First of all: yes, I know. These are stupid, nobody except other community people with no voice and no influence reads 'open letters'. Chris Cao and his corhorts will never see this message. But I have to try. Because you know what? They were right. D&D is undermonetized. Too many people are too proud of never spending a single dime in support of their hobby, crowing about how they use free services and their friends' purchases to do all their D&D. It's not fair to ask the forever DM of any given group to be the only person buying any resources, players need to chip in too. If you profess to love D&D, then you should've been tossing the team a few bucks when you could instead of being actively proud of never supporting the game you claim to hold so dear.
But this mobile-game money vampire shit isn't the way.
I've been arguing for a stance of moderation ever since the first "Apology' blog post. [REDACTED] What I believe is that informed, diligent passion can make a difference. It already has. We've brought them, at least in part, to the bargaining table, and it's time to bargain. But first and foremost, D&D has to bargain with the players. Chris Cao, you are betting that you can trade us in for a flock of casual mobile-game [REDACTED] who've never cared about D&D before and don't intend to start. You are actively sinking this hobby, deciding that the players you have aren't good enough and you want the players you've already victimized in the past with exhorbitant and predatory mobile-gaming monetization. You've got Hasbro backing you because they're desperate for revenue and they're willing to gamble on you turning D&D into a mobile gaming fad that'll bring a huge burst of revenue in the short term.
But you're sacrificing the future of the game to do it.
Nobody is going to care about this Digital Experience you're aiming for. It doesn't help people tell stories. It doesn't help people make memories. It's a Skinner box, because all you know how to make is Skinner boxes. Selling skins and FX and XP boosters and whatever else, demanding your two dollars here, five dollars there, twenty dollars the other for an empty, meaningless experience no one will care about or remember even just a month after they pony up. That's not D&D. It's never been D&D. And once you trade away the core of passionate players who love this game and use it to tell stories and make memories for a bunch of casual mobile-gaming fad chasers, you don't get to trade-backsies. Paizo is positioning themselves to scoop up all the people you're pawning off, and as much as I dislike Pathfinder and find it a tedious, annoying 3.5-y slog of too many modifiers and too-large numbers? I'll learn that dumb game and play it before I commit to a D&D branded Skinner box with absolutely no objective whatsoever except to part me from as much of my money as it can while offering me nothing in return.
[REDACTED] Freebooters need to ante [REDACTED] up and help support their game if they want it to survive. Sell more digital dice, sell character sheet cosmetics packs. Sell subscriptions to the website, and put stricter limits on content sharing. You wanna give Master subscribers only one content sharing channel and charge us another fifty bucks a year for more sharing? Charge per campaign instead of per player for content sharing? Fine. That's fair. Hell, you want to put the same limit on homebrew you do on characters? Five subclasses, five magic items, five spells, etc. per free account? Go ahead. Too many people use free homebrew to sidestep having to buy resources here on the website anyways, I understand why you'd want to limit it even if I don't agree. You wanna be straight with us for once in your life and just outright say "We can't keep making D&D if only one person in every five to eight players buys stuff"? Do it up. Because you're right. That's not fair.
But don't turn D&D into a mobile gacha Skinner box. Nobody likes those. They're a stain on humanity, something we as a species should be ashamed of having invented, and they only ever bring misery.
I've spent hundreds of dollars on this website even though I only occasionally DM. I've preordered most of my books even though preordering is a terrible mistake. I've bought (one set of) digital dice, and I still have my subscription running even though it's been real close a time or two. I am not a freebooter asking for more handouts. I am a customer of D&D, asking you not to take away the thing I love and paid for in favor of a mobile gaming model nobody asked for so a bunch of people who don't care about D&D can spend six months buying a bunch of gacha shit before flitting off to the next big mobile craze.
Please. There has to be a better way to get more people to pay their shot than this.
Yes, we ****ed up. Freebooters need to ante the **** up and help support their game if they want it to survive. Sell more digital dice, sell character sheet cosmetics packs. Sell subscriptions to the website, and put stricter limits on content sharing. You wanna give Master subscribers only one content sharing channel and charge us another fifty bucks a year for more sharing? Charge per campaign instead of per player for content sharing? Fine. That's fair. Hell, you want to put the same limit on homebrew you do on characters? Five subclasses, five magic items, five spells, etc. per free account? Go ahead. Too many people use free homebrew to sidestep having to buy resources here on the website anyways, I understand why you'd want to limit it even if I don't agree. You wanna be straight with us for once in your life and just outright say "We can't keep making D&D if only one person in every five to eight players buys stuff"? Do it up. Because you're right. That's not fair.
honestly...this, playing in several westmarches over the years on discord, the unified cry of most of them is "**** ddb because everythings stuck behind a paywall, why use that when i can just look it up in ******* and use a different service to make my sheet, whats gonna happen hm?"
this. this is what happens when to many people pirate, or cheat a company out of its earned money, they crack down and **** all of us.
and while this isnt the way for them to do it and its killing the community, we also need to stop doing the constant pirating or free bootlegging shit if we want our game to remain fun too. or else we are gonna lose it
Feel free to charge me more, have bought every damn book on the site, been the highest tier sub forever, milk me dry so long as you allow third party creators and VTT's to work unmolested.
