Posted by Stargazer | Posted on 07-04-2009
Category : D&D4e, DDI, Just my two cents, Legacy D&D, News, Reviews & Culture, RPG
Yesterday RPGNow announced that WotC has notified them that they no longer are allowed to sell or distribute WotC’s PDF products. That means even if you have purchased WotC PDF products over RPGNow you can’t download them again after April 7th. Today I received an email from Paizo informing me that Wizards has asked them to stop distribution of their PDF products, too.
There was some discussion on Twitter tonight about the reasons why Wizards of the Coast should cease all sales of PDF products until Fred Hicks provided us with an interesting link. And obviously they played the piracy card again. I think I’ve must have heard that somewhere before…
And I am pretty sure that’s not the real reason. Over 20% of all legal PDF sales are WotC products! Over 20%, that’s a lot. So what’s the problem with that. You’ll always have piracy even if you don’t sell the books in digital format. There are a lot of illegal scanned books floatng around on the net. So you don’t need a digital version of the book in order to distribute it over a P2P network. And I am pretty sure that this announcement will not end piracy of D&D products.
So, what’s the real reason? There may be several reasons, why Wizards slaps into the face of the customer again:
- Killing the competition
They want to create their own online distribution shop, and before they do so, they want to make sure noone else sells their stuff. And even if that’s the case, they dropped the ball again!
- Removing all older edition material from the shops
Perhaps they are less then happy with the fact that some of those pesky customers prefer older editions instead of buying their shiny new 4th edition. Books are aleady out-of-print, but PDFs were still available… until now!
Whatever the real reason is, it has nothing to do with piracy. Period! This excuse didn’t work for the music industry, the movie industry or the computer game industry. But it’s easy to tell the public that the evil software/music/pdf pirates are responsible when you just want to kick your customers into the proverbial nuts!
Posted by Stargazer | Posted on 10-03-2009
Category : D&D4e, DDI, Just my two cents, News, Reviews & Culture, RPG
This morning I’ve read gamegrene’s review of D&D 5th Edition. 5th edition, are you kidding me? Yes, 5th Edition. It’s a joke of course, but the scary thing is that it’s not that far from what may really happen. Let’s face it: roleplaying is and will be a niche market and big companies like Hasbro are focussed on reaching the mainstream customer, the “unwashed masses”, if you wish.
I think the game designers at Wizards still understand what pen&paper gaming is about but the company itself is getting more and more restless. DDI is just another try to tap into the MMO market. But D&D is not World of Warcraft and I am pretty sure that most D&D players haven’t even heard of DDI or are not willing to pay a monthly fee to get some crumbs thrown at them. Aside from the Dungeon and Dragon magazines, crumbs that fell from the table is what you currently get from DDI. A few previews here, a new class in playtest there… The character creation tool is still bugged even though it has been in development (and beta) for a long time and long-awaited features are still missing in action.
Although D&D 4th Edition is still a solid game it’s Hasbro’s try to access bigger markets. Some of the changes made were made to make the game more accessible to non-gamers. A lot of the mechanics that remind us of MMO games have been probably added in hope to get some MMO players to turn off the PC and play D&D. Again, that does not make D&D a bad game per se, but it alienated a lot of old fans.
Even with the revised GSL most third party publisher have decided not to support D&D 4th Edition. Some stick to plain OGL, others will develop for the Pathfinder RPG and the rest will put more effort in their own systems. In a way OGL kickstarted the RPG business and GSL helps to diversify it again, which is a good thing for the hobby. The d20 monoculture was getting a bit creepy at times.
So, what’s the future of D&D? Will it really turn into a GM-less boardgame or a MMO? If people, who don’t understand the hobby, have their say, this is possible. Will the roleplaying games hobby be hurt by this? Probably, but perhaps with the 8000 lbs. gorilla out of the way, there’s a chance that other roleplaying games will fill that niche.
As I said I don’t think D&D 4th Edition is a bad game. But the outlook for the future is grim and that’s because I think that the company behind D&D does not fully understand the hobby. But perhaps I am too pessimistic right now.
What are your thoughts on the future of D&D? Please let us know in the comments!
Posted by Stargazer | Posted on 30-01-2009
Category : D&D4e, DDI, RPG, Reviews & First Looks
This morning I downloaded the D&D Character Builder Demo version. Within a few minutes I had created a sample character and I was surprised how easy everything worked. But there’s still some room for improvement.
Download and Installation
The download is advertised almost everywhere on the official D&D site, so it’s hard to miss. You then download a tiny program that then downloads the actual software. *Sigh* Why is this necessary? Why not link to the ddisetup.exe file directly? There must be some obscure reason I am probably too dumb to understand. When I am not mistaken you also need a pretty up-to-date version of the .NET Framework to run the CB. But when you have some high bandwith internet connection it just takes you a few minutes longer to install the program. The installation itself is pretty straightforward.
