In what way is that gauche? It's a couple more data points in favor of the hypothesis that the ultimate decision-making authority behind the events at WotC, and D&D Beyond by extension, have interests that are quite different from those of many users. I don't really know why this upsets you so. It's not like we're dancing on the proverbial graves of these folks jobs. Quite the contrary.
But I'll push back on that last point. Unless the character builder is upgraded along with the new VTT, it will be a bottleneck in its utility.
I'm more bemused by your priorities than "upset."
And the character builder will likely be updated along with the VTT rollout.
In what way is that gauche? It's a couple more data points in favor of the hypothesis that the ultimate decision-making authority behind the events at WotC, and D&D Beyond by extension, have interests that are quite different from those of many users. I don't really know why this upsets you so. It's not like we're dancing on the proverbial graves of these folks jobs. Quite the contrary.
But I'll push back on that last point. Unless the character builder is upgraded along with the new VTT, it will be a bottleneck in its utility.
I'm more bemused by your priorities than "upset."
And the character builder will likely be updated along with the VTT rollout.
This worries me more than excites me.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
And the character builder will likely be updated along with the VTT rollout.
My priority is being able to play the game, RAW as of 2014. I cannot yet do that fully in DDB. A fancy VTT with shiny new graphics won't change that fact.
I hope you're right, sincerely. But recent events lead some of us to doubt.
I feel so sorry for the new people coming in, realizing the site has problems with reports and feature requests dating four years or so back.
You make it sound like DnDBeyond has issues galore. For my group, we use it regularly and haven't identified any issues at all. It works great. I am aware of a few issues it has, but those are generally options only a few use.
My only issue with DnDBeyond is the lack of DM support. To be fair, however, there has been some work lately with that.
I'm glad the site has been working for your group and that it has so far met your needs. But just a quick 5 minute scroll through some of the Bugs & Support threads and you'll find the issues aren't few and have been persisting now for several years with zero intention of fixing them.
I wonder if any of the big names in the D&D house had any feedback for top management after it was released that the OGL was being revised? Could they have thought out loud that killing third party engagement might be the wrong way to grow the brand? Skyrim seemed to enjoy some extra legs embracing third party creators.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I wonder if any of the big names in the D&D house had any feedback for top management after it was released that the OGL was being revised? Could they have thought out loud that killing third party engagement might be the wrong way to grow the brand? Skyrim seemed to enjoy some extra legs embracing third party creators.
I wonder if any of the big names in the D&D house had any feedback for top management after it was released that the OGL was being revised? Could they have thought out loud that killing third party engagement might be the wrong way to grow the brand? Skyrim seemed to enjoy some extra legs embracing third party creators.
wotc has done a 180 in 12 months, or appears to be starting. The OGL nightmare, which in a normal business would have had the decision-makers who agreed to that fired, is apparently forgotten, and now, 3rd party material is starting to appear. For a DM, that is just more headaches, but for wotc, more income.
I don't see it as a 180, more of a 90 to let things settle and creep towards the grail that is a walled garden of profits. The OGL debacle was not about stopping 3rd party it was about monetizing 3rd party. Having 3rd party IP in the DDB store accomplishes this albeit without near the negation leverage.
Nothing WotC has done this year has shown a change of anything but the sheep's clothes on this particular wolf for me.
The letting go of employee's at this time is likely a stop gap to satiate the board and share holders with a good first quarter so they can continue down the path to the garden of profits. It is a horrible PR move regardless of the underlying reasons
Hey, you have to admit it's not like they're not doing any legwork bringing 3rd party sources to Beyond. It's quid pro quo; the 3rd party people get a lot more visibility and their material gets integrated with D&DB's infrastructure (a not inconsiderable draw for people who are already using Beyond for their characters/campaigns), and Wizards gets a cut of the sales. If you're gonna go casting aspersions on the model, you're gonna need to start giving dark looks to GrubHub and DoorDash too.
Hey, you have to admit it's not like they're not doing any legwork bringing 3rd party sources to Beyond. It's quid pro quo; the 3rd party people get a lot more visibility and their material gets integrated with D&DB's infrastructure (a not inconsiderable draw for people who are already using Beyond for their characters/campaigns), and Wizards gets a cut of the sales. If you're gonna go casting aspersions on the model, you're gonna need to start giving dark looks to GrubHub and DoorDash too.
