My vision of what D&D Insider should become

[jelmore]

With all of the... ahem... "discussion" that the announcement of the new web-based character builder has generated, I've given a little thought to what I feel the D&D Insider experience should be.

MISSION STATEMENT: Improve the pen-and-paper D&D experience by providing resources to make playing the game faster and easier, and help the D&D community connect to and share with each other.

Making the game faster and easier:
* A character builder that gives me easy access to all of the options available, and cuts down on the tedium of character building: if I select a class build, pre-select all of the associated powers, trained skills and feats appropriate for that build.
* An encounter builder that makes it easy to build combat encounters and adjust them on-the-fly.
* A combat tracker that accepts input from both of the above tools.
* An interactive "character sheet" where I can track item and power usage, damage, healing surges, conditions, and so on.
* Support for popular mobile devices, either through tailored web portals or native apps for iOS, Android, etc.
* An online compendium that I can both browse AND do detailed searches on. (I can't be the only one who has wanted to find all class powers with the healing keyword, can I? What about looking at traps, or diseases, or poisons?)
* A session/campaign planning tool that can utilize all of the items I referenced above.

Help the D&D community connect to and share with each other:
* Give users tools to share their own self-generated content: campaign wikis, character journals, etc.
* Allow users to create their own powers, items, races, etc. with support in the character builder and other online play tools. You could include a voting or ranking system, with popular or successful ideas being added to the compendium, character builder, published in sourcebooks, etc.
* A community calendar where people and stores can post times and dates for open gaming tables, demos, etc.
* Support for play-by-post or other online play: examples would be dice rollers and easy linking to compendium content.
* Oh, and tie my RPGA and my DDI accounts together. Seriously.

I realize that many of these tools already exist in some form or another: iPlay4e and inCombat, Obsidian Portal, MasterPlan, and ENWorld's dice roller leap immediately to mind for D&D; examples outside of tabletop RPGs include sites like Wowhead (IMO, one of the best World of Warcraft resources not produced by Blizzard). But many of these were developed, or grew, in the absence of comparable tools with the cachet of being the "official" D&D resources.

Give me tools I want to use, and I will happily pay for them.

 

[ourchair]

There was a really awesome post in another thread about this, and I can't seem to find it.

Basically, the poster was talking about how WotC would really benefit from taking advantage of their customers producing content for them by hosting their third party creations in the form of some social network that allows people to swap adventures, campaigns, characters and even homebrew rules.

It was brilliant in how he said it.

 

[buddhafrog]

There was a really awesome post in another thread about this, and I can't seem to find it.

Basically, the poster was talking about how WotC would really benefit from taking advantage of their customers producing content for them by hosting their third party creations in the form of some social network that allows people to swap adventures, campaigns, characters and even homebrew rules.

It was brilliant in how he said it.

I didn't say it, but I was thinking the same. It would be interesting and quite easy for WotC to do many things now that they will keep all the content under their roof.

 

[blalien]

That all sounds like good stuff. I'm not holding my breath, though. I wouldn't say I'm angry about the move, but nothing I've heard so far impresses me. The three things I most want are:
1. A fast, reliable interface. If it's slow and glitchy then I'm just not going to bother. But considering the program itself is kind of slow, I'm not optimistic.
2. They really can't be lazy about product updates and new features. I want to see this thing supported.
3. A cloud where everybody in my campaign can upload their character sheets. Even the players who only own the basic version.

I might actually wait a few months to subscribe, just to see how well this works. If it crashes and burns like so many of Wizards' digital projects, then at least I won't have wasted money.

 

[Nikosandros]

They are all very good ideas, except (IMHO) the possible automatic inclusion of fan-generated content in the tools. If someone has a good idea, I'd rather it was submitted to Dragon, vetted and developed, and then added to the tools. Ideally, if the online tools will eventually provide good customizability, each user would still be able to add selected fan-created content to his tools.

 

[Scribble]

Psst... as far as the calendar they already have that one on the community page.


They also offer everyone their own wiki, but it's kind of just a straight wiki... I've been spoiled by the feature Obsidian Portal offers. (such as hiding info from players.)

 

[Prism]

I'd look to tie DDI into next years Neverwinter computer game. Maybe being able to create characters in CB, play them around the table and then import them straight into the computer game for other play options. Same with monster builder