My Opinion of WOTC's Digital Initative and the current events

[Hussar]

Freebfrost - I just tried to code in my Binder into PCGen. It's not as easy as you make it out to be. Sure, changing minor cosmetics in an existing class doesn't take long. Entering an entire new class is a major amount of work that I'm just not willing to devote.

From what I hear, DMGenie does it better.

For me, where PCGen REALLY shines is with advancing monsters. Now there is a huge time saver. I can advance a monster pretty much any way I want and it will come out sweet. Won't recalc the CR for me, but, it's still sweet.

 

[Najo]

The social stigma is gone. Look at LotR, Heroes, Lost, Spider-Man. Look at World of Warcraft. Look at Xbox, PS3, the Wii. Being a gamer is the norm.

The barrier to D&D is the need to buy/read all those books. At first glance the PHB looks like a school textbook. Before you can play you need to first study, then fill out a form and present it to your DM for review.

Talk about a bad experience for your target market.

How much better it would be if all character generation was online. With a few clicks you make your guy, print him out, and you're done--and the guy is 100% accurate/rules legal. No need to buy and study a textbook. No math. No dedicated chunk of time for hours of research.

Set aside personal preference* and think about D&D as a business. Examine the need to expand the customer base and make your own products more usable.

-z

* I like reading gamebooks, at least for the first time through. After that, I'd rather access the info in a more usable way: online.

D&D got a new social stigma, that of nerd or geek. It was featured in a tv commercial with the computer tech guy marrying the model. The 40 year virgin made fun of D&D. The two bad movies hurt it, especially with lord of the rings coming out right afterwards. Plus the text book element. Then the terrible MMO (compared to WOW standards) Putting the material online, while should be one option, only hurts that stigmata more. It says.."I am so complicated of a game I need to be done over the internet and I am not cool enough to be a video game." Computer dependacy, and even worse online dependacy would hurt D&D even more.

I am in the gaming business and look at all of this as a business should. You have to keep D&D accessible to all of its players, just as the digital initiative may go wrong for Dungeon and Dragon magazines, so would requiring D&D players to use the internet to build characters and play.

 

[Najo]

And who are they asking for that? I have seen one survey asking about the "product" and not the content. I have to go with what Dancey said in his blog - they are ignoring the customer component and building something that they think is what people want, but I haven't heard or seen anything to indicate that they actually asked the consumer.

And now they've taken the Dragonlance license. This just keeps getting better and better!

I see this too. I remember when TSR did that before as well. It is a company that doesn't understand its customer base as well as they think they do.

 

[Najo]

Couple of other quick things I would like to add:

The online generation tool would lose them market share. I know a large percentage of D&D players that want nothing to do with a computer when they are gaming, they are about as common as the ones who do use computers when they actually game (not DM prepping), if not a little more so.

Second, I have found in all of our research that hack and slay and young players still prefer story driven adventure and action over game mechanic driven action.

Here is an example: I had a kid who was 14 in one of our role playing classes, and gave a quick pre attack on the village description of the setting. When I asked him what sort of character concept he wanted to play, all he said and stuck by was "I want to kill stuff! Lots and lots of stuff!". So, I was stumped at first how to get him to work with the rest of the group as he continued to be uninspired with any concept or way to work with the others (the typical no parents, no purpose mercenary killer basically). I knew he was going to be a problem player and I was not going let him ruin everything for the others.

So I told him he doesn't remember much of his childhood, and that he was found as a young child by the priests of the tribe. He had a strange birthmark that ran up along his back and was said to have the mark of one of the ancients. The priests honed him as a demon slayer and when he came of age his first demon hunting caused him to get wounded by the creature he fought and the wound became corrupted from a piece of the demon's talon being left within him. Since then, he has been haunted by nightmares, able to feel the presence of demons and over taken by fits of rage unexpectedly. When the neighboring village is attacked evidence of demonic weapons and troops are found, so the priests pull their weight to send this berserker of theirs along with the other adventurers who are heading into the eastern empire to avenge their people and rescue the missing women.

Basically, I made his play style fit the story and he loved it. It made role playing for him, he bought a bunch of books and lost interest in many of his computer and video games.

Every time I have taken a hack and slay style of gamer, or a non story driven gamer and placed them in a story driven campaign they become converts. Every time.

The trick, is the tactical war game elements need to stay there. To often story role players through that out, which bores the guy who wants action and fights. D&D needs as much Conan as Dragonlance, and as much Elric as it need Lord of the Rings.

 

[Hussar]

D&D got a new social stigma, that of nerd or geek.

That's new? Good grief, D&D was for nerds and geeks 25 years ago. It's never exactly been a cool hobby.

