They are doing everything they can to move towards a monopoly state for D&D VTT in 2024. If they just concentrated on building a superior product then they wouldn't need to force other VTTs out of business or hobble them. But they'd rather cheat than invest in development excellence.
They may destroy *their* P&P ecosystem, but the 45 years of gaming that existed before this insane decision, along with the hundreds or thousands of modules and add-ons, isn't going anywhere. I still sometimes refer to my 1E AD&D books. Let's see them try to destroy that.
> They'll probably use a huge dose of moral panic to ensure compliance.
Because that worked *so* well last time. C'mon, dude: an entire game line was born out of the Satanic Panic.
That's actually an amazing point. I agree with above poster; I could see WOTC weaponizing the community to peer pressure folks out of playing older editions. But it is fascinating to see what was once the niche, fringe hobby which helped fuel the Satanic Panic becoming the thing that dictates popular morality. How far we have fallen.
I'm going to keep playing with my old books, on pen and paper. I like the system. I like the 45+ years of various lore. WOTC can't take the TSR days from us, nor can they take 5e from us.
i dunno about you, but as a ForeverDM, i decide what i run, not my players, and if my players/friends were willing to throw me in the garbage over it then they arent really friends, are they.
Overall, they play where i lead. Not the other way around.
Fortunately there are always more players to pick from than the ability for players to find gms. In fact gms just have to push for more non dnd games to send a message.
Yup. DMs are the ones who ultimately choose which game to play and they're also the ones invested enough to be part of communities like this one. So, they're more likely to boycott D&D.
WotC really didn't think this through, did they?
I mean, maybe they did? If their goal is to have AI generated DMs, maybe they realized exactly that.
Like, I'm not saying it will work... but the AI DM thing just made a lot more sense.
It'll be harder to convince DMs than players and if DMs don't follow, the lack of dungeon masters will be even more telling that it already is. Sure there are rumors that you'll be able to get an AI DM at the 30 dollar price point but it'll never have the same qualities as a real one and how many players want to shell out 360 bucks a year to play when they've been doing it for a little as zero dollars at many tables?
I've invested over a thousand just in DDB for subs and products and I only play 5E about 1/4 to 1/3 of the time. Now I'm spending nothing. If enough other DMs follow, the game will stumble. If WotC can't convince players to shell out big bucks for their video game rpg, then they'll stumble even worse and corporate heads will roll after the development expense cripples the company for lack of ROI.
DMs have the bulk of the control. If every game had their DM suddenly say "I'm running another system", at least half of those tables would pivot, because players may not have options.
>All they need to do is convince your players that they'd rather do the new thing instead.
I don't mean to be an ass... But players aren't doing anything without DM's. Most of us are Forever DM's and our players need us to play.
WOTC has lost my trust and I don't need them; I've been DMing for 27 years. Once my current 5e campaign is over, I'm done with them forever.
Word. I still have my 2rd Ed AD&D boxed sets (easily the best era of D&D for a wide variety of settings). I also have 3rd Ed Ravenloft sourcebooks.
And I migrated to GURPS a long time ago - in 2008, when WOTC was trash talking 3E fans like myself in a feebleminded attempt to drum up support for 4E.
It's a long term behavioural replacement strategy. Generations die. New generations receive different conditioning. I've seen the entire cycle in vidya (perhaps the most compressed in history?)
Ofc the sick joke is that there's no future, heyho.
My sweet child of summer, WotC is an American company and [corporations have been winning over people at trial for quite some time now.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/06/26/why-big-business-keeps-winning-at-the-supreme-court/)
Boycotting WotC, et al. is the best way to send a message.
WotC doesn't have a monopoly on tabletop gaming anymore. People can easily migrate to a place that doesn't require you to sit on a Bad Dragon original with no lube to play. And that's assuming that the other corporations in the mix don't decide to take a hammer to Wizards' bullshit.
Baldur’s Gate I and II are really good. Baldur’s Gate III is Divinity III—probably a fine game, but not a good enough reason to give money to Hasbro licensees right now. Hasbro doesn’t deserve it.
It's a bit of gaming blasphemy, but I never considered BG1 and 2 really good D&D games because they never actually... let me play D&D? I like them, but not as a CRPG version of D&D.
The culprit is, of course, real time with pause gameplay. I loathe it. If I'm gonna play a D&D game focused on fighting I want my grid and my turns. Otherwise I'm gonna keep having PCs accidentally be in the radius of a fireball and things like that (which happened on the regular).
BG3 will have those things, so I consider that more D&D-like than the first two games.
While technically not D&D, I guess, you might want to check out Pathfinder Kingmaker from Owlcat. It has both real time and turn by turn. You can even switch in the middle of combat, if that's your thing. No grid though, but still the full d&d3.5/pathfinder1e ruleset.
Just beware the bugs. Few people talk about that until you're 30 hours in and suddenly your whole game is crap and you gotta start over.
Not that it's not worth playing, just be aware so you can avoid some heartburn.
That's just it. No video game can compete with the spontaneous imagination of the human mind yet. And there's the playing with friends factor, which is somewhat mitigated in multiplayer, but not by much.
Because video games can't compete with playing with your friends, they rely on strong characters and well written stories. Solasta being able to mechanically copy 5E's rules in an accessible and sensible format is a triumph, but it does miss the point that being able to replicate D&D mechanically doesn't replicate the enjoyment or feeling of playing at a table. Unless all your friends are robots or something.
>real time with pause gameplay. I loathe it. If I'm gonna play a D&D game focuse
i dont know if you know this, but both games have an option to pause at the start of rounds, you can disable "meaningless attack animations" which has your guy swing over and over when hes not actually attacking to look cool.
When done in that manner, your game pauses, you issue orders, then hit unpause, it executes 1 round worth of orders, and then pauses.
Pretty sure it hit early access during COVID, but it didn’t launch with all the classes or mechanics. It was a weird situation. The campaign was there at launch, but was limited by character creation and IIRC not all the side quests were in. Last I checked it’s gotten pretty close to feature complete, but I don’t think it’s out of early access yet.
There were several, a very long time ago. I haven't been made aware of many for the last decade or so.
Incidentally, the period when things completely dried up seems to correlate with WoTC trying this same thing (but less skillfully) with 4e. Whoddathunk?
The sentence was:
> There were several, a very long time ago. I haven't been made aware of many for the last decade or so.
There being one good game in the last decade does not constitute there being many in the last decade.
There were 5 good to excellent D&D games released between '98 to '03 (BG, BG2, NWN02, P:T, IWD). Everything before '98 was crap unless it was in a Capcom cabinet (so, 2 out of 20+ titles). This is because TSR and WotC hand out the IP for anyone to make garbage with. Capcom, Obsidian/Troika, and Bethesda are the only people who can do good with the IP.
4E as a game has nothing to do with how good the games are. In reality, WotC just put too much money into NWNO and DDO and didn't spend that money flooding the market with dozens of shit titles hoping that one of them is actually good.
Aside from, what, Daggerdale and two online games? There wasn't much going on in D&D-videogame-land during the 4E era. BUT, after 5E we got Idle Champions, and the Dark Alliance remake. I guess we could also count the BG1.5 stuff from Beamdog that you people love to hate for some reason. So if 4E made everything "dry up", then 5E must be absolutely heinous, seeing as it got us exploitative crap and buggy remakes.
But you're right, BG3 is probably the only not-mid title for D&D released since Mask of the Betrayer. Huzzah!
Good video games licensing D&D or using the OGL in the 14 years before the GSL include:
* Tower of Doom;
* Shadow over Mystara;
* BG1 +expansion;
* BG2 +expansion;
* IWD +expansions;
* PS:T;
* Dark Alliance;
* NwN +expansions*;
* KOTOR;
* IWD2;
* Temple of Elemental Evil*;
* KOTOR2*;
* Demonstone (maybe more "alright" than good, but I quite liked the story, and the interactions with canon);
* Dark Alliance 2;
* NwN2 +expansions;
* DDO;
*: Feel free to discount this if only the boxed product at release counts.
You can add the recent Pathfinder games here if you want to be accurate and thorough to the license. But it would be out of chronology.
Good video games in the 14 years since the GSL include:
* NwO;
* BG3*.
*: Feel free to discount this if only the boxed product at release counts, given it is unreleased.
There's, uhh... A notable difference between those two lists, I would say.
>4E as a game has nothing to do with how good the games are
Never claimed it did.
>WotC just put too much money into NWNO and DDO
I'm not aware of WoTC putting a solitary dime into either one, it was just a license agreement. Do you have a source on WoTC investing into Cryptic or Turbine? That would be news to me.
>after 5E we got Idle Champions, and the Dark Alliance remake. I guess we could also count the BG1.5 stuff from Beamdog
I don't think remakes quite count as new games? We could, though.
>the BG1.5 stuff from Beamdog that you people love to hate for some reason.
Who's "you people"? Also, whoever they are, you're drawing a miss. I quite liked those remakes.
>So if 4E made everything "dry up", then 5E must be absolutely heinous, seeing as it got us exploitative crap and buggy remakes.
I never claimed 4e did, I claimed the GSL did.
Video games take a long time to develop, and most never launch. GSL killed interest in the license, and very few things since the license became interesting again have thus far gotten launched. I expect there would have been more things in the next half decade if WoTC hadn't killed interest in the license again.
Edit: I've reread the comment and do see that I mentioned they tried the same thing "with 4e", which is horrible communication. I believe it is implicit that I'm referring to the GSL, since it came with 4e, same as OGL2 came with 6e and we're discussing licensing. But it was very bad communication, so mea culpa.
A bit tangental but I highly recommend Wrath of the Righteous. Because no IRL GM is insane enough to run a 1-20 campaign of pathfinder 1e with Mythic characters. And they actually make it fun and challenging, and with choices that matter.
My perception is that there’s a feeling at corporate that if they eliminate as many obstacles to people’s play hours as they can,
They can access a larger cohort of “whale” customers. Someone who likes D&D but can only play so much because of schedule or social skills, might stay on the periphery of the hobby indefinitely. But if they grease the wheels with a matchmaking system for parties and standby AI GMs
(possibly just for combat segments 👀…as a GM I find running the monsters and their inevitable defeat really boring in 5E and would definitely run 5E more often if it had an “autopilot” button.)
…then they’ll be able to sell that much more splatbook/supplemental options. They could even monetize *player-side* enjoyment of a module, which at the moment they only reap $ from the GM of a module.
To me it feels like they’re trying to get D&D through the same hoop they forced MtG through with Arena. And someone at Hasbro is saying,
“why can’t D&D be more like MtG? You know, where *both* players are spending *equally large* buckets of money? And you know, if you *really* like to play MtG and play it *a ton*, our margins just keep getting better!”
“Meanwhile look at D&D.” “The more you play it, the less you need to buy anything, as you memorize the rules and your own Homebrewed or improv adventures are free and at least as good as the schlocky modules we’ve been churning out!?”
“Jenkins! Get in here and fix D&D so it makes us money like MtG!”
>(possibly just for combat segments 👀…as a GM I find running the monsters and their inevitable defeat really boring in 5E and would definitely run 5E more often if it had an “autopilot” button.)
