Stargazer's World » DDI

Ask the readers: Does not play well with others…

Sunglar — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:00:30 +0000

Over in the Paizo Blog I’ve been reading with some interest their proposed changes to the Pathfinder Society Organized Play program. I have never participated on such programs. When I began role playing I was intrigued by the RPGA, joined and got their Polyhedron Magazine. I still have the laminated card and the pin somewhere, but besides reading the magazine I never took any advantage of belonging to the RPGA.

Fast-forward to the days of D&D 3^rd edition and the changes they made to the RPGA. I loved the idea of Greyhawk being the default setting, the idea of regions assigned to geographical locations, etc. I even knew friend who were very active, but I never really joined. I had little free time, my campaigns, my adventures; I did not want to switch to a new campaign. I found all the excuses in the world, so that was that…

I took the DM tests the RPGA offered at one time (and passed), and when 4^th ed. came along I wanted to be part of that, until I became disenchanted with the system and gave up on DDI. The Pathfinder Society had no presence where I lived so I didn’t pay much attention to it when I began playing the game.

Much has changed since then, I have been blogging for a while now, became active with promoting games in Puerto Rico, and wonder if I should try to participate in some of these organizations that promote and support gamers. I wonder, what have been your experiences? Did you benefit in any form from belonging to them? My inquiring mind wants to know.

My rant on WotC’s new Character Builder

Stargazer — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 07:25:17 +0000

Yesterday WotC has announced a new, web-based Character Builder for DDI subscribes. While a web-based solution may have some advantages and the screenshots look quite cool, I have some issues with that move by WotC. I haven’t had the chance to talk with our resident 4E fan about this, who has probably a better understanding of what the fans want, so take my musings with a grain of salt.

The new CB will make use of Microsoft’s Silverlight. Silverlight is basically Microsoft’s answer to Flash. While it obviously has some advantages when you’re a developer, it’s still a bad idea. IMHO it’s a transitional technology, it doesn’t run on Linux, and even Microsoft will probably focus on HTML5 in the future. Heck, even Flash would have been a better idea.

Cloud-based applications are pretty popular today, and I can clearly see why. It’s handy being able to access your data from every PC connected to the web. But that also raises privacy concerns. WotC already stated they will use data mining to find out what their customer create in the CB. What if WotC owns everything you created using their tools? Then D&D fans around the world provide their corporate masters with free characters all day! Yay!

IMO the new CB is just another ploy to bind people to DDI. You can’t use the CB when you’re offline and you can’t use it when you don’t have an active subscription. IMO the old CB, while not multi-platform, was more customer-friendly. Subscribers now can’t share the CB with their group without giving out their passwords. Another thing is missing features. The new CB will released with some features missing. While this is normally not a big deal and they already promised to add those features at a later date, WotC’s track report when it comes to fulfilling promises when DDI is concerned is less than stellar. Some of the DDI tools promised before even the game has been released are still missing.

Of course, WotC is free to pull the plug on the old CB, make unwise choices when it comes to the software used and announce features that never appear, but it’s just dumb from a PR standpoint. When it comes to the digital initiative a lot of current and former fans are pretty skeptical. Even bloggers who praise WotC’s products whenever they have the chance to, pointed out the flaws in this new plan. A happy customer is a good customer, but it seems Hasbro sees its customers more like crack addicts who will keep buying as long as the drug is provided regularly.

But seriously, I doubt that the people who are making the decisions really care. For Hasbro it all comes down to money. If the new DDI forces people to keep their subscriptions to be able to access their characters, they make more money. The old CB (and the fact that it’s almost essential to properly create characters) was the entrance drug. When you want to keep using it, you have to keep paying especially with the next 100-paged errata around the corner.

So why do I care? I don’t play D&D 4E and I don’t intend to do so in the future. But I still care, because in a way I am still emotionally invested in D&D and WotC. I loved D&D 3.5 and I bought a lot of WotC products a couple of years back. But now the company and a large part of the hobby are moving in a direction I am not comfortable with. Perhaps I am an old grognard after all.

Pathfinder RPG Spellcards, for free!

Sunglar — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:00:12 +0000

I know free stuff is usually Youseph’s topic but I discovered this website this week and I’m thrilled. As you doubtlessly know I’m a Pathfinder RPG fan and have run a weekly game for the past year. Even if I don’t play D&D 4^th edition I can tell you many things I liked about the game, one of them was the ability, with the DDI, of printing power cards. I’ve wanted something similar for spells for Pathfinder for a while now. I know there are commercially available sets in RPGNow but I was reluctant to spend money on them, some of the samples did not impress me.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered theGM.org and the handy dandy Perram’s Spellbook! This is a free application that allows you to create and print spellcards for the Pathfinder RPG, including the Advanced Players Guide and some other Paizo books! You can even create custom cards…

I love this web application! Kudos to Jefferson Jay Thacker, aka Perram, for this! Go over and check it out, it is well worth it.