It was featured in a tv commercial with the computer tech guy marrying the model. The 40 year virgin made fun of D&D. The two bad movies hurt it, especially with lord of the rings coming out right afterwards.

Somehow I don't think LoTR hurt D&D any.

Plus the text book element. Then the terrible MMO (compared to WOW standards) Putting the material online, while should be one option, only hurts that stigmata more. It says.."I am so complicated of a game I need to be done over the internet and I am not cool enough to be a video game." Computer dependacy, and even worse online dependacy would hurt D&D even more.

I am in the gaming business and look at all of this as a business should. You have to keep D&D accessible to all of its players, just as the digital initiative may go wrong for Dungeon and Dragon magazines, so would requiring D&D players to use the internet to build characters and play.

Note, you want to use the word stigma, not stigmata. That's a whole 'nother beast.

I dunno if D&D Online is terrible. Is it less successful than WOW? Sure, but, then again, so's pretty much every other MMORPG out there. Does that mean that all MMORPG's are terrible?

Nothing in this actualy requires players to be online to do anything. No one is coming to your house to burn your books. The players who are not online will continue to not be online in all likelyhood. However, there becomes the enticement to come online when you have a number of elements that will make your life much easier as a player or a DM.

It's not about making the game more complicated. That's never been a goal. It's about looking at what is already out there and making life easier.

Couple of other quick things I would like to add:

The online generation tool would lose them market share. I know a large percentage of D&D players that want nothing to do with a computer when they are gaming, they are about as common as the ones who do use computers when they actually game (not DM prepping), if not a little more so.

How? Nothing in print magazines makes it easier to generate characters. Nothing, other than core is required to make characters or to play the game. The existence of online tools will not change that fact.

Second, I have found in all of our research that hack and slay and young players still prefer story driven adventure and action over game mechanic driven action.

Here is an example: I had a kid who was 14 in one of our role playing classes, and gave a quick pre attack on the village description of the setting. When I asked him what sort of character concept he wanted to play, all he said and stuck by was "I want to kill stuff! Lots and lots of stuff!". So, I was stumped at first how to get him to work with the rest of the group as he continued to be uninspired with any concept or way to work with the others (the typical no parents, no purpose mercenary killer basically). I knew he was going to be a problem player and I was not going let him ruin everything for the others.

So I told him he doesn't remember much of his childhood, and that he was found as a young child by the priests of the tribe. He had a strange birthmark that ran up along his back and was said to have the mark of one of the ancients. The priests honed him as a demon slayer and when he came of age his first demon hunting caused him to get wounded by the creature he fought and the wound became corrupted from a piece of the demon's talon being left within him. Since then, he has been haunted by nightmares, able to feel the presence of demons and over taken by fits of rage unexpectedly. When the neighboring village is attacked evidence of demonic weapons and troops are found, so the priests pull their weight to send this berserker of theirs along with the other adventurers who are heading into the eastern empire to avenge their people and rescue the missing women.

Basically, I made his play style fit the story and he loved it. It made role playing for him, he bought a bunch of books and lost interest in many of his computer and video games.

Every time I have taken a hack and slay style of gamer, or a non story driven gamer and placed them in a story driven campaign they become converts. Every time.

The trick, is the tactical war game elements need to stay there. To often story role players through that out, which bores the guy who wants action and fights. D&D needs as much Conan as Dragonlance, and as much Elric as it need Lord of the Rings.

None of that is negated by an online initiative. Unless you somehow believe that virtual tabletop play is less role play oriented than face to face, which is completely untrue. An online tool that allows you to quickly generate a 12th level wizard, complete with feats from 8 different books and spells from the Spell compendium will in no way change what you have outlined.

I'm not really sure what you are getting at.

My only thought is that you are somehow equating VTT play with MMORPG play. That's a false comparison. IME, VTT play tends to be more role play oriented actually since you no longer have the impediment of trying to imagine Bob, the 300 pound smelly guy as the hot elf chick.

 

[caudor]

Hussar,

Well said

 

[Najo]

That's new? Good grief, D&D was for nerds and geeks 25 years ago. It's never exactly been a cool hobby.



Somehow I don't think LoTR hurt D&D any.

Right now more than ever, what was "geek" is in. Spiderman, Xmen, LOTR, etc. D&D's movies were bad. Lord of the Rings was good, and made the D&D movies look worse. In turn, D&D gets poor mainstream marketing that makes non-gamers less interested in checking it out.

Note, you want to use the word stigma, not stigmata. That's a whole 'nother beast.