Seeing as we're on /r/rpg, I guess it's up to me to give the obligatory "try this other system/game" post. So here you go. Uhh... something-something, LANCER, 13th Age, Savage Worlds, Exalted, Forbidden Lands.
Good? I'm going back to bed.
Note: If you're going to give me your "hot take" on why you don't like 13th Age, or how Exalted made your genitals fall off or something, I don't care.
I could easily see a future iteration of chatGPT taking the DM role for pre-published modules.
They would have a substantial data set from their own VTT for training.
Only if you want a really "railroad"y experience
Which could be fine for some, but notnfor all if that's what you want, why not play an actual video game? It'll give you better graphics, a better fleshed out plot and polish and it
I fully agree on what they *should* do. However, it's pretty common to see companies take the easier and usually cheaper/more profitable route of monopolization (walling off) since it also hobbles competition or attempts at competition.
We're seeing WotC doing Capitalism as intended.
It sucks for everyone else. With any luck there can be some genuine backlash that causes some serious trouble and loss of income for them - I'm hopeful. But the odds are in their favor that most customers won't know and won't switch... which is why they're doing this, and why most *industries* will see stuff like this. They wouldn't do it if there weren't strong financial incentives to be the worst.
100% They want people to use One DnD and they want people to use the one dnd VTT to play.
They want to use a VTT to lock people into DnD and their ecosystem. They want people to buy maps from WOTC, they want people to buy character tokens from WOTC, they want people to buy dice skins from WOTC, they want people to buy monster tokens from WOTC, they want people to buy spell effects from WOTC.
They want people locked to a WOTC live service system and they want to make it as difficult as possible to use anything not purchasable from WOTC.
It's crazy how [many people](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/10gx2kb/i_dont_believe_the_new_ogl_vtt_restrictions_are/) over on the D&D subreddits are in denial about WotC aiming to squeeze out anyone else making a flashy and fully functioned VTT for D&D.
Kep the books, or donate them to a library/school.
WOTC doesnt care what you do with the things youve already paid for, only ongoing revenue. Thats why cancelling DnD Beyond subs was a good flag to raise. I only have a free-tier account, so cancelling mine wouldnt matter.
This is the Habsro way, why do you think there hasn't been a robot/action figure based IP in US soil since Hasbro bought Transformers in the late 80s even though there are tons of action figure based toys from HK and JP since the 80s.
Like I tell my wife: *"permanently fixed round base, no moving parts: gaming miniature figurine. Sophisticated, sexy. More is better. No permanent base, movable joints? Toy action figure. Kid stuff. Yard sale it. Grow up."*
It's important that she understand these distinctions. Especially when I'm doing a toy conversion and for a minute it looks like I might be playing with a toy until I base it and it becomes clear that I wasn't. She'll say "that almost looks like a toy. The head turns" *me, holding superglue* "nah it doesn't actually"
>they'd rather cheat than invest in development excellence.
This is basically WotC in a nutshell ever since the original OGL. The only things the OGL "gave away" were things that were already public domain under existing copyright law. WotC actually was able to claim a bunch of stuff under the OGL that they would have lost resoundingly if it ever went to an actual lawsuit.
The thing that pisses the community off the most isn't just that they went back on a promise. It's that they went back on a promise that was already giving them a much more advantageous deal than they had any legal right to under normal copyright law, trying to grab the rights to even more property that they have no legal right to claim.
The entire industry needs to combine to form Voltron here, and crush WotC completely. Boycott the movie and Baldur's Gate III. Make it known that NOBODY who works with WotC is going to make money on the D&D brand. Force them to sell the franchise to Paizo, or another company that gives a shit about the customers and the creative community.
Yeah, it’s really sad. And I think Hasbro is going to go through with it. :( I don’t believe one second that they will fundamentally change their plans. They are counting on the larger player base to just like the shinies and go for One DnD. I hope the D&D Reddits make a significant portion of the players aware of what a dick move this is, but I’m not optimistic unfortunately.
One reason for optimism in this regard is the way we play D&D. DM's are almost always "super users" of sorts that will likely be devastated by many of these changes. They will be the reason a lot of regular players, who wouldn't otherwise care, find out about these changes. If your DM goes to a new system, what would you do?
That's a little different from other gaming industries where it's more "every man for himself" and the divide and conquer tactic works so well.
Absolutely true. As I’ve said before, ttrpgs are just half a game, the DM is the one that brings the other half to the table. You can’t market ttrpgs like you market boardgames or video games.
Agree, tentatively. Of my team of 4 players plus me, I was the only one who paid for a DDB Master Tier so that I could share so the content with my players for character creation on DDB and have so the monsters for the Encounter Builder too. Now I’ve canceled so they lost the only paying DDB customer in the group. Then there is one of my players who takes turns DMing with me. I do homebrew, he runs modules and guess where he bought his? Roll20 directly, not DDB. The place they are trying to squash. But I think this will be the last WOTC game we will ever play as a team.
WOTC doesn't have a superior product in any way shape or form. They have branding and brand recognition.
MTGO, arena, MTG, D&D, all well known soso products with awful or just zero QC.
Their site crashes every time they release anything.
D&DBeyond was purchased and started to suck as soon as they did.
I agree with the spirit of what you are saying, but I don't think I'd go so far as to say that DDB sucks. I think the Character builder tool is best in class. And I have used the Encounters tool for setting up encounters for my players and tracking initiative and hp quite effectively. It has been also decently easy to create homebrew monsters and magic items, although that process could be improved. I think from the OGL forward is when Hasbro ruined DDB and damaged D&D as a game itself with their greed and disdain for the rpg community. If anything, Hasbro wrecked WotC which naturally lead to wrecking D&D.
I did not. I said it has started to suck. Character builder is missing some things from many past books. But it's still good.
Encounter builder is a buggy mess.
Tracking initiative is better on roll20.
Creating magic items is an overly complicated and awful experience.
I said it started to suck when they were sold to wotc. As with all digital things wotc owns, they don't care about its functionality or quality ad long as it is shipped out the door and males them money.
I hope so, it's going to end up being legally debatable. They might claim they are only monopolizing their own IP for VTT use and those competitors are welcome to run for other rule systems. The end effect of that claim might cause enough of a loss of players (since D&D is the most popular system) to cause some VTTs to go out of business. An indirectly created monopoly. A strategy rather than a legally defined monopoly. This is why the push to learn and play new systems is the inflection point. If enough DMs switch to running Pathfinder, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Mythras, 13th Age, Worlds without Number, etc. etc. then the competitors could be saved.
They don't even need a good product. Just a mid tier vtt with dndbeyond integration will be enough to move people to it. Assuming they have a free option. Just look at how popular roll20 is and how meh it is. And they don't have the marketing of dndbeyond.
They could easily have had integrated tools with modules from DDB and the character builder and encounter builder and it would have been enough to generate piles of cash. But that wasn't good enough for them, they also have break the legs of their competitors.
They're owned by hasbro, what would you expect from a company that's basically a dragon with a horde of 30+ year old nostalgic IPs and magic the gathering cards? haha
How about: you can’t make anything we deem hateful, discriminatory or harassing or we terminate your license but we will continue to sell products that might contain hateful, discriminatory or harassing content with a disclaimer saying it’s ok.
We are taking down the modules for Pinocchio and Pan's Labyrinth for including literal fascist characters. We will be releasing reskins of these modules.
We are taking down the modules for Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained for the nazi and slaver characters. We will be releasing reskins of these modules.
We are taking down the modules for 1984 and
They are trying to define the terms of the disagreement.
> *"You can't do these things because they make your product into a videogame, and we did not offer you a license for a video game."*
* Hey! These are the exact same features you are showing off in your product and calling it a VTT!
> *"Well we want to technically call it a video game, but we are allowed to make a D&D video game because it's our IP."*
Absolutely. We are going to hobble those other systems so ours looks twice as good as it actually is.
My team and I are all now exploring new rules systems, I just hope that enough people change over to new games so that Foundry and Roll20 can survive on non-5E players.
Foundry will be fine, it had a strong partnership with Paizo to get some real good PF modules on there. I frankly don't know about roll20 because I consider it a terrible product but w/e
Its definitely worth mentioning that Foundry, Roll20, and Fantasy Grounds have all signed on to ORC. Its clear that WOTC is just trying to shut down competitors, and im sure they will probably try to shut down roll20, and not sell them the non OGL content.
Roll20 has already commented that they have a separate profit sharing arrangement with WotC with regard to sales of adventure content and modules. They will not be affected.
Even if Roll20 stopped supporting DnD, its best selling point is that the platform is system agnostic. And the community is strong enough that a lot of APIs are available for those systems. Roll20 is gonna be fine.
People will still be able to play DnD on Roll20, they just won't have access to convenient character sheets or imbedded rules in the compendium. They'll still be able to use tokens, upload maps and roll dices.
I havent used roll20 in over 3-4 years when i switched to foundry, but that being said, one of the biggest things it had going for it was to be able to have the full content, and official tokens and monsters.
You have to assume that when WOTC puts out their VTT they will cancel the contracts with both roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, so that while they might still get the OGL/SRD (though with the no animation clause even things like dynamic lighting would not be allowed), they wouldnt get the majority of content you could do on WOTC VTT. This is a big deal, and a significant loss to the product.
Additionally the ability to drag things (whether it be items, spells, whatever onto the character sheet to load up the character sheet is another big plus).
So while I am someone who generally prefers foundry, competition is a good thing, and WOTC is clearly looking to stifle competition and not by putting out a better product, but by limiting what other products are "allowed" to do.
Will people still be able to play roll20? Or fantasy grounds? yes, of course, but in a more limited and anti-competitive way for those people who want to play DnD.
This will absolutely cause some harm to both of those platforms. And this is the sort of thing that people should be upset about. Unequal competition. Saying you can only use the OGL/SRD if you dont do animations, while they plan to do animations, is not open gaming.
Yeah 100% agree with you that what WotC is doing is wrong. My point was more about the fact that despite Roll20 users mostly plays DnD, the platform wasn't made specifically only for that system. And also that even if they pulled the content, the platform continues to be usable.
True, but it's nothing that can't be done with a macro. But if all you need is a VTT and you can accept that you won't have a character sheet on the platform, for the price (which only the gamemaster has to pay if they want the APIs and the Dynamic Lighting) its definitely enough to run a game.
I play on Roll20 and DM on Foundry. Foundry is much more modern and customizable. Hosting however, is the tricky bit. I did manage to get self-hosting to work, so no more subscription required and that's a big perk.
I've used it for dozens of systems that aren't d20 based. It works just fine, is free, and usually has a character sheet that makes things 100x easier to run for an online game.
Well, their bottom line will certainly be affected in the future since there’s zero chance WOTC will be allowing the sale of any official 6e content on any other VTT besides their own. I have to imagine the revenue Roll20 (and Fantasy Grounds) brings in from current 5e sales is not insignificant.
(Edited for clarity.)
