D&D 5E What’s next for DDI

[Emryys]

Since I DM, tools related to adventure/encounter building would be most welcome.

Encounter builder
Be able to creat a 2 page encounter from various elements, with the ease of Monster Builder.
Look things up in the compendium then drag them into my template.
Even have tile pieces to quickly create the map, turning on only the sets I have so I have a reference map for the encounter.
Might encourage more sales of the tiles by making them easier to setup.

Encounter manager*
Load the 'linked' characters from my players into the manager before hand and then saving my encounters built with the now non-beta Encounter builder

Skill challenge manager*
Could be part of the encounter manager, but needs flexibility to accomodate the nature of their use.

Character manager*
Allow folks to track their character at the table.

*If the various managers could be used offline with limited info, just enough to do what they need, load and go, they may accomodate most users needs.

 

[Ladislaus]

<post deleted>

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I was thinking of this page:
DDI Adventure Wiki

Yup that's the one I found, thanks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There are major problems with the coupons/scratch-off system which were expressed back some time after the Rouse mentioned it.

Companies A+B that i've worked for in mainstream publishing have both looked at the same idea, and both dropped it for the same reasons.

You cannot guarantee that the person using the code is the person who bought the product. Add in the increase in costs yes they're low, they're not negligible though and the customer service headache 'I bought X book and the code had already been used' etc. and there's a reason it's not taken up widely.

Some small companies offer similar, such as pre-order the hardback and get the pdf for free, or send a photo of your receipt and get it for free. Typically though these are dealing with sales in the hundreds to low thousands, not the tens of thousands.

It would also become a net loss financially. At the momenty 40k+ people pay X month by month through to year by year for the DDI account. With the changes above then that drops to <more people> paying nothing. And with no real evidence available to show more people would be buying books as a result.

Edit: Ballpark figure, they'd need to sell 87k more of the product(s) containing the code to make up for the lost revenue. Not $87k, another 87,000 sales each month.

I think you're seriously overstating the case. 87k book sales a month is a HUGE number, I seriously doubt WotC has ever even approached those kinds of sales numbers in their wildest dreams.

Suppose you sell 50k of a new book in the first month. You have given out 250k worth of $5 coupons. What is the redemption rate likely to be? 25% would be a VERY good rate for any sort of redemption program. So you end up with 12k new users that get a free month of the $5 "player" DDI subscription and that costs you around $60k IN THEORY, but in reality many of those people won't pay if they don't have the coupon, so the LOST sales of DDI subscriptions might amount to $1 a book or something on that order.

Now, if they make $.50 a month per DDI subscription and 25% of those people actually sign up after their $5 coupon is up then you just added $1500 a month of new PROFIT and gained 3,000 new loyal DDI customers. Basically you recoup your investment in customer acquisition in about 8 months, which is VERY GOOD for a retail program of any kind.

In other words the whole thing makes massive sense to me. I don't know all the actual numbers and maybe DDI penetration is already high enough that they don't need to do it, but I'm sure ideally they want every buyer of books subscribing and the coupon is certainly the most direct way to do that which I can think of.

Sure some people will steal coupon codes, big deal. It really isn't worth much to anyone that doesn't play 4e, so what will anyone gain from that? They can just buy the book, which presumably if they want DDI they are likely to want to do, and use the coupon. It simply isn't going to happen that much. If it does, then CS just gives the guy that got ripped off another coupon code, big deal.

It would work. My numbers are somewhat made up and the real ones might be different enough that it would be too costly but really I doubt that, it could easily pay for itself in 1 month with slightly more favorable numbers. If nobody uses the coupons? You lost nothing.

 

[ki11erDM]

The problem with the offline viewers are that you would only have the name of the power, not the content. They have said that the CB files will export into .dnd4e format.

Well, personally I would think just having the sheet and power cards on your system in a format that is easily used to track combat would be doable and useful. Even if the file contained all the text for every power and feat and item that is only a small amount of data… not like the current CB.

 

[evilref]

I think you're seriously overstating the case. 87k book sales a month is a HUGE number, I seriously doubt WotC has ever even approached those kinds of sales numbers in their wildest dreams.

