Personally, I would market this and build it out for any other TTRPG system but Dungeons & Dragons. I absolutely love Dungeons & Dragons but I think the writing is on the wall that DnD Beyond is going to get the lion's share of all digital DnD spending, especially for newer players. There's always going to be holdouts who don't like the corporate direction, but the majority are going to use DnD Beyond because of how well integrated it all is, and that will include both 2d and 3d tabletops soon enough. So if you're planning on turning it into a side hustle, you're probably better off targeting say Call of Cthulu players, or Fiasco players or Fate players etc.
Yeah, you make a good point. Definitely something I've thought about. When I started working on Diceright, DnD Beyond hadn't even been acquired by Wizards yet, so a lot has changed in relatively short time. That being said, they recently released an alpha of their 2d tabletop and there really wasn't much there. I assume it will get a lot better though.
Still, it was a tough call on what to focus on as DnD really is a huge player in roleplaying games. A smaller slice of DnD users still might be larger than a bigger slice of another game.
In the end, DnD is the game I know the most and the one I love. So I decided to do what I thought would be the most fun.
Yeah you've got to follow your passions. I reckon you could be well positioned to take advantage of an emerging market though. I'm pretty new to it all myself but I've been doing lots of reading on it the past year, and it seems the recent DnD popularity explosion mainly happened through Stranger Things bringing into the popular public conscious again and then Twitch/YouTube players like Critical Role. The latter seem to be drifting slowly away from DnD towards their own RPG systems and ecosystems. If you have a well developed product you may even be able to contact the teams behind these systems who may be interested in acquiring your product to become the base of their own DnD Beyond like system.
I'd join as many RPG reddits, forums and discord channels as you can find and then just periodically scout to see if you can spot any emerging trend and ride the wave. I personally reckon it's only a matter of time until there's some show on par with Critical Role's popularity but for detective RPGs, superheroes, sci-fi, Cthulu or whatever.
How much in the project is really D&D-specific? In your estimation, how much would have to change and be reworked in order to support, for example, Pathfinder 2e? PF 2e-support was the first thing I was thinking I wanted in this, but I am also atypical in that I don't even have a group and I'm just scouting around for a place I could use if/when I make one.
I would suggest keeping a D&D feature set, which is a "common ground" that most people are familiar with, to demo the app. But I agree with the post above, niche system players are going to love this more since they are underserved.
My counterpoint to this is just that DDB is not a super usable piece of software (it's slow, buggy, and expensive). It's got the massive advantage of having the rights to sell D&D content, but there's definitely room for disruption in that market.
As someone playing non-dnd games, I have to recognize that the market share for DnD 5e is so big that it make sense to target that even with DnD beyond. It's like wondering if you are making a gaming platform whether you should target linux since windows is covered by steam. The answer is: you should still target windows.
The other option is to make it game agnostic and focus only on the map part.
