OneDnD How much would you spend on monthly subscriptions for dnd?

[Malmuria]

How much would you spend per month on subscriptions related to dnd? This could be from dndbeyond, your VTT of choice, or even patreon subscriptions for things you use in your games.

 

[tetrasodium]

Depends on what it gives. I use a vtt that has a one time purchase that sells content packs of assets & have spent a couple hundred dollars total but I'm pretty sure it averages out to 5-10$ a month or less if I spread the total out. dndbeyond fills a different niche though & that niche seems to cater almost exclusively towards players with it offering little of interest to me as a GM who buys physical books. It would depend heavily on how oned&d and dndbeyond evolves.

 

[CleverNickName]

I voted $10 or less.

I would keep my annual subscription to Roll20, and that's it...but it's not exclusively a D&D expense for me. My friends and I play a lot of 5th Edition D&D on Roll20, but we also play a lot of older D&D editions (especially BECM/Rules Cyclopedia, 3.5E, and Pathfinder). And we also play Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, and Paranoia regularly on Roll20 as well.

So that's $100/year (or $8.33 a month), and it's for several games--not just D&D.

 

[overgeeked]

How much would you spend per month on subscriptions related to dnd? This could be from dndbeyond, your VTT of choice, or even patreon subscriptions for things you use in your games.

Literally nothing. Print books and purchased PDFs only. Too many free resources to bother buying services.

 

[MNblockhead]

Let's see...here is my current "D&D" spending (all prices in USD):

$55 per year (~$5/month) on D&D Beyond Master Tier subscription (allows me to share unlocked content with players in my campaign, I can do this for 3 campaigns, up to 12 players per campaign, so I can share with 36 people)

$964 for purchasing everything on DDB. I didn't buy it all at once, but that is what the legendary bundle will cost you today, without a coupon or sale. If all that content was available as a subscription it might be worth it if I didn't already own it. 964 comes to about $80 per month, but I've bought content over a period of years. Much of that content is adventure content and many people are not going to use enough of the adventure content to make paying more than 5 to 10 per month on a subscription worth it if they can just instead buy the few books they want.

$12/month for my World Builder tier subscription with Forge-VTT. That gives me 2 GB of game data, 20 GB for assets library storage, 250 MB per file asset, no limit on number of worlds, any community modules or any assets bought from the Forge marketplace does not count towards storage asset library limit, save points, advanced invite management and user integration.

$50 my one-time purchase for Foundry license, which I host on Forge-VTT.

$10 per month to Patreon ($5 to Mr. Primate for DDB Importer for Foundry, allows for all monsters and characters to be imported into Foundry. Also support importing adventures, fully prepped, but there can be a quite a lag between when adventures are available in DDB and when they are fully complete for Foundry. $5 per month to Moulinette. This is a mod to Foundry to make it simple to create custom tiles among other things. The 5/month is primarily to get access to an ever growing library of artwork that integrates with the mod.

Total monthly digital D&D stuff subscription spend = $27 (rounded). But this price doesn't include the actual content.

If WotC could offer a subscription of $30/month that would give you access to all content on DDB plus the VTT tools, that would be an easy buy decisions for many people I think. If you already bought or choose to buy content rather than subscribe to it, then 15-20 per month makes sense for content sharing, character building and character sheets, and VTT. I think $50/year for everything would be the high end they could get away with, but I think 50 per month would price a lot of people out.

WotC's VTT would have to be really good to get me to pay an additional subscription or to end my Forge VTT subscription and only use the WotC VTT.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I mean Roll20 eventually sucked me into paying a few bucks a month by making it free until I reached my storage capacity for uploaded materials, and I'd rather pay a little than have to learn a new VTT, so I had to vote for up to 10$. But I never would have signed up for a paid service if I hadn't already invested all those hours into learning it, and had my groups using it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I voted $25 or less, but that already goes to Patreon. I have no interest in paying for D&D Beyond.