Hell they added Tal'dorei to Maps even, and given all the Drakkenheim promos that's probably not far behind. They could have easily said "first-party only!"
In short, Hasbro sucks, but there are good people trying to do good things in spite of them.
That 3rd party material in the char builder is the nightmare scenario for a DM. We all know that is the process it would naturally follow, but is still brutal for a DM, as they now have to curate and cull even more stuff that players bring to the table to avoid wildly OP PC's.
Examples of wildly OP PCs from third party material in the character builder?
That 3rd party material in the char builder is the nightmare scenario for a DM. We all know that is the process it would naturally follow, but is still brutal for a DM, as they now have to curate and cull even more stuff that players bring to the table to avoid wildly OP PC's.
Examples of wildly OP PCs from third party material in the character builder?
I doubt he has any. He says that about all the newer official stuff, too.
The curation problem is real, even if it has nothing to do with stuff being "overpowered". A GM's current ability to control what their players can use from the pool of "everything anyone in the game has, including stuff they added to their homebrew collection" is limited to telling their players to turn off various toggles when they make their character.
The lack of granularity means that if you're allowing anything from under a toggle, potentially anything can come in, and it's not obvious to the players what the source is. So, if you're running a Theros game, Strixhaven stuff can seep in. (And some of the main-book stuff requires you to turn on secondary source toggles.) And Forgotten Realms stuff is just there, and if you use any homebrew, you get All! The! Homebrew!
And this is genuinely a hard problem, especially since I'm sure the backend has no support for it at all. If they're rebuilding the backend for the new rules revision, I hope they're including support for this.
Edit: Actually, the backend does support granular access control, because you have to buy stuff. It's still not a trivial operation, but it's probably less hard than I initially thought. The homebrew problem remains. (Give each campaign its own homebrew collection.)
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
It's not that easy, though. Players that I play with aren't that savvy with what content comes from what book (and I can't always remember off the top of my head. Both from a DM and a player POV, I'd much rather just have a curated list of what's allowed and say "have at it". This should really be one of the strengths of using digital media, but instead it's easier to do it with physical copies. It's really nice with spells that I don't have to look spells up and find out if the spell can be used by my class or not, unlike with cards, and a similar thing with campaign-acceptable content would be appreciated.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I'm thinking DDB/WotC is likely curating which products get put into DDB's marketplace. Tal D'L'oreal or whatever and the Ghostfire stuff make a lot of sense, as people involved in those products also have a history with DDB and/or WotC. There's some trust there that they're all playing at "the same level" and I don't think DDB/WotC wants to put on content that will be "game breaking" especially as such game breaking mechanics may not be compatible with future digital features. I think WotC/DDB will be selective about what comes online in the marketplace, favoring/trusting publishers who design material with fidelity to RAW. Ghostfire is very much up that alley, as is CR content. I don't see anything in either's catalog that breaks the game or power creeps it or whatever. Rather the Ghostfire stuff especially the sort of lair book (coming online just when MCDM's 5e Lair Book is starting to ship to backers) we're really seeing something that fills the gap for people who liked the Ravensloft book and wanted to see more of it, more tool boxes for putting gothic elements, a very broad field, into their play.
Circling back to layoffs, I've seen a few people online, most of whom had some experience doing work for hire for WotC, who see the layoffs as a harbinger of the D&D studio being more of a management system and creative work will be produced out of house after the new cores come out. As precedent they point to how the Tyranny of Dragons books, one of 5e's earliest campaigns was actually written by Kobold Press, they said "most" of the early adventures were actually written by 3rd party studios, but I only know about ToD for sure.
I think part of the issue may be mgmt and maybe the studio itself feels "stale". The revision was supposed to have more snap to it, but it seems like folks will be getting something a lot more familiar to them. There's also surveys where there's an unknown to us percentage of people who claim to use 5e and have the core but spend more money on third party products than they do official WotC D&D after the core. No one here can do more than speculate on that front, but I could see them seeing the only way to make this digital leap truly viable for D&D under WotC's stewardship is to grant 3rd party writers more license to the D&D marketplace (and from there I think we see what that NDA and wild percentage fees may have been really about).
