Insider Game Table: Guest Passes

[Shawn_Kehoe]

So I was reading the D&D Insider FAQ that was linked in another thread: http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1045521

Under the Game Table section, it notes that subscribers get a monthly allotment of "guest passes" for the Game Table. Is this replacing the old plan to allow players who just wanted the Game Table to pay a lesser fee?

I have serious doubts about being able to convince several of my long-distance friends to all pay the full monthly DDi cost.

 

[tenkar]

Your doubts echo mine. There is no way my players would pay $15 bucks a month to game when we could do it for free or for a one-time price with the other VTT options out there. Guest passes would be ideal, but to run a game weekly with five players you would need 20 passes for the month... somehow I don't expect to receive 20 passes a month

 

[Shawn_Kehoe]

Your doubts echo mine. There is no way my players would pay $15 bucks a month to game when we could do it for free or for a one-time price with the other VTT options out there. Guest passes would be ideal, but to run a game weekly with five players you would need 20 passes for the month... somehow I don't expect to receive 20 passes a month

Yeah ... and part of the appeal to me was for semi-retired gamers with young kids. I figured we could play twice a week for two hours after their kids go to bed ... same four hour session, no messy travel time.

But that would require twice as many guest passes.

 

[Glyfair]

Is this replacing the old plan to allow players who just wanted the Game Table to pay a lesser fee?

I am almost certain there never was any such plan. WotC employees have pretty much shot down any suggestions of that from close to the beginning. They have been talking about Guest Passes for quite a while, in fact.

Didier Monin has some info in This post.
Including:

Game session is usualy 3 to 6 hours for most people (and this is just a ballaprk, some play much longer or shorter sessions). See it as a sessiuon being equivalent to a game night...
Ultimately, One Guest Pass = One Game Session.
But Guest Pass will be set to allow for up to 24 hours of continuous play.
The extra benefit of time compared to the more usual session time is to handle the peculiar situation online gaming can get into, for example the DM has to stop for whatever reason after a few minutes, and this would have wasted the guest passes of all players. So we are still allowing them to jump during that Guest pass duration time in any other game session.

So technically a guest pass can allow you to play in more than one session, as it starts when you use it, and grant you access to the D&D Game Table for up to 24 hours after you have used it.

and

here is no public information yet on the exact price of a Guest Pass. We do know that guest passes will be granted to subscribers, though the exact number has not been defined yet.

 

[Shawn_Kehoe]

I am almost certain there never was any such plan. WotC employees have pretty much shot down any suggestions of that from close to the beginning. They have been talking about Guest Passes for quite a while, in fact.

Didier Monin has some info in This post.
Including:

and

No, I quite clearly remember them talking about a smaller fee for players who were part of a subscribing DM's game. This would have been around the turn of the new year.