One D&D

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Jacob Rodgers said:
I am much more a fan of Demiplane and avoid DnD Beyond these days, but this is FUD. You do not need to subscribe to DnD Beyond to read a book you've bought on the platform. Neither is that true for Demiplane, and, of course, Demiplane supports many games and many publishers, not just one.
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But can you download and read a book you’ve rented on DnD Beyond offline? Can you print that book off?
 
sharps54 said:
But can you download and read a book you’ve rented on DnD Beyond offline? Can you print that book off?
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Huh?

I never claimed you could, although here's a screenshot to prove that I could print something off of DnD Beyond...

Screenshot 2024-01-08 at 13.34.37.png

Note that it specifies 76 pages of material. And I could easily select PDF as a target, instead of my office printer.

But no of that was what I was contesting.

I was simply contesting the claim that someone would need a subscription to read their material, which is patently false.
 
Jacob Rodgers said:
Huh?

I never claimed you could, although here's a screenshot to prove that I could print something off of DnD Beyond...

View attachment 74505

Note that it specifies 76 pages of material. And I could easily select PDF as a target, instead of my office printer.

But no of that was what I was contesting.

I was simply contesting the claim that someone would need a subscription to read their material, which is patently false.
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Agreed, you don’t need a subscription to read the material for as long as they see fit to allow you access to it. The point, even if Turkey Lurkie Turkey Lurkie has the specifics wrong, is that these e-book rentals are much more limited then when you buy and own material as a pdf.
 
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, WotC just can’t help but get caught in lies and deceptions.

www.videogamer.com

Wizards of the Coast admits to using generative AI after MTG artist quits

An MTG artist has quit after the Wizards of the Coast AI art debacle, and there's a statement from the company too.
www.videogamer.com www.videogamer.com

BTW I’m not an “AI art is bad” guy but I am a “lying is bad” guy.
 
sharps54 said:
Agreed, you don’t need a subscription to read the material for as long as they see fit to allow you access to it. The point, even if Turkey Lurkie Turkey Lurkie has the specifics wrong, is that these e-book rentals are much more limited then when you buy and own material as a pdf.
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5e PDF's will come out soon after 6e's initial sales rush dies down, just like 4e.
Brand55 said:
You can make a PDF that's just about as useful as a book at the table, but it takes some work and nobody seems interested in putting in that much effort. Personally, the best PDFs I've seen were the "augmented" PDFs that Void Star Studios used to put out. You can pretty much get to any page in the book with a few quick taps of a tablet screen. You can see a demonstration of their Nova Praxis PDF on YouTube.
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More like, nobody wants to pay for it. Customers expect dirt cheap PDF's, and the additional expense from publishers doesn't translate to extra sales. The market is getting what it asked for.
 
Telok said:
My experience is about 4 months out of date but I haven't heard of any major upgrades. The character sheet is decent, although you have to hack in some sub-class modifications to base objects.

Had a celestial warlock who gets +cha to radiant damage spells and had to build my own sacred flame cantrip to get the save dc & damage right. Two +# things will stack, so said warlock getting two different +2 hit & save dc items was terrible and you can't disable it unless you want to go making your own magic items to use those instead (the items had different secondary effects that were quite good for the character but +4 save dc is a bit nuts).

The search & filter function is shit. I've seen better string searching & sorting written by 4th year college students. The guy GMing complained bitterly about the encounter builder & magic item builder. You need to open mounts, pets, etc., in a separate tab. There's no good way to manage allied npcs in any form. I don't recall it telling you if something was in a book you didn't "own" until after you tried to open it up. So you had to open a monster or item to see if it was accessibile to you.

Basically if all you have is baseline characters using the default rules, magic items, phb classes, and monsters... then it looks great and probably won't have any serious problems. We were unimpressed because its a prettied up online spreadsheet character with a dice roller add on. And the search & filter functions truely sucked.
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I’m still an active user, and I agree the search function is completely useless. I’m not exaggerating here. The most basic subjects won’t show up in a search, but any monster or magic item that has that word in its description will.

For example, last Sunday a player wanted to know how far he could throw a torch and I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. So I typed “throwing” into the search bar (which came up as a suggested search term) and all the results were monsters (like giants referring to throwing rocks) and magic items (like the javelin of lightning since it has the word in its description). But three pages of results in, there was no mention of throwing distances anywhere.

This is not a one-off, either. I’ve never had a search actually bring me a useful result and I’ve been running this campaign for more than three years.

However, I do disagree with the comment about the encounter builder. I’ve had it work flawlessly for me the entire time. And running encounters is a breeze.

When building encounters, you can immediately see if you don’t own a particular monster, but it may be different on the player side for other things.

As far as opening multiple tabs, I find that to work great. When I’m running, I have multiple tabs open in the browser at the same time, and there is no lag or maximum number of connections or anything. So I’ll open one tab with my list of encounters, and a new tab whenever we start running a particular encounter, plus a tab with the list of PCs (in the campaign page) and another tab for references (looking up spells or specific rules in the PHB, etc.)