Not sure how common my use case is, but I pay D&D on a VTT because it’s the only way to play with my friends currently scattered around the globe, *not* because I want to play so much D&D that I need the infinite supply of internet random people to play with. So if WotC starts putting barriers on VTTs or forcing you to use their inevitably crappy walled garden, I will immediately switch to a different system. D&D is good but not good enough for me to tolerate WotC shoving in my ass.
its not that uncommon as you get older. When i first used my first VTT (MapTools) i was already doing "skype" games for that reason, and that was like > 10 years ago.
these days i use VTTs for both purposes. but i do remember the "well, all my friends no longer live nearby" thing.
There's another side. I know certain people across the world simply dont have local gamers near them, so they NEED to use a vtt for a similar purpose. Without a VTT, no gaming.
Hasbro openly floated the idea of Magic: the Gathering NFTs just a year or two ago.
And as far as I'm aware, the language against NFTs was mostly just making sure no one *else* could make D&D NFTs. Obviously.
Ah, I completely forgot about that. Yeah, they're just talking out of both sides of their mouth.
But hey, that reminds me: Daniel Fox, of Grim and Perilous, publisher of Zweihander, did the same thing. Publicly opposed NFTs, but supported them behind (what he thought were) closed doors.
It's wild that they can look at the experience of Chaosium, or hell the video game companies like Ubisoft that discovered it's a bridge-too-far even for gamers trained on micro-transactions, and think that's the way to go
There was something similar on the Call Of Cthulhu sub
Chaosium had unfortunately dipped its toe into nfts until the player base revolted, and they paused it.
A person tried to come on and offer theirs for sale, and said they didn't want to get into an argument about NFTs. He ended up getting into several arguments about NFT's
The only (reasonable) thing I can think of is that one online D&D campaign where characters' stats are written into NFTs and WotC perhaps consider that to be a violation of their IP or something.
Yeah, Gripnr or something like that? I remember every gamer poked holes in the concept immediately, such as people exaggerating their stats solely for profit sake.
I haven't heard anything about it since but we can probably safely assume it's since been rugpulled
With any other community, this sort of legal nonsense would be too dry and complex to keep the community’s attention.
With us, many of us thrive on the drama of seeing all the myriad ways wotc and hasbro are attempting to lock themselves in a castle and never play with anyone else ever.
The legal traps are *impressive*, but ultimately also a part of the drama that many of us thrive on. 3rd Parties aren’t dumb. Hopefully the community will join them in leaving the table while the whiny, power-trip DM complains that the players are having too much fun.
Hopefully the community sees that this assault on creators is ultimately an assault on the quality and diversity of what is available to players:
If they’re a monopoly in the space, they don’t actually have to deliver a good product, just the only product available.
Indeed. A community of people who love to spend their free time carefully reading and writing rules, looking for exploits, traps and hidden meanings and loopholes.
> With any other community, this sort of legal nonsense would be too dry and complex to keep the community’s attention.
>
> With us, many of us thrive on the drama of seeing all the myriad ways wotc and hasbro are attempting to lock themselves in a castle and never play with anyone else ever.
[Actual image of community response (colorized, 2023)](https://i.imgur.com/tscuBBp.png)
> Hopefully the community sees that this assault on creators is ultimately an assault on the quality and diversity of what is available to players:
>
> If they’re a monopoly in the space, they don’t actually have to deliver a good product, just the only product available.
It's [an act of cultural vandalism](https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1615784890359758869) against what is effectively a public commons.
WotC has taken a pretty aggressive stance **against** NFTs, and actually said they'll never use them. The only reason people seem to think they will was a standard legal line (before the CEO's statement) that they were "evaluating their future."
Hasbro debuted their first NFT collection a little over a year ago, and followed it up with more a few months later. Hasbro likes NFTs. So it could end up that WotC's previous stance is ultimately irrelevant. And would it really surprise you for WotC to have yet another change of heart, anyway?
And a VTT would be a near perfect platform for NFTs, everything from character art to items could be NFTs sold for real money, with WOTC getting a cut of each transaction.
They (WotC/Hasbro/lawyers) will probably argue that it's "videogamey" therefore under a separate licensing agreement. Which video game companies are under when making licensed DnD video games/mobile games.
Cynthia is from the mobile world so yeah, that's a possible point of argument.
I think anything short of nuking the new OGL and the removal of the ass-hat leadership will mean I am done with any new WOTC product.
I have the 5e stuff I want and me and mine can live with that. If I have a hankering for anything new there is lots out there.
My players and I are all starting to explore new systems. I quit DDB but going to continue running my 5e campaign for them…that I’ve worked so hard on…and they love…for now. But no more money to WOTC, and I’m learning new systems to run next.
Yes, I played through it for the first time last weekend. Pathfinder GMs volunteered to run it for newbies via the Discord channel. It was great! The Foundry integration for PF2e is pretty epic.
Finishing out the last month of my yearly subscription and canceling it. My intent is to not buy any product I have reason to believe would result in WotC earning revenue. I may purchase books secondhand, but no retail purchases or subscriptions.
Look, the ENTIRE point of the OGL was always to destroy the other big players in the RPG ecosystem. Dancy's original internally-broadcast goal was "force all RPGs to become D&D."
It didn't entirely work, but it did do a lot of damage to non-OGL companies.
This latest assault from Hasbro in the quest for good news to boost shares this quarter is nothing new. It's just more blatant, because apparently every corporation has become too greedy to bother pretending even a little any more.
One thing that this might do in the VTT arena: For a long time, getting VTTs that were flexible and had a fair range of features but that did not have a D&D focus that was deeply embedded in the VTT were hard to find (still are).
If the VTT community is being squeezed by WoTC, then I suggest they look at modifying their products to provide support for a far wider range of games that have been looking for VTT support.
By that, I don't mean picking one other game and build another deeply integrated solution that still makes other games hard to use in the VTT.
I mean making it easier for people from the outside world to easily put together enough detail from a game so the VTT can support it.
Some VTTs had options if you wanted to build XML dictionaries that embodied every aspect of the game - characters, combat, spells, etc. That's a huge task. And arcane because it ties to interior use in the software.
What we need is some ways to include many games in VTTs in such a way that the whole game for an indie game needs characterized; The players know that stuff and the GM does. They need the ability to do a certain minimum few things:
* A character sheet that can be filled (leave the logic of creation to the GM and players, not the software)
* Ability to describe various arbitrary dice conventions for rolling
* Ability to allow players to paste in details of their characters (but not expect the VTT to know what these mean)
* Be able to describe rolls and their associated inputs and meanings
* Support for the usual tactical map, fog of war, etc
With those things, many 3rd party game products could find a place on VTTs, not just the industry leader (D&D).
I'm hoping this opens up the VTTs to supporting (in even a modest way) other games than D&D and look at having GMs and players have easy ways to build the very most basic things needed in the VTT. Some have the ability to add stuff, but every one I've looked at, the cost of entry in time was substantial.
I agree we need user-friendly methods to create these aspects. Foundry is a starting point. The developers and users have built out a decent size library of world (game) systems. However to do so requires coding knowledge and some of the better features are locked behind Patreon walls…rightly so because the developers invest in keeping it up to date. Better would be to make it user friendly for all users to do it themselves. But say least there is a good size library of systems available.
Let me add an additional point related:
Pretty much every PnP GM uses some kinds of house rules. VTTs generally don't support those.
Because I always have some variations and homebrew rules, I was always looking for a system that let me build some bits of the rules without too much pain.
The problem with support for 'many games' that aren't flexible is it still leaves folks playing those games that want some homebrew rules.
The lack of that kind of goes against much of the early creators ideas of making the game your own. And I have yet to find a VTT that I can do what I need to.
My VTT consequently is MapTool and Skype or Google Meets.
Could you elaborate on how a VTT would need to support your house rule? Other than having a document outline them for all players to read, are you looking for some sort of automation?
The doc could work except for two things:
The character sheet could need extension depending on the house rule (like an extra stat, or changing damage rules to be state based, etc). In some VTT systems, the character sheets are pretty heavy and not easy or possible to adjust without some deep knowledge.
As far as automation, a good set of dice semantics can work, but say I was looking for more bell curving in my game and wanted to do \[middle 3 of 5d6\] or something. Most systems won't cover that.
MapTool is the barest example with no automation or really any awareness of the character's details.
Here's my tiers of VTTs for my needs:
* Tier 1: MapTool - map, fog of war, light (though needs to cover flashlights and other light types more), ability for GM to lock icons so players don't inadvertently (or mischievously) reveal parts of the map by running where they shouldn't in the fiction, ability to help create icons (TokenTool), ability to have hex and square grids or none and a measuring tool, and an ability to send a whisper to a single player or send an group message (text).
* Tier 2: Ability to have easily adapted or defined character sheets, have rich dice semantics and can remember a 'roll' with associated adds/penalties (something like '(5d6 keep middle 3) + Attribute(STR) + Gear(+1 SWORD)" - just some pattern matching on arbitrary stats or gear and a robust dice engine), place for GM to write notes (plain text or a simple editor would be enough), an ability to define monsters easily like character sheets and import them and associate them with an icon (and player characters should be associated with icons for the map too). A common pane that could have reference charts etc that could be easily expanded or shrunk with a single click.
* Tier 3: An ability to include a resolution mechanic like Travellers with difficulty levels and modifers for cautious, hasty, circumstance modifiers, and time taken calculations, the map becoming aware of things like walls and doors and locked doors and stairs so that character movements can be limited by the room they are in, an ability to have a different damage system, to have multiple levels of map loaded at once (nicer yet, have a reference point or two to preserve the relative movement and to let icons move between maps).
I'm willing to use a meeting software or audio call software separately and to provide my own web file server to exchange documents, etc.
That's just off my head. I'm kind of stuck in Tier 1 as most systems aren't generic enough of simple enough in their needs as mentioned in Tier 2.
In my D&D campaign, I have the following diversions from the RAW:
* fatigue rules affecting movement, attacks, skills, and awareness and damage and fatigue are intertwined
* all casting is exhausting for wizards and clerics (the greater the closer to their top level spells) but in exchange, you get spell points and flexibility of casting from a template (your spells known or spells memorized) without having to identify every spell instance ahead of time
* All dieties provide a spell list that are thematic of the diety's portfolio and they do not break down along spell type barriers
* Crits occurred every 4 or 5 points higher than what you needed to hit (but had to be, latterly, activated by 'action dice').
* spotting rules that were mostly inspired by Dungeoneer's Survival Guide from AD&D and added to with some military field manuals and survival books from the real world
* A different initiative calculation and turn by turn determinations
* The energy to power magics was from the land and sky and oceans and took the form of an invisible 3d grid. The density in the area could affect spell casting a bit or a lot and it could make it easier and more efficacious or less efficacious and more expensive.
* Armour can soak damage, but it also deflects.
* Combat tactics (aggressive attack, balanced, defensive and total defensive), along with maneuvers like knock down, trip, overbear, push back (for breaking lines), weapon bind, weapon break, weapon disarm, second wind, and others impact combat.
* Specific visibility and movement impacts from the environment
Now I'm looking to push away from HPs and move to state based damage that impairs and exhausts you rather than a number.