That being said, this view of people who don't currently pay as being "leeches" and the enemy is kind of gross. The idea is that you can share your books the same way you do at a table, and while my players have kicked in for some purchases in the past, I wouldn't dream of looking down on anyone who doesn't have the money to invest much into the hobby. DnD is for everyone and a good DM is a river to their people.
honestly...this, playing in several westmarches over the years on discord, the unified cry of most of them is "**** ddb because everythings stuck behind a paywall, why use that when i can just look it up in ******* and use a different service to make my sheet, whats gonna happen hm?"
this. this is what happens when to many people pirate, or cheat a company out of its earned money, they crack down and **** all of us.
and while this isnt the way for them to do it and its killing the community, we also need to stop doing the constant pirating or free bootlegging shit if we want our game to remain fun too. or else we are gonna lose it
There are other companies in the industry who are reasonably successful despite giving away essentially 100% of their rules for free (which they actively support) and allowing third parties essentially free reign to make player tools and aids.
Despite products being available for free, they sell tons of pdfs and paper books.
If you make a high quality product, people will line up to pay for it.
If DnD literally came out with the best virtual tabletop experience ever, people would use it because it was inherently valuable and better than the competition. They wouldn't need to squash the competition - that implies they don't think their product will compete.
Yes, we ****ed up. Freebooters need to ante the **** up and help support their game if they want it to survive. Sell more digital dice, sell character sheet cosmetics packs. Sell subscriptions to the website, and put stricter limits on content sharing. You wanna give Master subscribers only one content sharing channel and charge us another fifty bucks a year for more sharing? Charge per campaign instead of per player for content sharing? Fine. That's fair. Hell, you want to put the same limit on homebrew you do on characters? Five subclasses, five magic items, five spells, etc. per free account? Go ahead. Too many people use free homebrew to sidestep having to buy resources here on the website anyways, I understand why you'd want to limit it even if I don't agree. You wanna be straight with us for once in your life and just outright say "We can't keep making D&D if only one person in every five to eight players buys stuff"? Do it up. Because you're right. That's not fair.
Ahh yes, make it more difficult for people to interface with your product. That worked so well for Movies, Television, Music, and Gaming in the past! The answer isn't to paywall everything, that has been tried before and failed numerous times. The only thing that's worked to combat digital piracy/revenue loss is a superior service at a price that makes pirating it less attractive. Piracy in gaming took a massive hit when Steam became popular. Piracy dropped over 30% when Netflix became popular and then ticked up again when all the clones started to arrive and content was then siloed once more. Music hasn't seem the uptick, because Spotify continues to be an amazing service for the consumer.
If you want to make more money and combat piracy, make your platform simple, robust, and a better value proposition than pirating. That's the only way you're going to "win" that war.
It's a delicate balance to strike, Wic. To be sure. I don't want to harsh people who really, truly are close to the bone and simply can't afford to maintain a sub or buy their own PHB. That's a sucky situation to be in, and a DM letting their close-to-the-bone friends use their books is one of the reasons my group came to DDB in the first place.
But we all know there's people out there who like to brag about how they've never paid Wizards a single red cent even though they're a software engineer or something and could buy a Legendary Bundle out of pocket change. Those are the folks who need to stop being Scrooges and ante up. But even then, like I said - this Digital Experience malarky just isn't the way. It'll price those close-to-the-bone people right out of D&D, more surely than anything else will, and those folks will go to another game and we'll be worse off for it.
I don't want us in this situation, at all. I'm really hoping we can find a way out of these shoals and turn the ship onto a more mutually acceptable course.
Yes, we ****ed up. Freebooters need to ante the **** up and help support their game if they want it to survive. Sell more digital dice, sell character sheet cosmetics packs. Sell subscriptions to the website, and put stricter limits on content sharing. You wanna give Master subscribers only one content sharing channel and charge us another fifty bucks a year for more sharing? Charge per campaign instead of per player for content sharing? Fine. That's fair. Hell, you want to put the same limit on homebrew you do on characters? Five subclasses, five magic items, five spells, etc. per free account? Go ahead. Too many people use free homebrew to sidestep having to buy resources here on the website anyways, I understand why you'd want to limit it even if I don't agree. You wanna be straight with us for once in your life and just outright say "We can't keep making D&D if only one person in every five to eight players buys stuff"? Do it up. Because you're right. That's not fair.
