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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5430028" data-attributes="member: 2067">I have an idea. It's kind of a wacky scheme.A DDI worth $10/month.Seriously. Quit making it suck more. The point at which your hare-brained anti-piracy schemes start chasing away legitimate, paying customers is the point at which you should realize you've gone too far past the land of sanity and you've lost sight of what is actually important. Come back over that horizon. Make DDI worth it. Quit letting anti-piracy lunacy dictate your business decisions. This is the main thing I want from you. More Helpfully: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> "Blockbuster" Hardcovers. More fluff than crunch. Big arty things. Proud to show these off to even non-D&D players. Think something like 3e's Draconomicon or Tome of Magic or Book of 9 Swords. Not just lists of monsters and lists of powers and lists of treasure. Give them a theme, give them a big art budget, give them a scope, and lets see what we can get. Don't give us one a month, give us maybe 4 a year. I want monster books that read like bestiaries, player books that read like legends. Make me excited for the rules therein. QUALITY stuff over QUANTITY of stuff.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Class Digests. Softcover Essentials-style. All the rules you need to make a class, all in one place. Appropriate races. Class and racial feats. Powers. Builds. Items. I should not need anything other than this softcover book to play any class. No more "Arcane Power" this and "PHB3" that and "DDI" the other thing. All of what I need to make a Fighter, in one portable book. You can mix and match books, of course, but since the class is the single most defining trait of any D&D character, supporting the class in various ways is the ideal. Maybe another 4 or so of these per year. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Dungeon and Dragon as DM and Player Supplements. That guy who wants new D&D rules stuff to read every month? He should get a subscription. There should still be "issues," with some sort of loose theme. This is where your Arcane Power-style alt builds and new items and fresh stuff goes. This is where short adventures and delves go. This is how you get your steady trickle of rules. You can "take it with you" to your game via your DDI subscription, or just print out your character sheet. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Complete Boxed Sets. Think of these like the Red Box on steroids, or sort of akin to 2e's boxed sets. Everything you need to play a game right now in one cardboard treasure chest, tightly themed around a given locality. Accessories (maps, tokens, tiles, handouts, cards), adventures (a booklet of a few connected plot threads), player material (a player's booklet with new races/classes/builds/powers/feats/items/allies/knowledge) and DM material (a DM's booklet with new monsters/treasure/traps/hazards/villains/NPC's/secrets/lore). It provides mostly what is needed to support the adventures in the location; there's no need for 30 new levels of a new class. Save that for the Class Digest. Give me 5 or 10. Enough to play around in, only what I need, and no more. </li> </ul>As a forinstance, lets say we're re-launching Dark Sun under this model. You get:[sblock=what you would get]<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The World of Dark Sun, a big, lush, hardcover discussing -- mostly in flavor (with rules support) -- Dark Sun and its awesomeness. You get to hear about slaves in the gladiator-pits and the liberators of Tyr. Stories and artwork, organized fluff and a skeleton of crunch. This is the book you read to get you pumped full of ideas about Dark Sun, and it includes some basic rules (survival rules, maybe a new class or build, a handful of races, gladitorial combat, etc.)  and articles (no divine classes, on warped races, on low tech, on survivalist D&D, Dark Sun in D&D history) that make Dark Sun distinctive. It doesn't focus on rules elements, but rules elements are there to support it. This is presented in its own format, not a format like the other 4e books. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The Dark Sun Digest. Easily portable softcover just filled with the mechanical rules of building a character in Dark Sun. A build, a few races, feats, survival rules, ceramic pieces, whatever else you need. You should be able to bring this + your Class Digest and make a Dark Sun character without any other books.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> "December is DARK SUN Month at DDI!". Oh I see someone was interested in the stats of the Sorcerer-Kings. HERE's a Dungeon article about them, presented like Dungeon's Demonomicon arctiles! Oh, I see someone wants to play Eladrin in Dark Sun. HERE's a Dragon article about how you might do that, complete with feats and advice and whatever.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The Tyr Boxed Set. Adventures set in the Heroic tier in the city-state and its environs. Here's a map. Here's some desert-y dungeon tiles. Here's 10 levels of the Dark Sun builds and the Dark Sun races. Here's some monster tokens, some character tokens. Here's your DM's book with its NPC machination chart and its rules for interaction.</li> </ul>You also get maybe 4-8 other items this year that don't necessarily follow any ONE theme, but follow their own theme. There's an arty hardcover about the Feywild coming out. There's Class Digests for the Psion and the Necromancer. And there's a Tomb of Horrors boxed set coming out that re-launches this classic campaign. There's a steady stream of Dragon and Dungeon fluff and crunch as well -- it's not throwaway brief articles, but real robust presentations of new stuff from both designers and fans that were "promoted" to Official. So even people who hate Dark Sun have a lot to look forward to. And after this point, we're not putting Dark Sun in physical form (for a while), but it'll have its spot in our regular Dragon and Dungeon entries, along with FR and Eberron and whatever. [/sblock]This encourages DDI people to also buy physical product (boxed sets and lush hardcovers = physical value; if they don't play online, class digests are too), and it encourages physical people to hit up DDI every once in a while (Want to see the sweetest new Ranger build, or need stats for Demogorgon? DDI!). No one feels cheated (just a casual player? Boxed set! More hardcore? Digests and Hardcovers!). Everyone gets high fives! <img src="http://www.wilterdink.com/Internet_High_Five.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

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