As a future purveyor of digital products, I stand behind them- but…

We all know I’m old fashioned and still retain a strong love for printed materials. My poor wife and my bookshelves will attest to my love of TTRPG books. In this day and age, you’ve pretty much hit the bigtime when you can shift from all digital to some Print On Demand Products.

One lovely thing about PDF books and other electronic book media is that they are flexible in terms of the number of pages, the amount of content, searchability (sometimes,) and once you download them, you, the customer, are free to print them. Once downloaded, they’re yours to keep.

The other best part about downloading electronic media is even if your phone falls in a mop bucket and your kid’s magnet collection turns your laptop into a brick, you can still go back and download them all over again.

Disclaimer: Statements expressed in this article are strictly my opinion. If you disagree or have a different opinion, that’s okay. I’m not an expert on everything. I’m not always right. I’m just writing from my experience as I know it. Your mileage may vary.

There’s a catch, though.

We have companies out there in the TTRPG sphere that might be threatening the paradigm of how we view electronic books. Do I really have to say who they are? Wizards of the Coast is possibly winding up to make their new Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide available through an electronic subscription service.

There’s a catch to it. Little short on rent and have to drop your D&D subscription? Oops. There goes all of those books. Maybe they’re still tied to the account if you were to subscribe again. Maybe they won’t be. We don’t know yet.

Another industry’s leader may already be striving to ruing things for all of us. The manager of subscription services for video game giant Ubisoft+, Phillipe Tremblay told Games Industry .biz in this article, “Gamers are used to owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen.”

Tremblay does go onto explain that purchase options will still be available with the game streaming subscriptions and missing a month or two won’t mean the deletion of all saved progress on any given game. Ubisoft+ seems committed to keeping multiple options available for now.

The music, TV, movie and even book industries are all leaning more heavily towards streaming and subscription services now. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast/D&D Studios steps into the ring with something similar.

Everyone is asking, “Will the new D&D Virtual TableTop make or break the TTRPG Industry?”

Honestly, I’ve gotten tired of talking about it, hearing about it, or even thinking about it. It’s gonna do whatever it’s gonna do. I think the newer D&D players will lean into it if they’re new to the game. It will have more of a video game feel coming off of Baldur’s Gate 3 for a lot of people. That’s cool, I suppose.

Will the rest of the TTRPG companies eventually go the same route? I don’t think so. The larger companies can offer subscription services for new releases, sure. However, those are downloadable products. If I drop my subscription, I can still download everything I’ve already purchased.

I think what Hasbro/WotC would prefer is if we never download anything to keep. It would keep the money in their walled garden and allow them to maintain a sort of monopoly on the industry, no pun intended. What’s worse is what could potentially happen to characters, homebrew adventures, and so on if they are all retained by the subscription service.

Oops, subscription lapsed. That darn pesky need-to-eat again, I tell ya. And there goes all the work we put into various characters, a cool homebrew campaign world, adventuress, etc. We should be happy if they’re not deleted entirely. It would be like banging out an entire 20 page term paper in one weekend and forgetting to hit “Save.” All gone forever.

This is why I laugh at social media challenges such as surviving in a cabin with no internet.

As long as I’m allowed to bring my physical books and some writing supplies, I can live alone in the woods for a year or more happily and never come out. As long as I’ve got food, light, books, dice, writing supplies, and a way to take care of basic hygiene, I can survive indefinitely. I’d be down because I’m weird like that. Don’t threaten me with a good time.

The problem with any digital media is a dependence upon electricity and an internet connection. As long as I’ve got food, dice, books, and writing supplies, I’m golden if the power goes out. Or maybe I can get the other hermits together twice a week for my Old School Essentials game. Heck, I could solo run Shadowdark every night of the week if I so desired.

Think of the pencil or pen and paper volumes of characters, campaigns, adventures, and sourcebooks that could be created without a dependence on the Internet! Okay, I have to lug a few books around. Yeah, we’d be rolling physical dice by candlelight, but imagine how much fun we could have!

The key is being happy with what you have.

Some people will undoubtedly subscribe to the top tier of whatever D&D gets shoved under their noses by the various YouTube shills. Good for them, I guess. IFF I were to ever buy official D&D again; it would probably stop at the three core books. I get so much more mileage out of my own creations and Third Party Publishers than I do official D&D, anyway.

From what I can gather so far, WotC might be determined to only put out the core books as some sort of collector’s set for nostalgia purposes. They might try to keep as much digital as possible to make it easier to change rules, fix their various 🦆🦆🦆-ups, and slip in wording changes when no one is looking. They’ve literally done all of that with digital products this last year, so try not to laugh. They could literally get away with anything they wanted to in an all-digital D&D subscription space.

If the fans attempt a boycott of a subscription service ala #StoptheSub, they’d risk losing access to everything under the new paradigm. If you think there’s a lot on D&D Beyond, wait until the new VTT rolls out and everything is tied to subscriptions and microtransactions. I think that day is coming as sure as I think AI Dungeon Masters will happen. (That’s another article.)

I’m going to leave it there before my family has to drag me off for naptime because I’m on another rant. Thank you for being here. I really do appreciate you. Please embrace that which brings the most joy today.