The Outsider
Well, it’s the end of May, and the D&D 4th Edition release draws ever nearer. Sixteen days or so as of this writing. I’ve been on the case since April 1st, and am eagerly awaiting for my lovely pre-ordered package of goodness to arrive from Amazon on that fateful day. Then comes a lot of reading, and prepping with my players, fits and starts and random asides, and the eventual lurching shift into first gear and a big happy forward vector on our maiden 4th-Edition voyage. Can’t wait.
Something that’s not on my to-do list, however, is signing up for a subscription to the Insider pay-a-monthly-fee-for-content service from Wizards. You can count me among what I’m sure will be the sizeable ranks of D&D Outsiders.
The reasons? Several. Not into paying a monthly fee for much of anything other than utilities. Skeptical (very much so) about the value added. Expectation that the most useful/vital material will make it to the free side of the net. Hopeful that freely-available community content will be superior in most ways.
Mostly it’s philosophical, though. I’ve always seen the D&D rules as a framework and guide, a starting point to be fleshed out and enlarged upon by using your own imagination, and helped along by the ideas and creativity of your fellow players as well. I have to really crank the dial on the Wayback machine to find a time when I bought any printed supplemental material, either. At least back in 1988 the stuff still came out relatively slowly, and so each book, no matter how shoddy or useless, was still perhaps noteworthy. Greyhawk was the last canned campaign setting that has any meaning to me… nowadays I figure the single greatest reward to running a campaign is in creating and sharing your own unique vision of a setting.
The feeling I get as we inch up to the starting line today is that additional Wizards content will be a chronic ailment: there will always be a bit more of it every week, and it’s never going to stop. Perhaps eventually it will coalesce into a thrice-per-year cycle of related updates, a la Magic, which might make it a bit more useful. Or not. Certainly, no one really wants to play against a moving target. But the irony is that in the face of ever more persistent and skillfully produced and marketed extras, fatigue is the result, and it makes it that much easier to ignore it all.
We’ll see.
Posted on May 22nd, 2008 at 3:10 pm. About 'The Outsider'.
Dude - if you are willing to wait a few months for the expanded rules to make it out of “playtest” and into print, then there is no need to hurry up and be subscribed.
If you have zero intention of using the WotC game table to play games with your old college buddies who live in other towns (sniff, sniff), then you don’t need to be an insider.
If you can live with hand-written character sheets, or you can find some other third party utility to help with generating NPC sheets, etc., then once again you don’t need to be subscribed.
As I have argued in my blog, WotC has a terrible track record at delivering digital products worth paying for.
If they DO deliver what they have promised, then it IS an OK value, especially if you are generating NPCs within minutes and dropping them into an online game later that night. If that’s not your goal, then you may very well not need the insider subscription.
However, don’t go knocking on subscription pricing models in general. Netflix is a wonderful thing, and if you think that’s a scam, then you should go back to lighting fires with tinder and flint.