Good riddance. It was a transparent attempt to bring mobile app style monitization into D&D.
I don’t think I’ve heard of this before, but from what I’m reading this sounds like a bad idea that doesn’t focus on what makes pen and paper games good.
I don’t want fancy 3d models. I want to use my imagination. I don’t need much more than a dry erase board.
Ed Zitron wrote a post about “Business Idiots”, where he said many of the people making decisions in businesses are out of touch with both the users and the product. I see no reason to doubt that hypothesis.
I don’t want fancy 3d models. I want to use my imagination
Personally, I wouldn’t mind fancy 3D models and animations. In theory. But to use a VTT with them requires much more prep as a GM than just playing theatre of the mind, or on a Paizo flipmat with a few quick dry-erase walls and pillars scribbled on. I want to spend my prep time prepping story, combat balance, and understanding NPC motivations & abilities, not meticulously placing assets on 3D battle maps. And then at the table, I want to be able to reach out in front to a shared space between me and the players, not have to figure out how everyone can look at the same virtual screen.
Even playing online, Roll20 does a much better job of replicating that at-the-table experience with a simple grid that you can hastily draw on if you want. In a fully 3D environment that really isn’t going to work. The chasm between the players’ character tokens and the fancy animations when they cast their abilities, and the white void they’ll be standing in if I don’t spend hours prepping, just isn’t going to create the immersive experience they seem to want.
D&D isn’t like other RPGs, in that it’s owned by a mega-corp that treats it much more like a business first and foremost rather than as a work of art which just happens to be sold through a business. Only really White Wolf has anything close to the same sort of corporate structure and concomitant problems. So Hasbro sees the fact that playing D&D requires a Dungeon Master, and that finding a DM is often difficult as a Problem to be Solved in order to grow their Customer Acquisition.
To wit: they want(ed) to embrace AI as a way to remove the need for a human DM. Their hope was to leverage this VTT to become an all-in-one portal to playing D&D. That’s part of why the original attempt to change the OGL included heavy restrictions on how other VTTs could use D&D content. Obviously they’ve since backed down on this. Maybe because they realised it was far too expensive to actually build out the VTT. Maybe because they realised people don’t actually want AI DMs. Maybe a bit of both, or something else entirely.
TL;DR:
businesses are out of touch with both the users and the product
bingo.
