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D&D Beyond, Wizards of the Coast, 5e, and You

by Mike on 18 December 2023

Wizards of the Coast continues to expand D&D Beyond's dominance in 5e tabletop roleplaying games and they've proven they don't always act in the interests of the larger 5e tabletop roleplaying hobby. It's up to us to ensure our handle on the 5e TTRPG hobby remains strong and beyond the whims of any single company.

We can do two things to strengthen our hobby:

Show WOTC how they can better support the larger 5e TTRPG hobby.
Make our own use of 5e products resilient to the whims of any one company.

Don't let D&D Beyond determine your happiness with 5e.

In addition to this post, you can watch my YouTube Talk Show on the subject or listen to me, Jessica Hancock, and Russ Morrissey talk about it on the Unofficial Tabletop Podcast.

WOTC Built a Resilient 5e

Earlier this year, after the OGL fiasco, Wizards of the Coast released the 5.1 SRD into the Creative Commons. This made the core concepts of D&D available to 5e publishers big and small. Not only can people write 5e compatible materials, but they can write D&D-style games with all of the nomenclature of D&D and not worry about getting sued.

They also released the 5.1 SRD in French, Spanish, Italian, and German. By doing so, they helped creators all over the world build 5e products in languages other than English.

Download these documents and save them on your hard drive so they'll be available forever.

Releasing 5e into the Creative Commons makes the larger landscape of 5e publishing extremely strong. Any of us can publish products compatible with 5e (not just the 2014 D&D but all other 5e compatible products and systems) without needing anyone's permission.

That's great for print products and static digital products like PDFs.

But the landscape for digital tools is changing.

Growing Their Walled Garden

WOTC's expansion of D&D Beyond, including adding products from other 5e publishers, gives WOTC further control over the larger 5th edition TTRPG hobby – the very control they hoped to acquire when attempting to violate their own contract by deauthorizing the Open Gaming License. That failed, and, in return, the 5.1 SRD is now under a Creative Commons License.

Digital play of 5e continues to grow. Just shy of 40% of the 3,300 GMs and players I surveyed on YouTube regularly use D&D Beyond (yes, I know such polls are flawed but polls do give us a sense of what trends are emerging). The more players and GMs depend on D&D Beyond to run 5e games, the more they depend on WOTC to dictate what that game is and how it's played. If you're reliant on D&D Beyond,

you're stuck with whatever options are available in D&D Beyond and don't have access to nearly all 5e material published by other publishers.
players often expect that everything in D&D Beyond is "official" and anything else is not.
you're stuck with their version of 5e, not any of the others like Level Up Advanced 5e or Tales of the Valiant.
WOTC can change material on D&D Beyond without notice and with no way to roll back to previous versions.
the more you buy there, the harder it is to jump to a competitor.
you must live with it even as WOTC changes their business model however they want.
WOTC can shut it down at any time, for any reason, and you lose everything you "bought". This isn't hypothetical. They shut down the 4th edition D&D character builder ten years ago.

What Can WOTC Do?

WOTC greatly strengthened the 5e hobby by releasing the 5.1 SRD into the Creative Commons. Here's how WOTC can further strengthen the hobby.

Let us download PDFs of our purchased material on D&D Beyond. WOTC is one of very few publishers who doesn't offer PDFs of its books.
Let us import structured versions of subclasses, spells, items, and monsters from other sources into our D&D Beyond homebrew collections. This access would allow the community to offer open content in a structured format we can import directly into Beyond.
Give us an official API to export structured versions of characters, class features, spells, items, and monsters we paid for so we can use them in other tools if we want to.
Continue to release D&D products on Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds.
Release D&D products on Foundry, Shard, Demiplane, and other character builders and VTTs as they come up.
Continue to make physical books the primary product of D&D.
Follow through on your promise to release the 3.5 SRD into the Creative Commons and release updated 2024 D&D material into the Creative Commons.

Make Your Hold on the Hobby Resilient

WOTC may or may not follow through on any of these things but there are things we can do to strengthen the resilience of our 5e TTRPG hobby.

Buy physical books and PDFs from other 5e publishers on their own store even if they're on D&D Beyond.
Back Kickstarters. Help fund the development of new 5e products from independent publishers.
Offer character options to players from other 5e publishers.
Try other online tools such as Shard, Demiplane, Foundry, Fantasy Grounds, and Roll 20.
Steer players towards using pencil and paper character sheets. Tug on their nostalgia for a disconnected analog game.
Try other systems like Shadowdark RPG, Numenera, 13th Age, Shadow of the Demon Lord. You don't have to leave 5e forever but try some other games every so often.
If you're a techie, get your hands dirty converting open gaming content into structured data formats so more tools can use them. Join Open5e and their Discord server to see how you can help.

WOTC's Role in the 5e Community

WOTC is in the unique position to bring more people into the hobby. I want them to spread the word of D&D far and wide. I want D&D postage stamps. I want movies. I want critically acclaimed, popular AAA video games. I want them to bring in every person they can into this hobby, show them how the game is played, and show them the value it can have in our lives.

I want them to bring those people into the larger community and show them that there's more. There are other options, other monster books, other sourcebooks, other adventures – thousands of products published by hundreds of publishers – all in support of this larger hobby we love.

These games enrich our lives. They saves lives. I want us all, WOTC included, to make this hobby as strong as it can be.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

This week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Running Monsters in Dynamic Situations and Saving Barborog – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 14 Lazy GM Prep

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as D&D tips. Here are this week's tips:

Continually expand and contract the aperture of your lens to keep the focus on the fun parts of the game.
Know the capabilities of the characters. Showcase their strengths.
You're the architect of your game. The books and rules are tools you can use or discard to serve that game.
Use paper character sheets.
Buy physical books.
Support independent publishers.
Don't let your game depend on any digital tool.