WotC Third party, DNDBeyond and potential bad side effects.

[Oofta]

If a player has access to an option on their own, your filters don't stop it from showing up in the character builder. The filters only let you prevent players from viewing particular books – the options are still available in the character builder.

Which isn't really any different from my purchasing a book the DM doesn't have. If I do so, I'm going to ask the DM if I can use those options.

 

[eayres33]

I am glad the people who make things "convenient" for all of the rest us do not listen to responses like this because some people don't like or appreciate the convenience.

SlyFlourish wants to play a game that their friends don't want to play. And that's WOTC'S fault?!? No. It's theirs. They have not made a convincing argument to their friends as to why playing this new game might be fun (even if it is "less convenient"). That's their problem to work around... not WotC's.

I don't think you a picking up on the issue, or maybe not seeing it in the same light. The issue is the friends would happily play the game if Hasbro allowed it to be on DnD beyond, but Hasbro doesn't allow it on DnD beyond, so they hesitate to play. So it's not a lack of wanting to play the game but an additional hurdle they see themselves as having to hope through to play.
Is it's Hasbro 's problem, no it's not. Would it be better for the industry if Hasbro made it easier for more people to access more products they don't own. I believe so, but that's my opinion other's may very.
Should Hasbro even care about what's best for the industry, again my opinion but I think they should, I think all companies should care about the health of their industry and not just their profit margin (not saying they shouldn't care about being profitable) but I'm kind of a Pollyanna when it comes to how I think companies should run.

 

[SlyFlourish]

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.

My job isn't to help WOTC run their business. My job is to help GMs run great games. WOTC could do a better job at that but they're letting their business needs get in the way and it can definitely get worse.

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.

You lost me. I offered a number of things WOTC could to to make D&D Beyond a better benefit to us and the larger 5e community. What system of mine do you see me guiding people to?

Obviously you're unconvinced so I'm not going to keep trying. If you're good, you're good! For me, I don't want my enjoyment of 5e to depend on WOTC's business practices.

 

[eayres33]

As someone pointed out..... How is it a deal breaker not to allow filtering in a tool, when you can't automatically filter books? Set the rules, have the players follow the rules, just like if there wasn't a tool.

Players react differently (some players at least) when it's an option available to them on a character builder as opposed to making characters on paper. Also at least last I used it DnD beyond didn't tell you the source of subclasses and spells in the character creation process, which would result in picking options that were not supposed to be available.
I wouldn't call it a deal breaker, if that was my only issue I'd work around it, but it was an issue for me and a bigger issue for others.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I had the top tier and it was not an option I saw, but I may have missed it, or is this a newer feature? (If it is there that's a plus for DnD beyond and DMs who use it

It's not. People get confused all the time that the "filter" in a campaign only prevents players from seeing the books. It doesn't prevent them from seeing the options in their character builder.

It also doesn't tell you where an option comes from so if you say something like "no spells from Xanathars or Tashas", they can still find Toll the Dead as an available spell and the Twilight domain for clerics as an available subclass without realizing they came from those books.

 

[Nikosandros]

It's not. People get confused all the time that the "filter" in a campaign only prevents players from seeing the books. It doesn't prevent them from seeing the options in their character builder.

It also doesn't tell you where an option comes from so if you say something like "no spells from Xanathars or Tashas", they can still find Toll the Dead as an available spell and the Twilight domain for clerics as an available subclass without realizing they came from those books.

Apparently, all of this is very hard to grasp. Also, if I, as a DM, have bought the book, I have to share all the rules content or nothing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

@SlyFlourish posted a comment in another thread and I think it's worth discussing in a separate thread.

Copying the message over from his post so it’s more accessible.

SlyFlourish
I have controversial thoughts on this.

Adding other 5e publishers' material to D&D Beyond increases WOTC's dominance in the overall TTRPG hobby and they've proven they cannot be trusted to act in the overall hobby's best interests.

During the last (only?) D&D Community Summit I heard community members lobbying for WOTC to include third party publishers into D&D Beyond as though it was good for the 5e TTRPG community. I don't think it is.

It's good for those publishers blessed by WOTC to be accepted into D&D Beyond. They get access to a WOTC's large D&D Beyond customer set (that they bought for $145 million) with an excellent non-exclusive license deal.

It's good for WOTC who gets a taste of products they didn't have to write. They also get to look like good guys: "Hey, we're supporting scrappy independent publishers like Darrington Press and Ghostfire Gaming".

Maybe it's good for GMs who prefer to have all their stuff under D&D Beyond and don't mind letting WOTC vet which 5e published material they can buy there.

But it certainly increases WOTCs dominance in the 5e TTRPG hobby, and we know they can't be trusted to always act in the best interests of the hobby overall.

And what about those benefits for other 5e publishers publishing on Beyond? WOTC is both the owner of the platform and a direct competitor publishing on the same platform. Consider WOTC's advantages:

• Other 5e publishers have to pay a fee to WOTC. WOTC's own products don't have to pay that fee.
• WOTC gets to see all the data for sales for all products. Publishers only likely get to see their own.
• I doubt publishers get access to direct customer data like the opportunity to subscribe them to the publisher's newsletter.
• WOTC gets to decide who to allow to publish and who not to. They probably get to choose which products are published.
• WOTC gets to advertise their own stuff for free. If they advertise products from other publishers, they're either being extraordinarily nice or charging them.

Publishing other 5e publishers' products on D&D Beyond makes D&D Beyond an even stronger gravity well for the 5e hobby overall. It hurts other publishers like EN World and Kobold Press whose variants of 5e almost certainly won't be available on D&D Beyond. The more dominant D&D Beyond becomes in the overall 5e hobby, the more we must trust one company to do what's right for the hobby. That's a dangerous place to be.