honestly...this, playing in several westmarches over the years on discord, the unified cry of most of them is "**** ddb because everythings stuck behind a paywall, why use that when i can just look it up in ******* and use a different service to make my sheet, whats gonna happen hm?"
this. this is what happens when to many people pirate, or cheat a company out of its earned money, they crack down and **** all of us.
and while this isnt the way for them to do it and its killing the community, we also need to stop doing the constant pirating or free bootlegging shit if we want our game to remain fun too. or else we are gonna lose it
But making a character sheet has... always been free? It's literally a piece of paper that you put stats on.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, but I disagree on a fundamental level - what I hear when I see both of your comments is this idea that somehow we're not giving enough money to D&D, and that if we loved the game we'd give them more money so they could 'survive'.
The issue is they are not struggling to survive; they posted record breaking profits last year. There is nothing about their current environment that is making it monetarily difficult to survive, they are thriving actually.
Secondly, a lot of the things you're both talking about - character sheets, homebrew etc. are fundamentally free parts of the game. It'd be fine for D&D beyond to charge for fancy character sheets, don't get me wrong - but I don't see there being any reason why we should expect to pay to make a new character, or pay to play a game of D&D. At the end of the day the things they need to be focusing on monetizing are fun additions that are not required to play the game, but people buy them anyway because they love the game and want to participate. That is the best (and in my opinion only) way for this game to thrive, because then the people who have no money can still participate and play, making the player base larger, and the people who have money can choose to spend it if they want to, and will do so because they are having such a good time playing D&D with their friends.
Nickel and diming people is not a good way to build a brand, especially when a lot of what your brand is hinges on the idea of what D&D is and started as; an affordable paper and pen imagination game that any teenager can play using bottlecaps as minis and graph paper for maps. Taking that away from the spirit of D&D feels fundamentally wrong.
I think we agree, to an extent. I think they're right, they do undermonetize. I would happily pay more, in return for more. Maybe do a subscription tier that includes all the books? Plenty of players might want access to all the books, but don't necessarily have the money to pay for them all up front. Go Netflix style.
Make their proposed VTT industry leading. Charge a premium for it. I'd pay top dollar for a premium product (so long as I'm doing it because its good, not because they've bullied other providers out of the market)
Add in higher tier subs for shiny fancy tools. Maybe magic item generators, map creation / generators bundled, magic item shop tools, animated assets for use in their VTT or for export to others, alternative art work for monsters, sell more official miniatures, DM guides and monthly small adventure bundles. I'm just spitballing, basically just sell me the kinds of things I pay other people for, and make them good enough that I want to, don't just force other people out of the market.
I'm a DnD whale. They know the people who spend the money, make more of the things we want to buy.
I think where we differ is just that I think it's counter productive to villanise people who don't want to / can't pay. It's like any other "f2p" venture, without the players who pay nothing to bulk out the numbers the people who do pay lose incentive because there's not enough people to play with.
Anyway, I think you should pirate D&D only if that is the only way for your group to play. I buy as much D&D stuff as I can, and once the deal with WotC is done I will probably subscribe here as well. But 150$ for books, plus dice, is unfortunately beyond of what many can afford. However, I do know a bunch of people who can afford WotC prices but just don't care, which I suppose is an option, I don't buy most of my music because I'd never have money for anything else (and I legally acquire absolutely everything else I use). I hope the new VTT won't be mind-numbingly predatory and soulless, but why do you think the monetizers want to replace all of us with the mobile crowd? AFAIK we shall still have all the other good stuff untouched.
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
Feel free to charge me more, have bought every damn book on the site, been the highest tier sub forever, milk me dry so long as you allow third party creators and VTT's to work unmolested.
That being said, this view of people who don't currently pay as being "leeches" and the enemy is kind of gross. The idea is that you can share your books the same way you do at a table, and while my players have kicked in for some purchases in the past, I wouldn't dream of looking down on anyone who doesn't have the money to invest much into the hobby. DnD is for everyone and a good DM is a river to their people.
Kinda in the middle of this, yes D&D like most games played at a table is shared. And I really enjoy sharing it, to the point that I may be an oversharer and some of my sharing can actually be reported on my taxes. And really when did Monopoly or Chess or Hungry Hungry Hippos require all players to "buy into" the product. The "monetization" analysis has always been a bit tone deaf, I was one of the first people on this board to say Williams "told me she knew nothing about playing dungeons and dragons without saying she knew nothing about playing dungeons and dragons" and that comment was derided by many.