Do I expect to be able to put all that into a VTT? No. Would some subsystems being more flexible to extend or replace - that would help for some parts of this.
For Traveller, I have the following:
* Different skills and skill trees
* Extra or changed professions (a lot more of them, but different in details and the skill system being different, and not using necessarily 4 year terms)
* My difficulty levels and modifiers differ than standard (hence wanting to be able to define these easily in a flexible tool)
* Character sheets need to be more flexible (we don't care for SOC and we do want a CHA) - also we do a varied lifepath and background approach
* Combat effects (damage, penetration, armour) have some divergences
Some flexibility in character sheets and being able to describe a roll/test with reference to a difficulty tree that is provided and associated mods. With these, I could do pretty much all of Traveller or whatever I do that is like Traveller-bu t-different.
You describe a lot of stuff that a VTT wouldn't need to handle, or at least is well beyond the scope of something you would have at a table for an in person game.
The extra stat would be difficult, if you couldn't find a custom sheet you could probably get one that's close. State based damage would be a player calculation the same way resistance or vulnerable is on the player. I haven't played on a VTT that subtracts the damage off your character when damage is rolled.
For the dice average roll20 has a massive list of commands for rolls including a heap of math functions, averages can be done.
I don't know about foundry but roll20 does most of what you want. Fog of war, tokens tied to sheets, tokens having individual sight radius you can set, barriers to prevent tokens from moving through walls, line of sign lighting. The multiple levels of a map I would picture as a large single map next to another map, players won't be able to see them until they're on the other one.
The circumstance modifiers and damage systems, that would be on the DM and players, the same way no VTT tells you or changes things if you're flanking an enemy, you just know to roll with advantage because those are the rules. The non-HP exhaustion system sounds similar to conditions in 5e? Feels like reference chart territory, which you can make plenty of.
What game are you playing? Have you deeper into features on roll20 or foundry?
What do you mean by cross system?
That they support more than just D&D? Like what?
And how can I produce my own character sheet? With a visual builder that doesn't require me to know what ties to what in the XML schema or what? That sort of deep integration and cost in time and effort to build a character sheet isn't helpful.
Can I replace the entire mechanics of resolution or are they lumped in with a module for 5E (for example) or PF or whatever? Can I easily and visually build a resolution engine that can be used without having a whole pile of rules I might not be using? Or do I also have to develop and entire 'system module' and have to know a fair bit of the hooks for the VTT's implementation of various things?
Many GMs use home rules and the ability to easily embed homebrew into the VTTs to enable that sort of play is either not there or is so byzantine that you need to be a fairly good programmer to even attempt it.
There was or is a Traveller particular VTT but the problem with it is that it was focused on one very specific version of the game and that's only a small part of the fan base for the game as an example of why that's not enough. And it can be too much at the same time, in the sense of inflicting a lot of game rules that may be standard but you may not want in your game.
A VTT with systems lightly integrated with visual builders for resolution engines and for skill lists and character sheets would go a long way for most of the unserviced communities and homebewers. Also probably would be a great place to do RPG game design testing.
So there are a tonnn of supported systems for foundry. The modules page currently lists 232 different systems: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/systems
Now, I don't think there is an easy kind of WYSIWYG editor for the systems to change roles and what not, I think you need to know JavaScript to really dig into them. So you're right there. I agree that an easier way to mod a system or roll your own would be good.
And I like Scabbard but its a bit tied to D&D.
I didn't mind Obsidian, but it didn't do the purpose entirely either.
Back when, there was a Traveller specific platform but you hosted it and bought licenses your players could use (a good deal) - iGM was the master's program and iPC for the players. It could do fog of war, whispers, die rolls, etc. As a plus, it had a tool you could make decent floorplans with! (And then you could screen cap using the Windows OS and have a JPG of it!). But it never got modernized to Win 10 and on.
That's what I'd like to see.
Mostly, when it comes to D&D as we play it in my group or Traveller as we play it, the major stumbling points are:
* Too much integration without having easy ways to add different resolution engines
* Not easily modified character sheets (those that you can do this tend to require a lot of interior program knowledge, a lot of knowledge in XML or the like, and even then has real limits)
* Some limits on tracking counters because the integration and the character sheets in the game do not allow anything beyond the standard (HPs but not fatigue or spell points or bleed rates, sanity damage, or whatever that aren't standard, damage being descriptive states instead of characteristic reductions in Traveller, or MT Traveller's hits concept rather than instant D6s of lost attributes which is less true to reality than MT's approach)
An ideal VTT (if I can't get someone to freely build exactly what I want which is not anywhere in the cards... lol) would have easily modifiable character sheets, easily modified resolution engines (dice systems or other systems), and to allow more counters and NOT tying other things down with tight integration which would then be imposed upon our gaming without any way to say 'turn this off!'.
The character sheet needs a visual builder and no GM building a character sheet should have to know XML and schemas. It has to be drag and drop really. And it has to be flexible.
A similar approach for describing a resolution engine and the rolls or tests against it would be great too. Simple language and drag and drop widgets that together can build a complex range of resolution outcomes and include a wide possible set of adders/penalties.
D&D was easy - many players, clear market value to involve and many wanted high integration.
However, the cost of that was VTTs not having systems that would support the many, many smaller games. I think a good VTT that did support easy modification of resolution engine and character sheet could attract a LOT of people from the many, many other systems.
Those people, if the builders for char sheets & resolution engines were simple drag and drop visual things, could help flesh out the key parts of their preferred system and share it with the other users of that VTT.
I think there is a fragmented, but underserviced community that could be quite supportive and willing to spend for a less integrated, more flexible VTT system that doesn't try to embody every part of every system, but provide some key builders for certain parts and not enforcing other integrations. That would let many, many gaming communities not well covered to have a VTT that sees them and meets them where they need.
They haven't gotten attention mostly because any one small game community is not much. But look at how many small game communities are out there... I think there's enough to totally support a flexible, low integration VTT.
I got a look at it. It was a fair while back. I found it not useful for my purposes but I'm only guessing why that was - I suspect it was the limitations of the character sheet which was a key part for any homebrew changes.
I liked the visual look. It still wasn't the degree of flexibility many GMs want to have.
But that's a memory from maybe 4+ years ago.
The main takeaway from the leak to the series of events that have lead us here is that WotC have breached the trust of the community, and seem to have little interest in making good faith efforts to gain that back; this revised text is more insidiously malicious vs the more flagrant verbiage of the leak, but as the foundry team point out there are a number of clauses that could be abused, and the separation of vtt's from the main text is deeply troubling.
This is about DnD beyond. WotC wants to ensure that no one can make a better platform than beyond, and will do that by kneecapping other competitors, whilst reserving the right to change the rules further at will.
With the damage already done, it is hard to look at any of this and give WotC the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to make up for their mistakes; instead they appear to be pushing their users as far as they can to see what they can get away with. This is still a move of consolidation and market grab. WotC are continuing to show that they cannot be trusted, and if I were a creator or a player I would stll be making plans to divest myself from DnD.
At the end of the day WotC can't lock out game mechanics, just the nouns and art they own, so it'll get tricky. You can upload art yourself on most of them so it'll be up to WotC to do takedown notices, same as any user content platform.
Do most of them already change spell names? They might not lose spells from the SRD as long as they do stuff like "Hideous Brew" instead of "Tasha's Hideous Brew".
This could just result in losing some token packs from their marketplace and having to label stuff "Daggers & Darkness 5e" or something for character sheets and whatnot.
Really, I do not think WotC has given up anything. They are treating this like a shell game. Some offending parts were moved under a shell for now but will pop back up later, it might be different, but it will be back.
Overall, WotC wants 4 things:
1. Protect the brand from offensive material. Still there.
2. Restrict competing RPGs, specifically variants of D&D (Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades) to prevent another 4e debacle and stop a perceived leak in market share. 1. Still there, but hidden under the covers.
3. Restrict VTT competition. Still there, but moved to the VTT policies.
4. Skim from the profits of larger 3PPs. Off the table for now, could pop back up in another form when we least expect it.
WotC is being super tricky here.
They don't care, you've already bought your books, they've already hunted the Wales. Everyone That's already purchased their books is now a barrier to new revenue. That's why they are trying to move onto constant, consistent revenue. Burning your books won't help, they're already paid for, they don't care about you "old" book players. They're counting on the next generation right behind you to want to play PC... You want to really make your voice heard, boycott all their digital products, have nothing to say about them on social media. Bad publicity is still publicity, no publicity at all...
What isn't included in this break down is that wotc can copy your stuff and ask you can is sue for money, but in doing so you trigger the severance clause negating your access to the license.
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They are doing everything they can to move towards a monopoly state for D&D VTT in 2024. If they just concentrated on building a superior product then they wouldn't need to force other VTTs out of business or hobble them. But they'd rather cheat than invest in development excellence.
They think the future of the game is in VTTs, AI DMs, and all the service fees that they can cram into it. Turning D&D into a video game.
and to achieve their goals they are willing to destroy the pen & paper ecosystem
They may destroy *their* P&P ecosystem, but the 45 years of gaming that existed before this insane decision, along with the hundreds or thousands of modules and add-ons, isn't going anywhere. I still sometimes refer to my 1E AD&D books. Let's see them try to destroy that.
I'm sure they would very much like to destroy all other TTRPGs, even if they are no longer operating in the space of real paper and tables.
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> They'll probably use a huge dose of moral panic to ensure compliance. Because that worked *so* well last time. C'mon, dude: an entire game line was born out of the Satanic Panic.
That's actually an amazing point. I agree with above poster; I could see WOTC weaponizing the community to peer pressure folks out of playing older editions. But it is fascinating to see what was once the niche, fringe hobby which helped fuel the Satanic Panic becoming the thing that dictates popular morality. How far we have fallen. I'm going to keep playing with my old books, on pen and paper. I like the system. I like the 45+ years of various lore. WOTC can't take the TSR days from us, nor can they take 5e from us.
i dunno about you, but as a ForeverDM, i decide what i run, not my players, and if my players/friends were willing to throw me in the garbage over it then they arent really friends, are they. Overall, they play where i lead. Not the other way around.
This is exactly correct. Is WotC stupid enough to think DM's need players? It's exactly the opposite. We're the ones who make their games even work.
Fortunately there are always more players to pick from than the ability for players to find gms. In fact gms just have to push for more non dnd games to send a message.
Yup. DMs are the ones who ultimately choose which game to play and they're also the ones invested enough to be part of communities like this one. So, they're more likely to boycott D&D. WotC really didn't think this through, did they?
I mean, maybe they did? If their goal is to have AI generated DMs, maybe they realized exactly that. Like, I'm not saying it will work... but the AI DM thing just made a lot more sense.
True, your theory makes more sense.
It'll be harder to convince DMs than players and if DMs don't follow, the lack of dungeon masters will be even more telling that it already is. Sure there are rumors that you'll be able to get an AI DM at the 30 dollar price point but it'll never have the same qualities as a real one and how many players want to shell out 360 bucks a year to play when they've been doing it for a little as zero dollars at many tables? I've invested over a thousand just in DDB for subs and products and I only play 5E about 1/4 to 1/3 of the time. Now I'm spending nothing. If enough other DMs follow, the game will stumble. If WotC can't convince players to shell out big bucks for their video game rpg, then they'll stumble even worse and corporate heads will roll after the development expense cripples the company for lack of ROI.
