Thread by @WhatDoIKnowJR

First off, I'm glad that Teos is posting these summaries, I really appreciate it. I'm really kind of perplexed at some of the decisions, and lack of decisions, going into this development so far. #DnD5e

https://twitter.com/Alphastream/status/1646526838372696065

This year, WotC has amazed me in multiple, very different ways. The OGL situation was so bad, and they deserve all the crap they get for it, but it also really needs to be noted how far they retreated when faced with an angry fanbase.

The other way they manage to amaze me, however, is how many times they seem to be repeating similar mistakes they made in the rollout of D&D 4e. And it's strange because I don't even think there are many people left at WotC that made those decisions at the time.

The 4e VTT was supposed to be all about placing tiles and 3D miniatures on a virtual surface, to mimic playing in real life. That 3D playing with minis and terrain really seems to be their priority with the VTT.

The first thing I said when they tried to embed an NDA in a survey to "secretly" preview this to randomized people answering a survey on the internet was that the thing they could do, that would absolutely bleed users from other platforms, is nail the VTT experience for D&D.

When I said that, I didn't mean, "terrain and minis on a literal virtual tabletop." I mean, even with the best character sheet on the platform, Roll20, for example, isn't built to run ONLY D&D, so to some degree, everything is a "patch" to get its unique aspects to work.

Shard Tabletop, with it's focus only on 5e SRD based games, does a much better job integrating rules from the game into implementations at play, because it's only worried about being a 5e SRD VTT. Sadly, it doesn't have official support from WotC.

If WotC has built a VTT that's primary purpose was to implement rules seamlessly into a VTT experience, while integrating access from D&D Beyond, this could have been game over for other VTTs. I'm not saying that would have been good, in the long run, but it's a win for WotC.

But they are so focused on that 3D experience being the core feature. "You can have official D&D minis on official D&D maps, in 3D, and you can even sort of use the rules with them."

Making a VTT where you access character abilities like you would with your hot-button loadout in an MMO is not what I want out of my VTT experience. It floors me that D&D Beyond integration isn't the primary focus of all of this development.

A 2D VTT with official artwork and a few flashy flourishes, that natively supports and integrates specific D&D rules SHOULD have been the primary focus. But somehow, the "core experience" they try to capture is virtual minis on a virtual map with terrain.

From 1985 to about 2002, the only thing I used miniatures for was to sometimes get an idea of party marching order, and most of the time, I didn't even do that.

From 2002 to the present, even using miniatures on a grid, I have almost never used 3D terrain. I've also used 2D cardboard tokens, pawns, or flat dry-erase pieces for much of that time.

In other words, my core experience has always been more about looking at stat blocks, characters sheets, and dice results, than playing on a 3D surface with accurate official miniatures for everything.

Teos also makes a very, very good point that they are pushing for this to work like a video game, when they could have built a 2D model that could allow people ease of use on mobile devices when they don't have a desktop to use for gaming.

This just really feels like they took the ball and ran with it, really, really far, before they checked in on what people may have wanted from this. Which honestly feels like a mistake WotC has been making a lot recently.

They want feedback, and I honestly believe they do, but they don't ask for it until they have heavily committed to a direction that already took a lot of work, and would be hard to correct from at the point where they ask for the feedback.