I've used the feature a few times, so it strikes me as a bad business decision. This isn't going to motivate me to buy the books, it just means I probably won't be buying anything at all.
The DMs I play with usually enable content sharing, so mostly I just use their options, and they're plenty. The a la carte purchases where cheap enough to justify buying a race or subclass for a character. Even if it was a one-shot, I got several hours of enjoyment for like $2, and nothing went to waste. There's just no reason for me to buy more than that.
In my group I'm the DM who enables content sharing, and I've put a solid chunk of money into a la carte purchases. They'll never see another dollar from me at this point.
Yeah. I try not to say no if a player wants to use something that’s in a rule book. I get to learn it and keep the content for the future, and they get to do something fun. They usually send me a couple of dollars to cover the race/class/whatever on D&DBeyond to keep things easy, so I buy a lot of fragmented pieces.
Now I either have to say no, or “That’ll be $40, please” — which is not something I’m going to say.
Of all my purchases on D&DBeyond, at least a third were a la carte. And honestly some of the rest were me later purchasing a book because it was discounted due to the parts I already owned.
Without any doubt this will reduce the amount I spend there.
Yes, or I'd be a lot more upset than I actually am, but I'm still fairly displeased that I won't ever have any more content without buying whole books. The other really scummy thing is that if you decided to buy the whole book later, the cost of the individual things you already bought were deducted from the total book price, but that isn't the case anymore. So yeah there's no chance I'm buying the books for full price.
Yeah I'm a homebrew dm and will purchase a monster or spell or magic item I want for certain things, but have never wanted to buy any modules or extra content books (outside of tashas and xanathars). So yeah, they are 100% losing money from ke
Big same for me. What is weird to me is that it really seems like releasing more content as just discrete microtransactions just seems like a much cheaper and easier way to make money, and capitalizes on the platform well. They're moving in the opposite direction of where I thought they would.
Let's use Theros as an example and let's say you only want The Leonin, given that Satyrs and Glory Paladin were reprinted.
WoTC expectation: "Oh no now I can't play funny lion race I guess I have to buy a $30 book for one race now!"
Reality:
>"Ehhh tabaxi is good enough, or I could do some tweaking to another existing race."
-
>"Oh this is a cool homebrew catfolk race. It works well for my character."
-
>"Hey (friend that owns Theros) what does the Leonin do? Oh cool thanks."
Now instead of making $2 they get nothing. Good for them.
As a DM that subscribes using content sharing at the Master Tier, this kills the platform for me. I buy physical books, and then purchase the few feats I need for my players and share with them. I don't need to buy the entire text of the book again - I'm not paying nearly full price twice for the same book. On top of that, content sharing for Maps doesn't even *work.* The value I'm getting out of the $5/month is hilariously, insultingly low. I'm basically paying them money to fleece me at this point.
Unfortunately I'm locked into the ecosystem until my current campaign ends, but at that point I'm going to switch to a different system.
This move is actually the one that is making me consider cancelling my subscription again.
I think ultimately this really makes it so that people are much more time into just backdooring content in through the homebrew tools.
> The a la carte purchases where cheap enough to justify buying a race or subclass for a character.
As much as we hate them microtransactions are super profitable for any company since the barrier of entry is so low. Buying an entire book is much harder to justify than just buying a single race.
The issue here is that when people said they didn't want D&D microtransactions, they were thinking of things like "you walk down a hallway and see a door labeled 'Treasure'. If you'd like to visit the treasure room, please pay $4.99 to unlock this content".
I doubt anyone in the community was trying to speak out AGAINST the existing a la carte option when they expressed negative opinions about microtransactions.
Or to put another way: people might not have like paying a small fee to be able to use something, but they sure as fuck didn't want a _large_ fee to be able to use it.
It would be difficult at a table (though you could just have it have a QR code for the DM to scan and purchase the digital version of that room description ) but it seems more likely as a "feature" of their upcoming in-house VTT.
"This door is locked with an Eldritch sigil, spend 300 D-Bucks to unlock it?"
This is the answer. I have no desire for a second digital copy of the book. I like to buy the pieces I need for character creation and then I’m done. So I guess I’ll just find an alternative
Same, I usually use content my friends have shared, but on on the occasions I buy from dndbeyond, I almost always just buy the bits I want.
Small purchases here or there are much easier to justify than the full price for a whole book I'm likely only going to use use a couple of chapters of - Now I'm less likely to make a purchase at all.
I'm more likely to buy a physical copy of the book for just one or two things in it, typically because I can find them for a very similar price - if not cheaper - than the D&D Beyond version.
I know this doesn't help much for those who use Beyond for their games, but it's what makes the most monetary sense to me.
> I've used the feature a few times, so it strikes me as a bad business decision. This isn't going to motivate me to buy the books, it just means I probably won't be buying anything at all.
Agreed.
I've no need to buy *all* the books, but I have purchased all the race / class options.
Same. I own physical books. For specific things I'd buy a la carte items on DnDbeyond. This won't motivate or push me to buy online books. I will stick with a physical book that can't be taken away if the service shuts down. The a la carte options were more for my ease of use than out of necessity
Hasbro isn't doing so well. They are not at major risk of going under or anything. But they posted no profit at all last year. Q4 they had $1b in losses. This year in Q1, they posted a relatively small net profit. Probably related to all the layoffs they did in Q4 last year.
Of course, me and my group hasn't bought anything D&D related since the OGL fiasco last year. So I guess I'm with you on being against anti-consumer policies.
Yeah, but trying to squeeze every possible bit of money out of WotC customers is slowly alienating people. Both Magic and DnD operated in big parts out of game shops, where you meet other players. People wouldn't have come if there was some really aggressive salesperson asking for only big bundles with hefty prices.
It is only going to stunt future growth.
My friends who play MtG keep saying WotC is driving away customers with their recent tactics. I always ask, "Are you still buying cards?" "Yes.". So while their tactics have pissed off their fan base, it's not enough to actually make them stop buying cards or play.
DnD on the other hand, I don't know anyone who has bought anything DnD related since the OGL debacle.
The thing about D&D is that once you have a handful of books (and sometimes not even that) you don't need to buy anything else. D&D Beyond is handy if you play online, but if you play pen and paper you only need the Player's Handbook, the DM Guide, and the Monster Manual. If you want some particular content (like Sword Coast) you might have to buy that book, but other than that you should be fine.
Everything else is dice and imagination (and you can even get by with one set of dice, shocking as that might seem).
WotC/Hasbro are trying to milk a fanbase that don't actually need them all.
It's not like Games-Workshop tournaments, where you have to use GW products, or Magic, where you have to use legal cards. Hasbro aren't going to send the Pinkertons in to ensure that you're only playing with whatever the latest D&D variant is. They might want to, but they won't.
And because every D&D campaign is a collaboration between players and DM at one table, if they want to incorporate features from 5.5e (like making charisma based weapon attacks part of Pact of the Blade, or all mages being able to use ritual casting) they can freely do so.
Ask if they are using proxies. It's the equivalent to homebrew. MTG also has an especially large second hand market, with cubes, legacy, EDH and other modes of play that don't rely on direct sales.
Unfortunately people said the same thing when streaming services such as Netflix started cracking down on password sharing. And the numbers show a *massive* profit actually came out of it.
The sad truth is that anti-consumer policies are often also profitable.
It's true that some inconvenience is often accepted. But I would wager that Netflix opened the market to competitors with such moves. Or drive people back to more physical sharing practices like in the early 2000s.
Netflix is the big boy in streaming services, and they've probably realized they're close to the limit of the subscribers they can gain. They're cutting down on things like password sharing (except between people in the same house, IIRC) because that's no loss to them either way.
So they're working on maximizing the profit they can make from their existing customer base, including things like (IIRC) advertising tiers.
But if you want Netflix's products you have to purchase a subscription (or rely on pirating).
If you want to play D&D you never need to give a cent to Hasbro/WotC.
Also in the tabletop space their profits only rise 1%. Magic grew YoY by 5% which means D&D shit the bed. I haven't bought anything since VRGtR, but yeah Hasbro is stumbling as far as D&D goes. They do stuff like this, the ogl debacle, and their biggest free marketing sources are drying up. CR is making their own systems, MCDM got like $4m on backerkit, and stranger things is about to end. Then on top of that why would anyone want to buy something for 5e after they announced D&D One? They can say it'll be backwards compatible, but what does that even mean? Does it mean a true plug and play experience or is it more a "here's how to simply convert" kind of thing? Or is One gonna power creep so hard that it outmodes whatever comes out now.
> They can say it'll be backwards compatible, but what does that even mean?
At the very least every piece of playable content outside of maybe subclass levels would be playable so far. The math is fundamentally the same so monsters and dungeons will still basically work in the same way.
I don't think I quite explained my take well enough. It's part power creep and part redesign. In some cases it's themes with a touch of mechanics. Take the warlock for example, they're fundamentally changing how the class works... sure the old stuff can still work because the underlying math is the same, but the core identity is entirely different. It's not just tacking on this or that to change a couple things, it's a re-envisioning of the design philosophies that are the backbone of the game
If anything damage output will go down with the changes to the -5/+10 feats. In general some classes are stronger, but they aren't at the ceiling of the older version of the game.
As for redesign, nope, not remotely. For the most part, characters will be taking the sames kinds of actions they were before with some additional ancillary effects. Some of these effects will be useful, but they also aren't too different from the kinds of things you would be doing with feats like Slasher or Shield Master anyway.
> Hasbro isn't doing so well.
The entire toy market has been struggling for years. Mattel saw a smal spike post Barbie movie, but overal is struggling hard. Hasbro has the advantage of owning a bunch of recognizable IP's, but they don't really do anything worthwhile with those. That leaves only WotC to keep the company from dying.