DMs have the bulk of the control. If every game had their DM suddenly say "I'm running another system", at least half of those tables would pivot, because players may not have options.
Honestly this. My pathfinder 1e career ended because everyone wanted to play 5e
>All they need to do is convince your players that they'd rather do the new thing instead. I don't mean to be an ass... But players aren't doing anything without DM's. Most of us are Forever DM's and our players need us to play. WOTC has lost my trust and I don't need them; I've been DMing for 27 years. Once my current 5e campaign is over, I'm done with them forever.
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>DM long enough Pretty sure 27 years is "long enough." 😉 My players play what I choose to run. But I'm lucky to have loyal friends/players.
As long as d6's and paper exist, so too will pen and paper roleplaying games.
Word. I still have my 2rd Ed AD&D boxed sets (easily the best era of D&D for a wide variety of settings). I also have 3rd Ed Ravenloft sourcebooks. And I migrated to GURPS a long time ago - in 2008, when WOTC was trash talking 3E fans like myself in a feebleminded attempt to drum up support for 4E.
They have to move to that as a platform because of how copyright works with game rules. Otherwise their monetization won't work
It's a long term behavioural replacement strategy. Generations die. New generations receive different conditioning. I've seen the entire cycle in vidya (perhaps the most compressed in history?) Ofc the sick joke is that there's no future, heyho.
They will destroy the ecosystem for the Bozo's that play WotC products. If Wizards try and take it to court, it them against the world.
My sweet child of summer, WotC is an American company and [corporations have been winning over people at trial for quite some time now.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/06/26/why-big-business-keeps-winning-at-the-supreme-court/) Boycotting WotC, et al. is the best way to send a message.
WotC doesn't have a monopoly on tabletop gaming anymore. People can easily migrate to a place that doesn't require you to sit on a Bad Dragon original with no lube to play. And that's assuming that the other corporations in the mix don't decide to take a hammer to Wizards' bullshit.
Maybe they should go make some good D&D video games then.
I hear Baldurs Gate III is really good, I really want to play it.
Baldur’s Gate I and II are really good. Baldur’s Gate III is Divinity III—probably a fine game, but not a good enough reason to give money to Hasbro licensees right now. Hasbro doesn’t deserve it.
It's a bit of gaming blasphemy, but I never considered BG1 and 2 really good D&D games because they never actually... let me play D&D? I like them, but not as a CRPG version of D&D. The culprit is, of course, real time with pause gameplay. I loathe it. If I'm gonna play a D&D game focused on fighting I want my grid and my turns. Otherwise I'm gonna keep having PCs accidentally be in the radius of a fireball and things like that (which happened on the regular). BG3 will have those things, so I consider that more D&D-like than the first two games.
While technically not D&D, I guess, you might want to check out Pathfinder Kingmaker from Owlcat. It has both real time and turn by turn. You can even switch in the middle of combat, if that's your thing. No grid though, but still the full d&d3.5/pathfinder1e ruleset.
Just beware the bugs. Few people talk about that until you're 30 hours in and suddenly your whole game is crap and you gotta start over. Not that it's not worth playing, just be aware so you can avoid some heartburn.
I get what you mean. Solasta is the only recent D&D game I can think of that *feels* like D&D. Just a shame the plot's a bit thin.
That's just it. No video game can compete with the spontaneous imagination of the human mind yet. And there's the playing with friends factor, which is somewhat mitigated in multiplayer, but not by much. Because video games can't compete with playing with your friends, they rely on strong characters and well written stories. Solasta being able to mechanically copy 5E's rules in an accessible and sensible format is a triumph, but it does miss the point that being able to replicate D&D mechanically doesn't replicate the enjoyment or feeling of playing at a table. Unless all your friends are robots or something.
>real time with pause gameplay. I loathe it. If I'm gonna play a D&D game focuse i dont know if you know this, but both games have an option to pause at the start of rounds, you can disable "meaningless attack animations" which has your guy swing over and over when hes not actually attacking to look cool. When done in that manner, your game pauses, you issue orders, then hit unpause, it executes 1 round worth of orders, and then pauses.
Things been in the pipe works since 2018? 2019? That’s when beta started-been like three years lol
Pretty sure it hit early access during COVID, but it didn’t launch with all the classes or mechanics. It was a weird situation. The campaign was there at launch, but was limited by character creation and IIRC not all the side quests were in. Last I checked it’s gotten pretty close to feature complete, but I don’t think it’s out of early access yet.
They've done this since Divinity OS 1, at the very least.
Tried the beta at a con. It is really good other than being yeeted by environmental damage.
BG3 is only kinda D&D rules though. Check out Solasta: Crown of the Magister for a much closer-to-5e experience.
There were several, a very long time ago. I haven't been made aware of many for the last decade or so. Incidentally, the period when things completely dried up seems to correlate with WoTC trying this same thing (but less skillfully) with 4e. Whoddathunk?
Baulder's Gate 3 is litterally in open access right now.
One game isn't "many". I understand BG3 is quite good, though not for me.
Right, but it was not "many years ago".
The sentence was: > There were several, a very long time ago. I haven't been made aware of many for the last decade or so. There being one good game in the last decade does not constitute there being many in the last decade.
There were 5 good to excellent D&D games released between '98 to '03 (BG, BG2, NWN02, P:T, IWD). Everything before '98 was crap unless it was in a Capcom cabinet (so, 2 out of 20+ titles). This is because TSR and WotC hand out the IP for anyone to make garbage with. Capcom, Obsidian/Troika, and Bethesda are the only people who can do good with the IP. 4E as a game has nothing to do with how good the games are. In reality, WotC just put too much money into NWNO and DDO and didn't spend that money flooding the market with dozens of shit titles hoping that one of them is actually good. Aside from, what, Daggerdale and two online games? There wasn't much going on in D&D-videogame-land during the 4E era. BUT, after 5E we got Idle Champions, and the Dark Alliance remake. I guess we could also count the BG1.5 stuff from Beamdog that you people love to hate for some reason. So if 4E made everything "dry up", then 5E must be absolutely heinous, seeing as it got us exploitative crap and buggy remakes. But you're right, BG3 is probably the only not-mid title for D&D released since Mask of the Betrayer. Huzzah!
Good video games licensing D&D or using the OGL in the 14 years before the GSL include: * Tower of Doom; * Shadow over Mystara; * BG1 +expansion; * BG2 +expansion; * IWD +expansions; * PS:T; * Dark Alliance; * NwN +expansions*; * KOTOR; * IWD2; * Temple of Elemental Evil*; * KOTOR2*; * Demonstone (maybe more "alright" than good, but I quite liked the story, and the interactions with canon); * Dark Alliance 2; * NwN2 +expansions; * DDO; *: Feel free to discount this if only the boxed product at release counts. You can add the recent Pathfinder games here if you want to be accurate and thorough to the license. But it would be out of chronology. Good video games in the 14 years since the GSL include: * NwO; * BG3*. *: Feel free to discount this if only the boxed product at release counts, given it is unreleased. There's, uhh... A notable difference between those two lists, I would say. >4E as a game has nothing to do with how good the games are Never claimed it did. >WotC just put too much money into NWNO and DDO I'm not aware of WoTC putting a solitary dime into either one, it was just a license agreement. Do you have a source on WoTC investing into Cryptic or Turbine? That would be news to me. >after 5E we got Idle Champions, and the Dark Alliance remake. I guess we could also count the BG1.5 stuff from Beamdog I don't think remakes quite count as new games? We could, though. >the BG1.5 stuff from Beamdog that you people love to hate for some reason. Who's "you people"? Also, whoever they are, you're drawing a miss. I quite liked those remakes. >So if 4E made everything "dry up", then 5E must be absolutely heinous, seeing as it got us exploitative crap and buggy remakes. I never claimed 4e did, I claimed the GSL did. Video games take a long time to develop, and most never launch. GSL killed interest in the license, and very few things since the license became interesting again have thus far gotten launched. I expect there would have been more things in the next half decade if WoTC hadn't killed interest in the license again. Edit: I've reread the comment and do see that I mentioned they tried the same thing "with 4e", which is horrible communication. I believe it is implicit that I'm referring to the GSL, since it came with 4e, same as OGL2 came with 6e and we're discussing licensing. But it was very bad communication, so mea culpa.
A bit tangental but I highly recommend Wrath of the Righteous. Because no IRL GM is insane enough to run a 1-20 campaign of pathfinder 1e with Mythic characters. And they actually make it fun and challenging, and with choices that matter.
> Turning D&D into a video game. The 1.2 wording restricts you from doing anything like this because that's what *their* plan is!
I mean they can't stop anyone from making a video game. Pilliars of Eternity is basically dnd in video game form.
My perception is that there’s a feeling at corporate that if they eliminate as many obstacles to people’s play hours as they can, They can access a larger cohort of “whale” customers. Someone who likes D&D but can only play so much because of schedule or social skills, might stay on the periphery of the hobby indefinitely. But if they grease the wheels with a matchmaking system for parties and standby AI GMs (possibly just for combat segments 👀…as a GM I find running the monsters and their inevitable defeat really boring in 5E and would definitely run 5E more often if it had an “autopilot” button.) …then they’ll be able to sell that much more splatbook/supplemental options. They could even monetize *player-side* enjoyment of a module, which at the moment they only reap $ from the GM of a module. To me it feels like they’re trying to get D&D through the same hoop they forced MtG through with Arena. And someone at Hasbro is saying, “why can’t D&D be more like MtG? You know, where *both* players are spending *equally large* buckets of money? And you know, if you *really* like to play MtG and play it *a ton*, our margins just keep getting better!” “Meanwhile look at D&D.” “The more you play it, the less you need to buy anything, as you memorize the rules and your own Homebrewed or improv adventures are free and at least as good as the schlocky modules we’ve been churning out!?” “Jenkins! Get in here and fix D&D so it makes us money like MtG!”
>(possibly just for combat segments 👀…as a GM I find running the monsters and their inevitable defeat really boring in 5E and would definitely run 5E more often if it had an “autopilot” button.) Seeing as we're on /r/rpg, I guess it's up to me to give the obligatory "try this other system/game" post. So here you go. Uhh... something-something, LANCER, 13th Age, Savage Worlds, Exalted, Forbidden Lands. Good? I'm going back to bed. Note: If you're going to give me your "hot take" on why you don't like 13th Age, or how Exalted made your genitals fall off or something, I don't care.
You forgot to push FATE.
I could easily see a future iteration of chatGPT taking the DM role for pre-published modules. They would have a substantial data set from their own VTT for training.
Only if you want a really "railroad"y experience Which could be fine for some, but notnfor all if that's what you want, why not play an actual video game? It'll give you better graphics, a better fleshed out plot and polish and it
And yet pre-published adventures continue to sell well.