One of the coolest things I saw during the Pandemic were some school kids I had played a few sessions with sit down without me (sniffle) over Zoom, roll up some characters with paper and pencil and dice reported on the honor system with some nat 20s and 1s photo'd and group chat distributed to counter "no ways". They played for close to four hours. None of them referred to a single damn book. I even poked my head in during character generation and their first encounter with a "hey, do you want to bring in off the shelf" and "Nah, Dad, we're good." And they were good, they had a great time. The DM clearly was recycling some stuff she'd seen in a game with me with some changes that suited this batch of PCs better. They were playing Dungeons and Dragons and nothing WotC pulls can ever prevent people from playing Dungeons and Dragons. WotC needs to figure out a way to entertain kids like that who don't have the interest of bandwidth or financial resources to go whale with the b.s. immersive apex gaming platform they say we'll see in the near future that isn't called Demiplane or any of the other platforms that have been platforming gaming for years. I've always been an advocate of different scales of products for different levels of game engagement/preference (free basic stuff maybe even supplemented with free content to DDB account holders as they've done I think a few times this year plus the encounter chains they used to run all the way up to Beedle and Grimms and digital immersion where the game might as well be played for you). If D&D doesn't consider, and I don't think they necessarily aren't considering since the initial One D&D rollout seemed to show a variety of ways of playing from paper to Unreal Engine concept art, ways to engage kids like the ones I just wrote about, kids and players who don't want to be taken for the full ride, well, that's WotC's loss. It's not D&Ds loss and definitely not those players' loss.
Matt Colville recently likened game design to music, and while it might have gone a bit further MCDM brand navel gazing than I'd like, music and gaming especially D&D are similar. WotC may want to be the purveyor of the finest (and maybe most expensive) instruments and production equipment, but they can't stop people from playing music. And musicians/players who don't buy the Stradivarius version of Strahd aren't leaches. Now if someone does steal artwork, or digital files that actually are WotC's property like some folks in the ******** adjacent spaces do, yeah call 'em leaches.
The problem is WotC doesn't seem to know, or feels insecure about what they own. I think a lot of this may be "looks what happened with 4e" anxiety. I can say I'm not impressed by One D&D yet, at least I don't see a need to shift from what I already have on hand to play, maybe the Giant book will be my last WotC purchase for some time. Maybe for the best as I learned this weekend I suck at building book shelves. Anyone got a digital toolset to walk me through how to do that right I'll gladly leach it from you.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'm addressing the latest D&D Shorts bit, which was a subject of discussion for my table for a good few hours this morning. If it turns out to be entirely false then I'll eat my crow and deal with it, but frankly as much as I hate how Shorts has handled this whole situation thus far? As much as I really wish he would stop trying to whip people into a ridiculous frothing rabid frenzy that's unproductive as ****? The latest thing makes too much sense for me to ignore, especially Hasbro being in serious trouble and pressing Wizards to produce the revenue regardless of where it comes from or what it does to the customer base long-term.
They'd be better off selling things like Merchandise and other D&D add ons rather than just books, like it is undermonetized in that there aren't enough adequate revenue streams for the IP that people are excited to participate in, but like at the end of the day I don't think it's smart to try and make big bucks off of the framework of the game - the books are spendy to make and distribute, the cost of full color printing has gone up a buttload in the last 20 years. They'd get a better return on investment doing things like...
Hell - Making a Digital Tavern here on D&D beyond where they regularly host different livestreams and events, and there's a constant chat going and it's like twitch where people can spend a few bucks to get a thousand tokens and do different emoji's or whatever (tbh I'm a little too old to really get it but I know other people really like it) and then like, they could host Ginny Di doing some kind of tutorial for an hour, and then have a regular ttrpg campaign, and players could perhaps submit their own content or even fan-made advertisements and it could be like a really cool constantly running D&D cable channel but it's on their website and they can make money on people wanting to buy advertising spots and participating in it because it's just fun and cool. That's a way to add an additional revenue stream that uses the IP and doesn't prevent players who have no money from playing the game or participating.
Maybe it's just because I grew up too poor to buy virtually anything like a $60 PHB or even a WoW subsription (I used to save up to buy those time cards because I never knew if I could regularly afford the 7.99 a month a regular subscription was, kids don't have money sometimes!) but putting things that bar players from the game itself just seems unwise. There are players out there who can contribute to the health of D&D without it being a financial contribution to WotC.
This? All of this? This is how we got here to begin with. “Piracy is okay, if it’s selective, and if you really really really don’t want to pay for it.” What a nonsense take.
Buying one set of books for a table made sense, because the rest of the work to play the game was on you. It’s not anymore. A table of 4 with one set of books, completely digitally, across the country in real-time is an undermonetized commodity. Someone put the time and effort to make those sheets work. Someone organized spell lists and rolling dice across the screen and fun sound effects, and those people deserve to be paid for the work you’re no longer doing. Hate this situation all you want, but end of the day in no small part we brought it on ourselves.