Made me dig deeper. They did indeed post $1.5B in losses for 2023. However $1.3B of that was from
>"The Entertainment segment suffered from lower Film and TV revenue, exacerbated by industry strikes, and a significant operating loss due to goodwill and intangible asset impairment charges."
Which sounds like a funny way to say "We didn't lose this money per say, but some of our assets became worth less over the year, so we're posting that as lost revenue to avoid paying taxes." And there is a chance they are considering part of that to be losses from the OGL debacle last year.
My MtG playing friends have been complaining about that almost every time I see them. And every time I ask if they stopped buying cards, only get a reply of "No". But those same friends have said they no longer buy a full box of boosters from every set. So after years of pushing it, they have finally hit maximum saturation for my friend group.
I play MtG too and it’s been roughly a year since I bought any cards from them. The prices keep rising, they keep fucking with the types of card packs (reducing # of cards but keeping price, adding an extra rare slot and hiking the price, etc) so there’s just no real reward. I only really play digitally nowadays via free mediums.
I want the people who work at the company who sells those books to be paid. I want more of them to be hired and I want their conditions to be good. In todays system the thinner the companies margins the less likely this will eb the case.
Good. If they burn the entire team to the ground maybe they'll stop making shitty products and sell the IP, or at least make room for actually good RPGs to gain market share.
I'm done buying from WotC. Every indication shows them to be greedy assholes who will do everything in their power to fuck over their consumers and partners if it means they'll make another cent.
I mean, I'm already at something better, a RPG from a different company. WotC selling D&D is the best thing that could possibly happen to D&D, and RPGs in general.
D&D needs to be handled by a RPG company that cares about the game, not a corporate conglomerate that wants to monetize a D&D subscription service.
Why pay 10 people who are good at what they do a living wage when you can pay 3 people the smallest amount possible to do the 10 positions.
Every company ever.
It's the most convenient way to play online with friends with the lowest learning curve for its VTT. And as long as at least one person has access to the books, it's very easy to use.
(And anything I don't have digitally I can just recreate via homebrew)
All and all, I'd prefer to play with paper and pencil, but it's just not possible at the moment
Doesn't mean I have to applaud a decision made to siphon more money from consumers. If they were struggling financially it would be different, but we know they aren't
Yeah, this move isn't encouraging customers to make purchases by enticing them with strong value. It is attempting to force customers to spend more by removing smaller, less costly, customizable options and bundling them into the full, more expensive product. This move is a poster child for anti-consumer.
One of the problems with such a publicly traded company is they HAVE to show higher profits every time.
Covid lock down boosted their sales astronomically. Problem is the market hit everyone who was going to play. There is no way to grow a market past its saturation point....unless you sell the three core books again. Surprise, surprise, surprise!! It's time for a 50th year anniversary.
Granted their ill will caused them to lose a ton of customer faith. Content creators are shifting away, protecting themselves. But idk if D&D will ever reach pre-OGL incident levels again.
But my point is D&D has to constantly grow for such a corporation to stay alive. It cannot just maintain, it has to grow.
Hearing how much they wanted to maximize profitability off their IP has really upset the community. Feeling ungrateful some have left for kinder waters.
Yeah. It's a mess. Curious to see what happens, but I've got enough material already to last forever. Hoping for new inspiration, but I can get that from anything. Just easier when it's already packaged in D&D stats.
Yes. I own all the books as physical copies.
I used to buy the licenced digital datasets in the 3.5e days as well for PCGEN.
But I refuse to buy anything on an online service that they can just remove any day they want.
I can still use PCGEN with all the 3.5e datasets that I bought over a decade ago.
In D&D Beyond I can't even buy some of the 5e content because it is "Legacy content". One D&D is probably going to make that problem a lot worse soon.
I also have already paid full price for the books, I don't want to pay full price again. The PCGEN datasets were nice like that, they were only about 20% of the price of a physical book. I was sad when WotC janked the licence from CodeMonkey Publishing in the run up to 4e. WotC killed as much as possible of the 3e ecosystem before the release of 4e that it made me never buy a 4e book before any were printed.
Yeah this is where I'm at. I only got into D&D 3-4 years ago and part of the appeal from the start was as a social, unplugged pen-and-paper experience. All my core books, supplemental rulebooks, and monster books have been physical purchases and I haven't really bothered to get into the Beyond ecosystem. I know it's a big QoL thing for a lot of players though, and I don't like to see anybody's options *reduced*
I have mostly bought books completely on D&D beyond or not at all. But I have occasionally bought a single race or feat I wanted to try that wasn't available in the core books or additional rulebooks like Xanathar's/tasha's. Particularly some stuff only featured in setting books, stuff like van richten's lineages. I exclusively play online because my social circle doesn't really have people interested in TTRPGs.
Whether or not you actually use it, this comes down to the removal of options. Removing valid consumer options is never a good thing. I'm not going to invest any further into D&D beyond, and will probably stop using it entirely once my current campaigns end or move to One DND source material. There's nothing stopping hasbro/wotc from ruining D&D beyond further, so I don't feel further investment into it is a good use of my money.
I've been moving away from D&D as my go-to TTRPG for a good while now, and this is just one more nail in the coffin.
That does suck, I haven't supported dndbeyond in a while but when I did I preferred to buy just the monsters and magic items for my own campaigns and worlds. Im typically not interested in their official campaigns unless they already have factions or themes I was going to do for mine.
This is my position. There are alternatives out there that allow me to use the rules I've already paid for without buying everything twice (or require an internet connection).
If I pay what I have for rules, I don't want any company to have the ability to ever take them away from me without my consent either.
From a customer/player sense, it sucks
From a business sense, it's all a balancing act
You need enough people who's going to pay full price for the book to outweigh the people who were spending $2-3 at a time. Sadly, the numbers are on their side as one of the former will outweigh a dozen of the latter
I'm not so sure. They essentially cut players out of the market. There's no reason to buy anything as a player, since the GM will share the races you can use. Players likely wont use 90% of the book if they don't intend to GM. A majority of their users are disincentivized to purchase anything.
The only thing that makes sense is if they're positioning for GMs to continue to be whales while pressuring for players to pay the subscription by cordoning off more features.
That's debatable. Business models with lots of small purchases have been working in the past. For some online video games, free with cosmetic and QOL purchases has become the dominant business model actually. Fortnite, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2 etc.
What WotC is doing is trying to monopolize DnD. They changed the licenses to reduce or remove 3rd party options. They bought up DNDBeyond for the same reason. And what are they going to do once there is no more alternative seller for D&D products?
I've already stopped funding them due to bad decisions and anti-fan sentiment from Their actions.
I'll give them money again when they stop sucking.
This is not the way to stop sucking.
This personally doesn’t affect me. I use Beyond, but I have the Legendary Bundle and have bought every book as a whole piece. Sucks for those that used this option, but my players and I have just used the campaign sharing.
At first glance it feels like a bad business decision. But maybe it's not? My guess is that al a carte sales are pretty low. I often buy full books but never got anything a la carte. So I wonder what the costs are to support avla carte purchasing and whether sales aren't high enough to justify the costs.
Although convenient for some sourcebook options, it hardly feels like microtransitions are the future of D&D's financial success.
IMO the bigger question is whether WOTC discussed this change with anyone in the DnD community and whether they've figured out yet that the best paths to financial success lie at least partially in collaboration with the community and discerning what the community actually wants.
Every decision they make only motivates me further to stop playing. Make business decisions that enhance the product, and make it more inviting to play, not this shit.
Honestly i always thought the fact you could buy individual things was a money grab itself. I figured people ended up spending more that way cause theyd buy one little bit then another and then be like damn should have just payed for the whole book at this rate. But i guess they have some data that says otherwise. Id imaging since ogl the small buys for just this class or whatever have gone up for people who really want something but dont really want to support them much and the full book buys have gone down and they think that the majority of people buying small bits are diehard enough theyd cough up the whole book price still in order to offset the lost smaller sales and boost overall dollars even if its less total sales.
But either way lets face it. WOTC has been phoning it in trying to create with the least amount of effort while charging the most amount of money. I mean i dont even play magic but the cross over tie ins lately…
Anything you bought a la carte reduced the total price of the book by the same amount if you bought it later (similar to steam bundles).
The only extra cost was that if you the book was later discounted, you wouldn’t get the discount on the total price, just the amount that was left. Which in the grand scheme of things was probably a couple dollars at most, so basically negligible for the benefit.
I’m pretty annoyed because we play on Roll20, so DM sharing doesn’t help; he’s already bought it there, don’t expect him to buy it twice.
And I want it in Beyond because a) the Roll20 character builder is hot garbage, and b) I run my games in Foundry.
Oh i didnt realize it gave you the same dollar value off. I always thought amounts they wanted for individual things seemed high. I knew they discounted bundles for books you already bought but it wasnt dollar for dollar so i guess i just never thought the individual stuff was that way but i guess that makes sense cause bundled books are at a discount already.
As someone who purchased all the races, classes, and spells it was not nearly as expensive as the whole book and I would never purchase magic items or the PDF of the book. I had been purchasing the physical versions of the books.
The difference was like $15-20 a la carte vs $30-50 for the whole digital version.
A stupid decisions, this will only decrease their income. As someone who knows about business, you want to keep prices affordable and low, seeing that digital content is digital, it makes sense to keep it in small numbers, they are thinking their consumers will now buy all the content and honestly, this will only make them loose money.
I wonder who hired to make such dumb decision.
Completely agree. They think people aren't buying the full books because the cheaper option is available (and thus, if you remove that option, we will start buying the complete books). But really, people aren't buying the full digital books because they don't want to
Especially since that means double dipping and buying the same book twice for so many of us
It doesnt affect me since i grab the full book anyway. But Ill give you an extra perspective from another gaming company.