The players are running two characters each and so they open one PC in each tab and can flip back and forth faster than they’d be able to do with paper sheets.

As far as having access to content offline, I always print to PDF every book as soon as I buy it, so losing access or not having it offline is not an issue. Plus, there’s an app (works on my iPad) that lets you download some or all of the books you’ve bought - you select which ones - to your device so you can read them offline. I don’t use it much as I’m pretty much always online.
So, like most things, there are great bits that work perfectly and some bits that are barely functional (just like the rules in every edition of D&D).

Overall, I’ve felt I got my money’s worth for everything I’ve purchased. However, this 5E campaign will be ending at some point this year, and I will let my subscription lapse at that point and will probably never go back. If I ever run D&D again, it’ll probably be OSRIC or something similar as I just prefer the feeling of AD&D.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
This is not a one-off, either. I’ve never had a search actually bring me a useful result and I’ve been running this campaign for more than three years.
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...OK, that's worse than I expected, and I thought that I'm jaded:shock:!
 
AsenRG said:
...OK, that's worse than I expected, and I thought that I'm jaded:shock:!
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The search is terribly primitive. Its literally just a basic string match through items, monsters, spells, and probably races. It might include classes and subclasses. I don't know that it includes actual rule sections. And I don't recall it supporting commom wildcards or limiters in the search function. The given filters are very basic.
 
Telok said:
The search is terribly primitive. Its literally just a basic string match through items, monsters, spells, and probably races. It might include classes and subclasses. I don't know that it includes actual rule sections. And I don't recall it supporting commom wildcards or limiters in the search function. The given filters are very basic.
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Isn’t google integration pretty standard for just about any website search function?
 
Technically, it’s not the worst search engine I’ve ever used.

I worked for a company with a huge database of images we could use for brochures, websites, that kind of thing. And they were draconian about enforcing proper tagging of each photo (e.g. forest, trees, daytime, sunbeam, that kind of thing).

Except the search function didn’t accept any operators, only words. And it was inclusive.

So if you searched for “people beach daytime,” for example, it returned every single photo that had been tagged with any of those words (not just ones that were tagged with all three search terms). Adding a word to your search expanded rather than narrowed the number of results you got.

So you had to try to guess which single word would return the fewest results and then click through page after page to find images that were useful to you.

The smallest search I ever managed to do returned about 300 results, so if you ever needed to find an image, you were going to waste at least an hour of your time.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
Technically, it’s not the worst search engine I’ve ever used.

I worked for a company with a huge database of images we could use for brochures, websites, that kind of thing. And they were draconian about enforcing proper tagging of each photo (e.g. forest, trees, daytime, sunbeam, that kind of thing).

Except the search function didn’t accept any operators, only words. And it was inclusive.

So if you searched for “people beach daytime,” for example, it returned every single photo that had been tagged with any of those words (not just ones that were tagged with all three search terms). Adding a word to your search expanded rather than narrowed the number of results you got.

So you had to try to guess which single word would return the fewest results and then click through page after page to find images that were useful to you.

The smallest search I ever managed to do returned about 300 results, so if you ever needed to find an image, you were going to waste at least an hour of your time.
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...I think I remember using a similar database for pictures. It was this week:shade:!
 
It’s a D&D thread so I haven’t read all of it but isn’t this One D&D? :tongue:

IMG_1101.jpeg

Doggerel

First Edition for Grognards, in homes they dwell,
Second for players whose Gygax lore did swell.
Third, fourth and fifth for the fooled, doomed to optimize,
BECMI for gamers, never alone in their prize.

In basements deep, where the dice do roll,
One Cyclopedia to rule, one to bind their soul.
One Cyclopedia to bring them all, in gaming find,
In the basement where gamers, stories unwind.
 
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it was inevitable, the TTRpG income and profit potential is peanuts compared to video games. I just hope the TSR era PDFs stay available so new people don’t loose access to those historical documents.

(Edit: sorry for the cross post, I posted here before I saw the other thread)
 
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Lunar Ronin said:
Yeah, but those partnerships were made well before WotC started publicly working on one VTT, let alone two.
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I suspect now that total domination is off the table they are switching to the other option. Maximize revenue across all partners licensing to all. Since they can't stop people from putting ogl compliant rules they might as well join in.
 
deflagratio said:
Hasn't Roll for Combat been really bad at reading tea leaves/has been the source for a bunch of false rumors in the past?
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The bizarre thing is the annoying women in the thumbnail aren't even in the video. I think the guys behind the channel are just using some shitty stockphotos.

Edited to add: yep, a quick Google search confirms they are stock photos. One of them labeled 'Young attractive woman with a surprised and shocked face...' I wonder why they picked it?

