WotC WotC'S May Community Update Talks School Support, Accessibilty, & Creator Marketplaces

The Community Update page on D&D Beyond has a new entry which briefly covers topics such as ongoing support for schools and clubs, accessibilty of D&D Beyond for players with disabilities, early plans for the third-party creator marketplace, plans for convention attendance, and the upcoming Virtual Tabletop.

It's mainly a (very brief) recap of things which came out of the recent D&D Creator Summit (see D&D Creator Summit--VTT & One D&D, D&D Creator Summit--'D&D Beyond And Beyond', D&D Creator Summit -- Morning Sessions) but the key points include:

• One D&D reiterated again as being 5th edition, not a new edition. This is something WotC is repeating frequently, and is a message they are clearly very keen to get across.
• School and club support includes teaching kits, afterschool club kits, and free access to D&D Beyond resources for educators.
• Plans to connect with accessibility experts to ensure D&D Beyond is a tool that everybody can use.
• Migration to D&D Beyond as the 'front door' of D&D.
• Intention to eventually create a third party marketplace, but this is a long way in the future.
• A new creator summit at Gen Con in August.
• Pre-alpha tests of the VTT with small groups.

D&D Community Update

D&D Beyond - Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition Tools, Rules, Races, Classes, Items, Spells, Monsters, and More

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[Demetrios1453]

I have my fingers crossed for the 3PP piece. It'd be nice to have the likes of Monster Manual Expanded integrated into one reference place. Same for being able to use Tome of Heroes on characters without having to try and code the stuff myself (and failing).

I would be over the moon if the MME books were integrated into DDB.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Deleted, after seeing mod post.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Maybe? Do they get more money from DDB subscriptions than the books? How many people will buy stuff that's not official? Who knows.

If they can increase subscribers for this and the VTT enough, potential loss of a few supplement books may be worth it.

I would have to assume that they would curate various DMs Guild products for the ones that would make the cut, allowing only the best of the best in so they don't overwhelm things, especially with mid-to-subpar products.

 

[cbwjm]

The one change I want to see in D&D beyond is that content from books I haven't bought should be filtered out by default. Browsing the spell or monster lists can be tedious these days, when 1/3 of the entries are from books I have no interest in.

I know this is unlikely to change, as customer satisfaction will always be a lesser priority than promoting their products.

Even if not by default, at least a toggle which allows you to do it. They can do it for the marketplace, surely they can do it for content.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, I really don't get the people that post saying they don't play 5E, have no plan on playing the 2024 edition, but D&D and WOTC are terrible.

There's more to D&D than just 5e, and whether we like it or not WotC are the custodians of all of it.

Which means, people who play editions of D&D not numbered 5 still have a valid complaint if-when WotC messes up that custodianship.

Edit after seeing mod note: and to bring this post on topic, the community updates are, I think, a very good way of showing us what they're doing - or planning to do - with that custodianship in the next while. For example: that they're going to GenCon, having avoided it for quite some time, is a big deal and welcome news.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I guess WotC is not going to say anything about future new titles until Planescape to be published.

3PPs in D&DB could be very good for everybody. Even Hasbro could talk with other companies for licence agremeents to recover value by almost forgotten franchises. For example "Golden Axe" by SEGA. Hasbro talks with SEGA. And then there is a pack of Golden-Axe in D&D-Beyond+VTT. Not only virtual miniatures of monsters and heroes, but the setting. The other company would writte the lore or background, and WotC would be in charge of the crunch part, the stats for monsters and those things.

Some packs could be free gifts for players who bought a new videogame and they received a special code. For example if you buy the new "Dragon Quest" videogame, then the gift will be a pack with the monsters and heroes of the videogame to be used in your VTT.

Or if you have paid a streamer service in certain month, then the reward would be "skins" of characters from some production released in that streamer service.

 

[Hussar]

One good thing that I hope does come out of this is a closer relationship between WotC and fandom. WotC really has kept things very much arms length for quite a while. These very public meetings hopefully become a regular occurrence.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

How many people will buy stuff that's not official? Who knows.

I have never seen Monster Manual Expanded not be a top 10 seller at DMs Guild (I check there way more often than I'd like to admit), and it's one of the top 121 sellers on DMs Guild and 175 of all OneBookShelf sales of all time, as an Admantine seller, meaning it's sold at least 5,000 copies (honestly, it's probably much higher for each of those 175 books, as they all remain big sellers today).

WotC selling 5,000 or so copies of a book is probably a failure in their mind, but if we guess that the Admantine sellers are each selling multiples of that, I can see the same folks who were nervous about the SRD, GSL and OGL being a little nervous about putting those books (the D&D compatible ones, at least) alongside WotC's offerings.

Speaking as a DM, which is how I view 99% of D&D-related stuff, the MME is clearly much more useful for actually running games than most of the books WotC has put out since they took over the D&D brand. Now, the right response to a book like that is to do one themselves. But the easiest thing for WotC to do would be to erect artificial roadblocks to that competition, like technical issues delaying implementation and fiddly legal terms that make it hard for the more serious competitors to be on D&D Beyond alongside some of WotC's weaker offerings.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There's more to D&D than just 5e, and whether we like it or not WotC are the custodians of all of it.

After this spring, WotC aren't the real custodians of 5E any more. It belongs to everyone, via Creative Commons. Between Level Up, Tales of the Valiant and C7d20, it will be easy to be a 5E fan without ever touching anything belonging to WotC ever again.

It will be extremely interesting to see if those competing corebooks can make it onto D&D Beyond. The value to players and DMs will be through the roof, but that may well be seen as inviting the foxes into the henhouse.

 

[Parmandur]

I have never seen Monster Manual Expanded not be a top 10 seller at DMs Guild (I check there way more often than I'd like to admit), and it's one of the top 121 sellers on DMs Guild and 175 of all OneBookShelf sales of all time, as an Admantine seller, meaning it's sold at least 5,000 copies (honestly, it's probably much higher for each of those 175 books, as they all remain big sellers today).

WotC selling 5,000 or so copies of a book is probably a failure in their mind, but if we guess that the Admantine sellers are each selling multiples of that, I can see the same folks who were nervous about the SRD, GSL and OGL being a little nervous about putting those books (the D&D compatible ones, at least) alongside WotC's offerings.

Speaking as a DM, which is how I view 99% of D&D-related stuff, the MME is clearly much more useful for actually running games than most of the books WotC has put out since they took over the D&D brand. Now, the right response to a book like that is to do one themselves. But the easiest thing for WotC to do would be to erect artificial roadblocks to that competition, like technical issues delaying implementation and fiddly legal terms that make it hard for the more serious competitors to be on D&D Beyond alongside some of WotC's weaker offerings.

For the money people, a 3rd party product on DmsGuild or Beyond is free money, since WotC gets as much money from every sale as the creators.

For the D&D team, the business model is to get people into the 5E ecosystem, so in-system competition is always positive.