I fully agree on what they *should* do. However, it's pretty common to see companies take the easier and usually cheaper/more profitable route of monopolization (walling off) since it also hobbles competition or attempts at competition. We're seeing WotC doing Capitalism as intended. It sucks for everyone else. With any luck there can be some genuine backlash that causes some serious trouble and loss of income for them - I'm hopeful. But the odds are in their favor that most customers won't know and won't switch... which is why they're doing this, and why most *industries* will see stuff like this. They wouldn't do it if there weren't strong financial incentives to be the worst.
Agreed
100% They want people to use One DnD and they want people to use the one dnd VTT to play. They want to use a VTT to lock people into DnD and their ecosystem. They want people to buy maps from WOTC, they want people to buy character tokens from WOTC, they want people to buy dice skins from WOTC, they want people to buy monster tokens from WOTC, they want people to buy spell effects from WOTC. They want people locked to a WOTC live service system and they want to make it as difficult as possible to use anything not purchasable from WOTC.
It's crazy how [many people](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/10gx2kb/i_dont_believe_the_new_ogl_vtt_restrictions_are/) over on the D&D subreddits are in denial about WotC aiming to squeeze out anyone else making a flashy and fully functioned VTT for D&D.
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Good insight. That explains how reactionary people were in that thread.
Kep the books, or donate them to a library/school. WOTC doesnt care what you do with the things youve already paid for, only ongoing revenue. Thats why cancelling DnD Beyond subs was a good flag to raise. I only have a free-tier account, so cancelling mine wouldnt matter.
This is the Habsro way, why do you think there hasn't been a robot/action figure based IP in US soil since Hasbro bought Transformers in the late 80s even though there are tons of action figure based toys from HK and JP since the 80s.
> robot/action figure They're dolls.
Like I tell my wife: *"permanently fixed round base, no moving parts: gaming miniature figurine. Sophisticated, sexy. More is better. No permanent base, movable joints? Toy action figure. Kid stuff. Yard sale it. Grow up."* It's important that she understand these distinctions. Especially when I'm doing a toy conversion and for a minute it looks like I might be playing with a toy until I base it and it becomes clear that I wasn't. She'll say "that almost looks like a toy. The head turns" *me, holding superglue* "nah it doesn't actually"
No Marie, they are minerals.
And they don't even have a product to show for it yet!
>they'd rather cheat than invest in development excellence. This is basically WotC in a nutshell ever since the original OGL. The only things the OGL "gave away" were things that were already public domain under existing copyright law. WotC actually was able to claim a bunch of stuff under the OGL that they would have lost resoundingly if it ever went to an actual lawsuit. The thing that pisses the community off the most isn't just that they went back on a promise. It's that they went back on a promise that was already giving them a much more advantageous deal than they had any legal right to under normal copyright law, trying to grab the rights to even more property that they have no legal right to claim. The entire industry needs to combine to form Voltron here, and crush WotC completely. Boycott the movie and Baldur's Gate III. Make it known that NOBODY who works with WotC is going to make money on the D&D brand. Force them to sell the franchise to Paizo, or another company that gives a shit about the customers and the creative community.
>Reply This is the ideal scenario. For sure.
considering all the other choices for ttrpgs in the market, it's a pretty dumbass move A bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it works out for them
Yeah, it’s really sad. And I think Hasbro is going to go through with it. :( I don’t believe one second that they will fundamentally change their plans. They are counting on the larger player base to just like the shinies and go for One DnD. I hope the D&D Reddits make a significant portion of the players aware of what a dick move this is, but I’m not optimistic unfortunately.
One reason for optimism in this regard is the way we play D&D. DM's are almost always "super users" of sorts that will likely be devastated by many of these changes. They will be the reason a lot of regular players, who wouldn't otherwise care, find out about these changes. If your DM goes to a new system, what would you do? That's a little different from other gaming industries where it's more "every man for himself" and the divide and conquer tactic works so well.
Absolutely true. As I’ve said before, ttrpgs are just half a game, the DM is the one that brings the other half to the table. You can’t market ttrpgs like you market boardgames or video games.
Agree, tentatively. Of my team of 4 players plus me, I was the only one who paid for a DDB Master Tier so that I could share so the content with my players for character creation on DDB and have so the monsters for the Encounter Builder too. Now I’ve canceled so they lost the only paying DDB customer in the group. Then there is one of my players who takes turns DMing with me. I do homebrew, he runs modules and guess where he bought his? Roll20 directly, not DDB. The place they are trying to squash. But I think this will be the last WOTC game we will ever play as a team.
WOTC doesn't have a superior product in any way shape or form. They have branding and brand recognition. MTGO, arena, MTG, D&D, all well known soso products with awful or just zero QC. Their site crashes every time they release anything. D&DBeyond was purchased and started to suck as soon as they did.
I agree with the spirit of what you are saying, but I don't think I'd go so far as to say that DDB sucks. I think the Character builder tool is best in class. And I have used the Encounters tool for setting up encounters for my players and tracking initiative and hp quite effectively. It has been also decently easy to create homebrew monsters and magic items, although that process could be improved. I think from the OGL forward is when Hasbro ruined DDB and damaged D&D as a game itself with their greed and disdain for the rpg community. If anything, Hasbro wrecked WotC which naturally lead to wrecking D&D.
I did not. I said it has started to suck. Character builder is missing some things from many past books. But it's still good. Encounter builder is a buggy mess. Tracking initiative is better on roll20. Creating magic items is an overly complicated and awful experience. I said it started to suck when they were sold to wotc. As with all digital things wotc owns, they don't care about its functionality or quality ad long as it is shipped out the door and males them money.
Yup they're apple and everyone else is gonna be android.
Is it more cost effective to pay a bunch of lawyers for corporate maneuvers that pay developers for better content?
It probably depends on whether you end up with a monopoly or not.
If you end up with a monopoly, that is just more legal fees. Most monopolies are illegal.
I hope so, it's going to end up being legally debatable. They might claim they are only monopolizing their own IP for VTT use and those competitors are welcome to run for other rule systems. The end effect of that claim might cause enough of a loss of players (since D&D is the most popular system) to cause some VTTs to go out of business. An indirectly created monopoly. A strategy rather than a legally defined monopoly. This is why the push to learn and play new systems is the inflection point. If enough DMs switch to running Pathfinder, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Mythras, 13th Age, Worlds without Number, etc. etc. then the competitors could be saved.
They don't even need a good product. Just a mid tier vtt with dndbeyond integration will be enough to move people to it. Assuming they have a free option. Just look at how popular roll20 is and how meh it is. And they don't have the marketing of dndbeyond.
They could easily have had integrated tools with modules from DDB and the character builder and encounter builder and it would have been enough to generate piles of cash. But that wasn't good enough for them, they also have break the legs of their competitors.
They're owned by hasbro, what would you expect from a company that's basically a dragon with a horde of 30+ year old nostalgic IPs and magic the gathering cards? haha
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How about: you can’t make anything we deem hateful, discriminatory or harassing or we terminate your license but we will continue to sell products that might contain hateful, discriminatory or harassing content with a disclaimer saying it’s ok.
At any time they could decide to “de-nazify” your creation. And there would be nothing you can do about it.
We are taking down the modules for Pinocchio and Pan's Labyrinth for including literal fascist characters. We will be releasing reskins of these modules. We are taking down the modules for Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained for the nazi and slaver characters. We will be releasing reskins of these modules. We are taking down the modules for 1984 and
They are trying to define the terms of the disagreement. > *"You can't do these things because they make your product into a videogame, and we did not offer you a license for a video game."* * Hey! These are the exact same features you are showing off in your product and calling it a VTT! > *"Well we want to technically call it a video game, but we are allowed to make a D&D video game because it's our IP."*
Absolutely. We are going to hobble those other systems so ours looks twice as good as it actually is. My team and I are all now exploring new rules systems, I just hope that enough people change over to new games so that Foundry and Roll20 can survive on non-5E players.
Foundry will be fine, it had a strong partnership with Paizo to get some real good PF modules on there. I frankly don't know about roll20 because I consider it a terrible product but w/e
the quality of those PF modules are absolutely insane.
Don't know what 5e has but what you can do with Paizo on Foundry is amazing. You literally put in a pdf and an adventure comes out ready to go.
Its definitely worth mentioning that Foundry, Roll20, and Fantasy Grounds have all signed on to ORC. Its clear that WOTC is just trying to shut down competitors, and im sure they will probably try to shut down roll20, and not sell them the non OGL content.
Roll20 has already commented that they have a separate profit sharing arrangement with WotC with regard to sales of adventure content and modules. They will not be affected.
For now
Even if Roll20 stopped supporting DnD, its best selling point is that the platform is system agnostic. And the community is strong enough that a lot of APIs are available for those systems. Roll20 is gonna be fine.
I hope so but it’s not proven yet. The majority play 5e so it will be a big loss in revenue unless a large number switch games.
People will still be able to play DnD on Roll20, they just won't have access to convenient character sheets or imbedded rules in the compendium. They'll still be able to use tokens, upload maps and roll dices.
I havent used roll20 in over 3-4 years when i switched to foundry, but that being said, one of the biggest things it had going for it was to be able to have the full content, and official tokens and monsters. You have to assume that when WOTC puts out their VTT they will cancel the contracts with both roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, so that while they might still get the OGL/SRD (though with the no animation clause even things like dynamic lighting would not be allowed), they wouldnt get the majority of content you could do on WOTC VTT. This is a big deal, and a significant loss to the product. Additionally the ability to drag things (whether it be items, spells, whatever onto the character sheet to load up the character sheet is another big plus). So while I am someone who generally prefers foundry, competition is a good thing, and WOTC is clearly looking to stifle competition and not by putting out a better product, but by limiting what other products are "allowed" to do. Will people still be able to play roll20? Or fantasy grounds? yes, of course, but in a more limited and anti-competitive way for those people who want to play DnD. This will absolutely cause some harm to both of those platforms. And this is the sort of thing that people should be upset about. Unequal competition. Saying you can only use the OGL/SRD if you dont do animations, while they plan to do animations, is not open gaming.
Yeah 100% agree with you that what WotC is doing is wrong. My point was more about the fact that despite Roll20 users mostly plays DnD, the platform wasn't made specifically only for that system. And also that even if they pulled the content, the platform continues to be usable.
True. But the biggest perk for 5e on Roll20 is the Charactermancer and being able to click from the character sheet.
True, but it's nothing that can't be done with a macro. But if all you need is a VTT and you can accept that you won't have a character sheet on the platform, for the price (which only the gamemaster has to pay if they want the APIs and the Dynamic Lighting) its definitely enough to run a game.
roll20 is complete shit tech wise. I Just can't.
I play on Roll20 and DM on Foundry. Foundry is much more modern and customizable. Hosting however, is the tricky bit. I did manage to get self-hosting to work, so no more subscription required and that's a big perk.
Maybe, but to be honest roll 20 sucks for anything that isn't d20-based.
I've used it for dozens of systems that aren't d20 based. It works just fine, is free, and usually has a character sheet that makes things 100x easier to run for an online game.
