As I was working on my campaign with the new Monster Builder something hit me: I’m prepping for D&D, and I haven’t opened one book. This is significant. For years , the game has been played with a stack of books being carried around on a backpack from game to game, and soon, that era will be over.
Sure, some of you will say that PDF’s already made that a reality, but I counter that you had the option to have dead tree material to play with if you so chose. I believe that with DDI, D&D is positioning itself to one day be an all digital game, and that published material will eventually be phased out. Why? Because it makes too much sense.
I don’t see the need for the company to keep publishing books, with the expenses and risk that go along with it, if they can just adopt a subscription based digital model. The door is wide open with DDI, and even though they haven’t released subscription numbers, my guess is they’re doing alright. We haven’t seen a “Try DDI free for a week!” yet, meanwhile KOTS and the quick start rules are available for download on their site.
There’s a lot more money to be made by charging a monthly fee than there is trying to get me to buy the latest book that comes out. I picked up the Eberron Campaign Guide at Border’s and then put it right back on the shelf when I saw the $40 price tag. Yes, I know Amazon is cheaper but that’s not the point. If I’m going to be charged $70 yearly, and I’m going to get the contents of the PHB3, PHB4, PHB5, well guess what? I’m not buying those books. I don’t own the PHB2 for example, but use its classes in my games. It’s fairly obvious to me at least, where my particular game is headed. The Monster Manual I own has become bathroom reading material, to put it crudely.
Fifteen years ago, nobody would have predicted the fundamental change the music industry has gone through in recent years, or the slow and predictable decline of newspapers. Fifteen years ago I had to put a cartridge in my Super Nintendo to play a game. Today, while yes, the physical media still exists (for now), I can download a game on XBOX Live and never touch a disk to play it. Movies can be ordered On-Demand, take a look at the outlook for Blockbuster Video if you’d like.
I’m no expert, but I think tangible media is slowly dying, and it’s naive to think our hobby’s not a part of that trend. Not now, not in 3 years, but one day in the near future. In my case, I welcome it, and I’m looking forward to the digital tools that are yet to come.
www. Newbie DM .com 
mudbunny
July 31, 2009
I think that there is one big barrier to getting the game of D&D to go entirely digital and it is a portable viewer for the books. Bringing a laptop to the table, with all the added distractions that it possibly brings with it (and I am not discounting the advantages) is a hurdle that a lot of groups are not willing to make. A small, portable reader on the other hand, would be a lot easier to stomach for a significant number of groups. For the DM, assuming that access to the compendium (as well as any other future DM DDI tools that are more oriented towards use during actual gameplay), tablet PCs will need to be widely available for that to gain a significant foothold.
newbiedm
July 31, 2009
Yeah, but look at the speed by which tech develops… It’s easy to assume that in 5-6 years there will be 15 different versions of the Kindle, in full color with touch screens…
Why not?
Who would have thought of an Ipod Touch 10 years ago?
Mike
July 31, 2009
you should check out this blog post http://www.squaremans.com/?p=105 its along the same lines as what your saying. The idea is making the core game free since no one will realy know the rules. Then players buy classes,powers,items with micro transactions
im right there with you in seeing that this is where things are going, and that wotc needs to be there first.
mudbunny
July 31, 2009
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I think that the game will tend more and more towards a completely digital (perhaps with dead-tree versions available for a premium??) version of the game. And the technology will end up getting there. There are some really nice touch-screen and touch-screen software packages out there that are starting to enter the marketplace. I just think that currently, it is still at the stage of the $1000 VCR.
I am however not sure whether it will be a big game (D&D, WoD, PFRPG) that will take the first step, or if the first move towards completely digital will be taken by a smaller company that doesn’t have a lot of inertia resisting change.
Rev. Lazaro
July 31, 2009
My 2 coppers:
I’m all for the progression of digital media and I think it’s very realistic in this economy for both publishers and customers alike to embrace it. That said, however, I think Print needs to be kept, or some kind of physical product. I order a ton of stuff online like anyone else does, but I still make the pilgrimage of an hour drive to a small store in a nearby town just to have the physical and social experience.
Oh, yes, the social experience! That, to me, is what the gaming hobby is about in the first place. Sure, we can meet other gamers online, but to me it doesn’t hold a candle to the face to face gatherings like you can find in a game shop.
I recently just bought a year of DDI, but I also plan on using that to help me decide which physical books to purchase. I was excited about the digital movement for a while; but I found laptops cumbersome (even netbooks), and there’s just something nice about passing books around.
I’m embracing the digital options; but I don’t want it to become the standard. I want to own my games, not licensed to use them under a terms of service or subscription fee. I can handle that stuff for software in general, but for my make believe games I still want a hard copy 😉
But, to be fair, I suppose all is well as long as we even have something as simple as the option to print out our own copies.
Sean Brady
July 31, 2009
I am still buying the 4e books (because the look so nice on my self), but I take your point. I still use the DMG every week to look up treasure parcels and read through bits that I think will be relevant. DDI, CB and now the MB are a big part of my prep, and I think that as the adventure tools progress it will be less and less likely that I will grab one of those nice books off of my shelf.
I agree 100% on the XBOX live stuff. I am having more fun playing the download games than I do with most of the games I have purchased on disks.
Daniel M. Perez, The Gamer Traveler
July 31, 2009
I think I’m somewhere there with you. I don’t think printed books will be completely phased out, but who knows what the future brings. Topics like this make me want to create time out of thin air so I can do The Digital Front podcast once more.
