What if Dragon and Dungeon go online only?

[Saeviomagy]

The idea that everybody always has a net connected PC/Mac wherever they want to make or view characters is, to say the least, severely flawed.

 

[surfarcher]

I would have said ed up in all kinds of ways.

As a DM over 90% of my prep time is on a bus/train... In other words without an internet connection.

Guess I'll just get my players to email me PDFs of their characters and switch completely to Masterplan.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The idea that everybody always has a net connected PC/Mac wherever they want to make or view characters is, to say the least, severely flawed.

How is that any more flawed than the idea that I can only make characters on those specific computers upon which I've downloaded the current Character Builder program?

 

[Katana_Geldar]

That's different, it's like asking to play a game on a computer where it isn't installed. If you want to have character sheets on a computer that doesn't have Character Builder, you need to make them pdfs. Simple as that and it's how many character sheets have traded places in my group.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Are you admitting that you broke the TOS for the CB by allowing others to download and use the CB from your account?

That was not the intent of the CB and your admission is one of the reasons they have chosen to move to the new CB.

...sigh...

That's not one of the reasons they mentioned, and they keep mentioning how they're trying to put sharing back into it.

What K_G actually did was use one person's $10/month to supply an entire gaming group with D&D goodness, expanding the hobby beyond simply K_G, and into places where it might not have reached otherwise.

Sharing is integral to D&D. Which WotC seems to understand. Which is why they're quickly adding sharing functionality back into the thing. Which is also why, in preventing sharing, that WotC will loose a few customers (at least for a few months).

All of this is basically working as it should (though it sucks for folks like K_G, and I hope they can last until WotC patches it. ).

 

[Walking Dad]

stuff

So, I happen to play only online. Would it after your reasoning be fine to pool money with five people from somewhere around the world and share everything with each other because we are one gaming group?

And, IMHO, if sharing and account with 5 people each month is the usual model in 99% of the D&D groups, it should have been a reason for the new format. It is still piracy if you only provide your friends.

And naturally the don't mentioned it. Should they have said:

"So, we know you share your DDI with your group. But we want more money, so we changed the format everyone of you has to pay for our service. It will (maybe) also prevent some piracy until in 2-3 months someone will come up with an emulator to make it a torrent again. But at least we got your groups money."

(I'm not advertising piracy, but I think the group sharing was one of the reasons for the change.)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

There are two things no longer possible:
- Downloading the software once with a subscription and keep using it forever.
- Sharing the sofware with multiple players. The latter could be done without ever breaking the Terms of Use, btw. I was allowed to install the software 5 times. More then enough to install it on my desktop PC and my notebook. A notebook I can take anywhere, including my friends, and create characters, that I might give to my friends instead of playing them myself.

I think WotC needs to work on a way for people to buy a cheaper subscription to get character builder access only, or a more expensive "group license" for shared use of, say, 6 players (DM +5 players) at the price of, say, 2 subscriptions. Or both.

The problem is we pay 15 $ for a combination of several services. But many players only need one service. The character builder. Most of my players in my online and "offline" groups don't really need more then the CB and never get to read Dungeon or Dragon. (And most of them do in fact have a subscription).

 

[I'm A Banana]

So, I happen to play only online. Would it after your reasoning be fine to pool money with five people from somewhere around the world and share everything with each other because we are one gaming group?

Ethically? I think you're fine. From a business standpoint? Heck, you're better than five guys in one small town in Podunk, Oklahoma. You're spreading the game around the world. I'd rather you all have subscriptions, especially since you play online, and it's so useful, but I know, being a clever businessman, that I offer the DDI at a really cheap price, and that it's totally worth paying for, so if you're not, it's not that I'm losing a sale (necessarily), it's that I'm gaining players whom I would not have been able to sell to. Players who, once they love D&D, will surely spend much more than they would have otherwise.

People who pirate music spend more money on music. People who pirate books spend more money on books. People who share DDI are going to spend more money on D&D.

And it's not exactly piracy, but that's a terminology quibble. It is still sharing. But sharing wasn't one of the reasons mentioned for the change, and killing the sharing aspect of the DDI would be akin to having a choice between $10 now and $1,000 over the next two years, and choosing the $10. They can't exactly approve of or cater to people getting the service for free, but letting it slide earns them more money than getting all paranoid about it.

And I don't think this is to counteract the sharing. There's still nothing stopping you from giving out your DDI password to your buddies and sharing it, and getting all of the information from all of the books for $10/group, for as long as you're playing your D&D campaign (and when you're not playing D&D, you don't really need to make characters or access the Compendium, so you're not losing much of anything).

 

[Mirtek]

Actually the new model makes sharing easier, you're no longer limited to 5 persons only, they just have to make sure they don't log on at the same time.

 

[OnlineDM]

Sharing is integral to D&D. Which WotC seems to understand. Which is why they're quickly adding sharing functionality back into the thing.

I think the sharing that Wizards of the Coast has said they want to add to the online Character Builder is different from the sharing that you're referring to.

I think they want to enable DDI subscribers to share the characters they have created with other DDI subscribers. So, a player should be able to send their character file to their DM as they can today with the offline Character Builder. This will probably also include some kind of PDF-like exporting capability to share the finished product of the character sheet.

It sounds like the sharing you have in mind is similar to the file-sharing ethos: One person has access to the online Character Builder and then shares that access with friends. I think they intentionally want to DISALLOW this kind of sharing under their terms of use. I think their intention is that, if you want to build a character you'll have to pony up for a DDI subscription (although I personally expect that there will be a free trial version that will allow non-subscribers to build low-level Essentials characters without a lot of customization of feats, powers, etc.).

Under the existing model with the offline CB, sharing access is pretty easy given the five downloads per month rule (still disallowed under terms of use, I think, but easy to do - just do an update when you're visiting your friend). The new online CB makes this harder - you'll have to share passwords, and who knows - they may someday limit access by IP address.

I think limiting access by IP address would be foolish since so many of us have laptops that we travel with, or multiple computers in one house, so I'm optimistic that they won't go that route. But I guess you never know.