I'm addressing the latest D&D Shorts bit, which was a subject of discussion for my table for a good few hours this morning. If it turns out to be entirely false then I'll eat my crow and deal with it, but frankly as much as I hate how Shorts has handled this whole situation thus far? As much as I really wish he would stop trying to whip people into a ridiculous frothing rabid frenzy that's unproductive as ****? The latest thing makes too much sense for me to ignore, especially Hasbro being in serious trouble and pressing Wizards to produce the revenue regardless of where it comes from or what it does to the customer base long-term.
D&D Shorts is about as trustworthy as a first floor goblin at this point. That being said, WotC did take a massive hit with the OGL crisis, so they may turn to some predatory practices, although the very fact that they took a hit because of a perceived predatory practice may just stop them for making an additional mess of things. Still, I support being vocal about anything and everything as long as it is not a R.I.O.T.
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
I don't want this to get bogged down in the "people shouldn't have to pay if they don't want to pay" discussion. I understand the call from a lot of people that they'd pay for D&D if D&D provided things worth paying for. The problem is that the current monetization scheme isn't working. For whichever reason, it's not working. Not to the point where the suits are willing to leave it alone. If we want something other than an awful Skinner box mobile gacha steaming pile? We have to figure out another way forward. D&D is worth paying for, right? Not the way Cao is looking at, I won't tolerate that any more than any of you will, but if we demand that they don't change anything we won't have D&D anymore.
WotC made 1.3 Billion in revenue in 2021, alone. It's working just fine, unless you're a greedy POS.
Yes, and over a billion of it was from Magic: the Gathering. D&D is worth roughly ~150M, in comparison. We're being put through all this because D&D isn't worth a quarter of what Magic is and the suits want to change that.
I just watched the full D&D shorts video, and basically he is recapping all the things he was saying so far (at least 3 of which have been proven false) before he shuts up because he has been getting heat FROM THE FANS because of his false data and fearmongering. The picture he paints is a bleak one, and we need to demand it doesn't happen like that, but it directly contradicts the D&D One announcement where they said that the VTT will be only one of a multiple ways to play D&D in the future. I agree that may have lied or underexaggerated the impact of the VTT, but all of that remains to be seen.
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
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First of all: yes, I know. These are stupid, nobody except other community people with no voice and no influence reads 'open letters'. Chris Cao and his corhorts will never see this message. But I have to try. Because you know what? They were right. D&D is undermonetized. Too many people are too proud of never spending a single dime in support of their hobby, crowing about how they use free services and their friends' purchases to do all their D&D. It's not fair to ask the forever DM of any given group to be the only person buying any resources, players need to chip in too. If you profess to love D&D, then you should've been tossing the team a few bucks when you could instead of being actively proud of never supporting the game you claim to hold so dear.
But this mobile-game money vampire shit isn't the way.
I've been arguing for a stance of moderation ever since the first "Apology' blog post. [REDACTED] What I believe is that informed, diligent passion can make a difference. It already has. We've brought them, at least in part, to the bargaining table, and it's time to bargain. But first and foremost, D&D has to bargain with the players. Chris Cao, you are betting that you can trade us in for a flock of casual mobile-game [REDACTED] who've never cared about D&D before and don't intend to start. You are actively sinking this hobby, deciding that the players you have aren't good enough and you want the players you've already victimized in the past with exhorbitant and predatory mobile-gaming monetization. You've got Hasbro backing you because they're desperate for revenue and they're willing to gamble on you turning D&D into a mobile gaming fad that'll bring a huge burst of revenue in the short term.
But you're sacrificing the future of the game to do it.
Nobody is going to care about this Digital Experience you're aiming for. It doesn't help people tell stories. It doesn't help people make memories. It's a Skinner box, because all you know how to make is Skinner boxes. Selling skins and FX and XP boosters and whatever else, demanding your two dollars here, five dollars there, twenty dollars the other for an empty, meaningless experience no one will care about or remember even just a month after they pony up. That's not D&D. It's never been D&D. And once you trade away the core of passionate players who love this game and use it to tell stories and make memories for a bunch of casual mobile-gaming fad chasers, you don't get to trade-backsies. Paizo is positioning themselves to scoop up all the people you're pawning off, and as much as I dislike Pathfinder and find it a tedious, annoying 3.5-y slog of too many modifiers and too-large numbers? I'll learn that dumb game and play it before I commit to a D&D branded Skinner box with absolutely no objective whatsoever except to part me from as much of my money as it can while offering me nothing in return.
[REDACTED] Freebooters need to ante [REDACTED] up and help support their game if they want it to survive. Sell more digital dice, sell character sheet cosmetics packs. Sell subscriptions to the website, and put stricter limits on content sharing. You wanna give Master subscribers only one content sharing channel and charge us another fifty bucks a year for more sharing? Charge per campaign instead of per player for content sharing? Fine. That's fair. Hell, you want to put the same limit on homebrew you do on characters? Five subclasses, five magic items, five spells, etc. per free account? Go ahead. Too many people use free homebrew to sidestep having to buy resources here on the website anyways, I understand why you'd want to limit it even if I don't agree. You wanna be straight with us for once in your life and just outright say "We can't keep making D&D if only one person in every five to eight players buys stuff"? Do it up. Because you're right. That's not fair.
