The question is discussed in this podcast episode.
Cynthia Williams is out at WotC, which begs the question: If you were hired as the new CEO, what would you do to right the ship of game and sail us all to safer waters?
The question is discussed in this podcast episode.
Cynthia Williams is out at WotC, which begs the question: If you were hired as the new CEO, what would you do to right the ship of game and sail us all to safer waters?
Do what Paizo did and make all rules free. Charge for books that contain art and adventures. Hire or contract with good writers for high quality adventures. Playtest the hell out of everything and have a robust QA department. Keep or hire diversity consultants to prevent other scandals.
Invest in the other classic settings more and revisit esoteric FR locations.
Actually balance the game for high levels and magic items. Standardize magic and item descriptions while keeping the effects and flavor.
Integrate dndbeyond with other vtts and sell content on them. Sell PDFs. Call Over D&D 6e or 5.5e ffs.
WOTC has greater resources than Paizo so they could theoretically do the same thing better (if they were so inclined). I’d love to see them turn D&DBeyond into a first party AON analogue. But with better UI, faster updates, a powerful API, maybe a featureful character builder, etc. all available. Maybe they could charge for the character builder and API, but the game content should be free just like PF2e.
Exactly what I was thinking. PF1/2e allowing AoN to use ALL of their content and display it makes getting into the game and seeing all your options ridiculously easy. It doesn’t have the best interface which could easily be expanded with a company that was paying to develop it.
What I really want to see DnDBeyond do is complete their Homebrew creator. It has SO many problems and doesn’t even implement all of the rules from content WOTC releases (can’t lower hit dice except by spending in short rest, some magic items do this). And I want to be able to create my own classes and item types like new weapons. And also some weird rules that aren’t allowed like changing weapon damage dice.
And they could really lean into 5e’s greatest strength: their 3rd party support. 5e being so popular means there’s a HUGE 3rd party scene that’s doing so much to keep 5e alive and fresh. DnDBeyond is just starting to embrace them now but they could really open it up as a marketplace in the same way they have the DMsGuild. Then 3rd party publishers could at their own leisure add their own content and sell dndbeyond licenses (or include them in their books) for their content. This would mean people who prefer to use dndbeyond’s character sheet (it really is one of the best digital ones that integrate with VTTs, foundry’s sheet is subpar sadly [haven’t tried 3.0 yet]) are able to do so while using any 3rd party classes and content they wanted.
Right now, I buy 3rd party content and then add as much in as possible to dndbeyond but I can’t do that for whole classes and I often run into roadblocks where I simply can’t add in certain features and there’s no automation for some things.