DDI vs WoW

[Xorn]

Okay, the thing that keeps irking me this whole thread is any mention, in any shape or form, of DDI's GameTable being remotely worth the cost.

Fantasy Grounds II (DM server + six player clients): $90 USD, one time
Fantasy Grounds is awesome and truly FEELS like tabletop (or as close as you can come to it! It's the program my gaming group (scattered all over the country) has been using for a year now!

But that's just ONE of the VTTs out there that own. Battlegrounds RPG is fan-freaking tastic (and a one-time purchase) as is Klooge.Werks, and don't leave out MapTool, which is free! We've been using VTTs for the last decade--those of us that wanted to--and there's no freaking subscription.

Take my $90 FG2 setup and compare it to DDI. Even if my entire gaming group commited to a year of service, we would be paying $70 per month. After a year we're out $840. Are you kidding me? But wait! You get a clunky 3D interface with 3D miniatures! Not for $840 USD, you don't--that's extra.

GameTable is going to fall right on it's face and crumble away as long as they stick to this "subscription" based service. It needs to be a standalone product, and if you want the miniatures for everything in the Monster Manual, you buy that virtual mini pack. And maybe, sometime after release, when they are wondering why almost no one is using GameTable, maybe they'll recognize that most people that wanted a VTT already have one--and actually offer them something with VALUE.

Because right now I don't even have a consideration that GameTable will be worth $840 USD per year for my group. When I say that, I wonder if Wizards feels as stupid saying it as I do when I repeat it.

And as for the original topic, there's a lot of hostility to 4E on the RPG.Net forums, and this post reeked of it. Everytime someone compares WoW to D&D, a gold farmer is born. So please, leave WoW out of it!

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

I think he is arguing that the tabletop business model should not try to compete with the MMO model and instead try to evolve or revolve in a way that originates and capitalizes to its basic unique premises and strengths in the new era.

Right. That's what I took away as well.

While I agree with him, this is a difficult topic for me to wrestle. I think that D&D and MMOs are different animals, but they certainly draw from a similar demographic, which means they're going to be competing on some level. Plenty of people out there own many 3.5 products and at least one MMO. The real competition is in the time investment. WoW is pick up and play. DnD takes preparation and planning. WoW can be played solo or with a group. DnD requires at least one other person with a similar time commitment.

What's really tough for me is that while I agree DnD needs to be moving in a different direction, away from MMOs, that's about all I can contribute to the discussion. As consumers, unless we have answers to this problem, the discussion is mostly academic in form, and serves as a nice way to see where the general community stands on the issues.

 

[CleverNickName]

Heck, we've run many campaigns just on AIM and it worked out great. I think technology is just going to make it easier and easier to find fellow gamers to play with. The main problem between the two is that with WOW you can always just jump in while with D&D there is usually an on-going structure that requires all parties to participate. So that will still be a problem even online, scheduling players.

Yup, this seems to be the case for my gaming group as well. In our online games, the problem isn't with the voicechat or tabletop software we are using, but with the bandwidth and timezone issues of talking to Florida, Oregon, and California from Oregon. But, we make it work. We use FantasyGrounds software (one-time purchase instead of a paid subscription) and our telephones (conference calling, free long distance). If you haven't tried FG, you don't know what you are missing.

I'm sure that DDI will do well, but it will be without any help from my gaming group. It's nothing personal...as far as 4E is concerned, I'm just having too good a time with 3.5E right now. And no matter what version of the game I happen to be playing, I will never pay a subscription...ever. The paid subscription-thing is why I have never had any desire to play WoW or Everjoke or whatever MMORPG is hot today. It's like, a fundamental law of gaming for me.

 

[Xorn]

Right. That's what I took away as well.

While I agree with him, this is a difficult topic for me to wrestle. I think that D&D and MMOs are different animals, but they certainly draw from a similar demographic, which means they're going to be competing on some level. Plenty of people out there own many 3.5 products and at least one MMO. The real competition is in the time investment. WoW is pick up and play. DnD takes preparation and planning. WoW can be played solo or with a group. DnD requires at least one other person with a similar time commitment.

What's really tough for me is that while I agree DnD needs to be moving in a different direction, away from MMOs, that's about all I can contribute to the discussion. As consumers, unless we have answers to this problem, the discussion is mostly academic in form, and serves as a nice way to see where the general community stands on the issues.

I'm only quoting this post because it's the idea I'm responding to, but I'm not looking for a reply from this person necessarily.

