I’m still not quite recovered on sleep from Gen Con, but I’m not going to let that stop me from bringing you your weekly update on D&D Insider. First I want to make sure you’re aware of everything that has gone on around our website in the last week and then I want to talk some about the festivities in Indianapolis last weekend. Meanwhile for those of you who are only interested in new toys to play with, feel free to skip to the end or click here (please note: you must be pre-logged in to Facebook).

Compendium Update

Last Wednesday we pushed live an update to the D&D Compendium. The Compendium now includes both a monster tab and also some advanced search options. In addition, the Compendium is now using data not just from the Player’s Handbook, but also from Dragon and Dungeon Magazines as well. You can read patch notes here and the official thread for Compendium feedback here. Even better, Compendium developer Cort Odekirk has been let out of his cage and he’s starring in several of the threads in the D&DI General forum. Feel free to take your feedback and suggestions straight to the source.

One piece of feedback that we have gotten consistently is that folks wish the Compendium had the basic rules of the game built into it. Things like “concealment” or “bull rush” are not there right now because we’ve always envisioned the Compendium as a repository for the giant pile of options that will accumulate over the years as new books and magazine articles add more and more rules elements to the game to choose from. That said, we hear you and I can promise that it’s something we’ll look into. I saw a lot of people at Gen Con looking things up in the Compendium on their iPhones as they played, but I know it would be even more useful if you could look up basic timing rules in addition.

Magazines

We continue to release new articles of Dragon and Dungeon multiple times per week. The Scales of War Adventure Path is getting particularly good feedback. Over the course of the next 18 months, it will take players all the way from 1st level to 30th. I also enjoyed the article on traps written by Matt Sernett and posted earlier this week. All of you have probably checked out at least one PDF by now, but have you told your friends about them? They’ll be free for at least one more issue, but we’d love to have more people take advantage of the free trial because we feel like the magazines alone already justify the $4.95/month price that you get if you’re willing to commit to a year.

Bonus Tools

No big updates this week, not that you guys can see anyway. We do have the next bonus tool ready for testing internally, but I don’t really want to tell you about it until we have a date for releasing it.

One thing I can say about it, that also applies to the currently live Encounter Builder, is that we know folks would like a printer-friendly version of the text. We’ve been working on having a pop-up that has everything formatted nicely, but there’s a bug right now buried somewhere deep in the way Flash and Internet Explorer interact with each other which means that we’re trying to pass too much data all at once into the new window. Even medium-sized encounters fail to display correctly so we turned off that functionality when we pushed out the Bonus Tools two weeks ago. We’re still working on this bug and hope to have it fixed both in the new tool and in the Encounter Builder. For now the work-around is just to cut and paste the text from the current display, but we know we can do better than that.

GenCon/Client Applications

You can see our online coverage of the Gen Con here. We’ve got a number of video interviews, including several D&DI specific ones but lots of other coverage as well. I spent most of my time either doing interviews about D&DI or watching demos of D&DI, but that was by no means the only thing going on. From a big picture point of view, 4th Edition was the big story of the show this year. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting daily allotment sold out by early afternoon each day and Living Forgotten Realms made its debut as well. All the events seemed to fill up pretty quickly and people just seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to play D&D.

As far as D&DI specifically is concerned, we had our Character Builder and Character Visualizer installed on computer kiosks in our booth in the Exhibitor Hall and also in the Sagamore Ballroom where all the RPGA gaming was going on. Folks were free to come up and use them, which they did in large numbers. The Builder seemed to be the real star of the show as a line of folks used it to put together character sheets for the characters they were playing then and there. It was all we could do to keep toner in the printers!

It felt good to have folks actually use the software and then give us almost universally positive feedback. Internally we always feel we can do things better, and in this case we also know folks wanted these tools to come out in June in conjunction with the edition (believe me, that’s what we wanted too), so it was particularly nice to hear that players liked and wanted what we had on display. The experience isn’t perfect yet, but things are working. The software does what it is supposed to do, it doesn’t crash, and it’s only going to get better over time. In upcoming weeks we’ll be focused on bug fixing, polishing the user interface, and making sure our data pipeline is up to the challenge of updating things every month with new rules from the books and magazines.

I did want to call out one feature in particular that seemed to make a lot of people at the show happy: The Character Builder will let you print out Power Cards in addition to printing out your character sheet. We know that a lot of people like to use cards to keep track of which powers they have used in a given encounter, or a given day, and so we’ve included a way to print out cards that have all the rules for each power on them, customized with all the relevant stats and modifiers from your character.

In addition, we had the Game Table installed on a couple of computers where we could run demos. Our focus in the short term is going to be on finishing the Character Builder and I do not expect the Game Table to be up and running publicly this year, but it was nice to hear players express both their desire for the product we are building and also their delight with the functionality that we already have working. This product is going to be awesome once it’s ready and we’re committed to doing it well (and not launching it until then).

I gave a bunch of interviews and there are already reviews of D&DI popping up around the web so I’d encourage you to check those out for an independent viewpoint. (For example, the first one I have seen is here. Even better, if you’re planning to be in Seattle next weekend you can try these out for yourself. We’ll have a pretty similar hands-on-kiosk set-up at PAX.

Dungeons & Dragon: Tiny Adventures

Yesterday we launched a Facebook Application called Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures (note: you must be pre-logged in to Facebook). It’s basically a free game that we’re giving away to Facebook users in an effort to draw more attention to D&D in general and to the D&D Insider free trial in particular. The game lets you choose a character and then send that character off on adventures. You can just check in on your character periodically and read updates (I think of them as postcards from the road) or you can spend lots of time fiddling with potions and inventory. In addition, you and your friends can buff and heal each other so it pays off to get all your friends to play too. We’re pretty happy with it – I think it’s a fun diversion for hard-core D&D players and it’s also a fun introduction for newbies. You should definitely let us know what you think and spread the word that it’s out there.

Randy Buehler
Vice President of Digital Gaming
Wizards of the Coast

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