WOTC Licensing and Competitive Threats

Recently, I reached out to some members of a group that I ran in the past as a GM on Roll20, and I learned that two of the players have made the switch to another virtual tabletop solution that now offers licensed content and built-in functionality for D&D 5E. They are also GMs who rave about its features and capabilities. I had a look at the features in detail, and they are truly very powerful. Combat tracking and player actions, in particular, can be handled seamlessly and very quickly. And the 5E integration with the tabletop is seamless, allowing monsters, NPCs, spells, skills, feats, and all aspects of 5E to be easily triggered and managed within the interface, and a GM can create custom monsters and NPCs with easy templates for following the 5E format. Of course, all of this come at a tremendous expense that is roughly equivalent to having to buy 5E hard copy materials all over again. As a loyal Roll20 supporter, I'm wondering if Roll20 has plans to offer something similar, with licensing of D&D. This would greatly simplify preparation for games and make games faster and easier to play. But I take issue with the exorbitant prices that are being charged to add this functionality. It's clear that switching to this other service would require ongoing investment to keep up with future core rulebook, module, and adventure releases. So I'd love to see Roll20 offer something similar but at a more sensible cost. My bigger concern, though, is that the 5E licensing could really hurt other virtual tabletops like Roll20. From a competitive standpoint, it seems like a huge advantage. Would the developers be nice enough to weigh in on this and let us know if something like this is planned or being considered? Or is there exclusivity to the license so that it will be impossible to offer this through Roll20? Thanks in advance for any insights!

Greg said: Recently, I reached out to some members of a group that I ran in the past as a GM on Roll20, and I learned that two of the players have made the switch to another virtual tabletop solution that now offers licensed content and built-in functionality for D&D 5E. They are also GMs who rave about its features and capabilities. I had a look at the features in detail, and they are truly very powerful. Combat tracking and player actions, in particular, can be handled seamlessly and very quickly. And the 5E integration with the tabletop is seamless, allowing monsters, NPCs, spells, skills, feats, and all aspects of 5E to be easily triggered and managed within the interface, and a GM can create custom monsters and NPCs with easy templates for following the 5E format. Of course, all of this come at a tremendous expense that is roughly equivalent to having to buy 5E hard copy materials all over again. It's worth mentioning that most of what can be achieved in that application is also achievable here, some parts with and some parts without delving into the API. And while that product can be customized to greater extent than Roll20 (they use Lua scripts to handle pretty much everything, including laying out the UI), they have a much smaller percentage of their userbase as power users creating such scripts. This is, in part, a consequence of the depth of their customizeability: it requires more knowledge of the system to customize it, and you can't really mix & match scripts (they generally come packaged in an executable designed to do everything you need for a given game system). I'm not speaking about hypotheticals here; I created their Exalted 2e ruleset. Greg said: I'm wondering if Roll20 has plans to offer something similar, with licensing of D&D. This would greatly simplify preparation for games and make games faster and easier to play. But I take issue with the exorbitant prices that are being charged to add this functionality. It's clear that switching to this other service would require ongoing investment to keep up with future core rulebook, module, and adventure releases. So I'd love to see Roll20 offer something similar but at a more sensible cost. My bigger concern, though, is that the 5E licensing could really hurt other virtual tabletops like Roll20. From a competitive standpoint, it seems like a huge advantage. Would the developers be nice enough to weigh in on this and let us know if something like this is planned or being considered? Or is there exclusivity to the license so that it will be impossible to offer this through Roll20? Thanks in advance for any insights! Yes! In fact, the Roll20 Compendium is our first step in that direction. (In fact, IIRC, the first phase of the Roll20 Compendium was rolled out prior to the built-in 5e support you're talking about was revealed, but I'm not 100% certain on that.) Currently, the Roll20 Compendium only has information from the Pathfinder SRD, but the development team has made a number of posts mentioning how they're pursuing licensing rights to other games. The Roll20 Compendium is also built in to the native mobile application. Eventually, the Roll20 Compendium will also have more integration into the tabletop and the character sheets system. I believe one of the examples mentioned was copying a block of spell text from the Compendium and pasting it into a character sheet, filling out all of the appropriate fields automatically.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "hard baked" into this other virtual tabletop and what that entails. It supports several game systems, although I don't know whether they're all licensed for integration. But it seems that the virtual tabletop has been programmed or designed with compatibility with various systems in mind, so that rules sets, adventures, and upgrades can be purchased and installed with seamless integration into the user experience. That's what I have in mind with my question, although with the caveat of it being less expensive. Asking users to pay $50 per core rulebook to get that content into a virtual tabletop is too much when you consider the additional costs over time. But perhaps the licensing costs are so expensive that it necessitates exorbitant prices passed on to the user. Also, was the second part of your post an indication that licenses are being delayed by the holders? If you think that contacting the license holders directly would lead to a quicker integration, then I would certainly do my part and try to encourage others to do the same.