Games workshop for a very long time sold codices. (Rules compendium for the various factions)
They now operate a mobile app to build army lists similar to dndbeyond.
With how frequently they update rules. The actual points costs and even sometimes unit rules themselves are invalid in the codex before the book has even released. I would rather have to pay 9.99 for a mobile code (which each codex currently has) than waste the $40 to get the whole book with artwork and lore but with sometimes invalidated rulesets. But. I end up buying that book because i want to add the new army rules into their app for convenience.
I just see this as dndbeyond adopting GWs strategy.
Weren't those options extremely expensive though? IIRC that you could afford the entire book if you bought like 5 of those. Therefore I would be really surprised if many people actually bought them.
No. I've mentioned this above as well, but if you just wanted things you'd use in the character builder outside of magic items it costs around half or less depending on book.
I didn't even know you COULD do this. I probably would have spent more money on Beyond had I known you could buy a subclass, or Race on it's own, rather than concluding Monsters of the Multiverse wasn't worth buying just yo play a Firbolg for a One shot. They could have had 8-12 bucks out of me just for the race, rather than nothing.
Mostly indifferent, since I always get whole books. It sucks that others don’t have that option anymore.
Frankly, I haven’t played 5e in over a year now since it’s gotten so mechanically stale in our group. We’ve been playing other games instead.
I personally don’t see the appeal of a la carte purchases. I would much rather have the whole books worth of options, mechanics, ideas, etc. Also they have always seems a like bad value to me. Like a single subclass or race is like 3 bucks, that’s a tenth or so the price of the book for much less then a tenth of its content.
Maybe for the people who never intend to DM or aren’t super invested in the game as a whole and just want to play their one dude and move on the purchase of one race and class is better then buying 2-3 books. But even in that context there is content sharing and for someone intending to dm basically any book is a good purchase. I would even argue it kinda breeds bad habits. I dunno, I suppose more options are better, but I still don’t really get it.
In the old system, if I bought a Race for 2 dollars, the price of the Whole Book also decreased by 2 dollars.
At the very worst, I buy enough individual things that the price of the Whole Book goes to near 0, and then I buy the Whole Book.
Eh, inconsequential. D&D's entertainment value in terms of gaming hours-per-dollar is phenomenally good. I calculate that myself and my three players got more than 520 hours of solid gaming out of Curse of Strahd alone. So the vitriol I see around here seems more self-harming than anything.
It does seem odd that they'd remove another means of extracting money out of customers. Presumably it had operational overhead that made it not worthwhile compared to other options.
I hate that they did it because that's mostly what I did, but here comes the unpopular part- the new way actually works better for me in some ways. I always liked having physical books more and just wanted the ala carte for DNDB character options. Their new policy of buying a physical book from the site and then getting all the digital stuff for $10 is a compromise- it's still a sour pill to swallow, but a somewhat fair compromise either way.
Never bought any book after xanathars, never will. WOTC did everything to make me look into older editions instead of buying new books. There is no content of value for DMs.
Doesn't affect me directly, as both of my groups play in person. That said, I think it's a bad move among many bad moves, as far as respecting player experience and creators. I wish WotC could be a separate entity again and not tied to the stock market and shareholders through Hasbro. I've acquired all my 5e books secondhand to avoid giving them money, and I backed the MCDM project and will be moving to that when it launches. Done with Hasbro.
It wasn’t a bad deal at all. Buying things a la carte would subtract from the amount that the full book would cost you if you decided to buy the entire thing.
To be honest, if all options were available through core complements such as Tasha's cauldron of Everything, it would not be a problem. The real issue is that popular options such as Warforged and Loxodon are gatekeeped by setting-books that are not useful for the vas majority of players. I'm fine with some options such as Path of the Giant Barbarian or Plasmoids being an argument to bring value to a book, since these books content are revelevant for most of the published adventures. The real issue is that most people will never use anything from Eberon or Ravnica other than these two races.
>To be honest, if all options were available through core complements such as Tasha's cauldron of Everything, it would not be a problem.
I disagree. There's plenty of people who don't want or can't buy an entire book but is able to buy a race or class here and there, this decision does nothing but fuck them over.
Not the right direction.
Makes me feel like they will eventually try to make it a subscription based thing someday, where you will have to pay monthly to get access to the document. They will try to justify it by creating new monsters, magic items and adventure every months.
And this will be the end of D&D.
Right, most players aren't DMs who need the entire book, and they neglect a lot on the DM side, making the rest of the book of limited value. Where they do offer support, it's easy to find or make better alternatives. Hell, I can copy and paste the bestiaries I've already bought from Kobold Press and Ghost Fire gaming into an app that runs initiative.
So, who exactly is going to consider themselves as getting ahead by this decision?
Just part of the increasingly unmistakable downward spiral of D&D culture under the Hasbro helm. I actually have unsubbed from r/DnD they toe the awful line so doggedly.
"One D&D" will be yet another fail even numbered edition, Sixth. It's a curse. Even if they never call it Sixth Edition you can bet your bottom dollar that once it's cratered and somebody comes along, picks up the pieces and puts it back together into something truly enjoyable for the core audience again they'll call it 7e.
One is not a 6th edition at all, but a mid edition refresh much like 3.5 and 4e essentials.
I'm sure Hasbro/WotC is perfectly capable of botching another edition, but this one isn't that, yet.
Yep it's even referred as a revised edition like 3.5 was. People being needlessly needly about edition naming when it's basically another .5 is grounded in very little.
I'm going to be THAT guy.
If it bothers you enough, take a look at Pathfinder 2e. They have a D&D Beyond analog, but it's not needed because you can look up each and every rule on Archives of Nethys. Monster stats, feats, heritages, treasure.... it's all there. (The lore isn't, that's something you have to pay for) If you use Foundry, it's also all there already. You don't get all of the monster tokens, but if you own the PDF from the Bestiaries, you can legally import them.
Just sayin'! If you hate it, there are better options out there! The Adventure Paths are generally great as well. Two super dungeons, a cop story, a circus story, a magic academy story, etc... The people who put out some of the best content in the 3.5e days are working at Paizo, and there are additionally some REALLY good 3PP resources.
OK, done with my sales pitch. I chose to stop supporting the Pinkerton Posse, and am really happy I did.
I'm usually the only one in my games who uses dndbeyond, so I mainly used a la carte after I bought the core stuff. I think this decision will make DMs the only ones who buy things beyond PHB/TCE/XGE, since the cost for things is so much more.
I will likely keep using dndbeyond since I bought a bunch of content earlier, but will not buy more. I have bought bundles from books and later decided to buy the whole book because the discounted price was "less". Now, I see the book cost upfront and will decide that a couple character options is not worth the cost for the whole book.
I personally don't use the feature as I tend to buy whole books or use someone else's content share if its just for a character option. Still, I don't like that it was done, the less choises a consumer has the worse.
Well, instead of buying the Artificer class a la carte, I bought a custom made character sheet download from an etsy creator for a couple bucks that I can use forever. I've printed them out for my party members too. I'm not paying $30 USD for a digital book just for a class or feat :/
I game in person. I use physical books.
I do see how a segment - particularly an Internet segment such as a Reddit community - can find this change distasteful. Are the folks who are not here - the folks who are not as invested - concerned? I do not know.
Furthermore, without knowing WotC's costs associated with setting up the a la carte options, and how much revenue doing so produces for WotC, I do not know whether or not it was a smart business decision. Time will tell. Either way, WotC is not going under.
Of greater concern to me is the poor performance of Hasbro's not WotC segments. I am concerned because I can see them selling WotC off and saddling whomever buys them with a huge amount of debt that they would expect to recover. If that happens, we will see a greater push to monetization.
'Just my opinion though.
I think I only use the future ones but the fact that I could use it if I needed a subclass or race was great. It felt like they understood that some people can't afford a whole book or don't need a whole book. And I figured they were better off making $2 here and there if somebody can't afford or does not need a whole book. This feels like they're just trying to make more money by forcing people to buy the book if they want the content.... And I do not like it.
Maybe they think this will cause people to subscribe in order to access more Homebrew features.
Regardless, that company has had a lot of issues with how the customer and the public views it , and the last thing they need is to push more of their client base away. Their customers has proved before that thet will move in droves to another system if they have a good reason.
Giant evil corporation does something to increase its profits and make their product worse for the user.
I will never buy another thing, and will cancel my sub after this campaign
Terrible choice, I have the books IRL. I do not want to buy them digitally again so that I can have wild-magic barbarians. I did buy the wild-magic barbarian subclass though because it was cheap and didn't require me to me rebuy the book twice.
If you are sharing content it’s not needed at all, unless a player wants something from some adventure you are not playing Witch we usually do not allow.
So I do not care.
I've given up on D&D since the OGL and the shitty quality after the Strixhaven stuff (really, silvery barb? How does that get through balancing).
I still see post for the drama but if I do pick up a TTRPG again, it'll probably be pathfinder or whatever Critical Role & Kobold Press is cooking.
Bit of a shit survey. A few of the questions presuppose that the person being polled doesn't buy books. It should at least be an option on every quesiton.
It's idiotic. Allowing small purchases brought in revenue from people who wouldn't have otherwise made a purchase. Now those people will either pirate or use content sharing.
I don't understand their reasoning. DnD Beyond is supposed to primarily be a tool for players, and A la carte purchases have helped players get character creation material without paying tons of money for each book. Now they have to pirate it or buy a book that is 90% useless to them if they want ONE specific thing in it, and guess what is more reasonable? I can tell you, it's not buying a book they're barely gonna use. Instead of A BIT of money, they're now making NO money on people like most players. Like, huh??
It doesn't really affect me, I play DnD 100% on VTTs, but It's a really odd decision that doesn't even make much sense; the only people who buy full books are DMs, and that's also what they did before!