But what about 4E is putting it into competition with D&D? It sure as hell isn't GameTable/DDI! I mean... EverQuest didn't compete with D&D, Star Wars Galaxies didn't compete with D&D, neither did City of Heroes/Villians, Anarchy Online, Asheron's Call, Planetside (the only FPSRPGMMO lol), Ultima Online, Tabula Rasa, Horizons, Shadowbane, or any other MMOs out there.

Hell, Dungeons & Dragons Online didn't compete with D&D. It's only players are hardcore D&D fans!

The only way that MMOs compete with tabletop is cost. And if little Johnny has to decide if he's going to spend his $15 on WoW, or the 4E PHB, then it's not MMOs that are getting in the way--it's that little Johnny needs a big boy job, because $15 is his entertainment budget.

Yet somehow, 4E is trying to be like an MMO. *sigh*

EDIT: Tangent with CleverNickName:
I'm totally with you on the ludicrous principle of paying a subscription fee for a VTT (you know exactly what FG can do) but not with fees in general. Even if WoW isn't the game for someone--I have to come back to the idea of how much money would I spend if I wasn't playing WoW? I don't believe I would just sit in a void, so I'm pretty sure in the 90+ hours a month I play WoW, I would have found a way to spend $15 that I don't spend. And the moment I play D&D over GameTable for 90+ hours a month, I'll pay a fee for that too! Wait, no I won't, because I created the content that is entertaining me.

The moment WoW forces me to design my own dungeons to run through, I'll stop paying a monthly fee. I just think people adamantly opposed to monthly fees should consider how often they play a single player game for 3 months straight. If you don't, WoW was cheaper.

 

[Ximenes088]

I'd agree that current free or one-time-fee tools can give the crude necessities for online play. I've never loved the tools I've tried, but they could get the job done. What DDI is selling isn't so much the tools as it is the community and the online rules access. You can mock up a VTT with a messenger client and a whiteboard- what you can't mock up is another four players.

The bigger the community and the smoother the matching interface, the more this is worth. I think it's a mistake to focus on the software as the selling point, but people are doing it because it's the only thing that exists as more than potential right now. As for paying $10-$15 a month for access to a good community and polished matching tools, that's a trivial expense. And frankly, if it isn't trivial for a given player, then I don't think that player is in a marketing demo that Hasbro cares about.

 

[CleverNickName]

I'd agree that current free or one-time-fee tools can give the crude necessities for online play. I've never loved the tools I've tried, but they could get the job done. What DDI is selling isn't so much the tools as it is the community and the online rules access. You can mock up a VTT with a messenger client and a whiteboard- what you can't mock up is another four players.

The bigger the community and the smoother the matching interface, the more this is worth. I think it's a mistake to focus on the software as the selling point, but people are doing it because it's the only thing that exists as more than potential right now. As for paying $10-$15 a month for access to a good community and polished matching tools, that's a trivial expense. And frankly, if it isn't trivial for a given player, then I don't think that player is in a marketing demo that Hasbro cares about.

I blogged about this a few weeks ago, now that I think about it. [SBLOCK=Quote from my blog]A while ago, I posted a blog entry about the development of the 4th Edition to the Dungeons and Dragons game. One of the features of the new system that they mentioned was something called "D&D Insider," which was an internet interface that would allow a game to be played over any distance, using an internet connection.

Now, my friends and I had been playing D&D under the 3.0 and 3.5 Editions since their release. Then our cleric and barbarian moved to California, our druid and monk moved to Florida, and the DM and his wife the fighter (that's us) moved to Oregon. The rogue and the ranger stayed behind in Colorado.

Needless to say, gaming has been difficult ever since.

We have tried gaming online a couple of times...our first attempt was a disaster, using a webcam and Ventrillo to communicate. After a while, we started using some special software called FantasyGrounds, which was pretty much just a virtual tabletop, and it worked out a lot better...but there was no voice chat support and Ventrillo was too unreliable. So we tried adding Google Talk to the mix, but it did not support multi-user chat. Now, whenever we game together, we use Fantasy Grounds and our telephones (conference calling, free long distance). It works for us.

So when we heard that Wizards of the Coast was developing an online tool for its users, we were very excited indeed...while we never really had any particular problem with 3.5E, we jumped on the 4E bandwagon just because it promised to make gameplay faster and easier...especially for us online gamers who don't like MMORPGs.

Over the next few months since, the details started to trickle in about 4E. Most of the news was neither good nor bad, just different...more focus on demons, no more elemental planes, strange new races in the core, and so forth...these were not "deal-breakers" for us, but they would take some getting used to. It is a new game, after all.

