Subscribing to D&D Insider

[I'm A Banana]

I think I'd rather play WoW than sit down at some random time with some random DM and some random group playing some random adventure. And hate is a strong word, but I really, really, really don't like MMORPGs.

Ye gods, why?

WoW: I grind for two hours on spawning mobs alone as an ill-equipped lowbie in a world full of shiny epic people who brag about stuff I can't do.

eD&D: I descend into a dungeon that someone lovingly crafted and face whatever insidious challenges they have put in store for me.

The personal touches are not lost on me.

 

[James Heard]

Reading the existing rules for forum usage and seeing a lot of WOTC threads in action I'm just not impressed with what they do and how they do it. Furthermore, I spend quite enough time online without adding a website I have to pay for the privilege of using into the mix. I've never liked the WOTC website. It's poorly referenced, it's badly managed, and it's never seemed a tenth as friendly as ENworld.

They're trying to sell what I was mostly getting for free before, and unless they're going to follow up their DI with a bunch of C&D letters to ENWorld for daring to have options to run PbP games basically they can stick it. If they try to run off the existing online gaming? They can stick it even harder then.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

No, I prefer playing D&D. The only question is whether to stick to 3.5 or go back to AD&D.

Are they revoking the OGL?

You. Cannot. Revoke. The. OGL.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Ye gods, why?

WoW: I grind for two hours on spawning mobs alone as an ill-equipped lowbie in a world full of shiny epic people who brag about stuff I can't do.

eD&D: I descend into a dungeon that someone lovingly crafted and face whatever insidious challenges they have put in store for me.

The personal touches are not lost on me.

I think his point was that sitting down at a random time with some random people you don't know to play a random dungeon with a random DM is likely not going to lead to results superior to what Blizzard's designers put together.

And if you can play WoW for two hours, you can get in a group and do a dungeon.

 

[jujutsunerd]

And if you can play WoW for two hours, you can get in a group and do a dungeon.

I play WoW, and rather like it (been playing since it was released, and my first character just got his basic griffon, yahoo! , but, finding a pickup group and going through an instance in two hours? Eh, not in my experience. YMMV, I guess.

Just getting a group together can take two hours. And, unless the group is fairly well balanced (i.e. has a good healer, dps and tank) and experienced, you can count on wiping once or twice due to stupidity/bad luck. 3-4 hours for a pickup group on a small instance sounds more likely.

Of course, with a good and well-matched group, it's a different story. But the odds of such a group gelling instantly from a bunch of random folks is, well, small.

Now, playing with a random group in D&D insider (or any other online rpg site) will have some of the same problems, but provided you luck out in your choice of DM, he (or she) can mitigate a lot of those problems by adjusting the story and challenge to be more appropriate to your group. (Not sure whether a bad DM is worse than a computer AI.

/Jonas

 

[Kae'Yoss]

It will depend on what it will offer.

 

[The_Gneech]

Hmm ... is there a "Hell no!" option?

I don't let MMO's leech of my wallet, I'm certainly not going to let the thing that killed my favorite mags do it.

-The Gneech

 

[Horacio]

Yes, of course... if it works on Linux.

Horacio, Linux-only

 

[Nefrast]

I am not interested in their electronic gaming table (which won't run on my non Windows computers anyway), so it depends mostly on the Dungeon and Dragon magazines content and the Forgotten Realms fluff I will find there. If I like what I find there I will subscribe.

 

[drothgery]

Depends on what my tabletop group does with 4e. If we all like the game, and I'm the DM, then I'll certainly subscribe, but if I'm not running a game then the value of Dungeon online is a lot lower to me (and I've never run D&D for my tabletop group; I'm going to run a SWSE game for a bit later this year, but that's my first shot at DMing), and if I'm not playing 4e (or SWSE) at all, then it's pretty much worthless.

It really looks like it'll easily be worth $10/mo for any 4e DM; the question is whether it'll be worth it for a 4e player or a SWSE GM.