Creating a character
Creating a character starts with race selection. I was surprised that even the CB includes all races and classes released so far (including the ones from Dragon magazine that were released before you had to pay for DDI). And since all rules and flavor texts are included you could probably easily use these races and classes without even having the original books (or magazines). Of course you’ll run into trouble as soon as you want to bring those characters to level 4. The DDI subscriber version of the CB obviously includes all 30 levels.
Choosing the different ability scores, feats, skills, powers for your character is very easy and since you get all necessary information you can create characters without even looking once at your rulebooks. The Auto Pick function that auto picks ability scores, skills and equipment for you, works pretty well. This comes in handy if you want to create some run-of-the-mill NPCs fast.
Campaign Settings and Character Sheets
After you’ve made all your choices, the program saves your character and you can print out a character sheet that includes power cards and even cards for things like second wind. That’s a very big plus in my book and what could lead me to subscribe to DDI after all. Although I have noticed a few bugs here as well: the font on the “Dragon Breath” power card was way to big, so that instead of the full descriptive text you only get the word “Attac” in size 72 or so. I hope this is just a problem with either the demo or my PC. Has anyone else encountered this bug? And is it in the “full” version, too?
You can decide on which option you choose for you campaign setting. You can easily decide which books you allow and you can add house rules. The program even tracks is your character is still legal for tournament play (or whatever you call those RPGA events).
Final Thoughts
I am impressed! The CB is much better than I initially expected but it’s far from being perfect. You can get a character summary in text form to copy and paste into e-mails, forums, etc. but this summary doesn’t have the usual stat block format. You can’t export PDF of the character sheet and it would have been nice to be able to print out single power cards. I don’t want to print out the entire sets everytime I spilled coffee on one of the cards. But all in all it’s a pretty nice piece of software that helps you to create characters in mere minutes. That’s a feat that I was never able to achieve using the traditional method. It just takes too long to find the necessary information in the books. But I really would prefer to pay a one-time fee to download the CB instead of paying a couple bucks every month to use it. So I will probably stick to the demo version until Wizards decide to change their policy.
Posted by Stargazer | Posted on 12-12-2008
Category : D&D4e, DDI, News, Reviews & Culture, RPG, RPG tools
DDI Non-subscribers rejoice! Wizards of the Coast has decided to make the D&D Character Builder beta version available to non-subscribers too. You can get the downloader for the latest version from here. The installation process is a bit complicated though. After you run this “downloader”, it starts to download and installs the real install files (including the most recent version of the .NET Framework). Expect to have to restart your machine to complete the process.
According to what I’ve read the Character Builder open beta includes the same feature subscribers currently get. You can create all kinds of D&D 4th Edition characters up to level 3, which is pretty nice for a free beta product.
I haven’t had the time to test it properly, so a proper review has to wait. And I hope that the new classes and class options that were introduced in recent releases (like the Swordmage etc.) are already part of this software package. I am keeping my fingers crossed!
Posted by Stargazer | Posted on 10-09-2008
Category : D&D4e, DDI, Just my two cents, RPG
Recently WotC’s Randy Buehler has revealed the plans for the future of DDI. In the near future we’ll no longer get Dungeon and Dragon for free, but we’ll have to pay to be able to access Dungeon, Dragon and the Bonus tools. A one-month-subscription will set you back around 8$ but the monthly price will be reduced to around 5$ if you subscribe for a whole year.
If we were talking about the printed Dragon and Dungeon from earlier (better?) times, I would subscribe at once, no questions asked. But since we are talking about digital magazines, I am more than skeptical. I don’t have any hope that Wizards is going to surprise us with a completely revamped and better website for DDI. And the current D&D website is not only looking outdated but it’s usability is subpar also. A digital magazine isn’t a bad thing in itself, but when you take Wizards’ history of failures in the digital domain into account, the future of Dungeon and Dragon looks grim indeed.
The other features you’ll get for your subscription is the D&D Compendium and the so-called Bonus tools. The latter are minor tools that they should have given us for free. They are nothing I would want to pay money for. The D&D Compendium could be interesting, especially if you plan your adventures on the PC. But like the rest of the D&D website, the Compendium is badly designed and lacks usability. By the way, while I was writing these lines, the Compendium didn’t work but I got the following message:
Server Application Unavailable
The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable. Please hit the “Refresh” button in your web browser to retry your request.
When DDI was first announced I was thrilled, but after the delay of the Character Visualizer, Character- and Dungeon Builder and the D&D Gaming Table and the utter failure of Gleemax, I fear that DDI was a good idea on paper only. Although Randy Buehler is teasing us with Dragon and Dungeon exclusives I am sure that I can resist the temptation. And so will a lot of D&D fans all over the world. To answer my own question: No, DDI is not worth up to 8 bucks per month as long as Wizards doesn’t show us that they can really pull this off.
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