Screenshot_20240131_213759_YouTube.jpg
 
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Lunar Ronin said:
Edit: Non-video source.
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This article appears to be a straight-up Google translate of the piece on the (apparently) Chinese language site 'Speed-Daily' whose source is Snow Leopard Finance, with one change in the text.

The linked article claims that 'Speed-Daily' has 'exclusively' broke the news but then the Speed-Daily site says that 'Snow Leopard Finance' has 'exclusively' broke the news. So...not so exclusive?

I can't find a Snow Leopard Finance online but there is a Snow Leopard Capital Management but their LinkedIn site says they are focused on Natural Resource sector, so they seem unlikely to be the supposed 'source.'

On the other hand there is a 'Snow Leopard-Wealth' site, name seems close enough. Snow Leopard Wealth, according to their LinkedIn account, with a whopping 3 followers, is based in the UAE. The lack of followers is a bit odd but some of these private 'wealth management' firms keep a low profile on purpose, for obvious reasons (hence why they would be based in the UAE).

Snow Leopard-Wealth promote 'AI machine learning' for investments on their site, which sounds like hype but their Co-founder appears from his LinkedIn profile, Twitter account and other traces online to be a real person, although there's no trace of him or Snow Leopard-Wealth making this claim online that I can see. Not that a private 'wealth management' firm in the UAE would want to be the a source for such 'exclusively learned' material.

tl;dr Very sketchy sources.
 
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Posting this here since this is a relevant thread and I didn't see a new thread bringing it up (maybe I missed it, since this video is a day old, and I've been away for a while). Plus some in this thread had criticized people for speculating that this thing would happen. But as with basically every bit of speculation I believe to be correct that gets summarily dismissed by high minded people online as empty fear mongering, given time (usually a year tops), it AWALSY comes to happen...

"Multiple independent sources with knowledge of the situation say that the team in charge of production and distribution of physical D&D books was laid off in December 2023..."

Sure, they may still put out the occasional book every once in a while using a third party publisher or whatever. But the future of D&D is digital, and they're bringing in people focused on digital publishing and software as a service. It seems like Hasbro/WotC want us to pay in perpetuity to rent access to D&D for now on (as many have speculated for a while now).

 
Voros said:
The bizarre thing is the annoying women in the thumbnail aren't even in the video. I think the guys behind the channel are just using some shitty stockphotos.

Edited to add: yep, a quick Google search confirms they are stock photos. One of them labeled 'Young attractive woman with a surprised and shocked face...' I wonder why they picked it?

View attachment 77105
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That would be Stephen Glicker and Mark Seifter.

The thing about YouTube is everyone wants to be first with news because of the algorithm. But what if the news is fraudulent? Most never put out a retraction (I see Professor DM did).
 
VisionStorm said:
Sure, they may still put out the occasional book every once in a while using a third party publisher or whatever. But the future of D&D is digital, and they're bringing in people focused on digital publishing and software as a service. It seems like Hasbro/WotC want us to pay in perpetuity to rent access to D&D for now on (as many have speculated for a while now).
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Except you don't have to pay a subscription to buy books on D&D Beyond. You just buy them.

People keep saying this and it keeps not being supported by anything.
 
Jetstream said:
Except you don't have to pay a subscription to buy books on D&D Beyond. You just buy them.

People keep saying this and it keeps not being supported by anything.
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But rent is the correct term as opposed to buy, you don’t own e-books on D&D Beyond, you just have access to those e-books as long as they decide to let you have it.

(I agree that you don’t need a paid subscription)
 
Jetstream said:
Except you don't have to pay a subscription to buy books on D&D Beyond. You just buy them.

People keep saying this and it keeps not being supported by anything.
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And what happens to your content if D&D Beyond is discontinued?

Unlike say, the Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM which I bought in 1999 and have backed up on several media along with my DriveThruRPG library.

1707272273136.png
 
Fenris-77 said:
I don't dig the Spotify model for RPGs.
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It’s not even a Spotify model. At least Spotify gives you access to a massively large library of music while your subscription is active. The equivalent to that would be paying a monthly fee to have access to everything on DriveThruRPG. DNDBeyond still makes you buy everything a la carte on top of your subscription (and at best is still a walled garden for a single system).
 
Jetstream said:
Except you don't have to pay a subscription to buy books on D&D Beyond. You just buy them.

People keep saying this and it keeps not being supported by anything.
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We've basically gone from "They're not gonna get rid of physical books" to "You only pay for your digital books (which you can only access from a digital platform) once." Give it time.

All the signs from WotC point to them wanting to move to a strictly digital business model.
 
Well lucky for all of us no one is forcing anyone to use D&D Beyond or 5e in any format.

I know it will be a long time before I run any form of D&D, let alone 5e.

Just move on and play what you're into.

Remember that your hobby is playing rpgs, not complaining about them online.

 
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