As for D&D Insider, the eye candy looked great (3D character "miniature" generators, animated tilesets)...not something we really needed, but nice to have. Other than these bells and whistles, it looked like it did a lot of the things that Fantasy Grounds could do.

Then it started to get sour.

Rumor suggested that the druid, the monk, and the barbarian did not exist in the new edition. They would be released at a later date, we were told, probably in a second Player's Handbook or an online enhancement. I know that sounds minor to most people, but those three classes constitute half of my adventuring party. I suppose we could crib together a "barbarian" flavored fighter or a "druid" flavored wizard by writing up a couple dozen new powers and tweaking the base classes, but who has time for that?

Monsters that were critical to my campaign would not be included in the initial release either...even iconic ones. As with the missing character classes, the popular rumor was that these monsters would be released at a later date, perhaps in a second MM or an online enhancement. In the meantime, I suppose I could just substitute another type of monster or modify a similar one on the fly from those provided, but again...who has time for that?

It looked like this new edition wasn't going to make things easier for us at all. It looked like it would be generating a lot of extra work for all of us.

The killing blow for us came when the cost of D&D Insider was announced. Fifteen dollars per person per month, to use their online chat and virtual tabletop service. Doing the math, ($15)(6)(12)=$1080, over a thousand dollars a year. I realize that a subscription to DDI is much more than just a license to play online, and I realize that even if it were, $15/month is comparable to many MMORPGs out there. Be that as it may, absolutely zero out of six players at my table were willing to pay for a subscription at any price.

So, D&D Insider was out. And while it was still possible to play 4E over FantasyGrounds, it would take a lot more work on everyone's part to convert characters and monsters, update XML databases, rebuild the online character sheets, and so forth...all of this on top of learning the new rules. As the DM, it was my decision...and I decided to stay with the 3.5 Edition. It is a good system, it is fun to play, everyone is familiar with it already, and we already own everything we need.

I'm sure that 4E will be quite popular, and WotC will make a fortune in book sales and online subscriptions. I have already preordered my copies of the 4E books, so it's not like I am in denial about it or staging some kind of boycott. 4E has some great ideas; it just isn't for us. Not right now, anyway.[/SBLOCK]
Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to say that DDI or Fantasy Grounds are "crude tools." They both seem to be professional-grade products designed with the computer-gaming nerd in mind...but I can't vouch for DDI just yet, not having used it before. And I wouldn't call any ongoing fee "trivial," either, because dollars can add up quickly when you increase the timeline and number of players.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

The only way that MMOs compete with tabletop is cost.

This is the statement I don't agree with, and the main point of my last post (which maybe I didn't convey accurately). Cost is not the only way for these games to compete. As I said, time, personal effort, and group organization are factors as well. I own plenty of 3.5 books and have played WoW on and off for a few years. I'm not suggesting they're mutually exclusive. But as I invested more time in one, I tended to neglect the other. I'm sure there are people out there who can balance both, but I have a 45+ hour/week job, girlfriend, family, etc. There's only so much time in the day. And in my case, when I realized that I wasn't really playing DnD, I stopped buying the books.

And by the way, I never said 4e is trying to be like MMOs" just that I agree it needs to capture a new demographic, while ideally holding onto what it's got.

 

[Kishin]

The only way that MMOs compete with tabletop is cost.

And ease of use. No prep, no scheduling, no need to block off time. You can sit down and play WoW for 30 minutes and still feel like you've accomplished something (Unless you've hit the level cap, and have such gear that the only way to improve is by raiding). That's the kicker. Tabletops are hard to coordinate. MMOs aren't.

Of course, D&D brings you unlimited, everchanging content. Whereas, with WoW, I personally never want to see Shadow Labyrinth again.

 

[Xorn]

Point made and accepted. There is a time factor too--but I feel that it's reasonable to expect that the majority of people that play D&D or WoW aren't choosing one because they don't have time to do both. From my perspective, I stopped buying D&D books because I wasn't playing anymore, too. But the reason I wasn't playing had nothing to do with WoW (or any MMO)--my gaming group was separated. So we got a VTT and now we're not separated anymore.

The cost for GameTable is off of the chart when compared to the other crude options available.

 

[Gundark]

Final Fantasy XI was released in May, 2002.
World of Warcraft was released in November, 2004.

FF 11 stole my Socom 2 clan oh well it was fun while it lasted.