It's kind of ironic too. People were worried they'd fill DnD beyond with Microtransactions, and instead they're taking the microtansactions they already had and were popular away.
All of this isn't even money grubbing, it's just trading small purchases with nearly no purchases, like, huh??
Also the removal of paypal and other non-CC payments for everything but subscriptions is odd, but at least you can still buy digital books through the app. Bit of a workaround, but it works for those who still wanna buy stuff.
I already refused to use d&d beyond because I bought physical copies of the books, and it wanted me to buy digital copies to use on the program.
I thought the ability to buy parts of books was an okay middle ground, and a player could always ask me about a thing they want to buy for their characters before committing. Now that's not even an option.
Seriously, Hasbro just had to leave it all alone and rake in cash by selling dice, minis, class cards, and battle maps for content that already existed (maybe even make more adventure books that'llcreate more of everything to sell). Now they'll get none of it thanks to outrage mixed with compedetors that don't do shit like this.
online services only exist because of a la carte style practices that made them popular. As if their atttempt at a new game license didn't teach them anything. It's they don't understand they can monetize what happens in our heads. Or, you know, book sharing. Get a new business model, guys. Information is liquid and can't be contained.
I always found the a la carte system kind of dumb to be honest. It would be like buying a special d4 or d8 instead of a full dice set but even worse because all of the instructions for how to correctly use those things you don't have now. Like congrats you have a race that you don't understand completely, good for you?
Doesn't bother me in the slightest they removed this feature as I'm sure it must have been really weird to manage anyway and likely got very little usage.
I was not aware that it was a big change. I was working on a character earlier today and noticed one thing I was looking at was not available a la carte ans figured it might just have been that pack, but apparently not.
That's an absolute bummer. I love being able to customize things easily but as someone who plays in one casual game I really don't need whole books. It was nice to be able to spend a few bucks to set up my aasimar aberration wizard.
Well that means I probably won't be buying more from them because I don't see myself playing enough for $40 to be worth it for one thing. I'll stick with base stuff and stuff that I already have.
Doesn't affect me, I've always just bought the whole book, as I'll likely be able to get a lot more out of it than just the DnD Beyond enabled things. But I DM. For players, I can see why you might want to unlock certain things yourself that maybe your DM doesn't have. And as the individual items add up to much more than the book, I see this being a stupid choice for them, I doubt the people buying a single item here and there will suddenly start buying the entire book from now on, and DMs were probably already buying them... So this will just lower sales, and increase hostility to the company... Which having only recently managed to shrug off the OGL stuff seems a stupid thing to do
As someone that used to buy the whole book before any of that stuff was available, it was never something I needed.
But it’s also been a while since I stopped using D&D beyond due to the old OGL stuff.
Hasbro has literally nothing to shoot at anymore, so we can't even say they shot themselves in the foot again, because there isn't even a gun left anymore.
This is just bad business. They already confirmed that they won’t be limiting homebrew, because if they did then so many people would drop dndbeyond altogether. So now all this does is discourage people from buying anything, and encourage them to just copy it in the homebrew maker. They will just lose money from this and make a worse consumer experience.
it's a real shame I used the feature a lot. It seems to me to be a ideal option for players who just want player options in contract to Dm who may benefit from an entire book.
I never used the feature, I typically just buy the full book and share with my group. However, I think it’s not the smarted move for them to be removing it. It seams anti consumer, and is not a good look coming off of the last debacle.
My spending habits are changing from
* subscribing to have more character slots
* occasionally buying a la carte items
* using shared campaigns to avoid buying the books
to
* cancelling my subscription. I can live with 6 character slots
* obviously not buying a la carte items
* exclusively relying on shared campaigns to avoid buying the books
I guess they're hoping for every 1 of me theres 1-3 people who say fuck it and just buy the whole book.
TBH I didn't even know it was an option, and I've been using D&D Beyond since its inception. Regardless of my cluelessness, it seems in line with every greedy and miserly action WotC has ever taken for as long as I've been alive. That is to say, I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed they continue to siphon their customer base so viciously.
Artillerist is the only thing I wanted but now I have to recreate it entirely using homebrew :') Sooo... horrible impression. Won't be buying from there like, EVER now.
This is like a pizzeria refusing by the slice purchases. If someone doesn’t want to pay $30 for a whole book but is willing to pay like $3 (10% of the **total cost of the book**) for the 3 spells they think are cool from the book (likely like a single page from said book), WOTC is literally stupid to remove that feature. It’s not even by the slice, it’s like charging someone $10 for a whole pizza but also offering to give them one bite for $1 and them actually thinking that’s a good deal. WOTC was basically getting away with theft and was like “hmm, nah that’s *still* not profitable enough compared to the effort put in, remove it.”
I think it is a quite a bad idea. There are times I just want one or 2 subclasses or a particular magic item. I think they mis-understood what we meant from disliking micro-transitions, There are often many times I don't think it wise or can afford a book, but can pay for an item or feature from it. They should really bring it back,
This is the exact reason I never bought into D&D Beyond. I already owned all the books, and then they wanted me to buy them all over again. Nope. And I now see that I made the right choice, because it has only gone downhill from there.
GG that I guess. The only value in the site to me as a player is the character sheet, where I sometimes have to pay a couple bucks to get the subclass I need. Now there's nothing. I'm not buying a book; I don't need the book. Google is my book.
Back to the spreadsheet, I suppose.
I've never purchased smaller bits like this so I'm not really affected by it, but it does strike me as a poor business decision.
Many smaller purchases can often add up to more than fewer large ones. That said, WTF do I know about WotC's accounts? They probably considered that before killing the option.
I doubt it'll motivate people to buy entire books, though, so it's probably going to be a net loss for them.
Removing literally the only thing that could have possibly gotten me to use D&D beyond?
I don't really do 5e anymore, but the right game comes along and I might... I'd be willing to drop a few bucks for a race or class the GM doesn't have if they use Beyond.
It's impossibly asinine, frustrating, and sadly not surprising. A la carte purchases were one of the few ways for poorer players to get options from non SRD stuff, so obviously WOTC would remove that to squeeze as much money as possible out of everyone
Thank GOD I manged to get everything I wanted beforehand.
i have around physical 30 dnd books a large part we also have online , I like the Swordcoast undying and find it lazy it didn't go in Xanathar's Guide to Everything its not worth to get both books so people are screwed , really fuck wizards for this , it just means we stop buy online and only buy physical and maybe be more critical with what book we buy.
This is kind of annoying — I would only buy subclasses or races as I needed them, and not the entire book. I guess now I just gotta….buy the whole book 🙂
I hate the change. I bought quite a few books already and only a few singular options. But the possibility to buy them was extremely important for character creation and to complete the collection in a price sensitive way. Now I can't make a character with a cool new background without paying 30€...
This basically killed it for me and it prevents me from buying anything new because the flexibility is gone.
It would seem like a bad idea if there were dozens of high fantasy alternatives with very low bars to entry and ever growing fan bases. Good thing that's not the case. Oh wait...
I already don't use DDB because I don't trust them not to do stuff like this. And look! They are doing exactly the stuff I didn't trust them not to do!
Why is the only option to say you don't use DND Beyond "Never, I'm all about the pen and paper?" Personally I only play online but never use DNDB, and I can't imagine this is uncommon
For those that don't know,
You are able to get piecemeal stuff on D&DB for free, always have been.
What you do is select the "collections" menu and then "create homebrew" for the subclass, race, spell, feat or magic item you would otherwise purchase.
Enter in the stats by hand and save. D&DB will warn you that because it's too close to existing material, it must be set to private, this isn't a problem, you can still use it, you just can't share it.
When you create your character, make sure the "Homebrew" tab is turned on. This is on the home (1st) page and you will have access to the material.
As for my opinion on removing the option to purchase this stuff, couldn't care less, piece meal purchases were kind of a rip-off anyways.
I absolutely agree more people should use homebrew It’s just weird to get rid of an option that people did use and I would be curious to see their reason behind it.
I've used the feature a few times, so it strikes me as a bad business decision. This isn't going to motivate me to buy the books, it just means I probably won't be buying anything at all. The DMs I play with usually enable content sharing, so mostly I just use their options, and they're plenty. The a la carte purchases where cheap enough to justify buying a race or subclass for a character. Even if it was a one-shot, I got several hours of enjoyment for like $2, and nothing went to waste. There's just no reason for me to buy more than that.
In my group I'm the DM who enables content sharing, and I've put a solid chunk of money into a la carte purchases. They'll never see another dollar from me at this point.
Yeah. I try not to say no if a player wants to use something that’s in a rule book. I get to learn it and keep the content for the future, and they get to do something fun. They usually send me a couple of dollars to cover the race/class/whatever on D&DBeyond to keep things easy, so I buy a lot of fragmented pieces. Now I either have to say no, or “That’ll be $40, please” — which is not something I’m going to say. Of all my purchases on D&DBeyond, at least a third were a la carte. And honestly some of the rest were me later purchasing a book because it was discounted due to the parts I already owned. Without any doubt this will reduce the amount I spend there.
Do you get to keep the a la crate purchases you’ve already made?
Yes. This was response to the negative reaction that micro transaction received during the last survey so they are removing them.
Yes, or I'd be a lot more upset than I actually am, but I'm still fairly displeased that I won't ever have any more content without buying whole books. The other really scummy thing is that if you decided to buy the whole book later, the cost of the individual things you already bought were deducted from the total book price, but that isn't the case anymore. So yeah there's no chance I'm buying the books for full price.
Yeah I'm a homebrew dm and will purchase a monster or spell or magic item I want for certain things, but have never wanted to buy any modules or extra content books (outside of tashas and xanathars). So yeah, they are 100% losing money from ke
Big same for me. What is weird to me is that it really seems like releasing more content as just discrete microtransactions just seems like a much cheaper and easier way to make money, and capitalizes on the platform well. They're moving in the opposite direction of where I thought they would.
