Beauty and Guile Are in the Eye of the Beholder!
We're excited to announce the bonuses you will receive for pre-ordering Xanathar's Guide to Everything on D&D Beyond:
Expanded Racial Feats*
You'll get access to 16 new racial feats for all the races available on D&D Beyond outside the Player's Handbook - from the aarakocra to the yuan-ti pureblood. Created by the D&D Beyond team, these feats can be used in your home games or as inspiration for your own upcoming homebrew racial feats.
Digital Character Sheet Customization
Get access to new digital character sheet image backgrounds and portrait frame options from artwork in Xanathar's Guide to Everything.
Alpha Access to the D&D Beyond Mobile App**
Get early alpha access to the D&D Beyond mobile app release later this year, which will include compendium/ reader offline access for all the sources you've unlocked on D&D Beyond. Be among the first to help us test an exciting part of D&D Beyond's future!
Xanathar's Guide to Everything releases on D&D Beyond on November 10th. Pre-order today!
Product Description
Explore a wealth of new rules options for both players and Dungeon Masters in this supplement for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.
The beholder Xanathar — Waterdeep’s most infamous crime lord — is known to hoard information on friend and foe alike. The beholder catalogs lore about adventurers and ponders methods to thwart them. Its twisted mind imagines that it can eventually record everything!
Xanathar's Guide to Everything is the first major expansion for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, offering new rules and story options:
- Over twenty-five new subclasses for the character classes in the Player’s Handbook, including the Cavalier for the fighter, the Circle of Dreams for the druid, the Horizon Walker for the ranger, the Inquisitive for the rogue, and many more.
- Dozens of new spells, a collection of racial feats, and a system to give your character a randomized backstory.
- A variety of tools that provide Dungeon Masters fresh ways to use traps, magic items, downtime activities, and more — all designed to enhance a D&D campaign and push it in new directions.
Amid all this expansion material, Xanathar offers bizarre observations about whatever its eyestalks happen to glimpse. Pray they don’t come to rest on you.
* - Expanded racial feats not available in Adventurers League play.
** - Limited to the first 10,000 pre-orders.
I’d pay twice the price for something like that.
So sorry for having an opinion guys.
Also: I am not sure I understand this comparison here "I understand that these books are fairly equivalent to DLC in video games...". Could you explain it to me, please?
Is this trying to incentivise the use of DDB? Hell yes it is, as it should, as it is without a doubt designed to, but I see nothing wrong with it, to be honest. It is not an "unfair advantage" of DDB against anything else (if anything, the price tag might be seen as that, but that's beyond [hahaha] the point), as anyone else selling digital versions of the WotC products (Roll20, FantasyGrounds) are perfectly free to use the SDL to create similar incentives (if we look at the feats and the customisation options of the character sheet). The mobile app is a different thing, but then again nothing stops Roll20 or FantasyGrounds to start developing a similar offer.
I would like to add to this as well, I was in another thread here and it was confirmed that all the Extra stuff is just early access everyone will eventually get the Feats and App, etc. No one is loosing out on anything !
Just to clarify the reason a lot of people have a negative reaction to preorder bonuses is because they're heavily associated with anti-consumer practices in the video game industry. There's been a lot of high profile cases in recent years of graphics that were downgraded from the screenshots and previews, clearly unfinished games, crippling technical issues at launch (often related to things no one wants like always online single player), and just outright awful AAA games. Meanwhile the big publishers really doubled down on sketchy pre-order marketing. It's not uncommon these days to know what the pre-order bonus for a game is when all we have is a vague announcement trailer. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's "Augment Your Pre-Order" campaign is probably the most notorious example of a sketchy marketing gimmick: It had tiers of content that got unlocked like a Kickstarter campaign, and there were multiple exclusive options you chose from each tier, eg: a digital comic or a digital novella, but you can't get both. This was so unpopular it got cancelled. Critics of this trend tend to be vehemently against pre-ordering games as a form of protest. There's also a whole other argument around if pre-order bonuses for digital content benefit anyone other than the publisher, but I won't get into that.
Personally these pre-order bonuses seem pretty tasteful. It's a good way to get alpha testers that are most likely invested in the platform. You WILL have at least a few vocal people complaining about the feats if they're not cheap/free for everyone at some point after launch.
TL;DR: Pre-order bonuses are a red flag for a lot of people because they've gotten burned in the past by a larger digital content industry with more developed marketing tactics.
I totally get the negative connotations behind preorders and such. However, in the video game industry, we (the consumers) have done this to ourselves. At every major game announcement there are constant posts across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media about "Remember [insert last failed AA launch]". Everyone posts about all the crap that happened and how they'll never preorder again, then they go and preorder. In that community, the consumers have no one to blame bu themselves.
In this community, however, there is rarely anything detrimental in preorder bonuses - if there even are bonuses attached to ordering early. I preordered the Critical Role Campaign Guide on Amazon and got nothing but a delayed release from everyone that ordered direct. Should I have ordered direct? Sure. But I didn't because I wanted that cheaper price and free shipping, and now I should have my book sometime soon. Those who preordered direct from publisher got a steep discount on the PDF version of the book for quicker review, if they so chose. Again, as you said, tasteful.
All of that said, this will likely get buried under the weight of the above, but I honestly can't wait for this! I happened to order on Amazon and DDB (I want that Mobile App access, yo!), so I'll be able to make full use of these things. I can't wait to make a Revenant Shadow Sorcerer, or an Aasamir Celestial Warlock, or multiclass my Variant Human as Shadow Sorcerer/Celestial Warlock for no reason other than it sounds cool and silly! There's a lot of cool things coming in this, and I think it'll really open up some cool option for my table. I am introducing my group to a new world, and some of these additional class options will really help make it seem wholly unique and alien.
@Iraski:
There's a reason I haven't purchased a new Video Game in... a great many years. I do believe Gears of War 3 was the last game I pre-ordered because of the destruction of that industry, and until recently, it was the last game I bought 'New' (thank you Gamestop), but I gave in and got Zelda Breath of the Wild. Otherwise, it's used-games only for me, because of Gamestop's return policy, that way if someone puts out garbage, I can return it.
Until I see that same sort of failure from the RPG industry, though, this is a completely different circumstance. One must be able to separate the suck of the video game industry's tactics, with the honest intent of just getting people to buy a (probably) already finished product.
Please don't do preorder nonsense that restricts content in the future, unless you plan to make those preorder feats available to the rest of us who can't preorder.