D&D (2024) How much would you spend on monthly subscriptions for dnd?

[Maxperson]

I would spend 0. I'm not paying for purely online content just like I don't pay for it with Magic the Gathering.

 

[Scribe]

So if the results so far and my own vote are any indicator, if they do not want to lose more than half their players, they better not do this.

They (WoTC) wont get out of printed materials, and so people wont just be jumping ship I think. There is already 'online only' content however.

 

[MNblockhead]

Owning something you don't use is not intrinsically better than renting something you do, as far as I'm concerned.

All depends on one's expected use case. When I see arguments about subscription services, versus purchased digital content, versus buying the physical material, I tend to see a lot folks talking past each other and not understanding where different people are coming from. When I really love a book, I will want a physical copy, even if that means I have to buy it twice in two different formats. I'm very glad I bought Volo's Guide in paper. It my favorite 5e book published by WotC. I'm also glad I bought it on DnD Beyond, because even though nobody can buy it now on DDB, I still have access to it and can share it.

My one concern with "renting" is that if they decide to make a book legacy and no longer support it, I suspect it may no longer be available. I prefer the current model where I can buy the digital books on DDB and still have access to them whether I pay for a subscription or not. My DDB subscription is more like a friends-and-family plan where I can share all my books with players in my campaigns, my son, and my son's friends. But I am also fully cognizant that WotC can change or remove my purchased content at any time. I still buy it because I the having errata automatically updated is mostly a good thing and I am pretty confident that I (and a number of people I share my content with) will get at least several years of use out of it.

But for the books I really like, I buy physical copies.

 

[MNblockhead]

I mostly play online these days but just do so over Skype or discord with no miniatures or grid. If you take out the battle mat, online play feels a lot more like live table play

I guess it depends on what your live table play is like. When I ran games in person, I was printing out battlemaps with a plotter printer and also had a lot of terrain and 2d and 3d minies. I have a paper cutting machine and made lots of paper terrain and paper standee minis. My D&D group is decidedly more on the tactical wargame side of the spectrum, more than TOTM. Actually, I first started using VTT or VTT like setups for my live game to save time and money. I bought an LCD TV and put it in a case to lay horizontally and display maps with fog of war, first in RealmWorks and then with Map Tool.

When a new job made it so I had to run my games remotely, at first I tried to run it via Google Meet. It just didn't feel like live table play to me. Once I started using VTT it felt a lot more like our games when we played in person.

But if I were to run other systems, I would probably use Role or some other gaming-focused video conferencing system with character sheets, dice rolling, and very light map and image sharing.

 

[MNblockhead]

There’s still a pandemic. I play 100% online. There are too many free tools online to ever bother paying for things you can get for free, do yourself, or don’t need.

What free tools do you use? If you don't want a full-featured VTT, sure, very easy to run TOTM games for free.

But once you get into VTT territory, many people would find it too much of a hassle to configure the technology to host the games themselves. I'm a huge fan of Map Tool, but I would never recommend someone run remote games using it unless I know they have a technical bent.

Roll20's free trier is a better alternative, but many game masters will hit the limitations of the free tier very quickly.

 

[MNblockhead]

I think if I was playing in person I would switch to D&DBeyond for my character sheet.

At much as I like DDB, I never liked using it as a character sheet when playing in person. I find having everything in front of me on paper is still more convenient than tapping around on a phone, tablet, or laptop. I also find electronics take me out of the game.

One thing DDB sorely lacks is good printable versions of the character sheets. The PDFs it generates are crap. When I was playing in person in the early days of 5e, I used Hero Lab. I would print my character sheets from Hero Lab which were very well laid out to easily reference even very complicated characters, had tick boxes for expendables like spell slots and ammo and many other nice touches.

 

[MNblockhead]

I have a master tier subscription on DDB and I consider it incredible value. It costs me 5-6 bucks a month, I think? Easily the best entertainment dollars I have ever spent. If there was a really good virtual tabletop that was easy to use (much easier than Roll20) I would pay for that, maybe a nominal subscription ($5-10/month) but I assume I'd also be making in-app purchases of terrain/creature modules.

I spend several hundred dollars/month on average for physical miniatures and terrain, so subscription fees are a drop in the bucket.

Edit: building on the "renting" vs. "owning" discussion folks were having, I am all for renting! Less wasteful and I don't wind up with crap cluttering up my house - I do enough of that with my miniatures.

Curious as to what you think of services that now rent terrain and minis. I've found them to be more expensive than I'm willing to pay. Even in-person, much cheaper and easier to just use digital battlemaps. But given how much you spend on terrain per month, perhaps you would save money renting--though I suspect that the painting and collecting are part of the appeal to you.

 

[MNblockhead]

I could imagine myself paying $500/year for D&D, but I'd need more value out of it than what I have now (basically VTT, character builder, and content).

For $500 a year, it would have to be character building, rules and adventure content, full featured VTT with fully prepped maps and notes for the adventures, AND:

• a decent encounter builder
• good tools for making it easy to create custom actors and items that will work properly in the VTT
• AND a fairly robust world-building / campaign management functionality.

 

[MNblockhead]

True, though if you buy something physical like a book you could always sell it later

Well, in my experience, more like donate or give away. Even with board games, I've never found the money made worth the effort to sell them. TTRPG books are even worse. I feel much better, and it is much easier, to give to people who you know will enjoy them. Also my LFGS has a community game library. I've donated a lot of stuff to it over the years and it is nice to know that quite a bit of it will continue to be enjoyed by many other people. Donating to Goodwill or another charity may give me a tax write off, but never enough to make the extra effort and bookkeeping worth it. Besides, I think supporting the ability of the local community to enjoy games for free is a net good, even if that is a service provided by a pro-profit company.

 

[overgeeked]

What free tools do you use? If you don't want a full-featured VTT, sure, very easy to run TOTM games for free.

But once you get into VTT territory, many people would find it too much of a hassle to configure the technology to host the games themselves. I'm a huge fan of Map Tool, but I would never recommend someone run remote games using it unless I know they have a technical bent.

Roll20's free trier is a better alternative, but many game masters will hit the limitations of the free tier very quickly.

I use the free tier of Roll20 but I’m not a pack rat with files. I don’t need to keep dozens of maps and tokens on their drives. A generic wilderness background, a generic town background, and a generic dungeon background are good enough. Any important details you can hand draw. Draw a few circles and tag them as enemies. It’s only when you get silly like thinking you need exactly the perfect map for every room, every hall, every town, and tokens for every NPC and monster that you run into trouble. Spending hours setting up dynamic lighting or worrying about whether the VTT has doors that open? Come on. You can run with butcher paper, markers, and tokens. No reason to get any more involved online simply because fancy tools exist. Save the time, save the money, and save the headache. The players can exercise a little imagination.