 

[Shiroiken]

I said $0, but it's possible I could be suckered into something if the price was right and the product worthwhile. I tried using the free version of Beyond, but it just didn't seem like it would be worth paying for after buying the physical products. The subscription model has never appealed to me, even with VTT I use each week. I've considered getting Foundry, but as long as Roll20 is still quite workable at "free," this is a much less appealing option.

I mean Roll20 eventually sucked me into paying a few bucks a month by making it free until I reached my storage capacity for uploaded materials, and I'd rather pay a little than have to learn a new VTT, so I had to vote for up to 10$. But I never would have signed up for a paid service if I hadn't already invested all those hours into learning it, and had my groups using it.

I had the same issue, but instead I figured out how to go into my storage and delete everything instead. They don't make this particular option easy to find, but that's to be expected. The size per file is also a bit on the obnoxious side, but I've managed. The only feature that made me consider paying for Roll20 was Dynamic Lighting, but another DM in my group tried using and it was a nightmare.

 

[Malmuria]

Personally I don't like the idea of paying a monthly subscription, but in the recent discussions around the "under-monetized" comments, it became clear that many people already use some combination of subscription services.

I wonder about what the average person spends on stuff in the hobby per month. If I had to estimate for myself, I probably spend around $200 per year? Last year/18 months I backed the kickstarters for Vaesen, Mausritter, Herbalist's Primer, and Reach of the Roach God, was briefly subscribed to the lowest tiers for Necrotic Gnome and Luka Rejec on patreon, bought random zines via exalted funeral, and then just bought Death in Space as a gift for a friend. But then I also sold a bunch of rpg books that I wasn't using.

 

[Malmuria]

I mean Roll20 eventually sucked me into paying a few bucks a month by making it free until I reached my storage capacity for uploaded materials, and I'd rather pay a little than have to learn a new VTT, so I had to vote for up to 10$. But I never would have signed up for a paid service if I hadn't already invested all those hours into learning it, and had my groups using it.

Owlbear Rodeo is so easy and has worked for my table, and because it is lightweight it is pretty fast. There's no character sheets or automation, however.

 

[MNblockhead]

I said $0, but it's possible I could be suckered into something if the price was right and the product worthwhile. I tried using the free version of Beyond, but it just didn't seem like it would be worth paying for after buying the physical products. The subscription model has never appealed to me, even with VTT I use each week. I've considered getting Foundry, but as long as Roll20 is still quite workable at "free," this is a much less appealing option.


I had the same issue, but instead I figured out how to go into my storage and delete everything instead. They don't make this particular option easy to find, but that's to be expected. The size per file is also a bit on the obnoxious side, but I've managed. The only feature that made me consider paying for Roll20 was Dynamic Lighting, but another DM in my group tried using and it was a nightmare.

If you and your players have good internet bandwidth, you might consider Foundry. One time $50 cost. You get best-on-market dynamic lighting, much more easily prepped maps, access to a dizzying number of community mods. If hosting on your own computer, your only storage limits are those of your machine.

I do use a hosting service to host my instance of Foundry, but that mostly because I'm usually running games from an location with not-great bandwidth and my players are in another country. There are other benefits to the hosting service I use, but if I were back working in, and running games from, the United States, I would likely just self-host on my computer. All of my content is fully portable. No lock in.

 

[MNblockhead]

Literally nothing. Print books and purchased PDFs only. Too many free resources to bother buying services.

Yeah, I think this poll only makes sense for those already playing online.

Owlbear Rodeo is so easy and has worked for my table, and because it is lightweight it is pretty fast. There's no character sheets or automation, however.

If you like a light "VTT" that does have character sheets and some very basic automation (at least in terms of dice rolls), check out: playrole.com. Also provide excellent video conferencing.

 

[CleverNickName]

If you and your players have good internet bandwidth, you might consider Foundry. One time $50 cost. You get best-on-market dynamic lighting, much more easily prepped maps, access to a dizzying number of community mods. If hosting on your own computer, your only storage limits are those of your machine.