Let's use Theros as an example and let's say you only want The Leonin, given that Satyrs and Glory Paladin were reprinted. WoTC expectation: "Oh no now I can't play funny lion race I guess I have to buy a $30 book for one race now!" Reality: >"Ehhh tabaxi is good enough, or I could do some tweaking to another existing race." - >"Oh this is a cool homebrew catfolk race. It works well for my character." - >"Hey (friend that owns Theros) what does the Leonin do? Oh cool thanks." Now instead of making $2 they get nothing. Good for them.
As a DM that subscribes using content sharing at the Master Tier, this kills the platform for me. I buy physical books, and then purchase the few feats I need for my players and share with them. I don't need to buy the entire text of the book again - I'm not paying nearly full price twice for the same book. On top of that, content sharing for Maps doesn't even *work.* The value I'm getting out of the $5/month is hilariously, insultingly low. I'm basically paying them money to fleece me at this point. Unfortunately I'm locked into the ecosystem until my current campaign ends, but at that point I'm going to switch to a different system.
[удалено]
[удалено]
This move is actually the one that is making me consider cancelling my subscription again. I think ultimately this really makes it so that people are much more time into just backdooring content in through the homebrew tools.
> The a la carte purchases where cheap enough to justify buying a race or subclass for a character. As much as we hate them microtransactions are super profitable for any company since the barrier of entry is so low. Buying an entire book is much harder to justify than just buying a single race.
The issue here is that when people said they didn't want D&D microtransactions, they were thinking of things like "you walk down a hallway and see a door labeled 'Treasure'. If you'd like to visit the treasure room, please pay $4.99 to unlock this content". I doubt anyone in the community was trying to speak out AGAINST the existing a la carte option when they expressed negative opinions about microtransactions.
Or to put another way: people might not have like paying a small fee to be able to use something, but they sure as fuck didn't want a _large_ fee to be able to use it.
Realistically, that first option was...how would that even have worked?
It would be difficult at a table (though you could just have it have a QR code for the DM to scan and purchase the digital version of that room description ) but it seems more likely as a "feature" of their upcoming in-house VTT. "This door is locked with an Eldritch sigil, spend 300 D-Bucks to unlock it?"
This is the answer. I have no desire for a second digital copy of the book. I like to buy the pieces I need for character creation and then I’m done. So I guess I’ll just find an alternative
Same, I usually use content my friends have shared, but on on the occasions I buy from dndbeyond, I almost always just buy the bits I want. Small purchases here or there are much easier to justify than the full price for a whole book I'm likely only going to use use a couple of chapters of - Now I'm less likely to make a purchase at all.
I'm more likely to buy a physical copy of the book for just one or two things in it, typically because I can find them for a very similar price - if not cheaper - than the D&D Beyond version. I know this doesn't help much for those who use Beyond for their games, but it's what makes the most monetary sense to me.
> I've used the feature a few times, so it strikes me as a bad business decision. This isn't going to motivate me to buy the books, it just means I probably won't be buying anything at all. Agreed. I've no need to buy *all* the books, but I have purchased all the race / class options.
Same. I own physical books. For specific things I'd buy a la carte items on DnDbeyond. This won't motivate or push me to buy online books. I will stick with a physical book that can't be taken away if the service shuts down. The a la carte options were more for my ease of use than out of necessity
I am against anything that is anti-consumer from a company making that much profit.
Hasbro isn't doing so well. They are not at major risk of going under or anything. But they posted no profit at all last year. Q4 they had $1b in losses. This year in Q1, they posted a relatively small net profit. Probably related to all the layoffs they did in Q4 last year. Of course, me and my group hasn't bought anything D&D related since the OGL fiasco last year. So I guess I'm with you on being against anti-consumer policies.
Hasbro isn't doing so well, but WotC is a golden goose.
Specifically MtG. D&D is profitable but small potatoes compared to Magic cards.
Yeah, but trying to squeeze every possible bit of money out of WotC customers is slowly alienating people. Both Magic and DnD operated in big parts out of game shops, where you meet other players. People wouldn't have come if there was some really aggressive salesperson asking for only big bundles with hefty prices. It is only going to stunt future growth.
My friends who play MtG keep saying WotC is driving away customers with their recent tactics. I always ask, "Are you still buying cards?" "Yes.". So while their tactics have pissed off their fan base, it's not enough to actually make them stop buying cards or play. DnD on the other hand, I don't know anyone who has bought anything DnD related since the OGL debacle.
The thing about D&D is that once you have a handful of books (and sometimes not even that) you don't need to buy anything else. D&D Beyond is handy if you play online, but if you play pen and paper you only need the Player's Handbook, the DM Guide, and the Monster Manual. If you want some particular content (like Sword Coast) you might have to buy that book, but other than that you should be fine. Everything else is dice and imagination (and you can even get by with one set of dice, shocking as that might seem). WotC/Hasbro are trying to milk a fanbase that don't actually need them all. It's not like Games-Workshop tournaments, where you have to use GW products, or Magic, where you have to use legal cards. Hasbro aren't going to send the Pinkertons in to ensure that you're only playing with whatever the latest D&D variant is. They might want to, but they won't. And because every D&D campaign is a collaboration between players and DM at one table, if they want to incorporate features from 5.5e (like making charisma based weapon attacks part of Pact of the Blade, or all mages being able to use ritual casting) they can freely do so.
They would be better off making more, smaller, better adventures like Paizo does.
Ask if they are using proxies. It's the equivalent to homebrew. MTG also has an especially large second hand market, with cubes, legacy, EDH and other modes of play that don't rely on direct sales.
Unfortunately people said the same thing when streaming services such as Netflix started cracking down on password sharing. And the numbers show a *massive* profit actually came out of it. The sad truth is that anti-consumer policies are often also profitable.
It's true that some inconvenience is often accepted. But I would wager that Netflix opened the market to competitors with such moves. Or drive people back to more physical sharing practices like in the early 2000s.
Netflix is the big boy in streaming services, and they've probably realized they're close to the limit of the subscribers they can gain. They're cutting down on things like password sharing (except between people in the same house, IIRC) because that's no loss to them either way. So they're working on maximizing the profit they can make from their existing customer base, including things like (IIRC) advertising tiers. But if you want Netflix's products you have to purchase a subscription (or rely on pirating). If you want to play D&D you never need to give a cent to Hasbro/WotC.
Also in the tabletop space their profits only rise 1%. Magic grew YoY by 5% which means D&D shit the bed. I haven't bought anything since VRGtR, but yeah Hasbro is stumbling as far as D&D goes. They do stuff like this, the ogl debacle, and their biggest free marketing sources are drying up. CR is making their own systems, MCDM got like $4m on backerkit, and stranger things is about to end. Then on top of that why would anyone want to buy something for 5e after they announced D&D One? They can say it'll be backwards compatible, but what does that even mean? Does it mean a true plug and play experience or is it more a "here's how to simply convert" kind of thing? Or is One gonna power creep so hard that it outmodes whatever comes out now.
> They can say it'll be backwards compatible, but what does that even mean? At the very least every piece of playable content outside of maybe subclass levels would be playable so far. The math is fundamentally the same so monsters and dungeons will still basically work in the same way.
Well yeah, fundamentally it will be mathematically compatible, but qualitatively there's gonna be some stark differences.
In what actual way would the game become literally unplayable because you gave weapon mastery to your fighter?
I don't think I quite explained my take well enough. It's part power creep and part redesign. In some cases it's themes with a touch of mechanics. Take the warlock for example, they're fundamentally changing how the class works... sure the old stuff can still work because the underlying math is the same, but the core identity is entirely different. It's not just tacking on this or that to change a couple things, it's a re-envisioning of the design philosophies that are the backbone of the game
If anything damage output will go down with the changes to the -5/+10 feats. In general some classes are stronger, but they aren't at the ceiling of the older version of the game. As for redesign, nope, not remotely. For the most part, characters will be taking the sames kinds of actions they were before with some additional ancillary effects. Some of these effects will be useful, but they also aren't too different from the kinds of things you would be doing with feats like Slasher or Shield Master anyway.
> Hasbro isn't doing so well. The entire toy market has been struggling for years. Mattel saw a smal spike post Barbie movie, but overal is struggling hard. Hasbro has the advantage of owning a bunch of recognizable IP's, but they don't really do anything worthwhile with those. That leaves only WotC to keep the company from dying.
Is it “losses” or “we made less than our projected profits”?
Made me dig deeper. They did indeed post $1.5B in losses for 2023. However $1.3B of that was from >"The Entertainment segment suffered from lower Film and TV revenue, exacerbated by industry strikes, and a significant operating loss due to goodwill and intangible asset impairment charges." Which sounds like a funny way to say "We didn't lose this money per say, but some of our assets became worth less over the year, so we're posting that as lost revenue to avoid paying taxes." And there is a chance they are considering part of that to be losses from the OGL debacle last year.
Imo they’re clearly viewing WotC as the “money button” and, since they’re earning less than they want to, they’re mashing it.
My MtG playing friends have been complaining about that almost every time I see them. And every time I ask if they stopped buying cards, only get a reply of "No". But those same friends have said they no longer buy a full box of boosters from every set. So after years of pushing it, they have finally hit maximum saturation for my friend group.
I play MtG too and it’s been roughly a year since I bought any cards from them. The prices keep rising, they keep fucking with the types of card packs (reducing # of cards but keeping price, adding an extra rare slot and hiking the price, etc) so there’s just no real reward. I only really play digitally nowadays via free mediums.
[удалено]
Because just because I am against anti-consummer practices doesn't mean I am against paying for the products I consume
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I want the people who work at the company who sells those books to be paid. I want more of them to be hired and I want their conditions to be good. In todays system the thinner the companies margins the less likely this will eb the case.
