[freshhawk]

It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this.

They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest.

So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?

[hellcow]

That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work.

The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.

DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_.

And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.

[trynewideas]

There's still a lot to see about what D&D One actually is in terms of product and not system. But these moves really make me suspect that they're going to try to make it a walled garden of player-driven transactional rewards, and to minimize the DM role as much as possible.

If their theoretical, non-existent One VTT does all the mechanical work for the DM and dresses up lots of cheap player customization options that players actually want, the DM's power to decide the system is diminished. If anyone can DM without memorizing hundreds of rules and looking up obscure 3rd-party homebrew fixes, Hasbro bets the DM can yell all they want, the players will go to One.

I don't know or think it'll succeed - there's zero track record from anyone involved in this specific kind of venture - but I think this is Hasbro giving up on the tabletop community and going all in on VTTs and casuals who don't know (or know but don't like or care) about any existing community. If Hasbro already aren't making money off DMs, and they couldn't bend the existing DMs creating content into their new system, then they'll take their cultural cachet and do something on their own that doesn't require that kind of DM.

[Aeolun]

I mean, if they want to tap a new market of casual DM’s, then that’s fine. But do thry really need to ruin the existing game over it?

[trynewideas]

Yeah. Why not? Monetizing only 20% of the player base in DMs isn't making them enough money to justify the investment otherwise, and casual DMs don't care about any of this.

[pdonis]

> The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.

DMs are higher information consumers than players.

I think this is a very important point to recognize. The proper market unit for a game like D&D is the play group, led by the DM, not the individual player.

[hinkley]

I don't think a DM will go entirely against their players' wishes, but I could easily see a DM and 2 players deciding they can 'work on' the rest of the group. So you could lose 100% of your users by pissing off the wrong 33%. Or 50% for pissing off 1/6th of your users. Which still supports the road trip etiquette of "don't piss off the driver."

[paledot]

Even that understates the situation, I think. Most players I know just aren't that particular about what system they play. (Sometimes they are particular about what system they don't play.) So if the DM says "I'm going to run the next campaign in Pathfinder", their players will shrug and look up Pathfinder character options. The more invested players might have more of a "cool, I've been meaning to give that a try" response. I don't know anyone personally who would fight against such a thing or quit the group because they only want to play D&D 5e.

As a DM, I'm partial to 5e because I already know it inside and out, so I can forget about the mechanics and just focus on the story. But aside from the sheer volume of official and "D&D compatible" material, I don't think it has anything going for it that other systems lack.

[Karrot_Kream]

I'm not sure these are the same market segments. Generally though, I agree. DMs are also the people buying most of the merchandise (books, supplements, etc) so they're going to drive more of the conversation around systems.

[bombcar]

When I was a player the story was way more important than the mechanism.

Many times we just reduced to a few D6 tbh

[alisonatwork]

This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.

[Karrot_Kream]

Depends on when you played. Earlier editions of D&D were much more like this, offering guidelines with dice and otherwise just leaving it up to DM or group discretion. This usually demands more of the group and also makes it harder to stitch a wide, cohesive story together. Later editions responded to this and added more mechanics and rules to D&D.

[bombcar]

Yeah, there's a form of D&D which is "I want to tell an interactive story and see where it goes" where the dice are basically just a way to keeping things a bit sane, and then there's "let's simulate a computer program using sheets of paper and a bunch of random number generators" which I kind of feel is where D&D went.

[kcartlidge]

Us too. Though in the end we settled on the Fighting Fantasy RPG rules as they were simple enough to play in the school playground whilst also providing just a little bit of authority to decisions.

[freshhawk]

Why didn't it work? Paizo had a big jump in sales ... for Paizo, the numbers are a rounding error for WotC.

Same with the DnDBeyond boycott drive, did that actually make a dent? To me there is basically no evidence for this supposed level of consumer power that the fandom is claiming they have. WotC's response was the most half-assed, who-gives-a-shit, PR statement I've ever seen. They did not treat it like a real PR issue at all.

> They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design.

Well yes, they will definitely be losing those people. However it's a small percentage of DMs who are even aware of 3rd party stuff in the first place. Single digit percentage and on the lower end, at best.

I think it's hard for lots of old players to realize that post Critical Role/Stranger Things, they are a tiny minority of the market now, and they kinda suck as consumers if you are trying to extract video game level profits from your players.

[hellcow]

My friend, WotC tried to make this change, was hit with backlash, and backed down. That’s a fact. Their statement of backing down is literally the article that you’re commenting on.

Saying “but you didn’t make a dent” is clearly not correct in WotC’s judgement. If they felt they could have made this change and made more money, then they absolutely would have. That’s why they tried. And it didn’t work, per WotC’s own reversal.

[hinkley]

The point is they tried to make a money grab from their most influential users. If those users go they take a lot of people with them.

CR started out on Pathfinder. Matt Mercer has been building his own world for 10 years as a full time job. If you convince CR to switch rulebooks a lot of people will follow. If you goad him into making his own rulebook, then you haven't just helped your competition, you just invented new competition.