This is a tough question.

First off, the goal of this post is not to convince you one way or another. The goal is to give you some informed information, so you know what you’d get if you subscribe to D&D Insider, or what you wouldn’t miss if you don’t.

If you play D&D, you’ve probably already spent some money on books; at minimum, the Player’s Handbook (PH), Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG), and Monster Manual (MM). Maybe just the PH, if you’re just a player.  And in truth, you can go on and have a long “career” of D&D gameplay with nothing more. But other books and tools do exist to help give you adventure ideas, advice on gameplay, and to help save you some time by offering ready-made monsters and adventures.

So you may already know about D&D Insider, Wizards of the Coast’s online content, and you may already have decided one way or the other. For starters, this is the pricing:

1 year = $71.40 (which is $5.95 per month)

3 months = $23.85 (which is $7.95 per month)

1 month = $9.95

Here is what you get, if you subscribe:

• Access to all Dragon magazine content = This is content for players and DMs alike, this is an ever-expanding resource of player options. Races, classes, powers, magic items, and just about anything relating to playing the D&D game. You can download a sample issue of Dragon here.
• Access to all Dungeon magazine content = This is content intended mostly for DMs, including campaign setting lore, serial adventures, standalone adventures, monsters, plot hooks, deities, and other campaign-building ideas. Essentially, it’s ready-made material.  You just need to read it and decide how to apply it to your campaign. You can download a sample issue of Dungeon here.
• D&D Character Builder = A tool that allows you create characters on the fly. It’s not the most intuitive tool there is, but it’s still a big time-saver, and it incorporates character options from all existing D&D articles and books, even ones you may not own. Periodic updates bring in classes, feats, powers, magic items, and other options from new articles and books. The Character Builder is also just a good way to test a class out and see what it feels like.
• D&D Compendium = A searchable database of information from all D&D books, even ones you may not own: Races, classes, deities, items, creatures, paragon paths, epic destinies, rituals, feats, powers, skills, traps.
• D&D Adventure Tools = A suite of tools (still in beta), only one of which, Monster Builder, is available. But the Monster Builder is a very helpful tool for DMs, allowing you to bring up the stats of any published monster and mess with it.  Do you want your characters to face a kobold at level 18?  No problem! Grab something like the normally 4th-level kobold slyblade (skirmisher), and change its level to level 18; all the stats will scale up for you. Until now, the inability in 4E to easily change any monster to any level of play has been a deterrent for some. Want your heroes to face the Tarrasque at 12th level?  No biggie. Scale it down to level 12 with this tool. Now it’s got only 655 hit points! Maybe it’s a baby Tarrasque.  And of course, as its name implies, Monster Builder also lets you create your own monsters.  I wouldn’t say it’s the easiest tool navigate, but it’s a good start for a beta.
• Art and Map Galleries = You can download all maps and all artwork not only from both Dungeon and Dragon magazine but also just about every other book Wizards puts out.

So that’s what you get for your money.  Is any of it necessary?  No.  Is it helpful?  Definitely.  If you’re a DM who plays 4E D&D fairly regularly, then it’s worth considering.  Or even just trying out for a month.  It is a shame that it’s purely digital. I, too, miss the old Dragon and Dungeon print magazines and still have an unwieldy stack at home.  But the truth is, being able to look stuff up in a comprehensive (if clunky) online database is enormously helpful.

If you’re a player, there’s probably no need for everyone in your group to subscribe.  Convince your DM to do so, and he or she can share with you specific player-based Dragon options. You’d probably need DM approval on some things, anyway!

I personally find DDI to worth the money, and I’m not just saying that because I’ve begun to write some the content.  (My debut was the Dungeon article, Fairhaven: Villains & Vagabonds, which detailed some rascals in the Eberron city of Fairhaven.)  I run a play-by-post Eberron campaign and I scan through DDI content pretty often for ideas, ready-made monster stats, artwork, maps (which I mess with in Photoshop and make into my own customized maps, like this one), and more recently the Monster Builder.

Of course, DDI is only good for those who play 4th Edition D&D.  Sure, if you play an older edition, or Pathfinder, or even some other RPG altogether, subscribing will give you access to some cool maps and a ton of artwork, but it’s probably not worth the money.

Even if you aren’t a DDI subscriber, the Wizards’ site still gives you plenty to look at.  The book preview articles may just be advertisements for their products, but they still give you some good player options to work with. And sometimes there’s even free adventures, like “Haruuc’s Tomb: A Novel Adventure.”

So what do you think?  Do you subscribe?  If so, is it worth it?  If not, why not, and since when?!