WotC Third party, DNDBeyond and potential bad side effects.

[DEFCON 1]

But right now I can’t get players to adopt A5E because it’s not on D&D Beyond. It took a lot of negotiation to get them to use subclasses from Kobold Press. I know they'd just prefer to use D&D Beyond. And that sucks. All the DM-facing stuff is fine. I can use all the material from Trials and Treasure and the Monstrous Menagerie easily regardless of what tools they use, but if I offer up A5e next to D&D Beyond, I know which way they'll go.

That's a shame.

It's a shame for you personally, because you have a game you wish to play, but no one to play with. That is understandable. But it is nothing that anyone else (including WotC) needs to or should care about.

Neither WotC nor anyone else should care if a person cannot find other people to play their games with them. That's no one else's concern. And more importantly it's no one else's responsibility to make it easier for that person to find people. That person probably just needs to do a better job of making their game interesting enough to convince 3 other people from across the globe to try it out. I mean come on... in this day and age when a person has the entire world of players open to them in some form or fashion across any tabletop gaming platform from which to find them... if they can't do that? If they are incapable of convincing 3 other people to play whatever weird-ass game or version of a game they themselves want? Then that's on them. They can make a choice-- not a play game they really want to but can't others who care... or play all kinds of games they might not prefer, but which they can find innumerable others to play with.

 

[Oofta]

How cool would it be if there was an import feature that let you drop in all the details of a subclass with one click? Why shouldn't we ask for that? Sure, they're probably more interested in building their own walls up but we might as well ask for what we want.

I support the idea of 3PP being easily added to DDB and we already see some movement in that direction with the addition of Darrington Press source material. I suspect there's a lot of technical debt here though, it sounds like the management behind DDB cared more about speed to market than building a flexible system.

Take a look at the options to create custom monsters. Most of it is just based on a text parser that uses a specific custom format. It sort of works as long as you adhere to their finicky parsing rules and standard layout, but try to get too out of the box and it ends up just being text with no mechanical implementation.

I assume that a lot of investment right now is in making the platform more flexible to support the 2024 edition changes but it's easy to say "Just add a button to import", it's a lot harder to make that button work. Especially if you're changing core game logic.

In my ideal world? Anyone interested in adding to DDB could do so at a minimal cost. There would be options for people to review these options along with tags for the type of content so I could easily add it in. It would be easy for publishers to add new monsters, classes, rule options. But we don't live in an ideal world and never will. I just don't see the DM or players saying "official books only" as being anything new. Whether or not the DDB developers could justify the cost of the changes required to have that import option is something we simply don't know.

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, absolutely. This doesn’t affect my Shadowdark RPG but I like to laugh and say that https://shadowdarklings.net/ is the future enshittification of Shadowdark (it's a fantastic tool developed by one guy).

This definitely only affects 5e.

But right now I can’t get players to adopt A5E because it’s not on D&D Beyond. It took a lot of negotiation to get them to use subclasses from Kobold Press. I know they'd just prefer to use D&D Beyond. And that sucks. All the DM-facing stuff is fine. I can use all the material from Trials and Treasure and the Monstrous Menagerie easily regardless of what tools they use, but if I offer up A5e next to D&D Beyond, I know which way they'll go.

That's a shame.

That’s how it works… the stick didn’t work out but a carrot can have the exact same effect.

 

[Morrus]

It's a shame for you personally, because you have a game you wish to play, but no one to play with. That is understandable. But it is nothing that anyone else (including WotC) needs to or should care about.

Neither WotC nor anyone else should care if a person cannot find other people to play their games with them. That's no one else's concern. And more importantly it's no one else's responsibility to make it easier for that person to find people. That person probably just needs to do a better job of making their game interesting enough to convince 3 other people from across the globe to try it out. I mean come on... in this day and age when a person has the entire world of players open to them in some form or fashion across any tabletop gaming platform from which to find them... if they can't do that? If they are incapable of convincing 3 other people to play whatever weird-ass game or version of a game they themselves want? Then that's on them. They can make a choice-- not a play game they really want to but can't others who care... or play all kinds of games they might not prefer, but which they can find innumerable others to play with.

This seems bizarrely aggressive.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's a shame for you personally, because you have a game you wish to play, but no one to play with. That is understandable. But it is nothing that anyone else (including WotC) needs to or should care about.