But don't turn D&D into a mobile gacha Skinner box. Nobody likes those. They're a stain on humanity, something we as a species should be ashamed of having invented, and they only ever bring misery.
I've spent hundreds of dollars on this website even though I only occasionally DM. I've preordered most of my books even though preordering is a terrible mistake. I've bought (one set of) digital dice, and I still have my subscription running even though it's been real close a time or two. I am not a freebooter asking for more handouts. I am a customer of D&D, asking you not to take away the thing I love and paid for in favor of a mobile gaming model nobody asked for so a bunch of people who don't care about D&D can spend six months buying a bunch of gacha shit before flitting off to the next big mobile craze.
Please. There has to be a better way to get more people to pay their shot than this.
Please do not contact or message me.
honestly...this, playing in several westmarches over the years on discord, the unified cry of most of them is "**** ddb because everythings stuck behind a paywall, why use that when i can just look it up in ******* and use a different service to make my sheet, whats gonna happen hm?"
this. this is what happens when to many people pirate, or cheat a company out of its earned money, they crack down and **** all of us.
and while this isnt the way for them to do it and its killing the community, we also need to stop doing the constant pirating or free bootlegging shit if we want our game to remain fun too. or else we are gonna lose it
Feel free to charge me more, have bought every damn book on the site, been the highest tier sub forever, milk me dry so long as you allow third party creators and VTT's to work unmolested.
That being said, this view of people who don't currently pay as being "leeches" and the enemy is kind of gross. The idea is that you can share your books the same way you do at a table, and while my players have kicked in for some purchases in the past, I wouldn't dream of looking down on anyone who doesn't have the money to invest much into the hobby. DnD is for everyone and a good DM is a river to their people.
There are other companies in the industry who are reasonably successful despite giving away essentially 100% of their rules for free (which they actively support) and allowing third parties essentially free reign to make player tools and aids.
Despite products being available for free, they sell tons of pdfs and paper books.
If you make a high quality product, people will line up to pay for it.
If DnD literally came out with the best virtual tabletop experience ever, people would use it because it was inherently valuable and better than the competition. They wouldn't need to squash the competition - that implies they don't think their product will compete.
Ahh yes, make it more difficult for people to interface with your product. That worked so well for Movies, Television, Music, and Gaming in the past! The answer isn't to paywall everything, that has been tried before and failed numerous times. The only thing that's worked to combat digital piracy/revenue loss is a superior service at a price that makes pirating it less attractive. Piracy in gaming took a massive hit when Steam became popular. Piracy dropped over 30% when Netflix became popular and then ticked up again when all the clones started to arrive and content was then siloed once more. Music hasn't seem the uptick, because Spotify continues to be an amazing service for the consumer.
If you want to make more money and combat piracy, make your platform simple, robust, and a better value proposition than pirating. That's the only way you're going to "win" that war.
It's a delicate balance to strike, Wic. To be sure. I don't want to harsh people who really, truly are close to the bone and simply can't afford to maintain a sub or buy their own PHB. That's a sucky situation to be in, and a DM letting their close-to-the-bone friends use their books is one of the reasons my group came to DDB in the first place.
But we all know there's people out there who like to brag about how they've never paid Wizards a single red cent even though they're a software engineer or something and could buy a Legendary Bundle out of pocket change. Those are the folks who need to stop being Scrooges and ante up. But even then, like I said - this Digital Experience malarky just isn't the way. It'll price those close-to-the-bone people right out of D&D, more surely than anything else will, and those folks will go to another game and we'll be worse off for it.
I don't want us in this situation, at all. I'm really hoping we can find a way out of these shoals and turn the ship onto a more mutually acceptable course.
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"From every gamer according to their ability, to every gamer according to their needs" is the motto for my table.
But making a character sheet has... always been free? It's literally a piece of paper that you put stats on.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, but I disagree on a fundamental level - what I hear when I see both of your comments is this idea that somehow we're not giving enough money to D&D, and that if we loved the game we'd give them more money so they could 'survive'.
The issue is they are not struggling to survive; they posted record breaking profits last year. There is nothing about their current environment that is making it monetarily difficult to survive, they are thriving actually.