Slipup, its late and I had a long day

I dunno if D&D Online is terrible. Is it less successful than WOW? Sure, but, then again, so's pretty much every other MMORPG out there. Does that mean that all MMORPG's are terrible?

D&D online is unsuccessful compared to the majoirty of other MMOs being actively played. Everquest, EQ2, SWG, AO, DAOC, LOTR, COH, Linage I and II..etc. Use google to search out MMO data sites and they all say basically the same thing. I played it for a bit, and it has many issues that hurt it. But that is for another discussion.

Nothing in this actualy requires players to be online to do anything. No one is coming to your house to burn your books. The players who are not online will continue to not be online in all likelyhood. However, there becomes the enticement to come online when you have a number of elements that will make your life much easier as a player or a DM.

It's not about making the game more complicated. That's never been a goal. It's about looking at what is already out there and making life easier.

How? Nothing in print magazines makes it easier to generate characters. Nothing, other than core is required to make characters or to play the game. The existence of online tools will not change that fact.

None of that is negated by an online initiative. Unless you somehow believe that virtual tabletop play is less role play oriented than face to face, which is completely untrue. An online tool that allows you to quickly generate a 12th level wizard, complete with feats from 8 different books and spells from the Spell compendium will in no way change what you have outlined.

I'm not really sure what you are getting at.

My only thought is that you are somehow equating VTT play with MMORPG play. That's a false comparison. IME, VTT play tends to be more role play oriented actually since you no longer have the impediment of trying to imagine Bob, the 300 pound smelly guy as the hot elf chick.

Did you read the whole thread? I thought my replies were clear. I was answering about the comments where people stated the solution to D&D's pile of books and amount of player choices was to automate it either through Character Generation software or online through the website. Some even went so far as to say that 4th edition character generaion could exclusively be online. Both these scenarios I was disagreeing with. I am not saying that D&D can't have tools like that, just that it can not offer that as the only option for players or they will hurt their market. I was saying though that a mainstream market is not going to see online or software based options as a good thing. They are not going to undertsand the value of a tool like that (since they would not have a previous RPG experience) and are going to see a product like that as either a lame "video game" or as proving the game is to complicated that it needs a computer to organize and play it, even though it is not a computer game, and this will be a turn off.

I was saying that D&D needs better organized and streamline rules, fewer barriers to entry whereever possible and easy to show off the value Pnp offers a new customer without making them learn a text book of rules right out of the gate. The current setup of the basic game and phb/dmg/mm does not accomplish any of this.

One other thing, if the D&D movie had been really good, or even pretty good that it got decent reviews from movie goers, D&D would have gotten so good plubicity from it. Instead it ended up looking boring and dumb, which is what a new player is going to be think or get the impression of when they are hit (and crit) by the wall of text that makes up the core books.

And on a sidenote, I have done roleplaying over phone(before internet), email, internet chat, on every MMO I played and just over IM. I believe that any tool can aid the game if your creative with it, and I welcome computer tools for D&D, just not as a way to put a bandaid on a clunky library of rules and scattered character options that need to be organized better first and then have those tools made for them.

 

[gizmo33]

The essay posted is not complete, and I think this conversation is highlighting some areas I need to explain myself a little more clearly.

What I think would help too would be to intermingle some examples in what you're describing. (Is that a "cut-scene") Like the old DnD books that had the examples of interactions with players ("a couple of ghouls just ate your gnome...")

 

[freebfrost]

Freebfrost - I just tried to code in my Binder into PCGen. It's not as easy as you make it out to be. Sure, changing minor cosmetics in an existing class doesn't take long. Entering an entire new class is a major amount of work that I'm just not willing to devote.

The learning curve is steep, kind of like learning to use Campaign Cartographer for maps. It takes a while to get up the path, but once you do it's fairly simple. And yes, its a rather large initial time committment.

From what I hear, DMGenie does it better.

And if I hadn't taken the time to learn PCGen years back I would agree. Having sunk that time in though, PCGen is much easier for me to use and alter as needed. And it's that ease of use that I don't see easily implemented in this forthcoming WotC DI...

 

[(contact)]

What I'm saying is if the way I choose is to stab them to death and take their pretty sparklies (which don't get me wrong can be a hoot and a half) WoW beats the crap out of tabletop RPGs. All of the payoff, none of the work.

Gotta disagree with you there, maddman75. MMORPGs are ALL work.

WoW was dearly loved by several of my gaming buddies, but it bored the crap out of me. I love H&S and kick in the door gaming, but taking 5 minutes to run back to where the last bad guy kicked your ass (if you can find it again), or spending an hour killing inconsequential monsters in order to level up made me want to cry.