Yeah, I know that. But the last time I let them off the leash in a major town, our sorcerer nearly committed homicide because they couldn’t afford an item.
Will probably also be costly af. While the design of Dndbeyond looks sleak, it hides everything behind -very- costly paywalls. If you want to have access to anything more than a complete barren character creation, you need to -both- pay a subscription cost roughly the same as WoW, and purchase all individual content books from their site, which are like 40-60 pounds/euro each.(Subscription only opens up options to subscribe to homebrew content, more slots for yourself and players etc, but adds- no- content.)
TL:DR you are looking at spending maybe between 200-300 euro+ subscription cost to properly use dndbeyond.
And I will assume their roll20 gameplay thing will be the same.
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That’s a peeve btw, both for gaming and now D&D. I adore roleplaying, I really like D&D and I like gaming.
But there is a weird mentality around it, especially D&D(especially now) that it should be a very -costly- experience.
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I prefer the Rogue Trader system above DnD myself. Having armour act as damage reduction and separate from dodging makes so much more sense to me, and a d100 allows for a lot more detail than a d20.
Never tried that myself. I have only experience with Pathfinder, Aberrant, 5th edition.
And I have looked at Age of Rebellion/Edge of the Empire system and a weird Dragon Age one which was d6 based and needlessly complicated.
It depends really.
WotC do this for basically every VTT because licensing. Beyond at least has the books the same price as the real product whereas R20 and FG charge more for some reason. You can also buy specific parts of books you want, like I nabbed all the character creation options from a few adventures for a fraction of buying the whole thing. Plus you can regularly find discount codes for 25% off or more entire purchases. I got most of the books with character options for less than £100 iirc.
The sub fee is optional unless you want to have more than six characters or share content.
Now if you already have the books it definitely seems like a ripoff to buy them a second time. But I didn’t have the books already save PHB, mm and DMG. So for me it wasn’t a huge deal.
I’m hoping in future that WotC buyout Beyond and start putting codes in future books to get the Beyond equivalent. They seem much closer to Beyond than any other site. I suspect they don’t do it already so they don’t piss off users of R20 or FG olwho already bought the (inflated priced) modules on those systems.
I strongly expect them to take a R20 approach where just using the VTT environment and a blank, fillable sheet will be free. So it’ll be very usable (and hopefully better) without paying anything. I just hope they don’t like stuff like dynamic lighting behind the sub and so on.
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I made an attempt at translating Warcraft to the Rogue Trader system myself. It worked rather well, though I didn’t exactly cover all imaginable spells, nor am I sure if my example creature stats are lore-accurate.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xaygzS4wWuzR_Pgf7HDgmbmR48V4pxQtaRoz44E_MLM/edit?usp=sharing
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This is weird to me, since D&D can cost literally nothing to play, even in person. We play in a club that provides us with dice, flipmats, minis, and a printer, so it costs nothing for the DMs and players except a per-game fee for the latter. For the DM it’s completely free.
The cost mostly stems from online tools and licensing fees. WotC is like your grandpa just figuring out the internet. Hopefully in 6e if that’s ever a thing they lean into the digital realm more without charging full book price for digital content.
I just feel like considering that we have sites such as the roll20 info pages or 5eTools(love this) and freely available character sheets, it feels a little weird to make you pay like 20 euro to just be able to use/fill out the details of a race on that site and stuff.
I know dndbeyond calculated things for you and all, but then the character creation options should be free or included in the subscription, not hidden behind purchases in addition to the other things.
This. I encourage people to broaden their horizons and look at different systems. D&D is good for what it was made to do - dungeon-delving - but there’s a lot of things that it’s rather bad at, even when it comes to playing a medieval fantasy game.
There’s hundreds of different RPGs out there, and I encourage people to play them rather than stick to D&D out of familiarity.
I like DnDBeyond since it ‘makes’ the sheet for me, as I easily get lost.
Though my peeve is my current group, as we are mixed between those that want to RP and those that min-max to just win.
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Info pages use basic rules and some limited stuff from the PHB. 5eTools is technically a pirate site as it hosts a ton of licensed content for free. It’s not sanctioned by WotC at all and I suspect the only reason it’s still up is because they’re not Games Workshop levels of rabid regarding book content being made free.
Beyond paywalls stuff normally in paid books because WotC don’t want people getting book content for free. The actual tools are free but using book content in them is not.
I’m foolish with money but my friends all chipped in for a master Beyond account with everything unlocked and a subscription, then using it to share the paid content with their personal accounts. So that can be an option too.
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I know people enjoy diffrent things, but I feel like min-maxing can be kinda hard on the groups. I mean, I get people want to be able to be strong/beat the encounters.
But the thing is, from what I have heard/little bit of personal experience to, if you have someone who soley just focuses on min-maxing the character to perfection, it really makes the characters who were more designed from a roleplay idea, often kinda suck. Really badly. To the point where even the fun of roleplay can become lost because everyone is so sub-par to the one min-maxing player.
I dont mind WotC selling their adventure/bigger rulebooks, but I dunno…I feel like when it comes to the races/classes, just character option stuff they could have done what they did with the Planeshift Series(Not counting GGR since it was an entire new rulebook), release them for free in like small 10 page PDFs.
I’m just generally a bit iffy to the whole mentality WotC, and alot of players also weirdly drive forward, in that “Oh of course playing D&D should cost you about a 100 £, that is what makes it special!”
To go back to the gaming thing, it reminds me of when Sony told players who wanted their new console but thought the price was too high to “just get a second job”.
Tbh in 5e it is stupid easy to “minmax”.
Half orc fighter, congrats you’re automatically amazing in melee. This isn’t Mathfinder where there are tons of knobs to turn.
I’m of the opinion that if you deliberately and knowingly make a subpar character, you don’t get to complain that the guy who just picked a standard race/class combo is doing much better. The gap between just picking the obvious stats, race and class, and a character absolutely minmaxed to heck, is not that significant. The gap between a subpar character and a “normal” character however can be huge.
Tbf Beyond somewhat addressed this by making it possible to buy JUST specific character options from a book for like $2 a piece. It can be a good way to do it if you ONLY want the character stuff.
Warhammer be like: “Here’s a new broken rulebook and model, £300 please. Oh and don’t forget the paints we make with unicorn blood! That’s why they’re £10 each!”
Honestly though? All the costs I mention are just lazy person tax.
You do not NEED the builders, or the maps, or even the books. It’s stupid easy to find the written rules of every book, then just fill in a blank sheet yourself, then “borrow” some maps other people made on the internet. Or crack open MSpaint. Or gitgud with photoshop.
I just have no significant life costs right now and I have a job, and I’m lazy. So I buy into all this stuff because I feel like it, and while a lot of it is good stuff by no means is it required.
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The only money I’ve ever spent on tabletop is £10 for several sets of dice and then another £20(ish) for the Savage Worlds handbook. You can invest precisely £0.00 into playing and still be able to do so.
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PDFs are your friend.
In fact, for our group they are/were pretty much mandatory even though we had all the books we needed, because it allows multiple people to use the same book when making characters etc.
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I’m of the opinion that if you deliberately and knowingly make a subpar character, you don’t get to complain that the guy who just picked a standard race/class combo is doing much better.
That I can agree to, but they don’t just min-max their stat. They even want you to stop living into your character and have you always pick the ideal choice to situation, even if it goes against your character. They seem to be there just to win.
This sort of things is what bothers me. That they maybe do higher dmg than me during combat ain’t a biggie.
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