Secondly, a lot of the things you're both talking about - character sheets, homebrew etc. are fundamentally free parts of the game. It'd be fine for D&D beyond to charge for fancy character sheets, don't get me wrong - but I don't see there being any reason why we should expect to pay to make a new character, or pay to play a game of D&D. At the end of the day the things they need to be focusing on monetizing are fun additions that are not required to play the game, but people buy them anyway because they love the game and want to participate. That is the best (and in my opinion only) way for this game to thrive, because then the people who have no money can still participate and play, making the player base larger, and the people who have money can choose to spend it if they want to, and will do so because they are having such a good time playing D&D with their friends.
Nickel and diming people is not a good way to build a brand, especially when a lot of what your brand is hinges on the idea of what D&D is and started as; an affordable paper and pen imagination game that any teenager can play using bottlecaps as minis and graph paper for maps. Taking that away from the spirit of D&D feels fundamentally wrong.
Did they make a new announcement somewhere?
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
I think we agree, to an extent. I think they're right, they do undermonetize. I would happily pay more, in return for more. Maybe do a subscription tier that includes all the books? Plenty of players might want access to all the books, but don't necessarily have the money to pay for them all up front. Go Netflix style.
Make their proposed VTT industry leading. Charge a premium for it. I'd pay top dollar for a premium product (so long as I'm doing it because its good, not because they've bullied other providers out of the market)
Add in higher tier subs for shiny fancy tools. Maybe magic item generators, map creation / generators bundled, magic item shop tools, animated assets for use in their VTT or for export to others, alternative art work for monsters, sell more official miniatures, DM guides and monthly small adventure bundles. I'm just spitballing, basically just sell me the kinds of things I pay other people for, and make them good enough that I want to, don't just force other people out of the market.
I'm a DnD whale. They know the people who spend the money, make more of the things we want to buy.
I think where we differ is just that I think it's counter productive to villanise people who don't want to / can't pay. It's like any other "f2p" venture, without the players who pay nothing to bulk out the numbers the people who do pay lose incentive because there's not enough people to play with.
Anyway, I think you should pirate D&D only if that is the only way for your group to play. I buy as much D&D stuff as I can, and once the deal with WotC is done I will probably subscribe here as well. But 150$ for books, plus dice, is unfortunately beyond of what many can afford. However, I do know a bunch of people who can afford WotC prices but just don't care, which I suppose is an option, I don't buy most of my music because I'd never have money for anything else (and I legally acquire absolutely everything else I use). I hope the new VTT won't be mind-numbingly predatory and soulless, but why do you think the monetizers want to replace all of us with the mobile crowd? AFAIK we shall still have all the other good stuff untouched.
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
Kinda in the middle of this, yes D&D like most games played at a table is shared. And I really enjoy sharing it, to the point that I may be an oversharer and some of my sharing can actually be reported on my taxes. And really when did Monopoly or Chess or Hungry Hungry Hippos require all players to "buy into" the product. The "monetization" analysis has always been a bit tone deaf, I was one of the first people on this board to say Williams "told me she knew nothing about playing dungeons and dragons without saying she knew nothing about playing dungeons and dragons" and that comment was derided by many.
One of the coolest things I saw during the Pandemic were some school kids I had played a few sessions with sit down without me (sniffle) over Zoom, roll up some characters with paper and pencil and dice reported on the honor system with some nat 20s and 1s photo'd and group chat distributed to counter "no ways". They played for close to four hours. None of them referred to a single damn book. I even poked my head in during character generation and their first encounter with a "hey, do you want to bring in off the shelf" and "Nah, Dad, we're good." And they were good, they had a great time. The DM clearly was recycling some stuff she'd seen in a game with me with some changes that suited this batch of PCs better. They were playing Dungeons and Dragons and nothing WotC pulls can ever prevent people from playing Dungeons and Dragons. WotC needs to figure out a way to entertain kids like that who don't have the interest of bandwidth or financial resources to go whale with the b.s. immersive apex gaming platform they say we'll see in the near future that isn't called Demiplane or any of the other platforms that have been platforming gaming for years. I've always been an advocate of different scales of products for different levels of game engagement/preference (free basic stuff maybe even supplemented with free content to DDB account holders as they've done I think a few times this year plus the encounter chains they used to run all the way up to Beedle and Grimms and digital immersion where the game might as well be played for you). If D&D doesn't consider, and I don't think they necessarily aren't considering since the initial One D&D rollout seemed to show a variety of ways of playing from paper to Unreal Engine concept art, ways to engage kids like the ones I just wrote about, kids and players who don't want to be taken for the full ride, well, that's WotC's loss. It's not D&Ds loss and definitely not those players' loss.
Matt Colville recently likened game design to music, and while it might have gone a bit further MCDM brand navel gazing than I'd like, music and gaming especially D&D are similar. WotC may want to be the purveyor of the finest (and maybe most expensive) instruments and production equipment, but they can't stop people from playing music. And musicians/players who don't buy the Stradivarius version of Strahd aren't leaches. Now if someone does steal artwork, or digital files that actually are WotC's property like some folks in the ******** adjacent spaces do, yeah call 'em leaches.