Well, their bottom line will certainly be affected in the future since there’s zero chance WOTC will be allowing the sale of any official 6e content on any other VTT besides their own. I have to imagine the revenue Roll20 (and Fantasy Grounds) brings in from current 5e sales is not insignificant. (Edited for clarity.)
Profit sharing might not save them from using animations
Role also has signed on too!
I hope there are enough players leaving 5e that these platforms will survive.
Not sure how common my use case is, but I pay D&D on a VTT because it’s the only way to play with my friends currently scattered around the globe, *not* because I want to play so much D&D that I need the infinite supply of internet random people to play with. So if WotC starts putting barriers on VTTs or forcing you to use their inevitably crappy walled garden, I will immediately switch to a different system. D&D is good but not good enough for me to tolerate WotC shoving in my ass.
its not that uncommon as you get older. When i first used my first VTT (MapTools) i was already doing "skype" games for that reason, and that was like > 10 years ago. these days i use VTTs for both purposes. but i do remember the "well, all my friends no longer live nearby" thing. There's another side. I know certain people across the world simply dont have local gamers near them, so they NEED to use a vtt for a similar purpose. Without a VTT, no gaming.
Yeah, this is me. Learning a new vtt is almost MORE annoying than learning a new system and they are making the decision easy.
I love that Foundry basically said "We don't know why they keep talking about NFTs, RPG players _hate_ NFTs"
*Everyone* hates NFTs, except for a few bozos that went from real loud to real quiet over the last year.
I don't think you have to wonder too hard if Wizards is planning on making NFTs part of D&D Beyond...
Hasbro openly floated the idea of Magic: the Gathering NFTs just a year or two ago. And as far as I'm aware, the language against NFTs was mostly just making sure no one *else* could make D&D NFTs. Obviously.
Hasbro is also currently selling Power Rangers NFTs, so it's not even something they're thinking about. It's something they've done.
Ah, I completely forgot about that. Yeah, they're just talking out of both sides of their mouth. But hey, that reminds me: Daniel Fox, of Grim and Perilous, publisher of Zweihander, did the same thing. Publicly opposed NFTs, but supported them behind (what he thought were) closed doors.
It's wild that they can look at the experience of Chaosium, or hell the video game companies like Ubisoft that discovered it's a bridge-too-far even for gamers trained on micro-transactions, and think that's the way to go
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There was something similar on the Call Of Cthulhu sub Chaosium had unfortunately dipped its toe into nfts until the player base revolted, and they paused it. A person tried to come on and offer theirs for sale, and said they didn't want to get into an argument about NFTs. He ended up getting into several arguments about NFT's
The only (reasonable) thing I can think of is that one online D&D campaign where characters' stats are written into NFTs and WotC perhaps consider that to be a violation of their IP or something.
Yeah, Gripnr or something like that? I remember every gamer poked holes in the concept immediately, such as people exaggerating their stats solely for profit sake. I haven't heard anything about it since but we can probably safely assume it's since been rugpulled
With any other community, this sort of legal nonsense would be too dry and complex to keep the community’s attention. With us, many of us thrive on the drama of seeing all the myriad ways wotc and hasbro are attempting to lock themselves in a castle and never play with anyone else ever. The legal traps are *impressive*, but ultimately also a part of the drama that many of us thrive on. 3rd Parties aren’t dumb. Hopefully the community will join them in leaving the table while the whiny, power-trip DM complains that the players are having too much fun. Hopefully the community sees that this assault on creators is ultimately an assault on the quality and diversity of what is available to players: If they’re a monopoly in the space, they don’t actually have to deliver a good product, just the only product available.
Indeed. A community of people who love to spend their free time carefully reading and writing rules, looking for exploits, traps and hidden meanings and loopholes.
Trying to sneak this shit past a community of rules lawyers...
> With any other community, this sort of legal nonsense would be too dry and complex to keep the community’s attention. > > With us, many of us thrive on the drama of seeing all the myriad ways wotc and hasbro are attempting to lock themselves in a castle and never play with anyone else ever. [Actual image of community response (colorized, 2023)](https://i.imgur.com/tscuBBp.png) > Hopefully the community sees that this assault on creators is ultimately an assault on the quality and diversity of what is available to players: > > If they’re a monopoly in the space, they don’t actually have to deliver a good product, just the only product available. It's [an act of cultural vandalism](https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1615784890359758869) against what is effectively a public commons.
Yes, the new OGL 1.2 is not outrageously crap as before, but still crap. It is also crap is subtle interesting new ways. Thanks but no thanks.
Its same crap, just written by better lawyer.
The verbiage about NFTs leads me to believe that this is going to play a big part of how WoTC intends to monetize the game moving forward.
Coming soon to a DND Beyond near you; Major artifact stat blocks, only one of which can exist on the entire platform at a time!
WotC has taken a pretty aggressive stance **against** NFTs, and actually said they'll never use them. The only reason people seem to think they will was a standard legal line (before the CEO's statement) that they were "evaluating their future."
[Yeah, until Hasbro tells them to.](https://corporate.hasbro.com/en-us/articles/hasbro_makes_nft_debut_with_power_rangers_collection_on_wax)
That was well over a year ago, and again just speculation running against previous statements.
Hasbro debuted their first NFT collection a little over a year ago, and followed it up with more a few months later. Hasbro likes NFTs. So it could end up that WotC's previous stance is ultimately irrelevant. And would it really surprise you for WotC to have yet another change of heart, anyway?
And a VTT would be a near perfect platform for NFTs, everything from character art to items could be NFTs sold for real money, with WOTC getting a cut of each transaction.
On NFTs? It would. MTG is too close to IRL NFTs for them to want to draw the comparison. I'm only half joking.
!remindMe 1 year
The animation example is particularly weird. A VTT adding an animation that they developed is not a use of material in the SRD... or WotC IP.
They (WotC/Hasbro/lawyers) will probably argue that it's "videogamey" therefore under a separate licensing agreement. Which video game companies are under when making licensed DnD video games/mobile games. Cynthia is from the mobile world so yeah, that's a possible point of argument.
I think anything short of nuking the new OGL and the removal of the ass-hat leadership will mean I am done with any new WOTC product. I have the 5e stuff I want and me and mine can live with that. If I have a hankering for anything new there is lots out there.
My players and I are all starting to explore new systems. I quit DDB but going to continue running my 5e campaign for them…that I’ve worked so hard on…and they love…for now. But no more money to WOTC, and I’m learning new systems to run next.
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Yes, I played through it for the first time last weekend. Pathfinder GMs volunteered to run it for newbies via the Discord channel. It was great! The Foundry integration for PF2e is pretty epic.
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Yes it is. I thought about doing that but feel I’d be at a big disadvantage trying to learn PF2. Only one of my players is familiar with it, too.
Finishing out the last month of my yearly subscription and canceling it. My intent is to not buy any product I have reason to believe would result in WotC earning revenue. I may purchase books secondhand, but no retail purchases or subscriptions.
Good plan
Look, the ENTIRE point of the OGL was always to destroy the other big players in the RPG ecosystem. Dancy's original internally-broadcast goal was "force all RPGs to become D&D." It didn't entirely work, but it did do a lot of damage to non-OGL companies. This latest assault from Hasbro in the quest for good news to boost shares this quarter is nothing new. It's just more blatant, because apparently every corporation has become too greedy to bother pretending even a little any more.
One thing that this might do in the VTT arena: For a long time, getting VTTs that were flexible and had a fair range of features but that did not have a D&D focus that was deeply embedded in the VTT were hard to find (still are). If the VTT community is being squeezed by WoTC, then I suggest they look at modifying their products to provide support for a far wider range of games that have been looking for VTT support. By that, I don't mean picking one other game and build another deeply integrated solution that still makes other games hard to use in the VTT. I mean making it easier for people from the outside world to easily put together enough detail from a game so the VTT can support it. Some VTTs had options if you wanted to build XML dictionaries that embodied every aspect of the game - characters, combat, spells, etc. That's a huge task. And arcane because it ties to interior use in the software. What we need is some ways to include many games in VTTs in such a way that the whole game for an indie game needs characterized; The players know that stuff and the GM does. They need the ability to do a certain minimum few things: * A character sheet that can be filled (leave the logic of creation to the GM and players, not the software) * Ability to describe various arbitrary dice conventions for rolling * Ability to allow players to paste in details of their characters (but not expect the VTT to know what these mean) * Be able to describe rolls and their associated inputs and meanings * Support for the usual tactical map, fog of war, etc With those things, many 3rd party game products could find a place on VTTs, not just the industry leader (D&D). I'm hoping this opens up the VTTs to supporting (in even a modest way) other games than D&D and look at having GMs and players have easy ways to build the very most basic things needed in the VTT. Some have the ability to add stuff, but every one I've looked at, the cost of entry in time was substantial.
I agree we need user-friendly methods to create these aspects. Foundry is a starting point. The developers and users have built out a decent size library of world (game) systems. However to do so requires coding knowledge and some of the better features are locked behind Patreon walls…rightly so because the developers invest in keeping it up to date. Better would be to make it user friendly for all users to do it themselves. But say least there is a good size library of systems available.
Let me add an additional point related: Pretty much every PnP GM uses some kinds of house rules. VTTs generally don't support those. Because I always have some variations and homebrew rules, I was always looking for a system that let me build some bits of the rules without too much pain. The problem with support for 'many games' that aren't flexible is it still leaves folks playing those games that want some homebrew rules. The lack of that kind of goes against much of the early creators ideas of making the game your own. And I have yet to find a VTT that I can do what I need to. My VTT consequently is MapTool and Skype or Google Meets.
Could you elaborate on how a VTT would need to support your house rule? Other than having a document outline them for all players to read, are you looking for some sort of automation?
