Virtual Tabletops

Two very significant things happened this week:

• Paizo announced on Saturday that they are developing a new Virtual Tabletop application. Details are scarce at this point in time, but it looks like it will be free-to-use, with the option of micropayments (or similar) in order to access maps and handouts for their Adventure Path products.
• WotC have cancelled their Virtual Tabletop, citing a general lack of interest.

Now, it's worth noting that I have never used a Virtual Tabletop. Indeed, at the present time I have absolutely no interest in a VTT - I prefer face-to-face play, and at the moment I'm involved in all the gaming that I can fit into my schedule.

But three years ago, I would have considered the VTT to be the "killer app" of WotC's DDI offering. Indeed, had they leveraged it right, that would have been the one thing that would have got me to subscribe to the DDI.

The key thing is this: three years ago, I was in a position where I had a lot more free time, I had significant interest in gaming, but had very little access to a physical group. That is, I wanted to play, I had time to play, but I wasn't at that time able to play.

What I was hoping for (and I suspect what WotC would have liked to offer) was for them to have a VTT solution where a person could go online, log in to DDI at any time of the day or night, and within 30 minutes have a party assembled and ready to go. With enough people in the DDI community, that should have been possible. Moreover, this would have meant that the more people joined the DDI community, the more valuable the subscription would become, as the more likely it would be that I could find a suitable group at a suitable time (and, indeed, been able to weed out those people I didn't want to play with).

And that's probably how they should have worked it:

• Sell the VTT software at a low cost (or even free)
• Sell access to adventure maps/handouts/etc on a micropayment basis
• Allow people to input their own maps/handouts/adventures, and make those available to all DDI subscribers
• Allow people with the VTT installed to play for free, but...
• Have DDI act as a clearing-house, enabling people to contact the other 80k+ subscribers, and thus find people to assemble adventuring parties.

Alas, it was not to be.

I fear that this bodes ill for the DDI as a whole. The current offering consists of two e-magazines (Dragon and Dungeon, each a poor shadow of their printed selves), a Character Builder (4e), a Monster Builder (4e), and a Compendium (4e). As a tool for playing 4e games, these are all extremely useful, even indispensable.

But when the time comes to move to 5e, both PCs and monsters will be significantly changed. This means that the respective Builders will no longer be useful - they would need to be rewritten almost entirely. Meanwhile, the Compendium could be repurposed, but that's only because it's basically just a database with a fancy front-end - each part of which can be redone without too much difficulty. The problem there is that the data won't remain useable, so at the very least there will be a big data-entry job to be done.

The upshot of this is that I now expect WotC to announce that there will be no DDI for 5e. Instead, they'll take the magazines free-to-view (and, alas, probably a shadow even of their current selves), and leave the 4e tools running as-is, but without any significant support or updates. In time, as the DDI subscriber numbers wane, it will cease to be even marginally profitable, at which point they'll pull the plug entirely.