Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5445500" data-attributes="member: 6669048">DMs are always going to spend more than players.  As a player, all you need is a character sheet (which you may have made on my computer with my DDi account), a PHB or Rules Compendium, and a mini for your character.  As a DM, I need that DDi account for the online Compendium just to cut my prep time, the Rules Compendium or a PHB AND DMG, MMs and/or MV (yes, even with the DDi stuff...players love doing things you can't plan for and jumping on my computer during a session will kill the session far quicker than thumbing through a book), and minis or tokens for the monsters I'm running.However, I fully agree that anything that makes it harder to find a DM is a bad thing.  I'm the only D&D player I've ever met who prefers DMing to playing in a game, and even then I need a break where I can just play or else I'll get burned out fast.  Rough guess with nothing to back it up, I'd say that less than 10% of D&D players actually want to DM regularly.  Most DMs I know prefer playing but had an idea for a campaign they wanted to run or they DM because if they didn't, they'd never get to play at all because no one else wants to run the game.  And the few players I know who've wanted to DM never do because they don't have all the minis and terrain and everything, so they feel intimidated thinking they need those things.Tools like the VT will help if there's not a massive up-front cost involved because (from what the liveblogs of the demo indicate) it does a lot of the work for you.  The monster stats are right there, click on the trapped square and you get the info for that trap, initiative is tracked for you (I ALWAYS hand this off to a player...ALWAYS...one too many things for me to keep track of), you don't have to remember if the orc that just got attacked is Orc #3 or Orc #5 on your sheet because they moved around and switched places and one of them is at full HP and the other's almost dead...it seems like it lets the DM focus on the game and the characters rather than the bookkeeping which is a good thing.However, if they do tiered pricing, it would HAVE to be Players getting the CB and able to play at a VT and that's it (no Dragon/Dungeon, no Compendium) for a lower price, not raising the price for DMs.  And frankly, if they're wanting to emulate X-Box Live's system to keep a steady revenue source, they REALLY need to remember that it only takes 1 X-Box Live Gold account to get a room full of people playing HALO.  I don't have to make every single one of my friends pony up $9 just so we can play online together.</blockquote>

Verification