Good evening all,

Hope your week is treating you well. I wanted to come on here and put out some thoughts regarding the most recent announcements from WotC and DDB. Specifically regarding the VTT aspect of this ambitious new plan. 

On the whole, and from the business side of things all of this makes sense. D&D is going to be *the* TTRPG for the next decade easily. I have some concerns though, and I wanted to raise them here. Since it seems WotC is going to confidently corner the VTT market and really push people into playing on their VTT.

To start, my group and I have spent a ton of money on Roll 20 purchases for our campaigns over the years. Not just WotC content, honestly, rarely WotC content, but one shots, tokens, spell icons, maps, and so on from third parties. And three of our five members DM, all the DMs have become extremely comfortable on R20 and intuitively know how it works, along with the players. Having to learn a new VTT isn't going to be all that great and we're not eager to jump ship and lose those purchases. In order for WotC to capture players like us, they're going to have to do a couple of things.

• Setting up games, sheets, maps, stat blocks, sessions, ect. needs to be extremely simple to learn and not restrictive

• There needs to be a 2D version, and there needs to be the ability to import art assets and third party resources

• Character creator needs to be extremely extremely robust and customizable

• Dynamic lighting/field of view needs to be functional and easy to setup

• There needs to be a third party shop actively available on D&D Beyond where people can purchase those third party materials

• All aspects of character sheets (AC, spell casting modifier, stats, items, race, class, ect.) need to be completely customizable by the players/DM. If I can't set STR as my spell casting stat in the same way I can WIS, then they're too restrictive.

• Homebrew needs to be fully supported

The biggest factor here that will determine if groups like mine jump over to this platform is how they support our ability to play the game the way we want to and not the way WotC wants us to play. If we feel like they're going to be too intrusive and not allow us to make the game we want to play, we won't come over. Basically, we want the Lego set to come in all of it's pieces and we want to put it together. We don't want to have it come pre-built in the shape of a castle. We want to build the castle. Even if the castle is lopsided and looks funny to WotC. 

I don't think WotC is going to feel particularly compelled to provide third-party content for sale on DDB or offer unlimited homebrew customization so you can build a class that casts spells using dexterity.

It does not sound like you were really interested in WotC products before (by your own admission). Providing all of that you had listed does nothing to address the barrier you listed of all the money invested into Roll20 either. It makes me wonder if this list of items would make a difference to your desire to use DDB even if WotC was moved enough by this OP to provide them. Does Roll20 do all the things that you are asking for? It has been so long since I used it, I honestly can no longer remember.

Quote from Erik_Soong >>

...Providing all of that you had listed does nothing to address the barrier you listed of all the money invested into Roll20 either. It makes me wonder if this list of items would make a difference to your desire to use DDB even if WotC was moved enough by this OP to provide them. Does Roll20 do all the things that you are asking for? It has been so long since I used it, I honestly can no longer remember.

 I think the point is that the new VTT has to be attractive enough to make it worth reinvesting in the same materials so they can use them in the new VTT. The DDBVVT can't just be on a par with or only slightly better than Roll20 if they want to attract R20 customers. Think about it, who, after having spent hundreds getting everything for Roll20 will spend hundreds again to get all that on DDBVTT if DDBVVT only offers the same things or only a slight improvement?

That said, I have found (admittedly anecdotally) that there most players are one of two kinds - those like me who buy and use mostly official stuff, and those that barely buy any at all.

Those of us who buy mostly WotC stuff might dabble a bit in homebrew or 3rd party stuff, but the vast majority of our stuff is WotC and we wouldn't really miss the other things if we couldn't use them. Were the profitable ones. Then the other kind only buy the minimal official things. Core rules, perhaps. Everything else comes from homebrew or 3rd party. Adventures, subclasses, races...they're not paid for (at least, not paid for to WotC), which is fine, but they're not all profitable.

Being able to use homebrew or 3rd party stuff could be expensive to implement and mostly be attractive to the second group, the ones that won't open their wallet as much. Depending on how they go about integrating character sheets and the VTT, I'm not sure whether they would make it easy to use non-WotC materials.

Yeah, asking Beyond to open up their platform like that is like asking Apple to open up their platform, it is not going to happen. If you really want to game, you want to get a Windows PC, not a Mac, and definitely not an iPhone. If you are really into playing TTRPGs as a whole, stick with a generic VTT platform.

