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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3716186" data-attributes="member: 18832">I have one suggestion, Mike: do some kind of front-page article about the ways you can use Fourth Edition online and offline. Sort of a compare-and-contrast deal, you know? You can talk about miniatures and dungeon tiles, M&Ms and pencil maps, and the Virtual Game Table side-by-side as sort of the three "streams" of tabletop and online play. In fact, I would say do it four ways: pencil maps and figure substitutes, miniatures and dungeon tiles, using the Virtual Game Table in a face-to-face session with laptops or whatever, and playing entirely online.Everyone's playing the same game, it's just with different tools, that sort of thing. It's an opportunity to emphasise the fact that the game can be played around the table just as you already do and advertise the nifty features of D&D Insider.Plus, when you get to the point of doing articles about the actual process of creating a character in Fourth Edition, return to that compare-and-contrast method. I'm sure it's many months away, but if you're planning to eventually have an overview of how character creation works - the steps involved, the methods used, that sort of thing - then parallel examples using the physical books at the table and the Character Visualiser online would be great, too. There may be something similar to this you can do sooner, too.It's also important, I think, to get some clear information out about how much of the content on D&D Insider will be "book supplement" content, as opposed to the Dragon and Dungeon content. Before the print magazines ended, for instance, they had a policy of printing all the necessary information to use a new monster or feat or even class which appeared in an adventure . . . but they also had articles which were directly aimed at supporting a current book.I see the potential for tension between articles which support current books not being seen to "take up space" in the D&D Insider article schedule for those who don't own the product, and Wizards of the Coast losing out on the chance to advertise the cool stuff in their new products through openly-accessible articles.I'm thinking right now of a Class Acts article which provided a couple of extra vestiges for the pact magic of the binder in Tome of Magic, and likewise a later one for Forgotten Realms-specific vestiges; that's good advertising for the supplement and you don't want it all hidden away in the "extra stuff for those who own the book" section, but if too much of that content is included in the roster of Dragon and Dungeon features then you have the problem of selling us stuff we can't use. This problem gets worse if we're talking about support for books which aren't considered "core".I think Paizo managed to strike a pretty good balance, and I guess I just think it's important that we have an idea of how such things will be balanced in the D&D Insider program.One other thing: there have been many assurances that the Forgotten Realms and Eberron will receive robust, frequent content and support from D&D Insider. The question I have about this is the extent to which the setting-specific content will be sharing space with the setting-neutral content - for instance, if D&D Insider has articles three times per week, is that three separate updates per week for each of "core", the Forgotten Realms, and Eberron, or would each of these receive one update per week? Are we even talking about three articles per week, or simply three days on which a batch of new articles (varying in number?) will be released?</blockquote>

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