| 19 people marked this as a favorite. |
I wanted to make this separately because I feel as if it would be more helpful to have its own centralized topic rather than to further muddy two already large and emotionally charged threads.
Demiplane has been thrown around a lot in a "but why can they have the pictures" way. This thread is not about that. This is to catalogue feelings (and fears) about Demiplane specifically for Paizo's review.
Many people, myself included, are worried that the end of the AoN partnership was either prompted by a desire to push Demiplane, or that Demiplane will now be pushed as a result. This is fact. This sentiment is on reddit, on blogs, and here in the Paizo forums. It is, everywhere I have seen it, not viewed as a good platform. I have not seen a single post talking about people liking it, in fact, I even saw one post sharing about how they had bought multiple books through it and still hated it.
I want to get this out now. I do not like Demiplane. Demiplane is not good. It is a half-baked, great-value version of DND Beyond that even now (I checked yesterday) cannot manage to display a character sheet without issue. As an SRD, it is a weak and clunky imitation (albeit a colorful one) of something we already have. The community by and large does not want it to become the sanctioned/official partner.
I do not want to pay $5.99 for the privilege of having a different colored border on an online character sheet. I do not want to piecemeal purchase content I have already purchased wholly and directly. I do not want drip subscriptions. I do not want to have to log in and subscribe to view a temporary license. These are things I will not do and only some of the fears that have begun to stir in my mind and in the minds of many. Mostly, I do not want to see you (Paizo) become WotC.
I am starting this thread in the hopes that I and many others are wrong, but also that you (Paizo) can see our stances on Demiplane in advance of any more decision-making.
This is meant to be civil and not intended to cause more inflammation or stoke the fires. It is just that with everything going on, clarity and communication seem to be needed. We are worried. We need you to know why so our worries can be eased.
---
EXPRESSING YOUR OPINION IS FINE, BUT WE CAN'T SWEAR ON THE FORUMS, EVEN IN PUNS. A HASHTAG WITH A SWEAR WAS REMOVED FROM THIS POST AND NOTHING ELSE. - EDITED MEC 7/16/2026
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, I do not and will not ever use Demiplane. I thought from the beginning when it was first announced that Demiplane would need to try to kill Nethys to have any chance at real success.
Paizo forcing me as a GM to dig through all of my PDFs to find the art I need for tokens is a major inconvenience, but it still won't be enough for me to use that site.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It's fine to not like Demiplane, honestly I find it a bit underwhelming in practical functionality compared to Nethys. I just wish people weren't trying to spin it into a big conspiracy and secret villain behind the curtain like they're doing right now.
Demiplane can pay paizo and AoN can't. AoN should have its agreement restored but I doubt Paizo is trying to pit one over the other when Demiplane isn't even bespokely for Paizo content, but caters to a number of different companies.
|
| 10 people marked this as a favorite. |
Replacing AoN and/or pathbuilder with demiplane would certainly make me look at other gaming options such as daggerheart. It would very likely drive me completely away from Pathfinder although maybe Foundry would be good enough for my purposes. But if Paizo also tried to push roll20 over foundry I'd be out of here.
Note that I think it very unlikely that this is Paizo's plan but, given that Paizo tried to remove the CUP awhile back I unfortunately no longer fully trust them to not to do something like that again. I view this thread as a good warning to them that doing so would be a bad idea.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
To appropriate and rewrite a line from a Canadian children's cartoon: "I don't care how fast it updates, I'm not using the Nexus."
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
Demiplane sucks and I'll never willingly use it.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Slow load times, forced account creation, paywalls, limp searches/filtering, and cumbersome graphics that make the website difficult to read on both browser and mobile. Also, it logs me out at literally every opportunity. I download PDFs on all my devices and use physical character sheets just so I don't have to use it for playtest reference, which is IMHO its only utility not easily covered by community tools.
The only thing I like about Demiplane is that it sometimes has images at higher resolution than AoN (or rather, has them at all now, I guess).
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
To paraphrase someone's elegant statement from reddit...
If Demiplane has no haters, send my mother flowers, for I am dead.
Haha! That was literally me! I'm glad you appreciated it! x'D
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I’ve gone back multiple times over the last couple years and tried Demiplane and it’s just not good. At all. Pales in comparison to the combo of AoN and Pathbuilder.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
So, I’m curious. Everybody seems to agree that Demiplane sucks.