I don't know how much I buy into the above theory. It's interesting, and I don't think it's entirely implausible that this is part of what's currently going on with D&D; but I don't think the truth is totally this or totally walled garden arguments, etc. A property that's D&D big is more complicated than those broad stroke assertions allow. But it's something to think about.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
It's not that easy, though. Players that I play with aren't that savvy with what content comes from what book (and I can't always remember off the top of my head. Both from a DM and a player POV, I'd much rather just have a curated list of what's allowed and say "have at it". This should really be one of the strengths of using digital media, but instead it's easier to do it with physical copies. It's really nice with spells that I don't have to look spells up and find out if the spell can be used by my class or not, unlike with cards, and a similar thing with campaign-acceptable content would be appreciated.
Some sort of citation/annotation in the DDB character sheet would be awesome. When you hover over a spell or item or feature for the box text explainer, the end text would have some sort of parenthetical citation. Maybe even have different tiers (official, trusted 3rd party, experimental 3rd party, homebrew) font colors or indicia. I don't know how hard that is to implement other than tediously putting in the citations to everything. Would definitely help the DM: "where did you find this" Player: "it was on the menu" discussions. Might be easier than the granular control DMs, including me, have be clamoring for.
Until a content sharing solution that the DM has control over books allowed in the campaign no mater who enables the sharing is provided on DDB, it is up to the DM and share enabler to make sure the books allowed by the DM are the only ones shared(if you are not the DM in the campaign and enable sharing you can not filter shared books, that is bad! just tested this.)
If you can't rely on the players to do their home work when building their characters, or if you can't trust the players to stick to that, that sucks, and I doubt I would play with them, I know there are instances where that is not an ideal situation, but for me it is always an acceptable option.
Even if you are the DM, have sharing enabled and filtered a player can use their own content to build a character so I doubt a better content sharing set up would stop anyone that wanted to use what they own. It would be nice for new players that have no idea and are making honest mistakes.
And the solution to that is a master tier sub and turn on sharing yourself when you create the campaign. If it will help your game it is ~$5 a month if your on the free tier, and ~$3 a month if you have the hero tier. Just depends on which is more work for you and your campaign.
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
It's not that easy, though. Players that I play with aren't that savvy with what content comes from what book (and I can't always remember off the top of my head. Both from a DM and a player POV, I'd much rather just have a curated list of what's allowed and say "have at it". This should really be one of the strengths of using digital media, but instead it's easier to do it with physical copies. It's really nice with spells that I don't have to look spells up and find out if the spell can be used by my class or not, unlike with cards, and a similar thing with campaign-acceptable content would be appreciated.
Some sort of citation/annotation in the DDB character sheet would be awesome. When you hover over a spell or item or feature for the box text explainer, the end text would have some sort of parenthetical citation. Maybe even have different tiers (official, trusted 3rd party, experimental 3rd party, homebrew) font colors or indicia. I don't know how hard that is to implement other than tediously putting in the citations to everything. Would definitely help the DM: "where did you find this" Player: "it was on the menu" discussions. Might be easier than the granular control DMs, including me, have be clamoring for.
They do have this for some of the character sheet proficiencies & languages, feats and traits, spells. Weapons and items can be looked up fairly easily in the sub menus under the game rules tab on DDB. I still think all but new players should do this themselves and it should be in the character creator if you the DM can't control books shared.
Winged frogs come to mind.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I'm more bemused by your priorities than "upset."
And the character builder will likely be updated along with the VTT rollout.
This worries me more than excites me.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
My priority is being able to play the game, RAW as of 2014. I cannot yet do that fully in DDB. A fancy VTT with shiny new graphics won't change that fact.
I hope you're right, sincerely. But recent events lead some of us to doubt.
I'm glad the site has been working for your group and that it has so far met your needs. But just a quick 5 minute scroll through some of the Bugs & Support threads and you'll find the issues aren't few and have been persisting now for several years with zero intention of fixing them.
Free Content: [Basic Rules],
[Phandelver],[Frozen Sick],[Acquisitions Inc.],[Vecna Dossier],[Radiant Citadel], [Spelljammer],[Dragonlance], [Prisoner 13],[Minecraft],[Star Forge], [Baldur’s Gate], [Lightning Keep], [Stormwreck Isle], [Pinebrook], [Caverns of Tsojcanth], [The Lost Horn], [Elemental Evil].Free Dice: [Frostmaiden],
[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].Doubt is healthy, doubt away.
