Quote from: Chris24601 on March 28, 2025, 01:29:18 PMFor all the guff 4E got for needing a program just to make character-building possible*,

the number of 5e players who are entirely reliant on D&DBeyond to manage their characters truly staggers me.

If it ever stops working the number of players who wouldn't be able to even function would probably kill half the campaigns at my FLGS.

1: Think you are mixing 4e with 3e., 4e was dumbed down so much that your choices were really limited.

2: Its more that there are 5e players who just love to make endless characters. Beyond makes it easy to organize em all. I was rather appalled to see a guy with over 25 different characters. WHY?

3: Most would hardly even notice because they have so many alts they cant even remember a tenth of them to actually care.

x: Any character builder is going to perk that creative side in some. I mean I knbow people who went through the Neverwinter PC games multile times just to see how different classes played, or to put to use things they learned to make better characters.

Quote from: Omega on March 28, 2025, 11:59:13 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 28, 2025, 01:29:18 PMFor all the guff 4E got for needing a program just to make character-building possible*,

the number of 5e players who are entirely reliant on D&DBeyond to manage their characters truly staggers me.

If it ever stops working the number of players who wouldn't be able to even function would probably kill half the campaigns at my FLGS.

Its more that there are 5e players who just love to make endless characters. Beyond makes it easy to organize em all. I was rather appalled to see a guy with over 25 different characters. WHY?

No. I mean half the players in the 5e campaigns I've been involved with literally do not know how to go from "I want a halfling rogue" into an actual character on a sheet (ie. how to take and assemble the statistics from the race, class, background and equipment sections into a functional PC) and only know how to level up by hitting the level up button in D&DBeyond.

And if D&DBeyond ever went down they wouldn't have enough drive to even learn how. I know this because three years in with some of these players and when we level up mid-session and they have their printed out D&DBeyond sheets they don't even know where in the book to go to determine how many spells their wizard can prepare now that they've gone up a level. They just let the program do all the lifting and used the number it gave them.

And this happens every time there's mid session level up. The same damnable "where do I find [insert basic character function they would know if they actually read the class entry in the book here]?" every time.

They don't learn, they don't want to learn. 5e is more like a face to face MMO than a TTRPG for them and if the functionality of D&DBeyond ever went away it'd be akin to WoW shutting down its servers. They'd not continue D&D (or ttrpgs in general) they'd just go find something else to do.

This shouldn't be surprising. D&D is bloated with players who only turned up to ride the wave of the fad... the fad is now passing and levels are returning to more normal, but the fad-followers don't exit all at once. Inertia carries them until something changes their trajectory (a new fad or something inside what they're doing changes enough it no longer satisfies).

Basically, I am saying that in my area, half the players are still fad-followers. A year ago it was 3/4 of them. Two of the three who fit this description in my Friday game are already tenuous and will probably be gone a year from now.

I'm also not calling it a bad thing. If DDB went down permanently tomorrow I think the D&D player community would be leaner, but healthier. I already have plans once the current campaign wraps to give the current GM a break and run an adjacent system (Mutants & Masterminds... I'll be building their starter characters for them) to begin breaking whoever is left out of their 5e ghetto.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 29, 2025, 07:58:27 AMNo. I mean half the players in the 5e campaigns I've been involved with literally do not know how to go from "I want a halfling rogue" into an actual character on a sheet (ie. how to take and assemble the statistics from the race, class, background and equipment sections into a functional PC) and only know how to level up by hitting the level up button in D&DBeyond.

And if D&DBeyond ever went down they wouldn't have enough drive to even learn how. I know this because three years in with some of these players and when we level up mid-session and they have their printed out D&DBeyond sheets they don't even know where in the book to go to determine how many spells their wizard can prepare now that they've gone up a level. They just let the program do all the lifting and used the number it gave them.

And this happens every time there's mid session level up. The same damnable "where do I find [insert basic character function they would know if they actually read the class entry in the book here]?" every time.

Hate to say it... but that has been a thing since probably D&D's start.

I thiuk we are seeing it more now because "modern" players seem to be stupider. They have trouble with basic math. Some are borderline illiterate. And theres this push to put all the workload on the DM.

Storygamers are the worst of this. Made all the more pathetic when they then turn around and bitch about "teh evul DM!"

That could in part explain why more rules light games have exploded in popularity over the past couple years (and I'm not referring to full on narrative games necessarily but even including traditional OSR in that).   My own tastes have shifted dramatically over the decades towards more rules light despite previously loving crunch like tracking every +1 bonus in D&D3.x or doing build point character creation in Shadowrun so gaming illiteracy isn't an issue for me at least for now.

Quote from: RNGm on March 30, 2025, 09:32:04 AMThat could in part explain why more rules light games have exploded in popularity over the past couple years (and I'm not referring to full on narrative games necessarily but even including traditional OSR in that).   My own tastes have shifted dramatically over the decades towards more rules light despite previously loving crunch like tracking every +1 bonus in D&D3.x or doing build point character creation in Shadowrun so gaming illiteracy isn't an issue for me at least for now.

My tastes shifted in two different directions for two different parts of the game.

For play its tracked lighter over the years, but for character building it's tracked towards very crunchy.

Basically, a lot of detail in how you get the numbers and special bits onto the sheet, but using those numbers and special bits is pretty intuitive and flexible.

As an example, Mutants & Masterminds is very crunch focused on building characters, but at the table it's mostly just d20 checks to interpret the effects of powers and other widgets that means you're rarely needing to look anything up (if you have your character sheet put together properly that is).

WoTC's failure truly is complete. They sacrificed goodwill to chase VTT gold,now they have nothing.

Quote from: S'mon on March 31, 2025, 05:43:28 AMWoTC's failure truly is complete. They sacrificed goodwill to chase VTT gold,now they have nothing.

D&D Beyond put out maps, a normal VTT which is what the player base at D&D Beyond have been using.