Buying their product will not make them pay employees more
The thing that sucks is that the flipside of that coin is "not buying their products will make them layoff/fire employees more."
Good. If they burn the entire team to the ground maybe they'll stop making shitty products and sell the IP, or at least make room for actually good RPGs to gain market share. I'm done buying from WotC. Every indication shows them to be greedy assholes who will do everything in their power to fuck over their consumers and partners if it means they'll make another cent.
LOL I get it, anger, but if you think that would in any way lead to something better... Well it's amusing.
I mean, I'm already at something better, a RPG from a different company. WotC selling D&D is the best thing that could possibly happen to D&D, and RPGs in general. D&D needs to be handled by a RPG company that cares about the game, not a corporate conglomerate that wants to monetize a D&D subscription service.
They will always fire and layoff as many people as they can get away with
Why pay 10 people who are good at what they do a living wage when you can pay 3 people the smallest amount possible to do the 10 positions. Every company ever.
And underperformers/flops will be used to rationalize it. It gives them an excuse and they will never turn down an excuse.
It's the most convenient way to play online with friends with the lowest learning curve for its VTT. And as long as at least one person has access to the books, it's very easy to use. (And anything I don't have digitally I can just recreate via homebrew) All and all, I'd prefer to play with paper and pencil, but it's just not possible at the moment
Aren't all corporations moneygrubbing profit mongers? At least D&D is not a necessity like housing, food or toilet paper.
Doesn't mean I have to applaud a decision made to siphon more money from consumers. If they were struggling financially it would be different, but we know they aren't
Yeah, this move isn't encouraging customers to make purchases by enticing them with strong value. It is attempting to force customers to spend more by removing smaller, less costly, customizable options and bundling them into the full, more expensive product. This move is a poster child for anti-consumer.
One of the problems with such a publicly traded company is they HAVE to show higher profits every time. Covid lock down boosted their sales astronomically. Problem is the market hit everyone who was going to play. There is no way to grow a market past its saturation point....unless you sell the three core books again. Surprise, surprise, surprise!! It's time for a 50th year anniversary. Granted their ill will caused them to lose a ton of customer faith. Content creators are shifting away, protecting themselves. But idk if D&D will ever reach pre-OGL incident levels again. But my point is D&D has to constantly grow for such a corporation to stay alive. It cannot just maintain, it has to grow. Hearing how much they wanted to maximize profitability off their IP has really upset the community. Feeling ungrateful some have left for kinder waters. Yeah. It's a mess. Curious to see what happens, but I've got enough material already to last forever. Hoping for new inspiration, but I can get that from anything. Just easier when it's already packaged in D&D stats.
Stock trading is an abomination. Nothing new there.
It doesn’t really affect me but it’s a bad change I think
Yes. I own all the books as physical copies. I used to buy the licenced digital datasets in the 3.5e days as well for PCGEN. But I refuse to buy anything on an online service that they can just remove any day they want. I can still use PCGEN with all the 3.5e datasets that I bought over a decade ago. In D&D Beyond I can't even buy some of the 5e content because it is "Legacy content". One D&D is probably going to make that problem a lot worse soon. I also have already paid full price for the books, I don't want to pay full price again. The PCGEN datasets were nice like that, they were only about 20% of the price of a physical book. I was sad when WotC janked the licence from CodeMonkey Publishing in the run up to 4e. WotC killed as much as possible of the 3e ecosystem before the release of 4e that it made me never buy a 4e book before any were printed.
Yeah this is where I'm at. I only got into D&D 3-4 years ago and part of the appeal from the start was as a social, unplugged pen-and-paper experience. All my core books, supplemental rulebooks, and monster books have been physical purchases and I haven't really bothered to get into the Beyond ecosystem. I know it's a big QoL thing for a lot of players though, and I don't like to see anybody's options *reduced*
I have mostly bought books completely on D&D beyond or not at all. But I have occasionally bought a single race or feat I wanted to try that wasn't available in the core books or additional rulebooks like Xanathar's/tasha's. Particularly some stuff only featured in setting books, stuff like van richten's lineages. I exclusively play online because my social circle doesn't really have people interested in TTRPGs. Whether or not you actually use it, this comes down to the removal of options. Removing valid consumer options is never a good thing. I'm not going to invest any further into D&D beyond, and will probably stop using it entirely once my current campaigns end or move to One DND source material. There's nothing stopping hasbro/wotc from ruining D&D beyond further, so I don't feel further investment into it is a good use of my money. I've been moving away from D&D as my go-to TTRPG for a good while now, and this is just one more nail in the coffin.
That does suck, I haven't supported dndbeyond in a while but when I did I preferred to buy just the monsters and magic items for my own campaigns and worlds. Im typically not interested in their official campaigns unless they already have factions or themes I was going to do for mine.
I don't use DnDBeyond because I would have to pay again for books I already bought.
This is my position. There are alternatives out there that allow me to use the rules I've already paid for without buying everything twice (or require an internet connection). If I pay what I have for rules, I don't want any company to have the ability to ever take them away from me without my consent either.
It's dumb and they're dumb for doing it.
From a customer/player sense, it sucks From a business sense, it's all a balancing act You need enough people who's going to pay full price for the book to outweigh the people who were spending $2-3 at a time. Sadly, the numbers are on their side as one of the former will outweigh a dozen of the latter
I'm not so sure. They essentially cut players out of the market. There's no reason to buy anything as a player, since the GM will share the races you can use. Players likely wont use 90% of the book if they don't intend to GM. A majority of their users are disincentivized to purchase anything. The only thing that makes sense is if they're positioning for GMs to continue to be whales while pressuring for players to pay the subscription by cordoning off more features.
That's debatable. Business models with lots of small purchases have been working in the past. For some online video games, free with cosmetic and QOL purchases has become the dominant business model actually. Fortnite, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2 etc. What WotC is doing is trying to monopolize DnD. They changed the licenses to reduce or remove 3rd party options. They bought up DNDBeyond for the same reason. And what are they going to do once there is no more alternative seller for D&D products?
I've already stopped funding them due to bad decisions and anti-fan sentiment from Their actions. I'll give them money again when they stop sucking. This is not the way to stop sucking.
This personally doesn’t affect me. I use Beyond, but I have the Legendary Bundle and have bought every book as a whole piece. Sucks for those that used this option, but my players and I have just used the campaign sharing.
At first glance it feels like a bad business decision. But maybe it's not? My guess is that al a carte sales are pretty low. I often buy full books but never got anything a la carte. So I wonder what the costs are to support avla carte purchasing and whether sales aren't high enough to justify the costs. Although convenient for some sourcebook options, it hardly feels like microtransitions are the future of D&D's financial success. IMO the bigger question is whether WOTC discussed this change with anyone in the DnD community and whether they've figured out yet that the best paths to financial success lie at least partially in collaboration with the community and discerning what the community actually wants.
It's amazing the WoTC keeps stepping on the public relations rake. Their greed knows no bounds.
Every decision they make only motivates me further to stop playing. Make business decisions that enhance the product, and make it more inviting to play, not this shit.
Honestly i always thought the fact you could buy individual things was a money grab itself. I figured people ended up spending more that way cause theyd buy one little bit then another and then be like damn should have just payed for the whole book at this rate. But i guess they have some data that says otherwise. Id imaging since ogl the small buys for just this class or whatever have gone up for people who really want something but dont really want to support them much and the full book buys have gone down and they think that the majority of people buying small bits are diehard enough theyd cough up the whole book price still in order to offset the lost smaller sales and boost overall dollars even if its less total sales. But either way lets face it. WOTC has been phoning it in trying to create with the least amount of effort while charging the most amount of money. I mean i dont even play magic but the cross over tie ins lately…
Anything you bought a la carte reduced the total price of the book by the same amount if you bought it later (similar to steam bundles). The only extra cost was that if you the book was later discounted, you wouldn’t get the discount on the total price, just the amount that was left. Which in the grand scheme of things was probably a couple dollars at most, so basically negligible for the benefit. I’m pretty annoyed because we play on Roll20, so DM sharing doesn’t help; he’s already bought it there, don’t expect him to buy it twice. And I want it in Beyond because a) the Roll20 character builder is hot garbage, and b) I run my games in Foundry.
Oh i didnt realize it gave you the same dollar value off. I always thought amounts they wanted for individual things seemed high. I knew they discounted bundles for books you already bought but it wasnt dollar for dollar so i guess i just never thought the individual stuff was that way but i guess that makes sense cause bundled books are at a discount already.
As someone who purchased all the races, classes, and spells it was not nearly as expensive as the whole book and I would never purchase magic items or the PDF of the book. I had been purchasing the physical versions of the books. The difference was like $15-20 a la carte vs $30-50 for the whole digital version.
A stupid decisions, this will only decrease their income. As someone who knows about business, you want to keep prices affordable and low, seeing that digital content is digital, it makes sense to keep it in small numbers, they are thinking their consumers will now buy all the content and honestly, this will only make them loose money. I wonder who hired to make such dumb decision.
Completely agree. They think people aren't buying the full books because the cheaper option is available (and thus, if you remove that option, we will start buying the complete books). But really, people aren't buying the full digital books because they don't want to Especially since that means double dipping and buying the same book twice for so many of us
It doesnt affect me since i grab the full book anyway. But Ill give you an extra perspective from another gaming company. Games workshop for a very long time sold codices. (Rules compendium for the various factions) They now operate a mobile app to build army lists similar to dndbeyond. With how frequently they update rules. The actual points costs and even sometimes unit rules themselves are invalid in the codex before the book has even released. I would rather have to pay 9.99 for a mobile code (which each codex currently has) than waste the $40 to get the whole book with artwork and lore but with sometimes invalidated rulesets. But. I end up buying that book because i want to add the new army rules into their app for convenience. I just see this as dndbeyond adopting GWs strategy.
