You Can't Buy Physical-Only D&D Books From WotC Anymore
www.belloflostsouls.net
Wizards of the Coast seems to no longer be selling solely physical copies of their books from their online store. Hybrid bundles are still up though.

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.

  • TootSweet@latte.isnot.coffeeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • AlexisLuna@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.