Is DDI Worthwhile in Your Opinion?

[Turtlejay]

Ten dollars a month is much less than I would be spending if I bought all the books I wanted too. I have a very limited gaming budget, and at the moment it is going to pay for DDI. I get basically all the stuff I need to build from all the books available.

A while back I was staying in the mountains with family, and I decided to whip up some characters by hand (I had brought books and some character sheets). I realized how spoiled I had gotten with the character builder. Chosing things did not take appreciably longer, with the exception of feats. It was applying those things to the character sheet that was time consuming. Attempting to edit down powers to fit in lined paper without spending all day scribing became impossible enough that I resorted to writing the bonuses down and the page things could be found on.

The CB is slick, and I approve.

Jay

 

[Nytmare]

I had it for a year, and found it useful, but not useful enough for me to renew my subscription.

I was let down by a lot of things, the builder is good for building characters, but the character sheets don't have the level of customization I had been lead to believe they would have.

It was nice having the compendium, but it always seemed as though it was either lagged to hell, or just plain down whenever I was actually running a game.

As for the magazines, I (embarrassingly enough) can't seem to find time to read them if I'm not sitting on a toilet...

But yeah, in the end, I guess I'm a split vote. I think there are a ton of useful tools and lots of useful information, but it just wasn't worth it to me.

 

[dontremb]

Ok, well, thanks guys. Thanks very much for all the information.

 

[Camelot]

I too am a non-DDI DM thinking about subscribing, but on the fence. The price is my main concern. I thought it was $6 a month for a year? What are the prices exactly?

 

[Dragonblade]

I subscribe to DDI and I love it. Worth every penny. If your gaming budget is small enough that you want to cancel and renew every few months then go for it, but thats too much hassle for me. I subcscribe and still buy almost everything WotC releases.

The character builder is phenomenal. The best electronic character builder ever released for any tabletop RPG ever. The monster builder is useful for DMs and the Compendium is a great online resource. I also love being able to read and download all the Dragon and Dungeon PDFs as they are released.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I believe it is $5.99 a month if you pay for a full year. IIRC $7.99 a month for a 3 month subscription and I don't recall exactly what 1 month is, somewhere around $9.99 or something like that.

Personally I think its well worth it. The Compendium alone is pretty valuable. I have the majority of the books but there are certain ones I didn't bother to get and its nice to have access to that content. Being able to just search and instantly find something is a huge time saver. Need some magic items to throw into a treasure parcel? Pretty easy when you can just go in and list say all level 10-12 weapon enchantments.

Dungeon and Dragon do have a lot of good articles too. I haven't read more than a fraction of them all and there are fair number that probably aren't interesting enough to bother with, but you can always come up with some interesting ideas and some stuff like the articles on skill challenges and whatnot are well worth reading.

Being able to run characters through CB is also very useful. Often I find that players in my game have missed stuff and having printouts of their powers and whatnot is always handy. The players have come to rely on those sheets a good bit too. Its not perfect but it is a good time saver.

Monster builder is definitely worth having as a DM. Its much easier than hand building monsters. The ability to go through powers of existing creatures and pull them into a new creature or to use them to customize another existing one is again a good time savings. Having printed out monsters saves a lot of page flipping during combat too.

I really haven't messed with the encounter tools.

It would be great if we had free tools that were this good, but for the most part they don't exist and the DDI stuff complements some of the free stuff pretty well. I think as time goes on and more free tools pull data out of the Compendium etc it just gets better. DDI may not have delivered everything WotC thought it could do YET, but what it does it does pretty well. I think they're on the right track and its worth the money.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Subscription

 

[Camelot]

Thanks! $6 a month for a year does seem really worth it. I'm going to go for it, and Dontremb, if you're a DM, I'd say you should too!

 

[Kzach]

I'd argue that DDI is worthwhile as a sub for players as well. The Character Builder is hard to give up. Dragon is meant for players. And having the Compendium on hand during a game, I've actually found speeds up play, rather than bogging it down.

I play in one group where having a DDI sub is a requirement of joining. Most of the players, and the DM, are still learning the system so if there's a rules question or dispute, we can quickly look it up and resolve it somewhat painlessly.

I was let down by a lot of things, the builder is good for building characters, but the character sheets don't have the level of customization I had been lead to believe they would have.

When did you stop subbing? The current level of customisation for the character sheets is pretty high. Can't get much more customisable than it currently is, really. There are some entries that it would be good if you could just plain delete, but other than that it's drag'n'drop and resizable and editable to your heart's content.

I wish they'd made it in OS X, though, so it could have high-quality, native PDF output instead of the crap XMF or whatever it is and CutePDF output it has.

 

[tiornys]

Another vote saying it's definitely worth it. My reasons have already been stated multiple times in the thread.

t~