You can homebrew in DnD beyond. What I see the new VTT doing is integrating directly with DnD beyond, one rules engine to maintain and manage and develop is just efficient. This means that anything you own in DnD Beyond will be available to use in the new VTT, it also means that anything you or anyone else home brews can be used. So that will cover most things. 

Another thing that has been ignored, or just not understood is that many of the VTT and other 3rd party solutions out there with a licence to sell 5th ed content, have a contract for just that 5th edition. By releasing a new edition in 2024 Wizards can just blanket say that yes, all 5th edition licenses are still valid but anything for the new edition is DnD products only. Meaning Roll 20 etc will no longer have access to the new material. 

There's another 3D VTT just been announced on Kickstarter.

I can't see them ever really taking off - the amount of work required to create anything homebrew would be extreme - especially for homebrew monsters.

The 3D view will also remove even more of the "theatre of the mind" aspects that a 2D VTT removes - relying less and less on people's imaginations to picture any particular scene.

It takes long enough to prep a 2D campaign on a VTT, never mind all the additional prep required of a 3D scene.

Quote from Linklite >>

Quote from Erik_Soong >>

...Providing all of that you had listed does nothing to address the barrier you listed of all the money invested into Roll20 either. It makes me wonder if this list of items would make a difference to your desire to use DDB even if WotC was moved enough by this OP to provide them. Does Roll20 do all the things that you are asking for? It has been so long since I used it, I honestly can no longer remember.

 I think the point is that the new VTT has to be attractive enough to make it worth reinvesting in the same materials so they can use them in the new VTT. The DDBVVT can't just be on a par with or only slightly better than Roll20 if they want to attract R20 customers. Think about it, who, after having spent hundreds getting everything for Roll20 will spend hundreds again to get all that on DDBVTT if DDBVVT only offers the same things or only a slight improvement?

That said, I have found (admittedly anecdotally) that there most players are one of two kinds - those like me who buy and use mostly official stuff, and those that barely buy any at all.

Those of us who buy mostly WotC stuff might dabble a bit in homebrew or 3rd party stuff, but the vast majority of our stuff is WotC and we wouldn't really miss the other things if we couldn't use them. Were the profitable ones. Then the other kind only buy the minimal official things. Core rules, perhaps. Everything else comes from homebrew or 3rd party. Adventures, subclasses, races...they're not paid for (at least, not paid for to WotC), which is fine, but they're not all profitable.

Being able to use homebrew or 3rd party stuff could be expensive to implement and mostly be attractive to the second group, the ones that won't open their wallet as much. Depending on how they go about integrating character sheets and the VTT, I'm not sure whether they would make it easy to use non-WotC materials.

 You've a lot right, but I wanted to provide some clarity. There is the 2D side of it which is important and needs to be supported. That aside, I wanted to address the idea that we don't open our wallets as often. That's not accurate, we just don't open our wallets as often *for* WotC. 

Let me explain. Books packed with character options and Stat blocks we do pick up. PHB, DMG, XGE, Tasha, ect. Are all things we do pay for from WotC because we do want to pay them for their products. What we don't do is buy every module released. We do buy modules as we want to play them, like Water deep, Mad Mage, and Strahd but won't we don't do is buy the modules that are just adventures only. That's a lot of money for content that we don't need. Especially considering the fact that we have three different home brew campaigns that different members of our group are working on. What we do open our wallets for though is maps, map effects, tokens, one shots, spell effects for our maps, and so on. Things that we can use and utilize in our campaigns. And while they're small purchases, they do add up quickly. Spell effect tokens were about $10, one shots can range from $3 to $10, maps can go for $1 - $25 depending on the pack you buy.

The reality is WotC can't meet what all we want in our campaigns. What's the chance that they've made a one-shot or a map that's going to mesh well with our campaign? Minimal at best. What's the chance a 3rd party has made something that works for the campaign? Extremely high.

My thought process is, this is an opportunity for WotC to capture funds that they wouldn't otherwise get. 

Imagine a third party shop integrated into DDB where WotC fully supported these creators and maybe got a few percent of the cut when they made a sale? Even if it's just 1% that's still a ton of revenue they would not see otherwise for content that they hand no hand in making. 

You're assuming that there's either no cost to WotC for doing that or that it's low enough to be worth the slight boost in revenue that might accompany it.  The data necessary to make such a determination isn't available.