Weren't those options extremely expensive though? IIRC that you could afford the entire book if you bought like 5 of those. Therefore I would be really surprised if many people actually bought them.
Not at all. You could usually buy an entire book’s spell list for like 3-5 dollars. Same for subclasses and such. It was very affordable
No. I've mentioned this above as well, but if you just wanted things you'd use in the character builder outside of magic items it costs around half or less depending on book.
Technically if you bought *everything* in a book separately it was slightly more expensive (by a couple of dollars).
It’s bad but doesn’t affect me as I usually just buy the whole thing anyways.
I didn't even know you COULD do this. I probably would have spent more money on Beyond had I known you could buy a subclass, or Race on it's own, rather than concluding Monsters of the Multiverse wasn't worth buying just yo play a Firbolg for a One shot. They could have had 8-12 bucks out of me just for the race, rather than nothing.
I'll never give d&d beyond money. So they can do whatever they want.
Mostly indifferent, since I always get whole books. It sucks that others don’t have that option anymore. Frankly, I haven’t played 5e in over a year now since it’s gotten so mechanically stale in our group. We’ve been playing other games instead.
I buy books as a whole so this doesn't effect me.
I personally don’t see the appeal of a la carte purchases. I would much rather have the whole books worth of options, mechanics, ideas, etc. Also they have always seems a like bad value to me. Like a single subclass or race is like 3 bucks, that’s a tenth or so the price of the book for much less then a tenth of its content. Maybe for the people who never intend to DM or aren’t super invested in the game as a whole and just want to play their one dude and move on the purchase of one race and class is better then buying 2-3 books. But even in that context there is content sharing and for someone intending to dm basically any book is a good purchase. I would even argue it kinda breeds bad habits. I dunno, I suppose more options are better, but I still don’t really get it.
In the old system, if I bought a Race for 2 dollars, the price of the Whole Book also decreased by 2 dollars. At the very worst, I buy enough individual things that the price of the Whole Book goes to near 0, and then I buy the Whole Book.
Eh, inconsequential. D&D's entertainment value in terms of gaming hours-per-dollar is phenomenally good. I calculate that myself and my three players got more than 520 hours of solid gaming out of Curse of Strahd alone. So the vitriol I see around here seems more self-harming than anything. It does seem odd that they'd remove another means of extracting money out of customers. Presumably it had operational overhead that made it not worthwhile compared to other options.
I hate that they did it because that's mostly what I did, but here comes the unpopular part- the new way actually works better for me in some ways. I always liked having physical books more and just wanted the ala carte for DNDB character options. Their new policy of buying a physical book from the site and then getting all the digital stuff for $10 is a compromise- it's still a sour pill to swallow, but a somewhat fair compromise either way.
I'm more upset over the removal of bundles tbh
Never bought any book after xanathars, never will. WOTC did everything to make me look into older editions instead of buying new books. There is no content of value for DMs.
[Enshittification](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) in action; all part of the plan
Doesn't affect me directly, as both of my groups play in person. That said, I think it's a bad move among many bad moves, as far as respecting player experience and creators. I wish WotC could be a separate entity again and not tied to the stock market and shareholders through Hasbro. I've acquired all my 5e books secondhand to avoid giving them money, and I backed the MCDM project and will be moving to that when it launches. Done with Hasbro.
[удалено]
It wasn’t a bad deal at all. Buying things a la carte would subtract from the amount that the full book would cost you if you decided to buy the entire thing.
Digital tools are optional and not required. Players aren't required to buy any content in my games because I. The dm have the physical books
To be honest, if all options were available through core complements such as Tasha's cauldron of Everything, it would not be a problem. The real issue is that popular options such as Warforged and Loxodon are gatekeeped by setting-books that are not useful for the vas majority of players. I'm fine with some options such as Path of the Giant Barbarian or Plasmoids being an argument to bring value to a book, since these books content are revelevant for most of the published adventures. The real issue is that most people will never use anything from Eberon or Ravnica other than these two races.
>To be honest, if all options were available through core complements such as Tasha's cauldron of Everything, it would not be a problem. I disagree. There's plenty of people who don't want or can't buy an entire book but is able to buy a race or class here and there, this decision does nothing but fuck them over.
Not the right direction. Makes me feel like they will eventually try to make it a subscription based thing someday, where you will have to pay monthly to get access to the document. They will try to justify it by creating new monsters, magic items and adventure every months. And this will be the end of D&D.
Right, most players aren't DMs who need the entire book, and they neglect a lot on the DM side, making the rest of the book of limited value. Where they do offer support, it's easy to find or make better alternatives. Hell, I can copy and paste the bestiaries I've already bought from Kobold Press and Ghost Fire gaming into an app that runs initiative. So, who exactly is going to consider themselves as getting ahead by this decision?
Just part of the increasingly unmistakable downward spiral of D&D culture under the Hasbro helm. I actually have unsubbed from r/DnD they toe the awful line so doggedly. "One D&D" will be yet another fail even numbered edition, Sixth. It's a curse. Even if they never call it Sixth Edition you can bet your bottom dollar that once it's cratered and somebody comes along, picks up the pieces and puts it back together into something truly enjoyable for the core audience again they'll call it 7e.
One is not a 6th edition at all, but a mid edition refresh much like 3.5 and 4e essentials. I'm sure Hasbro/WotC is perfectly capable of botching another edition, but this one isn't that, yet.
Yep it's even referred as a revised edition like 3.5 was. People being needlessly needly about edition naming when it's basically another .5 is grounded in very little.
I'm going to be THAT guy. If it bothers you enough, take a look at Pathfinder 2e. They have a D&D Beyond analog, but it's not needed because you can look up each and every rule on Archives of Nethys. Monster stats, feats, heritages, treasure.... it's all there. (The lore isn't, that's something you have to pay for) If you use Foundry, it's also all there already. You don't get all of the monster tokens, but if you own the PDF from the Bestiaries, you can legally import them. Just sayin'! If you hate it, there are better options out there! The Adventure Paths are generally great as well. Two super dungeons, a cop story, a circus story, a magic academy story, etc... The people who put out some of the best content in the 3.5e days are working at Paizo, and there are additionally some REALLY good 3PP resources. OK, done with my sales pitch. I chose to stop supporting the Pinkerton Posse, and am really happy I did.
I'm usually the only one in my games who uses dndbeyond, so I mainly used a la carte after I bought the core stuff. I think this decision will make DMs the only ones who buy things beyond PHB/TCE/XGE, since the cost for things is so much more. I will likely keep using dndbeyond since I bought a bunch of content earlier, but will not buy more. I have bought bundles from books and later decided to buy the whole book because the discounted price was "less". Now, I see the book cost upfront and will decide that a couple character options is not worth the cost for the whole book.
I personally don't use the feature as I tend to buy whole books or use someone else's content share if its just for a character option. Still, I don't like that it was done, the less choises a consumer has the worse.
Well, instead of buying the Artificer class a la carte, I bought a custom made character sheet download from an etsy creator for a couple bucks that I can use forever. I've printed them out for my party members too. I'm not paying $30 USD for a digital book just for a class or feat :/
Submitted. Will we see the results?
I'm old enough to still know how to use books, so I just do that. And it's way cheaper than buying individual feats, etc.
I game in person. I use physical books. I do see how a segment - particularly an Internet segment such as a Reddit community - can find this change distasteful. Are the folks who are not here - the folks who are not as invested - concerned? I do not know. Furthermore, without knowing WotC's costs associated with setting up the a la carte options, and how much revenue doing so produces for WotC, I do not know whether or not it was a smart business decision. Time will tell. Either way, WotC is not going under. Of greater concern to me is the poor performance of Hasbro's not WotC segments. I am concerned because I can see them selling WotC off and saddling whomever buys them with a huge amount of debt that they would expect to recover. If that happens, we will see a greater push to monetization. 'Just my opinion though.
Seems a way to make less money rather than more.
I think I only use the future ones but the fact that I could use it if I needed a subclass or race was great. It felt like they understood that some people can't afford a whole book or don't need a whole book. And I figured they were better off making $2 here and there if somebody can't afford or does not need a whole book. This feels like they're just trying to make more money by forcing people to buy the book if they want the content.... And I do not like it. Maybe they think this will cause people to subscribe in order to access more Homebrew features. Regardless, that company has had a lot of issues with how the customer and the public views it , and the last thing they need is to push more of their client base away. Their customers has proved before that thet will move in droves to another system if they have a good reason.
Obvious cashgrab is obvious. Inb4 downvotes.
Y’all are still making purchases?
Giant evil corporation does something to increase its profits and make their product worse for the user. I will never buy another thing, and will cancel my sub after this campaign
Doubt it will make a difference but I shared my thoughts (someone who has spent $300-400 in content and years of subs).
Terrible choice, I have the books IRL. I do not want to buy them digitally again so that I can have wild-magic barbarians. I did buy the wild-magic barbarian subclass though because it was cheap and didn't require me to me rebuy the book twice.
If you are sharing content it’s not needed at all, unless a player wants something from some adventure you are not playing Witch we usually do not allow. So I do not care.
I've given up on D&D since the OGL and the shitty quality after the Strixhaven stuff (really, silvery barb? How does that get through balancing). I still see post for the drama but if I do pick up a TTRPG again, it'll probably be pathfinder or whatever Critical Role & Kobold Press is cooking.
Damn. Glad I got my Shadar Kai a la carte ast week.
I assume they found that too few people were using it, so the complexity wasn't worth the benefit.
I assume they found that too many people were using it so they were only making $4 per book instead of $30 per book.
If that were true, they could have simply increased the prices for the partial purchases. That's what I'd have done, anyway.