Jeremy
July 31, 2009
Embrace the digital future…but not through WOTC…well, not if you use a Mac and don’t fancy paying for feature on DDI that won’t work on your OS. Just a thought.
jdg
Chris
July 31, 2009
You posit this within a week or so of the Kindle “1984” debacle? Brave man NewbieDM!
Sure, digital tools are a useful aid to DMing and play, but I sincerely doubt whether proprietary format (be it DDI or successor, locked-in iGadgets, or DRM-infested, home-phoning Kindle-a-likes) will be the way ahead.
I can’t see people being entirely comfortable with a subscription-based, proprietary RPG format when we all *know* it’s in the best interest of the company to kill support for a game when their next new shininess comes out. The old canard of TSR/WOTC “coming round and burning all your old books” when the next edition comes out is – at long last – a technical possibility.
And don’t imagine that the industry won’t *try* to make this happen; it’s in their financial interest that it does. Ask WOTC’s previous edition pdf customers how they felt about this particular Niemöller progression when it happened to them…
To paraphrase Pratchett’s Wee Free Men: “Nae Kindle! Nae DDI! We willnae be fooled agin!”
Scott
July 31, 2009
The only things I need to open a book for now are the encounter building guidelines and treasure parcels in the DMG. Heck, even at the game table, when a player asks how X works my first reaction is to do a Compendium search. I adjusted to having a laptop behind the screen a long time ago, and it’s especially nice now that I can leave the books where they lie.
Kameron
July 31, 2009
I meant to submit this post for the RPG Blogger carnival a few months back about the future of D&D. It incorporates the idea of digital rules and tabletop.
wickedmurph
July 31, 2009
The Kindle isn’t the only option here. Ebook readers like the ones from Sony don’t have proprietary software, and have native PDF support. The fact that all the 4e tools except the Compendium are downloadable, and that I can download pdf copies of the magazines makes me feel a lot more sanguine about the “next edition”.
I have a DDi account, and I really want an ebook reader. I might go with a netbook, just so I can access both my pdf’s and compendium on the same machine. In general, I LOVE the idea of having all my gaming books and reference materials on a small, portable machine. And the concept of searchable databases for stat and rule info – I refuse to do without it now.
While I admit that there is something nice about a big hardcover rulebook, in purely utilitarian terms, it’s archaic. I like em, but not enough to want to carry em around.
newbiedm
July 31, 2009
Just to be clear, I meant the article, as not just an rpg shift towards digital, but a general publishing-wise shift. Books, newspapers, etc…
@jeremy: In the short-term yes, the MAC thing is correct for the current DDI tools. But understand that my article is meant as a look towards a complete shift of content delivery to a digital model, disregarding mac/pc compatibility.
katanageldar
August 8, 2009
Wizards needs to seriously get with the times and stop being so paranoid in rgeards to releasing PDFs. It’s like the music industry in 2001. People want it cheaper and easier and books are somewhat harder to get than CDs.
And how much easier is it to send a PDF of the main gaming book to people in your group than have them fork out the $50 to $80 to get one of their own?
Neal Hebert
August 10, 2009
Newbie, I disagree with much of this for numerous reasons.
First off, I love DDI. I love the digital tools. I use them frequently.
But print books aren’t going anywhere because it simply isn’t smart to completely go digital. Joseph Goodman talked about his take on the digital market at Kobold Quarterly (just go to the Web site and do a search, I’m not sure how to linky this in the comments).
Second, you link to a Newsweek article about the Kindle but it’s kind of optimistic about the chances/impact of the device. I’d recommend you take a look at the piece on the Kindle 2 and the other eReaders in the last issue of The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker), which reveals the demographics of the people who are buying these devices and the genres of the books they read (think Oprah viewers, trashy romance novels).
While I’ll be the first to note that the RPG Bloggers Network gives the impression that all gamers are Web savvy technophiles, if you read interviews with all of the big RPG makers you’ll come to the conclusion that the type of people on the blogosphere amount to a niche of a niche. Most gamers – especially new gamers – seem much more likely to pick up a book in their local hobby shop or Barnes and Noble than they are to sign up for a subscription service. The books – complete with the great art – are a physical product to get the customer on the hook for the subscription services and supplements (the real money-makers).
As for newspapers and stuff, as a former newspaper man under the age of 30 I’m a big proponent of going digital – but going digital amounts to changing the newspaper business completely (and probably in ways that makes it unsustainable in its current form, leaving loads of people unemployed).
That being said, going digital and embracing new media means something different for magazines than it does for newspapers. Newspapers are being replaced by the Internet because they’re the repository of immediate, short form information – something that the Internet can readily replace with a newer generation. Magazines are a bit harder to replace. Though Newsweek and Time have both used the digital revolution to justify getting shittier and shallower, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist haven’t gone anywhere (indeed, The Economist is the only magazine that boasts increasing subscriptions every year even with the advent of new media).
Kobold Quarterly has both print and .pdf formats – and if you haven’t seen issue 10 in print, you’re really missing out (I actually feel bad for our subscribers who only buy us in .pdf). And though I hope KQ continues to grow, I’ll be kind of disappointed to see it on eReaders any time soon – barring a significant jump in the hardware of the eReaders, all of our charts, tables and art will look extremely shitty in that format.
Speaking for me only. Others at KQ might disagree with some of this!
pinterest
March 6, 2013
can i use your article on my website, if you allow?