and answered already. If playing inside the metaphorical lines is faster, simpler, and more rewarding (in an audiovisual sense), and playing outside of those lines requires you to do more to earn less, I strongly suspect that most people will stick to the former and eschew the latter. And again, you just have to look around to see examples of this in action.Yeah, also that.Again, stating this in a snarky fashion doesn't make it any less compelling. We know that WotC is trying to consolidate their influence over the industry. We've seen them <a href="https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/55248/wotc-ending-prh-distribution-dungeons-dragons" target="_blank">cancel their partnership</a> with Random House in order to try and be their own distributor. We've seen them buy D&D Beyond outright instead of renewing their licensing deal. And we've seen them try to replace the OGL with something which gave them a kill switch on products they didn't like as well as residuals on the highest-earning products. Call it "vertical integration" if you're fond of buzzwords, but these are not the actions of a company dedicated to openness; even the release of the 5.1 SRD into the CC strikes me as a conciliatory move which cost them little, since they'd already backed off of the OGL (even if they ended up releasing more into the CC than they meant to).The takeaway here is that WotC is going to do what's good for WotC, which while not unexpected does strike me as meaning that they're more committed to control than to quality, and that the VTT will reflect this ethos.That seems entirely reasonable with regard to their attitude to date.Songs and videos? Are you suggesting that people are going to want to upload thir TikTok media onto the VTT?No, they'll be able to buy those fancy colors from WotC for $0.99 each. Obviously that's an example, but it looks like an accurate representation of what WotC wants to do.On the contrary, the only thing not serious is your dismissals, which are based entirely around snarkly misstatements and look to be predicated entirely on faith in WotC's goodwill and the market's comparing all products on a completely even keel solely determined by "quality" (as defined by you).No one knows what will be a flop ahead of time, making this a puzzling accusation.I'm not sure why you think this is entirely based around the idea of new Core Rulebooks, as opposed to an issue with every subsequent book they'll release.</blockquote>

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