The playtest is available now, but only as a Foundry System. Which is the most awkward way to present a ruleset. Give me a fuckin' doc file at least.
It's also taken a backseat to Ember, their setting book that will be for both 5e (bit late on that, also I thought Foundry was done with 5e) and Crucible (Their house system). You'd think they'd want get to the system ready before investing a bunch of time and money into a setting.
This is ambitious as hell. It's what WotC wishes they were building instead of whatever AI-DM nonsense they're actually doing.
The price point is intimidating, but, honestly, ttrpg devs should be paid more.
Ominous Foreshadowing If this does well enough, we could start seeing more investor backed projects coming from companies.
I can't see this taking off unless we've well and truley surrendered the idea of running TTRPGs in person, with groups of entirely localized players. Which I haven't done, but maybe I'm the holdout? Maybe I'm the one person too miffed by the combination of technical requirements and creative limitations the format imposes on GMs?
I can tolerate VTTs as a player, where I only really need to manage a character sheet, but actually running games has been, in my experience, a pain in the ass of multimedia presentation and telecom fiddling that I don't want to have to do, ever, so the idea of this all is coming from an alien place to me, my needs, and my view of what makes running these games fun and worthwhile. At the best-case point of automated VTT integration this new system might offer, I say we should just play a fucking videogame on one of the other online exclusive platforms we all already have.
We should be able to run a TTRPG with a few sheets of paper, a pen, and some dice. It should cost zero dollars to run a TTRPG. I'm not buying VTT exclusive games to run, because they haven't even made VTTs valuable to me.