The VTT Wars

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

So I am late to the party with VTTs, enjoying playing solo or in person. I logged into Roll20 and made a serious effort to learn the platform. When you look at the number of games on these platforms, something deceptive is happening.

5E is the default choice since everything is ready to go. This is the "use an iPad as my computer" answer to the "Which game are we playing" question. It is about the most straightforward system to get going, all the integration features are there, and everything is done for you.

But damn, 5E is NOT designed for VTT play. If they are redesigning 5E for VTTs, the game's design needs to change dramatically to avoid all of the ritualistic "okay, do X, Y, and Z" to get a surprise round complete and the first round of combat. It is clunky and requires specialized knowledge, a rule book open, and multiple opening and closing character sheets and dice rolls to figure out what is happening.

5E's surprise round and the first round of combat remind me of old-school Car Wars in that game's slowness, ease of messing up, and complexity. It makes card-based initiative systems like Savage Worlds look amazing by comparison.

That first turn of combat is the most important. It "builds the shared universe" that defines the critical experience that is VTT play. There are so many rituals and procedures to follow; if you got a room of Apple engineers in there and said, "Simplify this and deliver a better experience," they would have a field day.

The entire game is like that, open a sheet, click on something, get the roll, and continue play. It is 90% set up, which makes it the default choice.

But what is really the default choice here?

It is not 5E.

It is the Roll20 platform.

5E is in the position the Java programming language was in a few years ago. The default choice for corporate people to build business applications in (and still the default for many organizations), but with many different flavors and vendors supporting the common language. There are other languages, but you use Java to play in the corporate sphere.

And there are as many different flavors of 5E as there is Java. Amazon, IBM, and many other companies make a version of Java to use. The default is the official Oracle version, but it is a weaker standard, and companies sometimes choose other versions. In 5E, we have Esper Genesis, Tales of the Valiant, numerous OSR variants, Low Fantasy Gaming, Advanced 5E, and many other flavors.

One of the substantial strategic weaknesses of Wizards 5E is it is fantasy only. They open the doors for competitors to play in every other genre, and other games own those spaces. Wizards should focus on 5E as a generic system, with officially supported modules for every game genre. A 5.5E wastes time, especially when the strategic goal is control of the VTT space. This is probably one of their critical mistakes with 5.5E, on the "Windows Phone" level, that people will look back on and say they blew it right here.

What happens when players want to play Cthulhu, modern, weird west, superhero, horror, or sci-fi? They play other games, some are 5E, and many are not. They use other VTTs with supported systems. You can't monopolize the VTT market by catering to one genre.

Properties Hasbro owns are using other systems! What is going on over there?

Wizards has an engine they could turn into any game genre and then control the platform that runs them all. It should be simple to see, build, implement, and support. They have the designers, IP, and know-how to do this.

But instead, they are blowing it by putting all their eggs in the D&D basket.

They should be putting their eggs in the 5E basket.

Roll20 is positioning itself as Linux, the system all games are run on. They do that by supporting all games across many genres. This is where Wizards should be, but they can't see it.