All of the control WOTC hoped to achieve by deauthorizing the OGL, they seem to be gaining with D&D Beyond.

I think realistically, DND Beyond is never going to be so popular that this is really an issue. I don't foresee Beyond growing with any rapidity for the next decade. It might slowly grow, equally it might even shrink a bit. They've already got like 1/3rd to 1/5th of D&D players registered on it, but are people who aren't already on it going to join it much?

There's no good financial pathway to do so. If you're not already on Beyond, you have to buy you material over again, and WotC has taken the rather strange decision to base the physical bundle pricing on RRPs, rather than real-world prices. If you were paying RRPs - which literally no-one, even FLGSes, can afford to follow because they're so high ($84.99 for Planescape is truly incredible in the most literal sense - Amazon agrees and is selling it for $50.99) - then the Physical/Digital bundles would be decent but not compelling deals (there's a reason that Kickstarters don't charge you extra over physical for physical + digital in most cases), but you aren't so they aren't. You're better off sticking to staying outside of Beyond if you're currently outside, negating the entire pathway for most people.

I don't think that issue on Beyond, btw, it's notable the Physical/Digital bundles aren't on their site, but that of WotC, and I suspect WotC is 100% in charge of pricing decisions there (ultimately they control Beyond as well, but I suspect they still have some freedom).

So I don't we're ever going to see Beyond as the dominant force it could be.

It will potentially be a big boost for certain third parties, and might bias the market further towards extremely boring and safe works, but, frankly, is that changing anything? People who only buy stuff on Beyond can already only access material like that.

So I don't meant to be flippant, and you all know I'm a keen critic of WotC, Beyond, and scuzzy dealings and market manipulation, but this seems like a bit of a nothing burger to me right now. I suspect even if boring/safe works are encouraged, more money pouring into the RPG industry in general and not just WotC in particular is a good thing. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't appear to be that these companies making money of this are forced to only ever make Beyond products, right? So they may well take this money and use it to do more interesting things, and even they do boring things, at least they're not WotC, so there's some de-monopolization.

I think the big problem with the argument is that this presumes this will make WotC/Beyond notably more successful, and I just don't think it really will. It think the main boost will be to 3PPs (it will, ironically, slightly further the ancient goal of making D&D "survivable", which the OGL once served, because some people only aware of WotC material will become aware of 3PPs).

It might also give WotC a Big Damn Problem if it does make Beyond much more successful, because from what we've heard, Beyond exists in some kind of internal competition with the the 3D VTT. For example, we've heard that the 3D VTT product owner strongly opposed purchasing Beyond, and we know the 3D VTT has a vastly larger operating budget than Beyond (they have like what, 5-10x as many employees?), and revenue of exactly zero, whereas Beyond has a revenue, and quite likely a profit even.

 

[SlyFlourish]

If you truly did not understand the context... then I'll spell it out even more plainly...

SlyFlourish wants to play Level Up.
SlyFlourish's friends want to play the D&D that is available to them on D&D Beyond.
SlyFlourish does not want to play the D&D that is available to them on D&D Beyond.
Level Up is not available on D&D Beyond, because it is not the "D&D" that is available to be on D&D Beyond.
SlyFlourish therefore will not play Level Up UNLESS they convince their friends to play a part of "D&D" that is not available on D&D Beyond.

Hopefully that has cleared things up for you.

It's slightly more nuanced than that. My friends would be happy to play A5e but because it's not on Beyond, they'd rather just play 2014 D&D. It isn't the system they're opposed to, it's the draw of D&D Beyond.

D&D Beyond is absolutely an awesome tool. If it totally sucked and no one used it, we wouldn't have a problem. It also wouldn't have been acquired by WOTC for $146 million.

Now there are alternatives out there and more coming – Demiplane, Shard, Roll20's external charactermancer – but those either are or could be constrained by what WOTC is willing to release on those platforms.

Do other people need to work hard to build a comparable character builder? Yeah! Absolutely. Do publishers have to work with other character builders to get their material in them? Yeah! Tales of the Valiant is partnering with Shard to do exactly that.

There's a lot we can do to make 5e a resilient system (btw, I'm not going to get caught up in whether something's D&D or not – it's all 5e to me). That's really what I'm hoping we do. Talk to publishers about releasing more of their material not just under an open license but in a structured format we can use in other tools. Talk to tool developers about building tools able to compete with D&D Beyond. Get our hands dirty converting PDFs to JSON files so we can import them in other tools. There's a lot we can do.

Talk to our players. Try to break some of their dependence on D&D Beyond. I was successful with this for my Empire of the Ghouls campaign where we used Midgard Heroes and Tome of Heroes as our secondary sourcebooks next to the 2014 PHB. I'm going to try to convince them to use A5e for our next campaign.

D&D Beyond is great. I use it and love it. I don't want to depend on it. I don't want D&D Beyond to determine my overall happiness with 5e and I suggest others do the same.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I sure hope the people with a voice push for a SRD here.

I know one person with a voice who will.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

If a player has access to an option on their own, your filters don't stop it from showing up in the character builder. The filters only let you prevent players from viewing particular books – the options are still available in the character builder.

I'd honestly love (nearly every single individual element) to have a "hide" toggle, so that I can pare down the clutter, just for MYSELF far or less for my players or anyone else! Maybe with a bit that says "This page has hidden content. Show it?" - just in case I want to look. But we're getting into the weeds with wishes, probably.