In my opinion? "Best" and "more easily" and "dizzying number" are exaggerations, but FoundryVTT is a good product. It requires a hosting service, as you describe, but you can self-host if you're savvy enough. (Fair warning: self-hosting is a lot more complicated and requires above-average familiarity with web hosting. It's complicated and unintuitive for the inexperienced user.) Foundry's biggest selling point isn't the dynamic lighting, the maps, or the community mods. It's the price tag: Roll20 can meet or beat everything else, but it can't hold a candle to that one-time purchase price of $50.

 

[MNblockhead]

Personally I don't like the idea of paying a monthly subscription, but in the recent discussions around the "under-monetized" comments, it became clear that many people already use some combination of subscription services.

I wonder about what the average person spends on stuff in the hobby per month. If I had to estimate for myself, I probably spend around $200 per year? Last year/18 months I backed the kickstarters for Vaesen, Mausritter, Herbalist's Primer, and Reach of the Roach God, was briefly subscribed to the lowest tiers for Necrotic Gnome and Luka Rejec on patreon, bought random zines via exalted funeral, and then just bought Death in Space as a gift for a friend. But then I also sold a bunch of rpg books that I wasn't using.

I am sure many will think that my ~30/month on subscriptions to D&D is high (360 a year), but I spent a lot more on kickstarters for minis and terrain when I was running games in person.

 

[MNblockhead]

In my opinion? "Best" and "more easily" and "dizzying number" are exaggerations, but FoundryVTT is a good product. It requires a hosting service, as you describe, but you can self-host if you're savvy enough. (Fair warning: self-hosting is a lot more complicated and requires above-average familiarity with web hosting. It's complicated and unintuitive for the inexperienced user.) Foundry's biggest selling point isn't the dynamic lighting, the maps, or the community mods. It's the price tag: Roll20 can meet or beat everything else, but it can't hold a candle to that one-time purchase price of $50.

My exaggerated wording aside, I spent a LOT of time testing and using all of the major VTTs on the market (albeit most of this was 2 years ago), including Fantasy Grounds (both classic and unity), Roll20, d20pro, and Foundry. Previously I was using Map Tool heavily. I looked at a variety of others, but they didn't interest me enough to really dig in. Also, I'm not including "light VTTs" like Owlbear Rodeo and Role as these are not what most people are thinking about when discussing VTTs.

I like Roll20 and still use it fairly frequently as a player. But as a DM is just became an unresponsive headache with large, complex maps and dynamic lighting. Like, it just wasn't useable. And I spent MANY hours reading help materials, articles, watching YouTube videos on getting the most out of it, and testing it. The amount of time I had to spend prepping my map images just so I could put them into Roll20 to prep them there and still have to cut back on advanced features to avoid performance issues made me eventually cancel my subscription. Foundry has been a breeze in comparison.

I agree that self hosting can be a bit intimidating. But if you are cost sensitive, it may be worth the effort figuring it out.

That said, I'm sure Roll20 has improved over the past couple years and I haven't tried to prep a game as a DM in it (other than Alice is Missing, which really is just a virtual cards, so not demanding at all), so maybe it would work for me now. Also, the requirements of most DMs are much less demanding than mine. Prepping Rappan Athuk in any VTT is no joke.

 

[John R Davis]

Absolute zero.

Buy loads RPG stuff but nothing on any subscription.

I am not the future monetizer they are looking for. I don't use DDB even.

 

[Horwath]

Zero.

Give me a one time purchase.

Also, every book should come with "book key", so you get that digital content for free or at a large discount.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

10 or less... Which I already do. 7 for DnD beyond.
3 Dollars for Ensider.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Zero. No more subscription services for me

 

[kenada]

I would and have subscribed to other services to support my hobby, but I would not subscribe for the core game itself unless I can get it elsewhere (book, PDF, etc) because I do not trust WotC with running such a service.