Firstly I was addressing the suggestion of '1 free month per product bought'. Secondly I was looking at it from the perspective of lost sales from DDI or lost profit from the book (as the money has to appear on someone's accounting line'. Looking at the book, given 'free' stuff is commonly put into either the line it is given away with, or general marketing, that $9.99 for a month is a significant proportion of the money WotC gets for any product - the publisher typically gets 45% of the RRP.

So, sure you can put the whole thing into a general marketing budget. And you can do it all as a loss leader but that's going from 'sell books with X profit' and 'sell DDI with x profit' into 'Sell books and give ddi away for free to anyone who buys the books'.

I was also assuming everyone who bought the book would be likely to make use of the voucher (because free stuff). Albeit I think the take up would be high, you're right that it wouldn't be 100% so I overegged the pudding there.

No matter what though they're going to lose money on that.

The $5 redemption you outline, particularly if it had a limitation, is definitely a better offer than the '1 month free per purchase' idea I was addressing. They started with 3 months free back when Dungeon and Dragon went online. Personally I think 1 month free access to the Character Builder would be a good idea (say when some of the teething problems are fixed).

 

[RLBURNSIDE]

I really do

apologize for the snark, both to the other forum members, and to mudbunny / whoever else is trying to wade through the negativity.

That said, I will no apologize for my opinion. It comes first hand from working in online cloud-hosting for a major video games company. And trust me, please (or don't), you have no idea what happens to your data. You know the phrase "whatever you say can and will be used against you?". Well, with regards to Eulas, do not under any circumstance assume that a draconian Eula will not be used against you. It can, and it will. Microsoft used to have undercover agents in computer stores handing out MSDOS boot floppies to people who bought new computers then shaking people down when they accused them of piracy. This is not hyperbole, but first-hand experience on the other end of this equation. So believe me or not, I only make gaming and MMO + UGC-related web services for a living (or did, because now I do 3D, but anyway my point is still germane), and have done many SQL scripts to search user data for all sorts of things. It's not even a question of paranoia but common sense.

Don't give up your campaign notes or even journals to these closed proprietary online things. There is no shortage of ways you can maintain your own control over your intellectual "efforts" (even if you don't think they belong to others...if I make 20 different versions of my character before hitting paragon to find the one I like the best...I like that to be an option that doesn't depend on the fact that I didn't pay for DP Insider this month)

Also, sorry for being a bit bitter, but I requested a refund for october and never received it, so yeah, Wotc's credibility is nil with me. I do like the latest changes to Hybrid Paladin DC mark and hope these tools work great, but just please don't assume anything valuable you stick in the new CB will remain there or totally screw you or your campaign over when there's a crash, some new pricing scheme, servers down, data lost, whatever. It's a single point of failure and I've seen it a million times. Don't buy the idea that a centralized storage is for the user's benefit. It's not. At all.

caveat emptor.

 

[Holy Bovine]

Who cares if the person redeeming the scratch off isn't the person who bought the book?

You will when some yahoo has gone through the book in the store and written down the code from the book you bought and it is now useless to you.

Of course they can seal the books - preventing people from browsing them and upping the production costs. This works for software as the packaging is hard to break into unnoticed in a store. It still happens though.

 

[JoeGKushner]

1. Tiles. I'm not talking about VTT but rather, jpegs properly sized of the various tiles that WoTC products that I can then copy and print out at my lesiure. Think Fat Dragon or something along those lines.

2. Tokens. As the above.

3. Lower the price. Internet access only is a limitation. The depth of that depends on where you're at. Eliminate the 3/6 month plan and keep a one month plan and a yearly plan but at a low rate on the latter.

4. Be as upfront and clear about any potential IP/copyright/etc... details as the tools roll out. Hide nothing. Be clear.

 

[Ahrimon]

1. Tiles. I'm not talking about VTT but rather, jpegs properly sized of the various tiles that WoTC products that I can then copy and print out at my lesiure. Think Fat Dragon or something along those lines.

I think it would be fairly simple to build a tile mapper (like the already have) and then when your done it generates a full size PDF/whatever on their end that you can save. That would eliminate sending everyone full size versions of all of the tiles which would be quickly available elsewhere.

Something like that would practically garuntee my subscription. I've been dying for a simple program to print out my own maps.

Of course, nothing would stop someone from building layout with all the tiles and then just using a photo editor. But that's but that's a whole lot of work for not much gain. And if they watermarked the files, it makes it that little bit harder.