Solving the DM-drought with the VTT

While responding to Dennis “What a Horrible Night to Have aCurse” Laffey, I suddenly thought of a way to promote DMing via the planned Virtual Table Top they’re working on at WotC.  My first ideas were nothing big, just offering some freebies to DMs, like tokens redeemable for personalized digital items you can use in your adventures.  But then I thought, well, how would they know I was DMing?

 

Obviously, you’d log into the VTT as a DM in order to have access to the DM tools, sorta like you do with Roll20.  Well, how do they know I’m actually DMing and not just futzing around?  They’d count the players as well, and to make sure you and some friends are not just sitting around logged in while you do other things, the VTT can track interactions: dice rolls, moving minis, interacting with your character sheet, etc.  So you’d end up with some sort of algorithm that calculated the number of players, the number of interactions, and the number of hours you played, and gave the DM running the game a score in tokens they could use to buy stuff from a digital store.  They could measure the tokens in Waterdhavian coins or something. 

 

But why stop with digital goodies?  Rack up enough “DM EXP” and maybe you get a physical patch, t-shirt, or dice branded to tell everyone what a dedicated DM you are.  (There will almost certainly be digital “badges” and achievements and the like; that stuff is low-hanging fruit.  I’m thinking what they could do to make everyone sit up and take notice.)  Maybe you get access to exclusive chat boards where you can converse with the designers and get sneak-peeks into upcoming new rules or adventures, and maybe even take part in polls to influence the final shape of the content. 

 

If DMs are, in fact, a bottleneck in the hobby, and WotC can get their VTT off the ground, there are all sorts of cool ways they could encourage people to DM.  And more DMs mean more players paying a monthly subscription to use the VTT and other digital goodies they’ll have on offer.  Yes, there are all sorts of ways to game this system, but this is one area where having a lot of ex-Microsoft people around can be very helpful. 

 

Will WotC do something like this? Damned if I know.  If their marketing data indicates that a lackof DMs actually is a problem, I imagine they’ll at the very least have badges and achievements you can festoon your profile with.  But I have no idea what sort of market research their doing this time, or what they see as their biggest hurdles.