Hell, I bought and enjoyed even just reading the core rule books when they came out, and have several more books on my wishlist for this Christmas perhaps, just because I think the rules are so damned smart and well done. Best DnD since 3.5, and that’s saying something coming from me. I wish I could get the band back together regularly and actually play some.
Buddy of mine keeps trying to drag me into his ongoing Eberron game using 5E rules. Some of my best friends are in that game. . . but it’s weekly on a Monday. Would gobble up a lot of my tiny amount of remaining free time :(
Me too, and I agree (except I thought 3.5 was largely unnecessary compared to 3.0, other than improved/clarified rules for utilizing miniatures). I love the art in 5.0 books, and even though I’m unlikely to ever play the game, I’d still pick up more of the adventures/core books if they weren’t so expensive.
And fixing horrifically broken shit like Haste.
Wizards’ 5e offering is coming out soon. Any thoughts about their D&D Beyond?
To me, it seems horribly expensive with lots of double-dipping on print and electronic purchases plus subscriptions, and I had subscribed to their $60 or $70/year 4e plan for a couple of years.
D&D Beyond provides flexible purchase options for both official digital content and subscriptions.
Players will be able to unlock official Dungeons & Dragons content in digital format for a one-time purchase that is integrated into the toolset. Players can also purchase individual game elements or bundled content within any official source. Like to play barbarians? You can unlock that class and all of its options only. Want to run “Tomb of Horrors” from Tales From the Yawning Portal? Unlock that single adventure.
Digital sourcebooks (such as the Player’s Handbook or Volo’s Guide to Monsters) will be available for $29.99, while adventure modules (such as Curse of Strahd or Storm King’s Thunder) will be available for $24.99.
For the first week after launch, the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual will be on sale for $19.99 each!
Players can get the most out their D&D Beyond experience by signing up for one of two subscription tiers.
The Hero Tier at $2.99/ month is intended primarily for players. It removes ads on the site, allows players to create an unlimited number of characters, and add publicly-shared homebrew content to your collection to use within the toolset.
The Master Tier at $5.99/ month is intended primarily for Dungeon Masters and full groups. It grants all the benefits of the Hero Tier, and also allows a DM to share all her unlocked official content with other players within a campaign - so content does not have to be unlocked by every player.
I can’t quite get the hang of the pricing. Does the $3 a month player option let me maintain a character using all source material, do I need to also buy Unearthed Arcana if I want to play the new Ranger?
From the quote, it seems like I pay to unlock the classes I want. Can I use them and accept ads on the site? Can I pay for the 2 times a year I am at a con and actually play D&D and want to have the web site handle the paperwork details?
This is all based on my understanding of the deal in question, Mark, but to attempt to answer:
$3/mo ONLY removes ads, adds infinite character slots, and enables homebrew content. My guess is that it also provides access to D&D Basic content, but I can’t find confirmation of that and never got into the beta, so I can’t really confirm that.
If you want full access to a class, you’ll need to buy the sourcebook it came out of ($25) or buy the class-pack (pricing details for which do not appear to be available).
Unearthed Arcana might be a special case, because it is freely available on their site, along with D&D Basic. Again, it is not clear from the material I can find what will happen with the currently freely available content.
edit: This post goes into some of the potential pricing breakdowns for individual content purchases (e.g., buying access to a single race, single class, and single background):
edit 2: User claims that Basic Rules and SRD available free without any purchase:
Huh. This sounds like a bad deal compared to the old D&D Insider.
That’s an amazing amount of nickel and diming.
Something on the order of $157 for a group to use the three core books and a single large adventure pack communally through a GM sub for a year. Pretty pricey!
The individual purchases sound like an awful deal. Lol, $2/magic item when you could get a whole shitton by just buying the GM’s book?
Single item purchases are a sucker’s game here.
Seems like they’re trying to compete with Hero Lab, which also has a lot of nickel and diming but isn’t THAT bad unless you go heavy into splat books
Can’t you buy all three books for under $100 on Amazon these days? A pen can be stolen from any bank and paper literally grows on trees. Whipper-snappers and their silly digital gaming!!!
it’s less of an issue with 5e, but 4E you pretty much needed the character builder. The sheets without the tool were a mess to sort out. What is nice is the tools take a lot of the hunting around. Oh, I chose this background…what skills did I get again?
Yeah, this whole double dipping and subscription blows. :(
As an aside, has anyone tried, or heard anything, about the official module support on Roll20? If my D&D group gets back up and running, I was thinking of doing this. We have used roll20 in the past and really enjoyed it.
I’m primarily just interested in how intuitive the setup is. I kinda had my own way of setting up the Rol20 stuff.
I played some Adventure’s League at a con near me this weekend. Kinda got my D&D blood flowing again.
I thought I’d try and get into a roll20 game, but almost all of them want you to pay $10 a week to pay. I’m not sure i want to pay 40-50 bucks a month to play D&D.
You can charge people to play in your Roll20 game? What the ever-loving-fuck??
Seriously? I didn’t even know that was a thing. That’s a big bag of batshit.
I think there are plenty of options for online D&D outside of pay-to-play games. Get into a relevant Facebook or G+ community, for example, and you’ll probably find plenty of pickup games and campaigns.
Or, even better, coerce some friends into playing. I know there’s even occasional talk around these parts.
I think Wizards still sponsors their “encounters” events at local gaming stores (?), which is another way to dip your toe into the D&D waters (and have it bitten off by a Sahuagin)
the reasoning is 'it pays for the module, my time to prepare, and the cost of the roll20 pro" which, yes, is bullshit.
That said, since the module can be purchased preset up on Roll20, if there was enough draw for it, I’d run a game 5 nights a week. that would pay for a lot of toys.
There is a game store near me that has events. The hardcover campaigns are always full with the same players. They have been running the same two AL modules for the past 4 months. there is a table fee of $2, which I can handle.
I was able to get a lot of the PDFs for the AL modules, so I might talk my Friday night group into running those once every month or so.
I think the only way I’d pay for a session is if it was a “celebrity” running the game, like Chris Perkins, Wesley Crusher, etc. More for the experience and the stories.