Yet it makes enough money to have bought roll 20 and hire sufficient staff to almost always be the first with updates.
Who does it make its money from, and why do these people spend their money on it?
My assumption? New players moving away from 5e and specifically D&D Beyond. If they liked the DDB interface, but fell out of love with 5e, that's where they'd go.
Edited to Add: Also demiplane hosts many a nexus, not just PF2e. It hosts Vampire the Masquerade, Avatar Legends, D&D 5e, just to name a few.
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
So, I’m curious. Everybody seems to agree that Demiplane sucks.
Yet it makes enough money to have bought roll 20 and hire sufficient staff to almost always be the first with updates.
Who does it make its money from, and why do these people spend their money on it?
Just want to clarify- Demiplane does suffer from severe suckage, but they did not buy Roll20 - Both Roll20 and Demiplane were gobbled up by DriveThuRPG.
When it was independent, Demiplane actually had some potential. The developers engaged with the community on a regular basis, and did their best to continuously improve it.
Edit - looks like I was wrong about that according to the google. I must have misremembered the order of things.
Still, I believe that’s what happened in principle.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
So, I’m curious. Everybody seems to agree that Demiplane sucks.
Yet it makes enough money to have bought roll 20 and hire sufficient staff to almost always be the first with updates.
Who does it make its money from, and why do these people spend their money on it?
In a world where Pathbuilder exists, I have absolutely zero idea why anyone would ever choose to go with Demiplane for their PF2e character creator.
So, I’m curious. Everybody seems to agree that Demiplane sucks.
Yet it makes enough money to have bought roll 20 and hire sufficient staff to almost always be the first with updates.
Who does it make its money from, and why do these people spend their money on it?
My assumption? New players moving away from 5e and specifically D&D Beyond. If they liked the DDB interface, but fell out of love with 5e, that's where they'd go.
Edited to Add: Also demiplane hosts many a nexus, not just PF2e. It hosts Vampire the Masquerade, Avatar Legends, D&D 5e, just to name a few.
That would be me, yes.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As a demiplane/roll20 user, I sympathise with many people who find Demiplane to be cumbersome when utilised as a reference tool. Aonprd loads faster, and has the information without the bells and whistles that cause the lag of demiplane.
However, I do enjoy its character building tools, ability to share digital sourcebooks with my players for the purpose of character building, and crossfunctionality with roll20.
Additionally PF2e isn't the only game that I use demiplane for.
I don't think it's a conspiracy to push people away from the free/pay-what-you-want AonPrd that doesn't see bottomline ROI vs Demiplane which might. Don't forget, none of us have visibility over Pathfinder's financials, and development costs of online tools are real the Demiplane licence would need to be profitable for both parties, and the Pathfinder forums and reddit are not necessarily an accurate reflection of the cross-section of the paying audience.
|
|
As a demiplane/roll20 user, I sympathise with many people who find Demiplane to be cumbersome when utilised as a reference tool. Aonprd loads faster, and has the information without the bells and whistles that cause the lag of demiplane.
However, I do enjoy its character building tools, ability to share digital sourcebooks with my players for the purpose of character building, and crossfunctionality with roll20.
Additionally PF2e isn't the only game that I use demiplane for.
Thank you for that answer.
| 13 people marked this as a favorite. |
What's Demiplane?
About half a plane.
---
EXPRESSING YOUR OPINION IS FINE, BUT WE CAN'T SWEAR ON THE FORUMS, EVEN IN PUNS. A HASHTAG WITH A SWEAR WAS REMOVED FROM THIS POST AND NOTHING ELSE. - EDITED MEC 7/16/2026
Sorry! That's my bad, tbh. That specific one's a bit of a default word for me and I sometimes forget that it counts. It was truly meant as a good-natured pun.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Demiplane is really bad and its platform-locked PDFs* are ludicrously overpriced compared to buying them direct from Paizo. I imagine it does as well as it does on the basis that most of the games it supports don't have anything like AON or Pathbuilder and players feel stuck with it regardless of how poorly designed and maintained it is.
We're lucky enough not to be, and hopefully we stay that way.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm a big fan of Demiplane, both the tools and the reader, but it feels like I'm just going to be eaten alive for stating anything I like about it in this environment.
I'm also highly active in their Discord, regularly chat with their staff, and have seen a lot of their improvements and passion for their community and the games they host. They're making a platform that supports many different game systems, so sometimes it's not perfect for the game you want.
