- cross-posted to:
- dnd@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- dnd@lemmy.world
D&D books are still available by themselves from your friendly local game store. You can find them at Target, Amazon, and beyond as well. But the community seems concerned about WotC’s move towards a more digital D&D.
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THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE MAJORITY OF THE COMMUNITY ASKED FOR. For years after D&D Beyond launched the community by and large asked “Why don’t I get a digital copy of the book when I buy the paper copy?” The answer was, because D&D Beyond only licensed the books and was not owned by Wizards of the Coast.
When WOTC bought D&D Beyond the community asked, “Will we finally get digital copies when we buy a physical copy?” And when WOTC said yes, the community rejoiced.
Now that WOTC is making good on said promise, people have to write articles about how it’s concerning behavior?
The big issue is that not every copy of the PHB will just come with a code for D&DBeyond out of the box. The bundle deals (which are $10/15€ more expensive than the retail book price) are only available from wizards directly, screwing over your FLGS.
And then there’s of course the obvious issue of D&D Beyond being insanely expensive from the start.
They are hiking the prices of books across the board, is assume books will start coming with codes no matter where you buy them. But that’s just an assumption.
As for the cost of Beyond, no additional payment is required to use your digital books. They are the only part of Beyond I have ever used.
Physical books will always be > than digital ones. We need a truly open source and democratised D&D alternative.
Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions, I didn’t realise there were so many! Imma look at open5e more :)
There are multiple.
To add to mummelpuffins comment:
For 5e there is https://open5e.com/, although that is under the OGL.
But for B/X and other OSR-systems there are whole lot more, I think. Basic Fantasy RPG is with it’s 4th edition OGL-free:
For 5e there is https://open5e.com/, although that is under the OGL.
Didn’t WOTC end up releasing that under a creative commons license?
Yeah, but I think after the original scare a lot of people want to be as independent and free from WotC as possible.
That doesn’t make it less open source, though.
It’s important to understand that those rules are now perpetually open and free to use/copy/modify. WotC truly relinquished any chance of trying to claw them back.
6e is just going to be a video game. And a buggy one at that.
It’s possible, but I doubt that WotC would ever release it unpolished. They alienated a big part of their hardcore audience and don’t seem very concerned about keeping anyone left. So it’s safe to assume that they are banking on getting new players from their “VTT” videogame. And for that to happen they can’t deliver something unfinished.
As someone who both used Magic Online and Mtg Arena I don’t trust WotC putting out anything digital that isn’t a total mess tbh.
To explin my thought process a bit here, there are rumors that their recent OneDND rules changes are designed to make it easier to implement an “DND Beyond AI Dungeon Master™” which they’d make part of their DND Beyond virtual tabletop. Also, because they seemed really possessive of the rights to animate DND spells, it sounds like they may be intending to make DND Beyond VTT the only immersive VTT experience in town.
Which (again if rumors are true) makes it feel like they might be trying to make the next edition more MMORPG-ish and less TTRPG-ish. Or at least trying to straddle the line between those.
Plus, I don’t think LLM’s are up to the task of DM’ing yet. So if they go that direction, I expect some really weird interactions with “DND Beyond AI Dungeon Master™.” Which is why I say it’ll be “buggy.”
I also expect if these are their plans, they’re way to far in and the big wigs’ egos are far too committed to back out now.
But also, given the Hasbro big wigs’ track record of making terrible decisions lately, I wouldn’t put rushing a buggy video game out past them.
Well, the part where wizards are making a videogame and not a ttrpg is something we agree on. I just think it’s not just c-suite people’s ego that’s on the line - the survival of the dnd branch kinda hinges on this game bringing new people in to replace their old fans. So they are incentivized to try their hardest to make something very polished and they seem to be trying.
I’m mostly basing this on info from Stephen Glicker from Roll for Combat who worked in the dev industry and is familiar with people in it. He said on stream that WotC hired a lot of very experinced (and expensive) additional developers, on top of their existing team. It would be very very dumb to spend all this money to release an unfinished product, considering that there isn’t really any urgency. That said I can totally see those big wigs being this dumb.
I also am curious with how they intend to fit the whole AI DM thing into this. I agree with you that currently it can be unreliable and I doubt that it can be brought to expected quality. Personally, I think they would rather quietly abandon that idea and just make conventional videogame AI rather than risk releasing an inconsistent product. I guess we’ll see.
Hardly surprising. Wotc wants to go all in on digital. Time will tell how that will play out for them…
…I am concerned about that. I would expect player handbooks to be the last thing you’d want exclusively digital, since most of them are hard to read on a cheap e-reader, and they’re already expensive. Does WotC think people are going to buy the book and a tablet or laptop to view it? And then bring said hardware to a session? Does WotC not understand that some people like to play outdoors?
I guess, as the article says, it’s their push to make everyone play online, but I feel like it’s not a good move for them to try to compete with the kind of online RPGs that have always been digital. That’s not an easy market to get into, and it doesn’t matter how much money is in a market if your company isn’t equipped to succeed there.
Since most of them are hard to read on a cheap e-reader
This right here is the actual problem. Everyone’s got the text but no one makes Epubs because it’s easier to just release the PDF you made for whoever printed the book.
I have zero interest in the micro-transaction VTT that WoTC seems to be moving towards. If they quit supporting pencil & paper tables, we’ll stick with 5e/pf2e
I imagine they’ll make giant fistfuls of money though. Lowing the bar to play by having the server deal with the crunch, gee-whiz graphics, customizable avatars … I suspect they’ll onboard a bunch of Fortnite kids who are used to paying for skins.
Get off my lawn. We used to play D&D uphill.
