D&D Beyond is the official WotC digital ecosystem and, if you’re playing 5e, is the most integrated with the rules. The other digital TTRPG solutions, if I remember right, can’t have the same breadth of material due to copyright and licensing. A couple of the benefits of the platform, besides having all the official stuff potentially available, is the ability for a DM to share books so players don’t have to buy all their own and for people to buy select subclasses or other a la carte options.
D&D Beyond, I believe, does not yet have an actual digital tabletop but they’re working on making one to go with the new edition. Right now it’s more of a way to buy/share the printed material digitally. I don’t use it because I’m old and want my stuff in a format I can physically leaf through on my sofa but there isn’t really a digital equivalent to use instead and losing the a la carte option feels like a pretty big step back for the players if it’s true.
While I assume most game devs want to make money on their games, most aren’t beholden to shareholders in a giant toy & game company so motivations might differ a bit.
Motives aside, moving to a new edition and then making people buy the entire book rather than the previous ability to just buy the parts you need feels like a definite bad move for consumers. Especially since most of the rules are supposed to be cross-compatible so you’re getting a bunch of rules you don’t need if all you wanted was the new Warlock stuff. It’s an obvious squeeze that, if you want the new content, you have to get ALL the new content in the book. You don’t have to assume Evil Greed to say you’re getting a raw deal on the change.
I’m honestly surprised to learn that you could buy stuff a la carte like that, but I’ve never engaged with their online stuff since I see absolutely no reason to tie my hobby to a specific digital ecosystem.
Here’s my question, though: could you buy things a la carte from the core rulebooks, or was it restricted to later books?
Taking into account that I think it’s a bad consumer choice to be there at all, I don’t think it’s all that unreasonable to tell players that if they want to use the new system in their VTT, they have to buy the core rulebook.
Which of course is only the case if you’ve yoked yourself to their VTT. At the table, or even in a more flexible system like Roll20, you just say “I’m using the new warlock subclass - I don’t have the book but here are the details.”
The core books. If you only wanted to play a paladin, you could just buy the paladin section from the PHB.
But you wouldn’t have the details without the book unless you’re pirating it or using a site that breaks copyright. The new stuff isn’t automatically covered by SRD. Like I said before, they don’t even have a VTT yet – it’s a way to legally purchase the material in a digital format and integrate it with a digital character sheet for game play, but not a VTT system like Roll20. You could be using it while playing on Roll20 or a game on Discord or a tabletop game played on a real table top. Though they are launching a VTT soon to go with 6e
Got it. That makes the value proposition even more confusing to me, to be honest.
See this is games as a service bullshit (them, not you). The idea that playing a class when you don’t own the book yourself is pirating is flabbergasting when we’re talking about a pencil & paper hobby. Is it pirating if I’m playing an artificer even though I don’t own the book and am cribbing off of the guy sitting next to me, who does? WotC is trying to shift perspectives from D&D as a tabletop game to a subscription-based video game.
Which is of course the point, and it’s why WotC doesn’t do PDF sales. They want to be Apple, locking players into their garden. That’s bullshit whether they’re selling a la carte or not, and why I’d never recommended to a friend that they buy anything other than a physical copy of the book, where WotC has no say in how they engage with the product, even if they’re playing online.
5e, by the way, was absolutely excellent in terms of how they released substantive mechanical additions. With a few exceptions, they were mostly contained in just a few books so it wasn’t at all difficult to keep up. Very different from the 4e model of releasing one thousand official supplements that introduced more and more options until the (admittedly slick) digital tool was the only way to make sense of it all.
I hope they follow the same philosophy for this edition, and removing a la carte purchases implies to me that they will.
It’s the same value as buying books on Kindle or owning digital copies of console games instead of a hundred DVDs. Less shit in your house and less shit to carry to a game table. There’s some value in having it all integrated into a character sheet so you can easily click options to level up and you can search the rules by keyword, etc but I assume 95% of it for most people is just “Less stuff I gotta find a place for.”
But another value was, if you weren’t invested enough in the game to buy a $50 rule book, you could make a D&D Beyond account, pay $2 for the Paladin class for your character sheet and have what you needed. That’s no longer an option. If you want to have the revised paladin class integrated into your sheet, you need to buy the entire new book.