The problem is WotC doesn't seem to know, or feels insecure about what they own. I think a lot of this may be "looks what happened with 4e" anxiety. I can say I'm not impressed by One D&D yet, at least I don't see a need to shift from what I already have on hand to play, maybe the Giant book will be my last WotC purchase for some time. Maybe for the best as I learned this weekend I suck at building book shelves. Anyone got a digital toolset to walk me through how to do that right I'll gladly leach it from you.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
@Dindomir
I'm addressing the latest D&D Shorts bit, which was a subject of discussion for my table for a good few hours this morning. If it turns out to be entirely false then I'll eat my crow and deal with it, but frankly as much as I hate how Shorts has handled this whole situation thus far? As much as I really wish he would stop trying to whip people into a ridiculous frothing rabid frenzy that's unproductive as ****? The latest thing makes too much sense for me to ignore, especially Hasbro being in serious trouble and pressing Wizards to produce the revenue regardless of where it comes from or what it does to the customer base long-term.
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They'd be better off selling things like Merchandise and other D&D add ons rather than just books, like it is undermonetized in that there aren't enough adequate revenue streams for the IP that people are excited to participate in, but like at the end of the day I don't think it's smart to try and make big bucks off of the framework of the game - the books are spendy to make and distribute, the cost of full color printing has gone up a buttload in the last 20 years. They'd get a better return on investment doing things like...
Hell - Making a Digital Tavern here on D&D beyond where they regularly host different livestreams and events, and there's a constant chat going and it's like twitch where people can spend a few bucks to get a thousand tokens and do different emoji's or whatever (tbh I'm a little too old to really get it but I know other people really like it) and then like, they could host Ginny Di doing some kind of tutorial for an hour, and then have a regular ttrpg campaign, and players could perhaps submit their own content or even fan-made advertisements and it could be like a really cool constantly running D&D cable channel but it's on their website and they can make money on people wanting to buy advertising spots and participating in it because it's just fun and cool. That's a way to add an additional revenue stream that uses the IP and doesn't prevent players who have no money from playing the game or participating.
Maybe it's just because I grew up too poor to buy virtually anything like a $60 PHB or even a WoW subsription (I used to save up to buy those time cards because I never knew if I could regularly afford the 7.99 a month a regular subscription was, kids don't have money sometimes!) but putting things that bar players from the game itself just seems unwise. There are players out there who can contribute to the health of D&D without it being a financial contribution to WotC.
This? All of this? This is how we got here to begin with. “Piracy is okay, if it’s selective, and if you really really really don’t want to pay for it.” What a nonsense take.
Buying one set of books for a table made sense, because the rest of the work to play the game was on you. It’s not anymore. A table of 4 with one set of books, completely digitally, across the country in real-time is an undermonetized commodity. Someone put the time and effort to make those sheets work. Someone organized spell lists and rolling dice across the screen and fun sound effects, and those people deserve to be paid for the work you’re no longer doing. Hate this situation all you want, but end of the day in no small part we brought it on ourselves.
D&D Shorts is about as trustworthy as a first floor goblin at this point. That being said, WotC did take a massive hit with the OGL crisis, so they may turn to some predatory practices, although the very fact that they took a hit because of a perceived predatory practice may just stop them for making an additional mess of things. Still, I support being vocal about anything and everything as long as it is not a R.I.O.T.
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
I don't want this to get bogged down in the "people shouldn't have to pay if they don't want to pay" discussion. I understand the call from a lot of people that they'd pay for D&D if D&D provided things worth paying for. The problem is that the current monetization scheme isn't working. For whichever reason, it's not working. Not to the point where the suits are willing to leave it alone. If we want something other than an awful Skinner box mobile gacha steaming pile? We have to figure out another way forward. D&D is worth paying for, right? Not the way Cao is looking at, I won't tolerate that any more than any of you will, but if we demand that they don't change anything we won't have D&D anymore.
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WotC made 1.3 Billion in revenue in 2021, alone. It's working just fine, unless you're a greedy POS.
Yes, and over a billion of it was from Magic: the Gathering. D&D is worth roughly ~150M, in comparison. We're being put through all this because D&D isn't worth a quarter of what Magic is and the suits want to change that.
What can we do about that?
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I just watched the full D&D shorts video, and basically he is recapping all the things he was saying so far (at least 3 of which have been proven false) before he shuts up because he has been getting heat FROM THE FANS because of his false data and fearmongering. The picture he paints is a bleak one, and we need to demand it doesn't happen like that, but it directly contradicts the D&D One announcement where they said that the VTT will be only one of a multiple ways to play D&D in the future. I agree that may have lied or underexaggerated the impact of the VTT, but all of that remains to be seen.
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.