I think we all saw the pre-order image for the new Dungeons & Dragons, yeah? This one? This Ubisoft lookin'-ass thing?

It was a very long time ago when you could get the whole 4th edition Boxed Set, with attractive Dust Jacket, for sixty dollars. I would never in a million years try to manifest some boomer retread of how much things cost back in the day. Everything costs more now, for a variety of reasons. But I do think it's fascinating that Dungeons & Dragons went from a hideous and reviled treatise on demonology to something like an index of an era's excesses to dire straits and acquisition to a reclaimed dork space to resurgence as a new form of theatre and now it has a Freemium-tier preorder matrix and you sorta have to wonder what's next.

It feels weird. Is it weird? I don't know. Is the apex of this offer - a hundred and eighty dollars - just the fifty dollar price for the three books at retail, plus a ten dollar premium for the addition of digital? Thumbing the scale with fomo digital goods is new, and offering items for a virtual tabletop they've barely even described the functionality of seems weird at this juncture, but this entire model is from the type of content we usually discuss here - the digital realm, the ongoing services realm, which they covet - and for good reason. The medium is too generous, and it always has been. These pesky, eternal books and their recalcitrant community ain't doing the job.

(CW)TB out.