What kind of take-away/offline material does D&D Insider (DDI) give you?

Question

This relates to another question that was just recently asked:

• What is DDI (D&D Insider)?

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What kinds of materials does DDI give you that you retain access to "offline" (including if you were to let your subscription lapse)?

At one point the Dragon and Dungeon magazines were called out as being available as PDFs at the end of the month, but I haven't seen mention of this elsewhere. If so, are you able to get access to older magazine issues from before your subscription started? Do Character Builder updates stay valid at the point you last updated them, or do you have to connect to get them to work?

Answer 1

Basically you keep what you've already got:

• any Dragon/Dungeon magazine PDFs already downloaded

• the current update status of the Character Builder and Monster Builder

What you do lose is:

• access to the Compendium

• access to not yet downloaded issues of Dragon/Dungeon

• access to the Flash utilities and updates for the CB/MB with new material

Answer 2

Baelnom has given a good set of basic info for what happens when you end your subscription. I'm going to more directly answer the questions in your last paragraph.

• The Dungeon and Dragon magazines release articles throughout the month in PDF format. At the end of the month, they are compiled into 1 PDF for each magazine. Although they leave the individual article PDFs available, you should prefer the whole magazine version as there are occasionally updates made.
• While your subscription is active you can download all older magazines
• Your character builder stays updated as it was when your subscription ran out. You can continue to use it.

For folks that don't need everything always up to date or want to save some money it will work out fine to get a one month subscription every 6 months or so.