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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kapture" data-source="post: 3199287" data-attributes="member: 7645">See, this is the thing that boggles me.We never got new material for free on the web.Wait, that's an exageration. I'm know I'm exagerating. We got some adventures of varying quality early on. And spells. And the template classes were new. Previews, which are advertising. Art galleries, also advertising. The WOTC site is a very good advertising tool. A nice newsletter. I use it to preview stuff all the time.But lets look at the amount of material that isn't new: NPCs, a lot of monsters with templates, some adventure locations, maps from pre-existing products. Monsters with templates. Did I say, monsters with templates? What's in the archives:    News    Character Class    D&D Alumni    D&D Fiction    D&D Fight Club    Design & Development    Elite Opponents    Map-A-Week    The Mind's Eye    Product Spotlight    Rules of the Game    Save My Game    Steal This Hook!    Tactics and Tips    Use This Book Tonight    Vicious Venues    Consolidated Lists    Tools    Bardic Knowledge    Battle Sheets    Behind the Screen    But What Do They Do?    Celebrity Game Table    Cliffhangers    Epic Insights    Far Corners of the World    Fey Feature    Gamestoppers    Monster Mayhem    NPC Closeup Archive    PC Portraits Online    Random Encounters    Revision Spotlight    Savage Progressions    Spellbook.The red stuff is what I remember as "new." New crunch. Not reworked rules, or gaming advice. That's five out of 36 archived series.  All of them retired. I go to WOTC all the time to read this stuff. Quite a bit of it I like a lot. But it's really not new or original in the way that say, Tome of Magic is.I don't buy a ton of books anymore. Can't really afford to. I know wizards would rather have somebody buying two $30 books a month from somebody. But since they're probably not even getting two books a year out of me, they might be happy to have $10 or $20 a month.If I were them, I'd realease the "not-so-new" stuff on the website, like monsters with templates, or "how to be a GM," on the website three month's later, after it comes out on the premium site. I'd keep the new classes, new monsters, new adventures, etc. on the premium site.It occurs to me that if you play a tabletop game in a virtual environment, you need to charge for space and bandwidth like the MMPORG's, but unlike MMPORG's, where the rules are hidden from the player, you still need the explication of print material. If the players are at the virtual tabletops, the material needs to be there. Some players may not even care to have it in print at that point.That's a perfect place to create a pay-per-view, or more likely, subscription service.</blockquote>

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