The Gaming Den

Its clear that changes for D&D are on the horizon. How extensive they will be we have little idea of. However, I think I have figured one of the major problems with 4e. The character builder tool is exactly the sort of thing that is BAD for a pen and paper rpg. Its bad for players. Its bad for Dms. Its bad for Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro.

The character generator changes the way casual players approach the hobby and is unlike any other published character generator before it.
Consider for a moment they way you play 3.x, or Shadowrun or pretty much any other rpg. There are a number of situations that act to limit your game in a way that keeps it managable and older material relevant. Basically its these three things

You cannot Play what you don't have. If nobody in your gaming group had the book of 9 swords your games probably didn't have bo9s monsters or characters. If nobody had book of exalted deeds/vile darkness your gaming group probably didn't ever deal with exalted and vile feats and powers.

Everbody in a game is screwed up the same way Before the character builder if you group had house rules or a custom way of doing something you just wrote that on your character sheet and moved on. Everybody in a single gaming group might be screwed up or broken from an outside view, but in all likelyhood they were mostly screwed up in the same way.

There was a real cost to expanding the game This is somewhat related to item 1 but: to get more stuff required the purchase of new material. Most people were unwilling to simply own EVERYTHING so players and DMs acted as filters for their own games. The balance of cost was also fairly equally shared. If a gamemaster wanted to play in a specific campaign world its likely that HE bought that book. If players wanted more options for their ranger/fighter/mage THEY likely bought the sourcebook. This was good for WIzards of the Coast/Hasbro because it actually made there be a reason to keep buying stuff.


Now the real issue. The character builder has totally destroyed all these aspects of table gaming. The character builder

1) Gives players access to EVERYTHING. You build a new character and every option that has ever been printed anywhere is at your fingertips. This seems like a great thing because we all know players love options, even bad and trap options. However, with every option available a lot of players turn to forums/character build websites. Every 4e character is like a 3e character that went insane with dumpster diving. Every option that is not OPTIMAL is discarded. By having EVERY option players end up with the LEAST options because a "best" choice exists for everything. This is directly the fault of the character builder.

2) The character builder results in players having little to no idea how the numbers on their character sheet get there. This is what directly operates against point 2 above. Many players assume that as long as the blue Legal/Houseruled tag under their name says legal that their characters are good to go. Now, yes there is a way to add house rules to the character builder, but all that does is let people who know the program use that to their advantage in making chracters for the table game. Especially when players use "builds" as mentioned above they often have NO IDEA what was added due to what. This problem would exist somewhat with any computer character building program, but 4e updates monthly dumping whole books worth of addtional options on so that it is continually compounding the issue.

3) The final thing the character buidler does even explains some of 4e's falling sales numbers. The characters created with the builder basically need the character builder to be maintained. This hooks people into paying the monthly access fees. However, the character buidler also adds all the latest options/abilities/powers into the game lagging only 1 month behind the printed version.

The problem is obvious: If it REQUIRES the character builder to keep your character managed, but the Character builder also holds ALL the options in ALL the sourcebooks, lets you browse EVERY option, and prints you a character sheet detailing EXACTLY how to use every ability you have on your character sheet, WHY would you EVER purchase another suppliment? 4e characters are NOT found in martial power or arcane power 2. 4e Characters ARE the character builder.

Finally consider that the character builder costs $25 dollars for 3 months (I think, its right around that). 1 subscription lets you download the updates for the character builder AND the advneture tools to 5 computers each month.

4e Presupposes a party of 5 players and a dm. Most groups probably have 2 players that are related or share a household. So $25 dollars split 5 ways.

Hasbro has traded a system where players might buy 1 $30 dollar book a quater for one where players really only need to spend 5 dollars every 3 months to get EVERYTHING. Hell even buying the character builder for 1 3 month period will let you get every ability created to that point. Thats a lot better than buying old sourcebooks!

Really, the character builder is one of the core problems 4e. It changes th game in a way that hurts all parties. Wizards should really rethink this offering.

what is this i don't even

#1 - I sort of agree. Particularly annoying is the list of 1,001 feats that you have to choose from, of which two or three are actually worth taking.

#2 - If the DM has some complicated house rule he wants to use (e.g. more complicated than "you can't take feat X"), he can deal with the paperwork. Too bad for him.

#3 - I wouldn't be surprised if WotC is actually making a decent income from DDI (i.e. more decent than what they might get from churning out only dead-tree splatbooks).

The 'every player is now a major dumpster diver' is the big one for my group. Whenever I want to read an ability a player is trying to use (the printouts sometimes don't match the books), it's a mad scramble to try to figure out which 'book' the new power came from.

I've 'limited' the campaign to just 8 books, but every week it's "can we add xxx book, because there's one line on one page that I want to use for my character"...call me a fogey, but I want the actual print version in my hand, and don't want to buy an ever larger stack of ever more unreadable books (I recently bought PHB 3, but don't see myself actually reading the whole thing, or even more than a necessary page).

Definitely, the dumpster-diving madness is not a good addition to the game.

Of course, in my opinion, the massively bad math that underlies all aspects of the design is the real problem for 4e, but next fantasy campaign will definitely address the dumpster-diving stuff, too.