@FossMaNo1: Agreed
I wonder if any of the big names in the D&D house had any feedback for top management after it was released that the OGL was being revised? Could they have thought out loud that killing third party engagement might be the wrong way to grow the brand? Skyrim seemed to enjoy some extra legs embracing third party creators.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
They also tried to kill them.
To paraphrase a poster above, corporations gonna corporate.
I don't see it as a 180, more of a 90 to let things settle and creep towards the grail that is a walled garden of profits. The OGL debacle was not about stopping 3rd party it was about monetizing 3rd party. Having 3rd party IP in the DDB store accomplishes this albeit without near the negation leverage.
Nothing WotC has done this year has shown a change of anything but the sheep's clothes on this particular wolf for me.
The letting go of employee's at this time is likely a stop gap to satiate the board and share holders with a good first quarter so they can continue down the path to the garden of profits. It is a horrible PR move regardless of the underlying reasons
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Hey, you have to admit it's not like they're not doing any legwork bringing 3rd party sources to Beyond. It's quid pro quo; the 3rd party people get a lot more visibility and their material gets integrated with D&DB's infrastructure (a not inconsiderable draw for people who are already using Beyond for their characters/campaigns), and Wizards gets a cut of the sales. If you're gonna go casting aspersions on the model, you're gonna need to start giving dark looks to GrubHub and DoorDash too.
I do love the third party being on DDB and in the character builder.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Hell they added Tal'dorei to Maps even, and given all the Drakkenheim promos that's probably not far behind. They could have easily said "first-party only!"
In short, Hasbro sucks, but there are good people trying to do good things in spite of them.
Examples of wildly OP PCs from third party material in the character builder?
Neutral Good
Characters in active campaigns:
Rowan Wood elf, 10 Circle of Stars Druid
Wyll Forest Gnome, 4 Divination Wizard
I doubt he has any. He says that about all the newer official stuff, too.
The curation problem is real, even if it has nothing to do with stuff being "overpowered". A GM's current ability to control what their players can use from the pool of "everything anyone in the game has, including stuff they added to their homebrew collection" is limited to telling their players to turn off various toggles when they make their character.
The lack of granularity means that if you're allowing anything from under a toggle, potentially anything can come in, and it's not obvious to the players what the source is. So, if you're running a Theros game, Strixhaven stuff can seep in. (And some of the main-book stuff requires you to turn on secondary source toggles.) And Forgotten Realms stuff is just there, and if you use any homebrew, you get All! The! Homebrew!
And this is genuinely a hard problem, especially since I'm sure the backend has no support for it at all. If they're rebuilding the backend for the new rules revision, I hope they're including support for this.
Edit: Actually, the backend does support granular access control, because you have to buy stuff. It's still not a trivial operation, but it's probably less hard than I initially thought. The homebrew problem remains. (Give each campaign its own homebrew collection.)
Agreed, the appropriate solution then is to grant individual DM's finer control over what is or isn't allowed in their particular campaigns. Claiming 3rd party material is a 'nightmare scenario' for reasons that would apply to any other 1st party source is absurd.
Free Content: [Basic Rules],
[Phandelver],[Frozen Sick],[Acquisitions Inc.],[Vecna Dossier],[Radiant Citadel], [Spelljammer],[Dragonlance], [Prisoner 13],[Minecraft],[Star Forge], [Baldur’s Gate], [Lightning Keep], [Stormwreck Isle], [Pinebrook], [Caverns of Tsojcanth], [The Lost Horn], [Elemental Evil].Free Dice: [Frostmaiden],
[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].Exactly. Plus there's only so many technical fixes to people-problems. If a DM doesn't want someone to use certain books or to ask permission for 3pp material, just tell the players that. No need for complicated extra coding and user interfaces as long as sources are shown when making choices in the character builder.
Just talk with the players. If the group can't come to an agreement, then no amount of code is going to solve that problem.
But this is admittedly getting a bit astray from the topic of the layoffs.