I get that it’s not for you. It ain’t for me either. I find digital versions of game materials much less satisfying to use or read for pleasure than actual physical books. But a lot of people DO use it and it makes sense as an “ecosystem” if you’re only playing 5e because it’s all right there. When I would run Adventurer League games, I saw a bunch of people, even new players, using their phones or tablets to access their characters through D&D Beyond. But even if you think it’s total stupidpants, it’s still objectively worse for the consumers to now have to buy a $50 book when they used to be able to buy a $2 class chapter.
Can’t argue with that at all, and raising the entry point for their ecosystem is definitely a loss for consumers. But I’m also not convinced that asking you to buy the entire core rulebook if you want to play via the app is explicitly anti- consumer.
Do we know if there will be a new SRD and, if so, what will be in it? Is current SRD content available for free in the 5e app or do you have to purchase those bits too?
Yeah, I’m not trying to argue that Hasbro/WotC is a monster, just that it sucks for people who use D&D Beyond that they’re changing it and think it’s obvious that they’re changing it to get maximum profit out of the rules change.
There will be a new SRD. We don’t know what’s in it. The old SRD and basic rules are free both on D&D Beyond and numerous other places (you can just download them). Based on what’s in the current SRD rules, I assume it’ll remain a chassis for the mechanical rules and then a few stripped down archetype options to get you into the game (Champion Fighter, Life Cleric, one type of each main race, etc).
That’s never been how anyone I know has played DND, though I recognize kids these days do it differently than I did.
Someone in your group had the book (or later on, an ebook) with whatever you wanted in it, they’d let you have a peek, you’d jot down the relevant info for gameplay on your character sheet (or later on if you were fancy you’d create a macro in Roll20) and that was that.
I understand the appeal of having a character sheet on the official DND website that you can add feats and spells and whatever to with a click. But it isn’t necessary for playing the game, nor is it worth paying a significant amount of money for, IMHO.
That’s the crux of it. I’ve heard all the grognard old man “Hur hur, what if the internet goes down and they can’t play but I have my notebook paper character sheet!” stuff about it but the fact remains that a lot – I’d wager “most” in my experience – of newer players do it that way.
Which is why it was good for people to NOT have to buy a whole book when they only needed a few pages from it.
I’m not even saying that - like I said, Roll20 has existed for over a decade.
If people managed to load up 3.5 character sheets, with all the feats and dozens of stacking +2s, into 3rd party programs manually - they can do it with the greatly simplified 5e characters.
Or they can pay out the ass for a WOTC logo. People do it for all kinds of other brands, so it doesn’t surprise me; I just don’t see the value there.
Again, $2 or $3 isn’t “out the ass”. It seems a reasonable price for what you get: official content automatically integrated into your sheet, easy-peasy. Which is why someone might be upset or disappointed if that’s no longer an option.
Well, yes- there is always a difference between having to make the single or partners happy in many game companies and having to account to shareholders.
Yesbut everything up to the new PHB is out there under the SRD.
If you want to play 5e or even 5e with enhancements from upcoming version, its is all there for free.,
That is not the way it will work for tabletop. It will likely be on the SRD - but even it is isnt one person buys the PHB and everyone can use whatever they want from that book. Online gaming is different of course, but still, you can play most online games using roll20 or whatever.
The issue is if you want to play a game through WotC.
I can buy most WotC products on Amazon through Digital Code.
Are you sure that wont be an option later? I mean the 6e PHB hasn’t even been released yet.
I mean complaining that this is the way WotC will do something before the product is even out seems premature.
I’m not “complaining” as I don’t personally care and won’t be affected. I’m not currently playing 5e and won’t be buying any 6e stuff. I said that, if what’s said in the video holds true and they don’t allow for a la carte purchasing than it’s a negative for those who DO use the service.
Geez, you mean a hater makes up bullshit based upon their bias rather than actual, you know- facts?
Hate for WotC vids and even channels are clickbait. One guy calling himself a “Professor” used to give out helpful DM advice until he found he can get a lot more clicks and thus $ by making up rumors and lies about WotC.