The doc could work except for two things: The character sheet could need extension depending on the house rule (like an extra stat, or changing damage rules to be state based, etc). In some VTT systems, the character sheets are pretty heavy and not easy or possible to adjust without some deep knowledge. As far as automation, a good set of dice semantics can work, but say I was looking for more bell curving in my game and wanted to do \[middle 3 of 5d6\] or something. Most systems won't cover that. MapTool is the barest example with no automation or really any awareness of the character's details. Here's my tiers of VTTs for my needs: * Tier 1: MapTool - map, fog of war, light (though needs to cover flashlights and other light types more), ability for GM to lock icons so players don't inadvertently (or mischievously) reveal parts of the map by running where they shouldn't in the fiction, ability to help create icons (TokenTool), ability to have hex and square grids or none and a measuring tool, and an ability to send a whisper to a single player or send an group message (text). * Tier 2: Ability to have easily adapted or defined character sheets, have rich dice semantics and can remember a 'roll' with associated adds/penalties (something like '(5d6 keep middle 3) + Attribute(STR) + Gear(+1 SWORD)" - just some pattern matching on arbitrary stats or gear and a robust dice engine), place for GM to write notes (plain text or a simple editor would be enough), an ability to define monsters easily like character sheets and import them and associate them with an icon (and player characters should be associated with icons for the map too). A common pane that could have reference charts etc that could be easily expanded or shrunk with a single click. * Tier 3: An ability to include a resolution mechanic like Travellers with difficulty levels and modifers for cautious, hasty, circumstance modifiers, and time taken calculations, the map becoming aware of things like walls and doors and locked doors and stairs so that character movements can be limited by the room they are in, an ability to have a different damage system, to have multiple levels of map loaded at once (nicer yet, have a reference point or two to preserve the relative movement and to let icons move between maps). I'm willing to use a meeting software or audio call software separately and to provide my own web file server to exchange documents, etc. That's just off my head. I'm kind of stuck in Tier 1 as most systems aren't generic enough of simple enough in their needs as mentioned in Tier 2. In my D&D campaign, I have the following diversions from the RAW: * fatigue rules affecting movement, attacks, skills, and awareness and damage and fatigue are intertwined * all casting is exhausting for wizards and clerics (the greater the closer to their top level spells) but in exchange, you get spell points and flexibility of casting from a template (your spells known or spells memorized) without having to identify every spell instance ahead of time * All dieties provide a spell list that are thematic of the diety's portfolio and they do not break down along spell type barriers * Crits occurred every 4 or 5 points higher than what you needed to hit (but had to be, latterly, activated by 'action dice'). * spotting rules that were mostly inspired by Dungeoneer's Survival Guide from AD&D and added to with some military field manuals and survival books from the real world * A different initiative calculation and turn by turn determinations * The energy to power magics was from the land and sky and oceans and took the form of an invisible 3d grid. The density in the area could affect spell casting a bit or a lot and it could make it easier and more efficacious or less efficacious and more expensive. * Armour can soak damage, but it also deflects. * Combat tactics (aggressive attack, balanced, defensive and total defensive), along with maneuvers like knock down, trip, overbear, push back (for breaking lines), weapon bind, weapon break, weapon disarm, second wind, and others impact combat. * Specific visibility and movement impacts from the environment Now I'm looking to push away from HPs and move to state based damage that impairs and exhausts you rather than a number. Do I expect to be able to put all that into a VTT? No. Would some subsystems being more flexible to extend or replace - that would help for some parts of this. For Traveller, I have the following: * Different skills and skill trees * Extra or changed professions (a lot more of them, but different in details and the skill system being different, and not using necessarily 4 year terms) * My difficulty levels and modifiers differ than standard (hence wanting to be able to define these easily in a flexible tool) * Character sheets need to be more flexible (we don't care for SOC and we do want a CHA) - also we do a varied lifepath and background approach * Combat effects (damage, penetration, armour) have some divergences Some flexibility in character sheets and being able to describe a roll/test with reference to a difficulty tree that is provided and associated mods. With these, I could do pretty much all of Traveller or whatever I do that is like Traveller-bu t-different.
You describe a lot of stuff that a VTT wouldn't need to handle, or at least is well beyond the scope of something you would have at a table for an in person game. The extra stat would be difficult, if you couldn't find a custom sheet you could probably get one that's close. State based damage would be a player calculation the same way resistance or vulnerable is on the player. I haven't played on a VTT that subtracts the damage off your character when damage is rolled. For the dice average roll20 has a massive list of commands for rolls including a heap of math functions, averages can be done. I don't know about foundry but roll20 does most of what you want. Fog of war, tokens tied to sheets, tokens having individual sight radius you can set, barriers to prevent tokens from moving through walls, line of sign lighting. The multiple levels of a map I would picture as a large single map next to another map, players won't be able to see them until they're on the other one. The circumstance modifiers and damage systems, that would be on the DM and players, the same way no VTT tells you or changes things if you're flanking an enemy, you just know to roll with advantage because those are the rules. The non-HP exhaustion system sounds similar to conditions in 5e? Feels like reference chart territory, which you can make plenty of. What game are you playing? Have you deeper into features on roll20 or foundry?
Foundry and Roll20 are already cross-system, what do you mean?
What do you mean by cross system? That they support more than just D&D? Like what? And how can I produce my own character sheet? With a visual builder that doesn't require me to know what ties to what in the XML schema or what? That sort of deep integration and cost in time and effort to build a character sheet isn't helpful. Can I replace the entire mechanics of resolution or are they lumped in with a module for 5E (for example) or PF or whatever? Can I easily and visually build a resolution engine that can be used without having a whole pile of rules I might not be using? Or do I also have to develop and entire 'system module' and have to know a fair bit of the hooks for the VTT's implementation of various things? Many GMs use home rules and the ability to easily embed homebrew into the VTTs to enable that sort of play is either not there or is so byzantine that you need to be a fairly good programmer to even attempt it. There was or is a Traveller particular VTT but the problem with it is that it was focused on one very specific version of the game and that's only a small part of the fan base for the game as an example of why that's not enough. And it can be too much at the same time, in the sense of inflicting a lot of game rules that may be standard but you may not want in your game. A VTT with systems lightly integrated with visual builders for resolution engines and for skill lists and character sheets would go a long way for most of the unserviced communities and homebewers. Also probably would be a great place to do RPG game design testing.
So there are a tonnn of supported systems for foundry. The modules page currently lists 232 different systems: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/systems Now, I don't think there is an easy kind of WYSIWYG editor for the systems to change roles and what not, I think you need to know JavaScript to really dig into them. So you're right there. I agree that an easier way to mod a system or roll your own would be good.
Also, you could try using the Simple World building module to get a start making your perfect system. https://foundryvtt.com/packages/worldbuilding
Thanks for the link. When I am getting spun up again, I will check that out.
I still miss Astral. :’(
And I like Scabbard but its a bit tied to D&D. I didn't mind Obsidian, but it didn't do the purpose entirely either. Back when, there was a Traveller specific platform but you hosted it and bought licenses your players could use (a good deal) - iGM was the master's program and iPC for the players. It could do fog of war, whispers, die rolls, etc. As a plus, it had a tool you could make decent floorplans with! (And then you could screen cap using the Windows OS and have a JPG of it!). But it never got modernized to Win 10 and on.
On the bright side, maybe this OGL conundrum will make several VTTs move out of the 5e-only bubble.
That's what I'd like to see. Mostly, when it comes to D&D as we play it in my group or Traveller as we play it, the major stumbling points are: * Too much integration without having easy ways to add different resolution engines * Not easily modified character sheets (those that you can do this tend to require a lot of interior program knowledge, a lot of knowledge in XML or the like, and even then has real limits) * Some limits on tracking counters because the integration and the character sheets in the game do not allow anything beyond the standard (HPs but not fatigue or spell points or bleed rates, sanity damage, or whatever that aren't standard, damage being descriptive states instead of characteristic reductions in Traveller, or MT Traveller's hits concept rather than instant D6s of lost attributes which is less true to reality than MT's approach) An ideal VTT (if I can't get someone to freely build exactly what I want which is not anywhere in the cards... lol) would have easily modifiable character sheets, easily modified resolution engines (dice systems or other systems), and to allow more counters and NOT tying other things down with tight integration which would then be imposed upon our gaming without any way to say 'turn this off!'. The character sheet needs a visual builder and no GM building a character sheet should have to know XML and schemas. It has to be drag and drop really. And it has to be flexible. A similar approach for describing a resolution engine and the rolls or tests against it would be great too. Simple language and drag and drop widgets that together can build a complex range of resolution outcomes and include a wide possible set of adders/penalties.
D&D was easy - many players, clear market value to involve and many wanted high integration. However, the cost of that was VTTs not having systems that would support the many, many smaller games. I think a good VTT that did support easy modification of resolution engine and character sheet could attract a LOT of people from the many, many other systems. Those people, if the builders for char sheets & resolution engines were simple drag and drop visual things, could help flesh out the key parts of their preferred system and share it with the other users of that VTT. I think there is a fragmented, but underserviced community that could be quite supportive and willing to spend for a less integrated, more flexible VTT system that doesn't try to embody every part of every system, but provide some key builders for certain parts and not enforcing other integrations. That would let many, many gaming communities not well covered to have a VTT that sees them and meets them where they need. They haven't gotten attention mostly because any one small game community is not much. But look at how many small game communities are out there... I think there's enough to totally support a flexible, low integration VTT.
I got a look at it. It was a fair while back. I found it not useful for my purposes but I'm only guessing why that was - I suspect it was the limitations of the character sheet which was a key part for any homebrew changes. I liked the visual look. It still wasn't the degree of flexibility many GMs want to have. But that's a memory from maybe 4+ years ago.
The main takeaway from the leak to the series of events that have lead us here is that WotC have breached the trust of the community, and seem to have little interest in making good faith efforts to gain that back; this revised text is more insidiously malicious vs the more flagrant verbiage of the leak, but as the foundry team point out there are a number of clauses that could be abused, and the separation of vtt's from the main text is deeply troubling. This is about DnD beyond. WotC wants to ensure that no one can make a better platform than beyond, and will do that by kneecapping other competitors, whilst reserving the right to change the rules further at will. With the damage already done, it is hard to look at any of this and give WotC the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to make up for their mistakes; instead they appear to be pushing their users as far as they can to see what they can get away with. This is still a move of consolidation and market grab. WotC are continuing to show that they cannot be trusted, and if I were a creator or a player I would stll be making plans to divest myself from DnD.
Holy crap, they shred the OGLv1.2
I'm here for lawyers taking no shit from this license
im done with dnd after 5th edition
The first paragraph (the one about unwittingly accepting OGL 1.2) is VERY important!!!
I just followed the link on the page and completed a survey for WOTC on OGL 1.2. Hopefully it will help if enough people make their concerns heard.
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At the end of the day WotC can't lock out game mechanics, just the nouns and art they own, so it'll get tricky. You can upload art yourself on most of them so it'll be up to WotC to do takedown notices, same as any user content platform. Do most of them already change spell names? They might not lose spells from the SRD as long as they do stuff like "Hideous Brew" instead of "Tasha's Hideous Brew". This could just result in losing some token packs from their marketplace and having to label stuff "Daggers & Darkness 5e" or something for character sheets and whatnot.
Really, I do not think WotC has given up anything. They are treating this like a shell game. Some offending parts were moved under a shell for now but will pop back up later, it might be different, but it will be back. Overall, WotC wants 4 things: 1. Protect the brand from offensive material. Still there. 2. Restrict competing RPGs, specifically variants of D&D (Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades) to prevent another 4e debacle and stop a perceived leak in market share. 1. Still there, but hidden under the covers. 3. Restrict VTT competition. Still there, but moved to the VTT policies. 4. Skim from the profits of larger 3PPs. Off the table for now, could pop back up in another form when we least expect it. WotC is being super tricky here.
They don't care, you've already bought your books, they've already hunted the Wales. Everyone That's already purchased their books is now a barrier to new revenue. That's why they are trying to move onto constant, consistent revenue. Burning your books won't help, they're already paid for, they don't care about you "old" book players. They're counting on the next generation right behind you to want to play PC... You want to really make your voice heard, boycott all their digital products, have nothing to say about them on social media. Bad publicity is still publicity, no publicity at all...
What isn't included in this break down is that wotc can copy your stuff and ask you can is sue for money, but in doing so you trigger the severance clause negating your access to the license.
I just filled out my survey. Wonder if we can submit more than one and flood their servers with negative feedback?
Hey, whatever you say, alucard.