I also think people miss when they're looking at the price: Anything Paizo you buy there comes with the Paizo PDF. It actually just adds it to your Paizo library or you get a discount on Demiplane once your accounts are linked.
And if it exists on Roll20? You get it there too. Free. I know people love Foundry (and I've been shouted out of discussions for not being a huge fan of it before) but for money saving, the Demiplane/Roll20/Paizo setup is just better.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm a big fan of Demiplane, both the tools and the reader, but it feels like I'm just going to be eaten alive for stating anything I like about it in this environment.
I'm also highly active in their Discord, regularly chat with their staff, and have seen a lot of their improvements and passion for their community and the games they host. They're making a platform that supports many different game systems, so sometimes it's not perfect for the game you want.
I also think people miss when they're looking at the price: Anything Paizo you buy there comes with the Paizo PDF. It actually just adds it to your Paizo library or you get a discount on Demiplane once your accounts are linked.
And if it exists on Roll20? You get it there too. Free. I know people love Foundry (and I've been shouted out of discussions for not being a huge fan of it before) but for money saving, the Demiplane/Roll20/Paizo setup is just better.
I use Demiplane for the Marvel Multiverse RPG, and only because by buying the books did I get the stuff free there. But for Pathfinder? I won’t give them a cent, because my experience is that it is horribly, painfully slow. I have waited for it to get better, but every time I check it, it’s still slow.
So, I’m glad you like it and that it’s useful for you (and you shouldn’t be pilloried for like it), but for me, it’s nothing short of garbage, and I won’t pay anything to use it.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm certainly not going to eat you alive for your opinion but... The PDF on Demiplane costs significantly more than the PDF on Paizo, so the 'free' PDF isn't saving you any money, it's just protecting you from being fully DRMed into their system as your sole means of accessing books you've paid for. Doubly so for the 'free' added copy of the PDF locked on Roll20 which the majority of people won't ever need to use. And the discount for rebuying a book you've already bought from Paizo is relatively tiny and costs add up real fast.
I don't think the staff on Demiplane are bad people, but I hate their business model and think the site is very poorly made. I mean I just went to the site to try to double check if it forbade you from using character options from books you didn't buy with them, but I can't even get the character builder to load for me at all.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I know I won't convince many, I just want to be clear about the things I like and that I think Demiplane does well.
The 'significantly more' is about 15% for Rulebooks (just checked Player Core, GM Core, Guns and Gears RM) and 25% for single book APs (Mythspeaker, Outlaws). Current APs Hellbreakers and Hell's Destiny are actually the same price as Paizo.
The bit of extra money gets you:
- Sharing entire books with my friends without giving them a physical book or PDF. 24 of my friends can just... read them on Demiplane
- Not having to download a book on every device for each book you're trying to read or reference (I like reading things in-context, being able to see what comes before/after, which some rules are difficult to do on AoN and other sources)
- Continuous scroll through any books or adventures per chapter (no 2 column or PDF pages breaking chapters, no sentences split by a full page map)
- All images in books and adventures in full resolution by clicking on them, easily copyable to drop into Discord/VTT of choice
- Maps are presented in 3 variations in full resolution when available - GM view, player view, and player view gridless, even when those aren't normally found in the PDF
- And yes, building any features/spells/feats into the character builder, which while it would be great if it was free, does cost time and money to build
Also, for most of the game systems they have (when they have a partner agreement) buying into their Ultimate Bundle (one time purchase everything currently out) you get a permanent discount on everything going forward, even if you're just buying individual books, you never have to buy back up to everything again.
For me, that means there's no extra cost to getting rulebooks and very little for adventures, which, because I use Roll20 on a TV in my gaming table, is a big savings.
And the negative:
The builder isn't perfect and has some issues but it's improving all the time. Believe it or not loading times are faster than they were about 2 months ago. Homebrew is coming fast for custom items and buffs (which I think should have been there a while ago, oh well). They don't support Gestalt which I like to use. And first-time loads of the engine after things change take a while but after that it loads a lot faster (for a week or two).
|
|
Thank you for that explanation of why you think demiplane is worth it to you.
I'm not going to attack you for your opinion :-). We all value different things differently.
I'm genuinely glad their model works for some, the more alternatives the better.
That all said, I'm never going to switch to demiplane as long as what are, for me, better alternatives exist (Foundry, pathbuilder, AoN)