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If you are playing (or planning to play) Dungeons and Dragons 4E, I would strongly recommend that you subscribe to D&D Insider.  The D&D Insider includes D&DI News, a kind of newsletter about Dungeons and Dragons, Character Builder which (to me) is a simply indispensable tool when it comes to creating my character, D&D Compendium which is a kind of an online Encyclopedia about all things D&D, and the Dungeon and Dragon Magazines.

All these features are of course very useful (especially if you are the Dungeon Master).  And they are certainly a handy way to save money.

If you are a player the most useful features (in my opinion) are the Character Builder and the Dragon Magazine. 

Character Builder

I don’t know about you, but I am always forgetting something when it comes to calculating my ability scores, my defenses, or my powers.  And if I am making my own character sheet, I am definitely and absolutely going to forget to use my action point at least once in any given game.  But with Character Builder, there is no danger of any of that.  It calculates your stats for you, tells you your range and what to add on all your powers, color-codes your at-will, encounter, utility and daily powers and creates a huge icon called “action point” on your character sheet.  In short, it makes creating your character easy.  Plus the Character Builder includes a “Shopping” section which you can use to equip your character using the equipment described in all the books published thus far.  You decide what abilities and weapons you are going to have and let the computer cross-reference all the books for you.

The Dragon Magazine

The Dragon Magazine is, in my opinion, a really helpful tool for creating the psychology of your character.  In a game I just started for example, I play a Deva Bard.  Not only can I simply not sing but it was really hard for me to imagine what a Deva is like.  According to Player’s Handbook 2, devas are beings who are constantly reborn, who once served the gods and who are committed to fighting evil.  They are also reborn fully grown and have dim memories of all their past lives.  Millennia worth of memories.  How does one go about relating to (or even conceptualizing) a being like that?  This was more than an academic question.

After all, Dungeons and Dragons, is basically your chance to get together with a group of like-minded people and tell a story through your character.  And if you can’t figure out what makes your character “tick” then you will have a pretty hard time telling that story.  Chris Sims article “Ecology of the Deva” was thus indispensable to me.  This article walked me through the history of the devas (the various myths surrounding them), their physiology, appearance, life cycle, psychology, even what a Deva considers leisure (and how important leisure is to him/her).  Reading this very in-depth background piece made the Deva seem more accessible and playing a Deva fun.

Saving Money

And of course the D&D Insider is a great way to save money.  Consider: a typical Dungeons and Dragons manual, be it the Players Handbook or the Eberron  Player’s Guide cost between $35-$30 per book.  Sure, you can get them cheaper on amazon or (if you’re lucky) e-bay but with Wizards of the Coast publishing at least one new book every month, that’s still a lot of money to spend on a game.  And let’s be honest here: are you really going to have the time to read that library of books?  The D&D Insider contains all the information in those books and you can either pay in installments (currently it’s $7.95 per month but normally it’s $10 per month) or you can pay $60 for one year.  That’s quite a difference especially in these times.

And so I repeat, if you’re planning on playing a 4th Edition game anytime soon, I would strongly recommend getting a subscription to D&D Insider.

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