Assassins, and Necromancers, and Hexblades! Oh My!

Youseph — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:00:43 +0000

I was quite excited when I recently read the Critical Hits post titled, “D&D 4e: The New Player’s Option.” In the post written by Bartoneus it was discovered that Wizards of the Coast will be putting out a new Dungeons & Dragons book called Player’s Option: Heroes of Shadow that will allow players to play as the Assassin, Necromancer, and Hexblade classes available in March 2011. The book is also said to contain additional races, but I have not yet had any success in finding any information on them.

Based on the information provided by Bartoneus, the book is said to be 320 pages long with a reduced physical size of 6″x9″ and a cost of only $19.95. This is so oddly strange to me that it is almost enough to make me think the whole book is nothing more then a badly written rumor. However, my desire and dream to own a Players Hand Book that contains an Assassins class continues to hope this release is true.

The first Player’s Hand Book was only 320 pages long so I find it hard to believe a book with that many pages would be shrunk down and made into a paper back book. That is something Wizards of the Coast has ever done before. A book with all the normal art we have come to expect from a Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition book sold at $19.95 also does not make sense. It does not seem like that price point is high enough to recoup production costs.

It is worth noting that the Assassin is not a new class. If you are a subscriber to Dungeons & Dragons Insider you have had access to the exclusive Assassin class either through the character builder or through the online magazine Wizards of the Coast, a product of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.

Personally, I was upset when Wizards of the Coast announced the Assassin class was to be a Dungeons & Dragons Insider exclusive option only. One of the biggest reasons why I like Dungeons & Dragons is because it is a pen and paper based game. By it’s nature, there should be no need to pay for a subscription service to allow you to play a particular class or race.

Roughly a year and half will have passed when Player’s Option: Heroes of Shadow is finally released in March of 2011. Wizards of the Coast must be thinking that whatever revenue they would have gotten from people signing up for Dungeons & Dragons Insider exclusive Assassin class has already been made, so now they will release a new book with the Assassins class and two other classes. This will result in Dungeons & Dragons obtaining money from people who did not previously sign up for the exclusive as well as them getting more money from the people who had signed up and would now like access to the two additional classes. I believe when companies release products like this it is often referred to as, “Double Dipping.” You see that a lot with DVDs.

Hey Wizards of the Coast! Where Are My Apps?

Youseph — Wed, 19 May 2010 10:00:47 +0000

This is a questions that has been bugging me for almost a year now. Why have Wizards of the coast not made any Dungeons & Dragons apps for the iPhone? The way I figure it, the iPhone was released in June, 2007. The 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons came out in June of 2008, making this edition 2 years old next month. So, where are the iPhone apps at? Shouldn’t we have an official Dungeons & Dragons Character Sheet, or a Dungeons & Dragons Initiative tracker, a virtual dice app or something for the iPhone from them by now? Anything?

I know that Dungeons & Dragons is a paper and pencil game – that is one of the things I love most about it. I can get a gaming session rolling with just the bare bones basics if need be. However, I know many gamers out there always travel with an iPhone or an iPad.

Wizards of the Coast does offer a subscription service called Dungeons & Dragons Insider that gives its subscribers access to a wide range of tools that they can install on their Windows machines or use from their web browser, making all aspects of Dungeons & Dragons easier for gamers. I have a Dungeons & Dragons Insider subscription for the Dungeon Magazines and the Dragon Magazines. These are amazing and full of great advice as well as adventures you can use. I personally don’t think Wizards of the Coast is charging enough for them.

Now, I don’t want to turn this into an operating system holy war over which is better, Windows or Macintosh. (Macintosh is clearly better.) Simple math tells us that there are more Windows machines out in the world than machines running the Macintosh OS, so I don’t fault Wizards of the Coast for focusing on the Windows platform. Truth be told, I have tried all of these programs on friend’s computers and they are all good and very helpful. Never the less, with all the iPhones in the world I find it shocking that we the players of Dungeons & Dragons don’t have any official iPhone apps. I am not asking for earth shattering apps, but it seems like Wizards of the Coast could easily put together a couple of the more basic things that Dungeons & Dragons gamers want.

Wizards of the Coast stops all PDF sales

Stargazer — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:34:56 +0000

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!

The future of D&D

Stargazer — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:11:40 +0000

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!

A quick review of the D&D Character Builder

Stargazer — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:30:23 +0000

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.

D&D Character Builder is now in Open Beta

Stargazer — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:56:07 +0000

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!

Is D&D Insider worth up to 8$ per month?

Stargazer — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:36:47 +0000

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.