By guest blogger Michael Zenke

Wizards of the Coast plans to supplement? Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, the masterful revamp of the venerable game system that was released Friday, with a new online component.

Called D&D Insider, the service will mark the first time anything of this scope has been integrated with a pen-and-paper title. D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast has not yet provided Wired.com with an expected launch date for the online offering.

Unfortunately, D&D Insider, or D&DI, may be banished to an existence on the fringes of the hobby, all due to bad timing and a bad business decision made by Wizards of the Coast. That's an incredible shame, because at its core D&DI is incredibly ambitious.

First and foremost, it will be a storehouse of knowledge for players and dungeon masters, or DMs. The two magazines (imaginatively named Dragon and Dungeon)

that have long served the Dungeons & Dragons player base will be incorporated into the D&DI site. Regular articles will appear there, offering new options for players looking to improve their characters and new adventures for DMs to run. D&DI will serve as an information storehouse, with players having the option of unlocking online versions of the D&D books for a very small fee. Subscribers will have access to the D&D Compendium, which is a searchable rules-mechanics database, for use as reference.

The most ambitious component of D&D

Insider is a "virtual tabletop" called the D&D Game Table. It's a client that will allow a DM and players to participate together in fights, conversations and role-playing experiences online.



A character model creator called the Character Visualizer will have players customizing their appearances in ways simply not possible with the traditional metal or plastic miniature figurines. A tile-set manipulator will allow a DM to create a dungeon to explore in a short amount of time, and tools will be available for the DM to reference monster descriptions at a glance.

All of this will be tied together by a voice-chat service with special "voice fonts." Participants can actually use masks to disguise their voices, so a young man can sound like an older one, a high-voiced woman like an orc, or even a gruff-voiced male like a female.

The D&D Game Table will utilize VOIP, which will be powered by Vivox.?

The virtual tabletop is a product that has been offered before by various third-party companies, but never with this level of sophistication. It's also never been tied into the core game the way D&DI is, nor coupled with the Dungeon and Dragon magazines – respected publications with a long history of serving the D&D community. In short, D&DI should be a tremendous service.

The only problem, aside from the fact that the service was not available when the D&D 4th Edition books went on sale, is D&DI's price tag.

Details uncorked at D&D Experience earlier this year revealed that Wizards of the Coast is rolling out a subscription model used by many massively multiplayer games. In order to gain access to the service, players will be asked to pay $15 a month. Buying in bulk months ahead of time can reduce that price somewhat – to $13 a month if buying a six-month block or $10 a month for a 12-month block.

For a hobby that has (despite the high prices of the actual D&D books) mostly been a fairly cheap pastime, D&DI's pricing is tantamount to highway robbery. It may sound reasonable – until you consider that in order to participate in an online event, each player will need to be paying this fee. For an average group of four players and a dungeon master, that's a monthly outlay of about $75. Even at the lowest price of $10 a month, that's roughly $50 a month just for that one group.

To be sure, it's a great value for the money – when Dungeon and Dragon were print magazines, they each cost about this much. D&DI offers both magazines in electronic format, plus the convenience of the virtual tabletop. In my eyes, though, this is a huge missed opportunity. Wizards of the Coast is mimicking the pricing schemes of massively multiplayer games like EverQuest and Ultima *Online *from 10 years ago, without considering the advances in player behavior (and business models) that have come since then.

What Wizards of the Coast has a chance to do here is nothing short of inspirational: Reintroduce an entire generation of online-gaming kids to D&D. Get them playing in that online mind-set, but with a whole layer of socialization and personal interaction that just isn't possible in a game like Counter-Strike or even most Massive titles. That monthly fee may look great to the accountants, but for a 12-year-old, that fee might as well be a giant Keep Out sign.

Instead of aping EverQuest, Wizards should be looking to the recent successes of Korean import Nexon, which runs the highly successful (and free to play) titles MapleStory, Audition and Kart Rider. In Korea, these games have millions and millions of players. Here in the United States, they've taken off as well, with MapleStory alone gaining 5 million users since it launched last year. Those users, though they pay no regular monthly fee, make Nexon piles and piles of money every month.

Nexon makes its money through microtransactions, selling in-game items to its players. Instead of selling items, Wizards of the Coast should be thinking about selling time on a small scale. Offer the virtual tabletop service to everyone – for an hourly fee. Most gaming groups meet once a week, and game sessions can go anywhere from an hour to (in the case of marathon gamers) 10 hours or more. Most groups I've played with fell toward the more reasonable number of five or six hours – an enjoyable afternoon/evening with friends.

If Wizards of the Coast were serious about breaking open the online tabletop market, it would offer players the opportunity to buy hours at varying rates. For folks who only want to play once a week, a handful of hours would buy them all the time they needed. That's the typical user, and Wizards would still get a decent amount of money from that transaction. The key is that this type of model includes the other two extremes much better.

Say a kid hears about D&D from his friends and decides to hop online to play with them one night. All he needs to buy are the few hours he'll use to try out the game. He needs no more, no less. With a flat monthly fee, he's given no opportunity to experience the tabletop for himself, to decide if that steep cost is worth it.

UPDATE: D&DI subscribers will be given guest passes to use with members of their gaming group, allowing friends to try to online experience before making a purchase decision, according to a Wizards of the Coast representative.

Marathon gamers, who meet multiple times a week or for longer sessions, fall at the other end of the spectrum. Hourly rates would allow Wizards to make even more money off these players than a flat fee would allow.

This is just an example, an alternative to the subscription model. There are several other ways Wizards could offer this service, including event-based tickets or Nexon's microtransactions. The point here is that a flat fee is a disservice to the potential of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and the virtual tabletop concept.

Wizards has the opportunity to turn this niche hobby into a mainstream success story – but the company is locking that greatness behind a lock and key.

Just this week, the company announced that D&D Insider will see a few months of free-to-play shakeout before the service enters subscription mode.

UPDATE: Wizards will let players test D&DI free for an as-yet-undetermined length of time once the service becomes available. The testing period is dependent on many factors, including the readiness of the D&DI applications, according to the Wizards rep.

My hope is that in that time, Wizards will realize its error. The gate between D&D Insider and the D&D player does more harm than good. The more people rooting through dungeons and slaying monsters, the better.

Michael Zenke blogs professionally for Massively and recreationally for MMOG Nation.

? Correction and editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that D&D Insider has not yet launched. Additional information has also been added throughout to more accurately reflect the current status of Wizards of the Coast's plans for the D&DI rollout.

? Correction: This story has been updated to accurately describe D&DI's voice-chat component.

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