Neither WotC nor anyone else should care if a person cannot find other people to play their games with them. That's no one else's concern. And more importantly it's no one else's responsibility to make it easier for that person to find people. That person probably just needs to do a better job of making their game interesting enough to convince 3 other people from across the globe to try it out. I mean come on... in this day and age when a person has the entire world of players open to them in some form or fashion across any tabletop gaming platform from which to find them... if they can't do that? If they are incapable of convincing 3 other people to play whatever weird-ass game or version of a game they themselves want? Then that's on them. They can make a choice-- not a play game they really want to but can't others who care... or play all kinds of games they might not prefer, but which they can find innumerable others to play with.

So, "too bad, get good or let it go", basically? TTRPGs are social games, ones that are often played with people you already know, not just random strangers. It's not unreasonable to want to play a game you like with your actual friends and family, and to be annoyed that part of the industry is discouraging your friends and family from engaging with a particular thing you enjoy by making something else more convenient. It's not easy or enjoyable to disengage with your social group and play with strangers on the internet to do what you want.

 

[mamba]

It's a shame for you personally, because you have a game you wish to play, but no one to play with. That is understandable. But it is nothing that anyone else (including WotC) needs to or should care about.

WotC certainly does not care, but saying we should not care that this is potentially strangling and eventually killing off alternatives to WotC material goes a bit far.

This is not about one DM not finding players for their weird little homebrew. They were talking about Level Up and Kobold Press, and how them not being on DDB directly limits their potential audience because enough people cannot be bothered to look beyond it

If all you care for is WotC material and want to use DDB over anything else, then I guess you are not affected, whether you care then is up to you / your level of empathy

 

[Clint_L]

The issue with DnD beyond is it doesn't let a DM filter options so if you buy the thing through a micro transaction it's on your sheet. It's not something the DM gets to approve or veto, it's on your sheet.
Of course can say no you can't use that during the game, "but we are using DnD beyond and it was available, I already spent the money," is going to be a friction point for a lot of DMs.
I'm assuming that WOTC is assuming most DMs will cave.
Could be wrong but I cancelled my DnD beyond subscription at the start of the OGL saga anyway. Hasbro doesn't need my money and there are so many better 5e resources from 3PP, and other systems to play.

It definitely does let the DM filter options, and I do.

 

[Clint_L]

To me, this argument reads like “what if WotC make DnDBeyond so good that everyone wants to use it?” I’m already at that point because I run a ton of different campaigns, all but one for beginners, and it saves me hours per week while making my games run much more smoothly.

That’s how a market economy works. It’s not up to WotC to undermine themselves in order to help their competition, it’s up to their competition to do even better. Demiplane is trying exactly that. But the future clearly belongs to online platforms for TTRPGs. The people are choosing.

 

[Remathilis]

Every point you make I've heard people demand of Apple. I think they've been sued over a few of them. Is Apple really the model you want for WOTC and D&D? I love Apple products and I sure don't want D&D to go down that path.

I may be old but I do have 26 years of software engineering under my belt. I think I understand much of the technology pretty well.

My point is that the Apple model has worked perfectly well for Apple, and despite all the known issues, Apples still has a strong hold on the smart phone market. You can certainly argue if Android is better (I would, I am diehard Google/Pixel user) but for a LOT of people, iPhones are good because they satisfy the users needs.

More interestingly, I see you didn't address my concern about "going back" from technology. Your answer to D&D Beyond's potential is to not use it. In fact, to guide away from WotC and to your own system (I see what you did there) under the notion of avoiding technology as a crutch. That's not going to work. It's 2024. Lots of people who resisted smart phones now use them daily. Nobody buys CDs (or increasingly DVD/Blu Ray). Very few people own landlines. Nobody carries paper calendars, fold-out maps, or solar calculators. Digital tools will become increasingly popular because of convenience. My laptop is A LOT lighter to carry to game than a shelf of hardbacks.

If you want to make an argument about digital ownership (Cf Netflix, Spotify, and other cloud-based programs vs. physical media) I think there is a reasonable discussion to be had. And to be fair, I think D&D Beyond would benefit far better as a subscription/rental system than a book purchasing system, the latter has a far greater assumption of ownership. I don't believe I am owed a copy of Loki to download and put on DVD just because I subscribe to Disney+.

 

[Nikosandros]

It definitely does let the DM filter options, and I do.

That's news to me. Where can you filter character options for a campaign? That's a very useful (and requested) feature.