It's not that easy, though. Players that I play with aren't that savvy with what content comes from what book (and I can't always remember off the top of my head. Both from a DM and a player POV, I'd much rather just have a curated list of what's allowed and say "have at it". This should really be one of the strengths of using digital media, but instead it's easier to do it with physical copies. It's really nice with spells that I don't have to look spells up and find out if the spell can be used by my class or not, unlike with cards, and a similar thing with campaign-acceptable content would be appreciated.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Couple of things on the third party tangent.
I'm thinking DDB/WotC is likely curating which products get put into DDB's marketplace. Tal D'L'oreal or whatever and the Ghostfire stuff make a lot of sense, as people involved in those products also have a history with DDB and/or WotC. There's some trust there that they're all playing at "the same level" and I don't think DDB/WotC wants to put on content that will be "game breaking" especially as such game breaking mechanics may not be compatible with future digital features. I think WotC/DDB will be selective about what comes online in the marketplace, favoring/trusting publishers who design material with fidelity to RAW. Ghostfire is very much up that alley, as is CR content. I don't see anything in either's catalog that breaks the game or power creeps it or whatever. Rather the Ghostfire stuff especially the sort of lair book (coming online just when MCDM's 5e Lair Book is starting to ship to backers) we're really seeing something that fills the gap for people who liked the Ravensloft book and wanted to see more of it, more tool boxes for putting gothic elements, a very broad field, into their play.
Circling back to layoffs, I've seen a few people online, most of whom had some experience doing work for hire for WotC, who see the layoffs as a harbinger of the D&D studio being more of a management system and creative work will be produced out of house after the new cores come out. As precedent they point to how the Tyranny of Dragons books, one of 5e's earliest campaigns was actually written by Kobold Press, they said "most" of the early adventures were actually written by 3rd party studios, but I only know about ToD for sure.
I think part of the issue may be mgmt and maybe the studio itself feels "stale". The revision was supposed to have more snap to it, but it seems like folks will be getting something a lot more familiar to them. There's also surveys where there's an unknown to us percentage of people who claim to use 5e and have the core but spend more money on third party products than they do official WotC D&D after the core. No one here can do more than speculate on that front, but I could see them seeing the only way to make this digital leap truly viable for D&D under WotC's stewardship is to grant 3rd party writers more license to the D&D marketplace (and from there I think we see what that NDA and wild percentage fees may have been really about).
I don't know how much I buy into the above theory. It's interesting, and I don't think it's entirely implausible that this is part of what's currently going on with D&D; but I don't think the truth is totally this or totally walled garden arguments, etc. A property that's D&D big is more complicated than those broad stroke assertions allow. But it's something to think about.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Some sort of citation/annotation in the DDB character sheet would be awesome. When you hover over a spell or item or feature for the box text explainer, the end text would have some sort of parenthetical citation. Maybe even have different tiers (official, trusted 3rd party, experimental 3rd party, homebrew) font colors or indicia. I don't know how hard that is to implement other than tediously putting in the citations to everything. Would definitely help the DM: "where did you find this" Player: "it was on the menu" discussions. Might be easier than the granular control DMs, including me, have be clamoring for.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Until a content sharing solution that the DM has control over books allowed in the campaign no mater who enables the sharing is provided on DDB,
it is up to the DM and share enabler to make sure the books allowed by the DM are the only ones shared(if you are not the DM in the campaign and enable sharing you can not filter shared books, that is bad! just tested this.)If you can't rely on the players to do their home work when building their characters, or if you can't trust the players to stick to that, that sucks, and I doubt I would play with them, I know there are instances where that is not an ideal situation, but for me it is always an acceptable option.
Even if you are the DM, have sharing enabled and filtered a player can use their own content to build a character so I doubt a better content sharing set up would stop anyone that wanted to use what they own. It would be nice for new players that have no idea and are making honest mistakes.
And the solution to that is a master tier sub and turn on sharing yourself when you create the campaign. If it will help your game it is ~$5 a month if your on the free tier, and ~$3 a month if you have the hero tier. Just depends on which is more work for you and your campaign.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
They do have this for some of the character sheet proficiencies & languages, feats and traits, spells. Weapons and items can be looked up fairly easily in the sub menus under the game rules tab on DDB. I still think all but new players should do this themselves and it should be in the character creator if you the DM can't control books shared.
Winged frogs come to mind.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.