#and if all the games I can find expect me to have some dndbeyond subscription shit or pay for a class/race I can just google

[glitterfiasco]

i found this ramble in my drafts from february and it makes some reference to dated news but I wanna post it anyway bc nothing has changed about the issue itself

it really baffles me how dndbeyond does cosmetics.

there's a whole host of currently existing options - varying theme colours, pretty artwork to make your background, cool frames for your character profile! i play with all of these on my character sheets, and they're funky, really help you personalise your sheets and connect them to your characters!!

the main problem? the *only* way you can get a majority of the cosmetics is through pre-ordering books. now, pre-order bonuses are a good marketing strategy, sure, and with pre-order bonuses comes the nececcity for those bonuses to be exclusive. but when those cosmetics are a big majority of those that exist? you have a problem.

on a whole, of course i dislike the overall sentiment behind Cynthia Williams' notion that dnd is 'under monetized' - and the whole money-hungry mess that things have seemed with wotc lately. yet, i think in this specific matter i actually agree that it's a shame players don't have many options to spend money on the game. but...maybe let's give them some reasonable ones?

i am a DM, and have, as per Williams' observations, probably spent more on the game than the average non-DM. wotc can care about that discrepancy, but i really dont. what i do care about is that i am also a player and i *want* to be able to also spend on player things - like making my sheets look cool! and i actively cannot! in fact, the cosmetics i do own are primarily from pre-ordered books (some kindly gifted!) that i had interest in because i was a DM! it's not worth as a player it to pre-order a book you won't use for only the pre-order bonuses, and though a DM can awkwardly share those bonuses with their players, currently the only primary way players can get cosmetics is the few unpredictable monthly reward of a subscription. and we'll get back to those.

another downside to the pre-order bonus model? how fucking specific those cosmetics are - and i move to focus primarily on the frames here. they're of course themed to the books, but so often in a way that makes me wonder how few characters these would really fit the sheets of.

here are some frames from the Tasha's and Ravenlost pre-orders. the art is nice enough but...who wants these? i dont want these.

to get back to the subscriber frames, one might expect these to offer the more universal range of options. there are a couple nice vague frames, but the very few options are, once again, largely very specific, as season-themed frames. the subscriber frames include such all-applicable options as these.

you'll also notice a trend of heavily obscuring the character portrait itself (most obvious with my first two examples, and i promise there are other similar instances). overall it's just...frustrating that it's so difficult to find a frame that actually fits a character, nor obscures them beyond readability.

for so long, I've been baffled at the lack of a cosmetics shop where one can buy generic and specific frames for pocket change. It seems so obvious, and hardly outside dndbeyond's current setup. give me leafy frames for naturey characters, music note frames for musicians! frames themed after signature spells - magic missile, mage hand, crown of stars. frames designed after the types of damage, after different subclasses, after different weapons! frames with varying levels of complexity - both simple designs that can just match a character's colour scheme, and detailed animated frames!

when we got these frames, and I was estatic! It really seemed like a step in the right direction with simple, useable, non-obscuring frames. they're great!

but since, though frames have gotten a little better in readability and specificity, we see no indication towards any change. occasionally, a book like the wildemount book will have some lovely generic frames, but then then the subscriber rewards are right back to weird and specific. can only keep fingers crossed, i suppose.

[sera-wasnever]

nerd shit that no one here cares about but I really hate how much I like the actual mechanical and character creation changes we know about in this 'one dnd' shit given how much I detest the announcement overall with its focus on moving towards digital (video game industry-ification of dnd ahoy with microtransactions and all) and the general resentment of all attempts to squeeze more money out of republishing core books etc