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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5374439" data-attributes="member: 82106">lol, yeah, totally got to agree with you there. Advanced education and street smarts or social savvy don't really have much to do with each other at all.Well, let me give you a different view on that. I have a group that started with 4e right after it came out. We have never met. That is I've met SOME of the people in the group (one of them is my sister). The rest I have never met IRL and a few people have come and gone who were total strangers. Yet we play in my campaign weekly, we have fun, we buy books and DDI subscriptions, etc. Now, I think playing at the table is great and it is a preferable way to play, at least for me. OTOH I'm an old fart in the D&D world, the younger generation that has been brought up with computers and CRPGs and MMORPGs may well feel a bit differently about that. As evidenced by MY playing using a VTT online if even old time players are at least somewhat willing to do that it seems like a viable play mechanism that WotC should do as much as they can to support. The important thing is people play their game. HOW they do that is secondary and the more ways that exist the better.In any case lets look more closely at the WotC strategy. If you were primarily interested in moving in the direction of an online "micro-payment" or "digital goods" sort of system what would you be doing? Well, for one thing you'd reduce the cost of the physical "hardware" to play the game to the absolute minimum, and concentrate on making those products the most useful ADJUNCTS to playing the game you can. Maybe you would redesign your books to be cheaper smaller paperbacks with a tighter focus in each one. Maybe you would sell a lot of tiles and token sheets. Maybe you would really push to make sure there are FLGS with places to play in as many areas as possible. Huh, maybe you would do what WotC is doing!Now, I don't claim they're doing all this stuff purely for the purpose of making the game more focused on the online/digital products. There are a bunch of reasons for Essentials, DDE, Encounters, etc. As with most things in this world the evolution of D&D products and business model is being driven by multiple forces. It is just interesting that (as it seems to me) the evolution of the product DOES make sense from a perspective of moving to a new model something like what the OP outlined.Obviously this is going to be a LONG term thing though. 10 years from now I suspect you will still be able to play D&D the same as you can today and never ever touch any online anything if you don't want to. You'll just be using paper and pencil to make up characters, etc. Maybe you'll even have access to a certain amount of free basic online functionality like the OP mentions. The people that want to play 'old style' will have that option. People that want to do everything online or a mix of the two will have a bunch of other options. They'll probably be able to buy access to content packages and features that they want to use at reasonable prices. They'll probably be able to buy little add-ons or smaller chunks of the bigger packages for less reasonable prices.I mean really, if you think about it that tempting impulse buy really is an amazing business opportunity. Sure, 50 cents for a monster is expensive when you can get a library of 250 of them for $25, but if THAT is the monster you need right now to put the sauce on your encounter and you can just click the "add it to my monthly payment" button have it RIGHT NOW, well I suspect it might not actually be too hard to make money off that.I wouldn't be so eager to condemn the idea. Sure, you may get 350 monsters for $40, but how many of them will you actually ever use? When you look at it that way the great deal you get buying the book doesn't look quite as appealing. Beyond that what you can get online has more VALUE. It is searchable, can be used with various tools (encounter builders, campaign planners, VTTs) and it isn't limited to a specific length by virtue of being stuck in print format, nor will it become obsolete or eventually fall apart and have to be repurchased (lost, stolen, etc). Heck, all sorts of extras can be tossed in. For the nostalgic your $1 monster can have old stat blocks copied out from every version of the game where it ever appeared, and the old text too, and a slew of new text, etc. As for the problem of review, that is mostly surmountable as well. The way you go about it is for instance by promoting certain people as especially good monster designers. "Get the new Joe Smith Kobold Sneakthief, it's the best thing ever!" With things like community ratings and just generally a really active and critical online community it should work quite well. Really, what I would expect to see is a gradual evolution and transition. From now on all the digital content is online and part of SOME program you get with a subscription, maybe for free, or maybe as some reward program or redemption system. I'd expect to see them perhaps open up something analogous to the App Store. A place where you can go and make content and charge for it. WotC gets a cut, and you get a cut (which probably you just turn around and use to pay for your DDI stuff anyway unless you do really amazingly well with it). Heck, they could let you sell variant rules systems, settings, adventures, anything. This could be a GREAT system. As time goes on they will probably transition to a more graduated sort of subscription service with player and DM level subscriptions, a free introductory level, etc. I sort of agree with the people that say WotC isn't the swiftest navigator of the digital world. They HAVE been successful over time, but they seem to move slowly and often misstep before recovering. M:tG online wasn't just instantly successful, it spent a lot of years getting perfected. I think 4e Online will spend a few years getting to where it is going too.</blockquote>

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