First Dungeon Crawler Carl, now D&D Beyond: the time of the Drop has come
The age of supplements is over.
We raised one eyebrow when Dungeon Crawler Carl announced seasons of content with regular “Digital Drops”, but now we're raising the second one as well. D&D Beyond just announced that they are now doing content drops — but theirs will happen weekly.
What will be in these moist, moist drops? Both GM and player-facing material: more player options like items and abilities, more pre-built encounters with maps and VTT support. Stuff that used to come in magazines and sourcebooks. The difference being, of course, that you could own a sourcebook. D&D Beyond’s drops will disappear if you ever stop subscribing to either paid tier. Also, the material cannot be shared even by DMs with their players, even when those DMs pay for the tier that specifically lets you do that. It's unclear if these aspects of the new announcement were also “the number one thing they asked for”, to quote D&D Beyond executive producer Brian Perry speaking to Polygon. Based on the first flush of comments, it seems maybe not. D&D Beyond technical product manager Jey Jani clarified to Polygon that any time someone subscribes, they will unlock past drops as well. So, at least you're not at risk of losing out just because a payment processor messed up one month.
This model of renting digital rights to things you used to own outright has dominated the modern internet — television and film through streaming platforms, Game Pass and live service video games, music with Spotify, most new software, etc. Individuals own vanishingly less and less that they can take with them if they leave a service (or if it unceremoniously dies when sold to the next VC firm).
D&D Beyond’s drops don't replace Wizards of the Coast’s traditional physical releases in any way but are now a wholly separate way of accessing “official” D&D stuff. There's been a long history of people worrying about microtransactions entering tabletop RPGs ever since live service video game execs started being hired in leadership roles at Wizards of the Coast. It seems to have finally arrived, albeit in a different form — bundling all this so-called content into the existing subscriptions at D&D Beyond. This has led to some commenters on the official announcement page to see it as being “free”.
As far as Dungeon Crawler Carl goes, which is now on course to hit $10 million before the campaign ends, there seems to be no plan for supplements beyond the “digital drops” that come with the season pass (but this could change). These season passes are also “free” for backers, effectively giving away one year’s worth of subscription, potentially to convince people of the value in subscribing to year two. But for both companies, subscriptions seem to be the end goal. Which only makes the language of drops even stranger. Is it a drop if you paid for it in advance?
