The Dungeons & Dragons Virtual Table

[Aspeon]

My thought about pricing is this:

I don't have a group that plays online. I have friends all over the country who might be interested in this, but I doubt I could get them all to pay $70/year each for the privilege. So my hope is that Wizards is trying to make the VTT buy-in for a player less than DDI, not more. If they're getting some sort of money from each person in a group, that's probably more than they're getting now from a group with, say, the DM subscribing regularly and most of the players updating the offline CB twice a year.

 

[CM]

Actually, for those of us who don't play online, there is no real value to a VTT.

Well I don't play online, but if the VTT ends up being high quality it may finally push me to buy that projector I've been eyeing.

 

[catastrophic]

I hope they don't expect to launch with only a bunch of tokens from the starter boxes. I mean, I assume that's not the case, and that's only for the beta.

Because my players, and between two games I have 11, all have unique art for their PCs, including one guy who is pretty good and draws his pcs and also did a pic for the guy playing a gnoll.

Every week, I can trawl the internet for pictures to use for npcs, villains, locations, and of course, maps.

I can build pretty decent maps in maptool, just by dling various object files from free dl sites, and assembling them however I want- if i'm worried about file sizes, I just screenshot the result and then use a flattened png or jpg when running the actual games.

I can't imagine ever paying for a vtt program that can't give me those kind of options. Even if I can trasfter monsters and PCs over.

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

Well

I don't know anything about the monster/character builder problems, but I'm curious about this. I've thought WoTC needed a VTT for a long time, and in my book being a lot like Maptools is a good thing.

Could someone with access to this thing post a thread comparing and contrasting it with MapTools?

Maptools is really awesome, but a Maptools like VTT with tighter integration with a specific rulesset and premade monster tokens (both of which WoTC could easily do) would be even better. I don't play 4E, but if I did I'd be quite psyched about such a thing.

 

[falcarrion]

so far I'm not impressed.
Every thing i see so far I can do for free.

 

[Hussar]

Looking at the screenshot on the front page, is that little speaker icons on the left, over the player names? Integrated chat and sound support would be a pretty big leg up over Maptools and most other VTT's where you have to go to something like Skype or Voxli to do voice.

I'm guardedly optimistic. Considering the recent events, I might not even be that much.

 

[delericho]

The FAQ states that they haven't yet decided about the pricing. This seems to me a rather strong hint that the VT won't be part of the current DDI subscription.

If they don't include the VTT as part of a DDI sub (whether with an increased price or not), then that would probably signal the death-knell for DDI. From everything I've heard, the eMagazines have been dropping in quality of late (and the early issues I saw were already very poor, especially eDungeon), the tools have not lived up to the hype, the online Character Builder has been a fiasco, and we're about to see a repeat with an online Monster Builder.

They need the VTT to steady that ship. And it needs to be an outright success, not a buggy mess that comes good "in a few weeks".

They may well also want to offer it as a stand-alone option for people who don't want a full DDI subscription (or maybe just a "player client" as the standalone, with the fully-featured "DM console" being part of the sub).

 

[delericho]

Of course, maybe we are seeing the end of the DDI as a subscription service. If the revenues haven't matched the projections, and/or the investment has been much more than was expected, then perhaps upper management have started losing confidence in the project.

In which case, going to an online-only CB would be an attempt to build subscriber numbers by locking off the "subscribe for one month out of every six, just for the updates" people. I would also expect to see the eMagazines go online-only in the near future, as well as any other tools that we've forgotten about.

If it doesn't work, or if it's already too late, then we'll see a winding down of all updates, a gradual shedding of subscribers, followed by the "sad news" that the project has been cancelled.

Naturally, that doesn't preclude them starting to sell the VTT, and maybe a "new and improved" offline Character Builder and/or Adventure Tools as a standalone product.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Looking at the screenshot on the front page, is that little speaker icons on the left, over the player names? Integrated chat and sound support would be a pretty big leg up over Maptools and most other VTT's where you have to go to something like Skype or Voxli to do voice.

I'm guardedly optimistic. Considering the recent events, I might not even be that much.

The FAQ (i think?) states that this is the case.

I expect:
- this to cost extra. No big deal for me since they announced that when they scrapped the original VT and other tools.
- there will be microtransactions of some kind. Let's be honest, the LOTRO & DDO models have simply been far too successful for this to be NOT the case. They have to do this right, however, by truly selling addons that other players/DMs do NOT need. Like the boosters for Gamma World.
- while they say that the other tools are not directly integrated, there seems to be a character management and monster management tool. This could mean (i hope) that you have to import monsters and characters by hand, and cannot simply dragndrop them into the tool. Which would be acceptable. This would also be what would make me give up Maptool.

And best of all:

BETA TESTERS ARE ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT ALL THEIR EXPERIENCES. How i hope that other companies would do this as well.

 

[wedgeski]

Annoyingly, I just dropped $150 for the Fantasy Grounds 2 Ultimate License and I'm beginning to regret it. It's incredibly hard to figure out, I've spent a week on it so far and been unable to smoothly get a player into it and playing. Which is alarming for a paid app, and $150 at that.

I agree. FG is very pretty but I just couldn't get on with it.