D&D General Hey, are we all cool with having to buy the same book twice, or what?

[DEFCON 1]

Yes, I'm perfectly fine with it. Because I'm not paying the same company twice for the same product, I'm paying two separate companies for two separate products (both of which have similar stuff in them.)

If I didn't want both products, I wouldn't have bought them.

 

[cbwjm]

Yes, I'm perfectly fine with it. Because I'm not paying the same company twice for the same product, I'm paying two separate companies for two separate products (both of which have similar stuff in them.)

If I didn't want both products, I wouldn't have bought them.

Exactly this. I'd be a bit put out if DnDbeyond was owned by WotC but since this isn't the case I'm fine with it.

As is, the theros book is apparently going to have a 50% of voucher included for the DnDbeyond book so that's something. Still not free but as a discount that's really good.

 

[Blue]

Are we all cool with buying the same book twice?

Nope, we are not all cool. I'm not, so I don't.

Are we some cool with buying the content once in a physcial book which requires layout, production, and distribution, and a second time which requires coding and adding a character builder and indexing and such? Yes, some are, and they do.

What's the problem? Some don't want to, and aren't forced to. Some like the additional functionality of having it both ways, and find it a reasonable purchase. I know some who only have the digital, some who only have physical, and some with both.

In some ways, it seems as if you are mistakenly proxying the D&D Beyond material, which has a lot of additional functionality, as a PDF of the physical books which would have low direct costs to produce oen fromt he other. It's not. Don't confuse it for it. If your real problem is that you want digital offerings without the additional work that D&DBeyond adds, then come clean and push for that. Because it's very different animal.

 

[LordEntrails]

I gave up on hard copies years ago. They are a PITA to store. They wear, they fall apart, they get stained and more than anything, they are HEAVY. Paper sucks. I gave up the emotional attachment to it years ago when I use to travel for work. If you can give up the emotional attachment, digital is far superior.

Anyway, when I switched to 5E in 2015 I went digital from the start. Have never bought a dead tree version and have no intention of doing so. Everything is on Fantasy Grounds, so much better. Who wants to carry around 100 pounds of books when I can carry a 4 lb laptop? And have searching and linking and an item forge and character creation and everything else FG gets me.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's been three years since D&D Beyond launched and I see many people, here and elsewhere, gladly pay for the physical copy of a release and then again for the virtual copy.

There are companies 1/100th the size of WotC that will gladly provide a virtual copy of the physical book you bought for free, and have been doing it for years (Not to mention they're generally normal PDFs that aren't tied to a service).

My question is this: is the consensus that this is fine and normal and the other publishers are wrong or should we be banging a drum about how this is a anti-consumer practice?

Dndbeyond isn’t equivalent to owning a pdf. Even if you only ever use the compendium, the compendium is much better than a pdf. I can search all 5e products for every wondrous item on dndbeyond. Or every magic weapon of a given rarity. Or a specific magic item that I don’t know the source of.
It’s even more valuable for monsters. I own every 5e books except mad mage on ddb. When I plug some filters into the encounter builder for my next adventure, it has a huge list of options with such good organization that I’m never overwhelmed.

This is why I don't pay for D&D Beyond. It's a product that doesn't fit my needs, since I already bought the books.

The “books” isn’t all DDB provides.

Nope, and I don’t buy books on dnd beyond. Maybe if I regularly ran games online I’d consider it, but I prefer in-person anyway, so physical books are sufficient for me.

To be fair, I never ran a game online before the isolation orders, but use ddb at every session. To each their own, of course.

 

[Charlaquin]

To be fair, I never ran a game online before the isolation orders, but use ddb at every session. To each their own, of course.

Oh, yeah, it is very useful even for in-person games. Just not worth the price tag for me.

 

[cbwjm]

One thing I like about DnDBeyond is that you don't need to buy the books, you can buy things piecemeal if you would like so you only need to buy the subclass you want to use. If you still don't want to, then you can just replicate the subclass using the homebrew creator. It takes time, but it lets you use the functions of DnDBeyond without having to buy the books.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

Yes.

AWESOME! I didn't know that existed. Thanks for the link!

 

[Morrus]

Sure it is.

When I buy a PDF from Drivethru and download it, it's mine forever.

When you buy a book on Beyond or one of those other VTTs it's yours as long as they find it worth their while to exist.

You used to own a thing forever, now you don't. Who benefits? The consumer?

I promise you it's not. You mean something else. Anti-consumerism is about the acquisition of goods and wealth at the expense of society. It's about ethics and the environment and stuff.

Anti-consumerism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

What you mean is "things that I personally find too expensive" which is a very, very different thing to anti-consumerism.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's been three years since D&D Beyond launched and I see many people, here and elsewhere, gladly pay for the physical copy of a release and then again for the virtual copy.

There are companies 1/100th the size of WotC that will gladly provide a virtual copy of the physical book you bought for free, and have been doing it for years (Not to mention they're generally normal PDFs that aren't tied to a service).

My question is this: is the consensus that this is fine and normal and the other publishers are wrong or should we be banging a drum about how this is a anti-consumer practice?

I haven't "paid twice" for any 5E books.

All my books are on Beyond. I'm leery of the long-term consequences of this, but currently trust that when 5E is replaced by the inevitable 6E, WotC and Beyond will arrange something reasonable. But the ease of use is so massive from Beyond, and the fact that my house is no longer full of books and print-outs and more books is a good thing, so I'm okay with that.

I think Beyond's pricing for single-items from books is predatory and ridiculous, but you don't have to engage with it. They are perfectly fine with you using their extensive and effective "homebrew" stuff to make copies of items (and races, and subclasses and so on) from books you don't own, you just can't share them.

On top of that, I've actually paid quite a lot less for the material I have, because Beyond has often had large discounts (25-33%), which can be applied to bulk purchases. I didn't buy the "everything" package because honestly you couldn't pay me to say, have Tortles in my game, but I bought all the books I needed when I started running 5E with some kind of large discount, and every time since when I've bought books it has been with a similar discount (25-33%).

One thing that also makes me feel good about Beyond is their app for reading the books. Initially I was like "ugh these guys suck, no PDFs!???!", and when the app was only on iOS, as it was initially, I refused to do business with them (we just didn't play 5E, we played Dungeon World). But once it got on Android, and I tried it with the free stuff, I was really impressed - it's actually much easier to read/use than PDFs on even my Chromebook. Indeed, my Chromebook (which flips into a tablet) makes it very much like reading an actual rulebook if I'm just laying on the sofa or something.

If I really was having to pay twice, and just getting the rulebook and a PDF, with nothing else, I'd be pretty annoyed (and likely just buying the PDFs and then printing them out as needed), but that's not the case. The added functionality from Beyond is amazing and so far has continuously and steadily improved for a very long time.