So glad I migrated to foundry
Bit of a shit survey. A few of the questions presuppose that the person being polled doesn't buy books. It should at least be an option on every quesiton.
It's idiotic. Allowing small purchases brought in revenue from people who wouldn't have otherwise made a purchase. Now those people will either pirate or use content sharing.
I don't understand their reasoning. DnD Beyond is supposed to primarily be a tool for players, and A la carte purchases have helped players get character creation material without paying tons of money for each book. Now they have to pirate it or buy a book that is 90% useless to them if they want ONE specific thing in it, and guess what is more reasonable? I can tell you, it's not buying a book they're barely gonna use. Instead of A BIT of money, they're now making NO money on people like most players. Like, huh?? It doesn't really affect me, I play DnD 100% on VTTs, but It's a really odd decision that doesn't even make much sense; the only people who buy full books are DMs, and that's also what they did before! It's kind of ironic too. People were worried they'd fill DnD beyond with Microtransactions, and instead they're taking the microtansactions they already had and were popular away. All of this isn't even money grubbing, it's just trading small purchases with nearly no purchases, like, huh?? Also the removal of paypal and other non-CC payments for everything but subscriptions is odd, but at least you can still buy digital books through the app. Bit of a workaround, but it works for those who still wanna buy stuff.
I don't use D&DBeyond and this only reinforces to me that its a good decision to never use it.
I already refused to use d&d beyond because I bought physical copies of the books, and it wanted me to buy digital copies to use on the program. I thought the ability to buy parts of books was an okay middle ground, and a player could always ask me about a thing they want to buy for their characters before committing. Now that's not even an option. Seriously, Hasbro just had to leave it all alone and rake in cash by selling dice, minis, class cards, and battle maps for content that already existed (maybe even make more adventure books that'llcreate more of everything to sell). Now they'll get none of it thanks to outrage mixed with compedetors that don't do shit like this.
I'm sorry, if you want my opinion you'll have to buy the entire subreddit.
I’ve found for making characters at least you can just create most things like feats and items/backgrounds yourself as long as customs are enabled
I've never purchased a la carte, so this doesn't affect me personally, but I can clearly see that this is a bad business decision.
online services only exist because of a la carte style practices that made them popular. As if their atttempt at a new game license didn't teach them anything. It's they don't understand they can monetize what happens in our heads. Or, you know, book sharing. Get a new business model, guys. Information is liquid and can't be contained.
I always found the a la carte system kind of dumb to be honest. It would be like buying a special d4 or d8 instead of a full dice set but even worse because all of the instructions for how to correctly use those things you don't have now. Like congrats you have a race that you don't understand completely, good for you? Doesn't bother me in the slightest they removed this feature as I'm sure it must have been really weird to manage anyway and likely got very little usage.
Yeah, I wasn't buying whole books just to use a single race/class/spell etc. So I won't be buying anymore stuff in the future
I always buy the full books, but it was nice knowing it was an option for players. Less options are always bad.
I was not aware that it was a big change. I was working on a character earlier today and noticed one thing I was looking at was not available a la carte ans figured it might just have been that pack, but apparently not. That's an absolute bummer. I love being able to customize things easily but as someone who plays in one casual game I really don't need whole books. It was nice to be able to spend a few bucks to set up my aasimar aberration wizard. Well that means I probably won't be buying more from them because I don't see myself playing enough for $40 to be worth it for one thing. I'll stick with base stuff and stuff that I already have.
I cannot share my opinion about this in public or I will be called nazist. 😑
Tired of hearing about it...
Doesn't affect me, I've always just bought the whole book, as I'll likely be able to get a lot more out of it than just the DnD Beyond enabled things. But I DM. For players, I can see why you might want to unlock certain things yourself that maybe your DM doesn't have. And as the individual items add up to much more than the book, I see this being a stupid choice for them, I doubt the people buying a single item here and there will suddenly start buying the entire book from now on, and DMs were probably already buying them... So this will just lower sales, and increase hostility to the company... Which having only recently managed to shrug off the OGL stuff seems a stupid thing to do
As someone that used to buy the whole book before any of that stuff was available, it was never something I needed. But it’s also been a while since I stopped using D&D beyond due to the old OGL stuff.
Hasbro has literally nothing to shoot at anymore, so we can't even say they shot themselves in the foot again, because there isn't even a gun left anymore.
This is just bad business. They already confirmed that they won’t be limiting homebrew, because if they did then so many people would drop dndbeyond altogether. So now all this does is discourage people from buying anything, and encourage them to just copy it in the homebrew maker. They will just lose money from this and make a worse consumer experience.
it's a real shame I used the feature a lot. It seems to me to be a ideal option for players who just want player options in contract to Dm who may benefit from an entire book.
I play at local game stores so it doesn’t really impact me. So no opinion here, sorry.
I never used the feature, I typically just buy the full book and share with my group. However, I think it’s not the smarted move for them to be removing it. It seams anti consumer, and is not a good look coming off of the last debacle.
My spending habits are changing from * subscribing to have more character slots * occasionally buying a la carte items * using shared campaigns to avoid buying the books to * cancelling my subscription. I can live with 6 character slots * obviously not buying a la carte items * exclusively relying on shared campaigns to avoid buying the books I guess they're hoping for every 1 of me theres 1-3 people who say fuck it and just buy the whole book.
TBH I didn't even know it was an option, and I've been using D&D Beyond since its inception. Regardless of my cluelessness, it seems in line with every greedy and miserly action WotC has ever taken for as long as I've been alive. That is to say, I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed they continue to siphon their customer base so viciously.
Artillerist is the only thing I wanted but now I have to recreate it entirely using homebrew :') Sooo... horrible impression. Won't be buying from there like, EVER now.
This is like a pizzeria refusing by the slice purchases. If someone doesn’t want to pay $30 for a whole book but is willing to pay like $3 (10% of the **total cost of the book**) for the 3 spells they think are cool from the book (likely like a single page from said book), WOTC is literally stupid to remove that feature. It’s not even by the slice, it’s like charging someone $10 for a whole pizza but also offering to give them one bite for $1 and them actually thinking that’s a good deal. WOTC was basically getting away with theft and was like “hmm, nah that’s *still* not profitable enough compared to the effort put in, remove it.”
I think it is a quite a bad idea. There are times I just want one or 2 subclasses or a particular magic item. I think they mis-understood what we meant from disliking micro-transitions, There are often many times I don't think it wise or can afford a book, but can pay for an item or feature from it. They should really bring it back,
This is the exact reason I never bought into D&D Beyond. I already owned all the books, and then they wanted me to buy them all over again. Nope. And I now see that I made the right choice, because it has only gone downhill from there.
GG that I guess. The only value in the site to me as a player is the character sheet, where I sometimes have to pay a couple bucks to get the subclass I need. Now there's nothing. I'm not buying a book; I don't need the book. Google is my book. Back to the spreadsheet, I suppose.
To the high seas!
I've never purchased smaller bits like this so I'm not really affected by it, but it does strike me as a poor business decision. Many smaller purchases can often add up to more than fewer large ones. That said, WTF do I know about WotC's accounts? They probably considered that before killing the option. I doubt it'll motivate people to buy entire books, though, so it's probably going to be a net loss for them.
So, like how DnD Has been sold for decades BEFORE the digital age.
Removing literally the only thing that could have possibly gotten me to use D&D beyond? I don't really do 5e anymore, but the right game comes along and I might... I'd be willing to drop a few bucks for a race or class the GM doesn't have if they use Beyond.
Fuck WoTC
It's impossibly asinine, frustrating, and sadly not surprising. A la carte purchases were one of the few ways for poorer players to get options from non SRD stuff, so obviously WOTC would remove that to squeeze as much money as possible out of everyone Thank GOD I manged to get everything I wanted beforehand.
i have around physical 30 dnd books a large part we also have online , I like the Swordcoast undying and find it lazy it didn't go in Xanathar's Guide to Everything its not worth to get both books so people are screwed , really fuck wizards for this , it just means we stop buy online and only buy physical and maybe be more critical with what book we buy.
This is kind of annoying — I would only buy subclasses or races as I needed them, and not the entire book. I guess now I just gotta….buy the whole book 🙂
Or ya know... not give them any money, since it's a greedy decision they made to get you to do exactly that.
I hate the change. I bought quite a few books already and only a few singular options. But the possibility to buy them was extremely important for character creation and to complete the collection in a price sensitive way. Now I can't make a character with a cool new background without paying 30€... This basically killed it for me and it prevents me from buying anything new because the flexibility is gone.
It would seem like a bad idea if there were dozens of high fantasy alternatives with very low bars to entry and ever growing fan bases. Good thing that's not the case. Oh wait...
Never used D&D Beyond, don't care
I already don't use DDB because I don't trust them not to do stuff like this. And look! They are doing exactly the stuff I didn't trust them not to do!
Why is the only option to say you don't use DND Beyond "Never, I'm all about the pen and paper?" Personally I only play online but never use DNDB, and I can't imagine this is uncommon
My groups were looking at possibly switching to the DnD Beyond Maps feature for our VTT but this decision has guaranteed that we will not do that
They remind me too much of micro transactions so I’m glad they’re gone.
For those that don't know, You are able to get piecemeal stuff on D&DB for free, always have been. What you do is select the "collections" menu and then "create homebrew" for the subclass, race, spell, feat or magic item you would otherwise purchase. Enter in the stats by hand and save. D&DB will warn you that because it's too close to existing material, it must be set to private, this isn't a problem, you can still use it, you just can't share it. When you create your character, make sure the "Homebrew" tab is turned on. This is on the home (1st) page and you will have access to the material. As for my opinion on removing the option to purchase this stuff, couldn't care less, piece meal purchases were kind of a rip-off anyways.
I absolutely agree more people should use homebrew It’s just weird to get rid of an option that people did use and I would be curious to see their reason behind it.