Doom314 wrote:
I've 'limited' the campaign to just 8 books, but every week it's "can we add xxx book, because there's one line on one page that I want to use for my character"...call me a fogey, but I want the actual print version in my hand, and don't want to buy an ever larger stack of ever more unreadable books (I recently bought PHB 3, but don't see myself actually reading the whole thing, or even more than a necessary page).

Definitely, the dumpster-diving madness is not a good addition to the game.

Well, that's a good idea in theory, but limiting what content players can use doesn't quite work in 4E. Remember, WotC only uses Errata to nerf things, the actual fixes and buffs only come by way of new books and DDI articles.

For instance, until the PHB3 came out all Swordmages had to look in the middle of a Monk beta test article in Dragon to find the all-important math fix feat that would work on a sword used as a weapon AND an implement. Likewise if you want to play a Warlock or Avenger and not completely do less damage than the defender, you have to have feats from some dragon article because WotC can't be bothered to fix those two classes with actual errata when they can put it out as new content instead.

The answer to broken shit is to not write it.

The answer to too many meaningless numbers is to clean up the bonus system.

The only legitimate complaint here is that the char gen takes away incentives to buy books. I would argue that books should contain more than just rules for characters and that books that are simply character supplements are simply not as interesting.

Basically frostburn is a more interesting and better book than complete warrior.

The char gen might be making inherent problems worse or more obvious but it isn't the problem itself.

sake wrote:

Doom314 wrote:
I've 'limited' the campaign to just 8 books, but every week it's "can we add xxx book, because there's one line on one page that I want to use for my character"...call me a fogey, but I want the actual print version in my hand, and don't want to buy an ever larger stack of ever more unreadable books (I recently bought PHB 3, but don't see myself actually reading the whole thing, or even more than a necessary page).

Definitely, the dumpster-diving madness is not a good addition to the game.

Well, that's a good idea in theory, but limiting what content players can use doesn't quite work in 4E. Remember, WotC only uses Errata to nerf things, the actual fixes and buffs only come by way of new books and DDI articles.

For instance, until the PHB3 came out all Swordmages had to look in the middle of a Monk beta test article in Dragon to find the all-important math fix feat that would work on a sword used as a weapon AND an implement. Likewise if you want to play a Warlock or Avenger and not completely do less damage than the defender, you have to have feats from some dragon article because WotC can't be bothered to fix those two classes with actual errata when they can put it out as new content instead.

What you said shows it to be a horrible idea. 4e isn't 3e, where Dragon mags were broken and shoddily tested bullshit. In 4e, that claim is dubiously disproven, but they are outright necessary for constructive errata. Without the weird little content sneak buffs, 4e would be even more of a broken, sloppy mess. The whole system is contingent on the fact that they pump out more shit that you have to buy in hopes that they make your class not suck. Cutting off the direct pipeline means not only do you have to buy and lug around the books for one or two useful powers, but if you miss a fix then congratulations, your class is ass.

The sheer absence of thought put into OP's post given how 4e works and what 4e is almost doesn't deserve a proper reply. I mean seriously, the Character Builder is the only thing that makes building a 4th Edition character not an exercise in soul-crushing tedium. It was and is a brilliant idea.

First of all, there should not have to be math fix feats. You can figure out the math for every class with solar powered calculator during your lunchbreak. We're talking fucking addition here. Releasing products that are not mathematically stable is totally inexcusable when your RNG is a simple uncurved die roll.

The DDI is a completely lazy crutch. "Don't worry, we'll patch it after it goes gold" is the worst thing you can say to a development crew, because they stop even fucking trying.

-Username17

The Character Builder is maddening because it can only accomodate house ruling so far before becoming totally unmanageable as a piece of software. To wit, the CB lets groups to implement house rules by respect to which sources they allow to even show up during char gen (and leveling up). That's important, and like one poster above, I'm limiting my own campaigns to a set number of hardbacks, while DDI-exclusives aren't allowed under any circumstances anyway (for reasons of quality control and of not wanting to create a 'have/don't have the DDI-rare power' rift in my player base).

So source restriction and similar houserules (as in, I table banned dragonborn and tieflings from the get go) are easy to implement. The real catch is with the 'updates' on CB. As was mentioned above, there's a disparity between stuff printed in the DDI and in the books when it comes to specific feats and powers. Sometimes there are even more than 3 versions. And what's REALLY great is when you log on your character onto the CB only to find out that one of your feats was actually errated away... as in, it's gone!
So basically we've got the houserule that we play without WotC updates except for a very small subset thereof. We don't see the need in our own group to nerf Righteous Brand or the Battlerager. The only prob is - the Character Builder will have none of this. It won't let you choose which version of the rules (pre- or post-nerf) you want to use in your group. And that's why for us the CB is useless. The only way to get round is to track down earlier versions on the internet. But that won't really float either. If you want to play with an unerrated version of Martial Power AND with an unerrated version of Martial Power 2, there exists no single version of the CB out there which lets you. So to create such a character you'd have to log on two different versions on the CB, and then try your best to merge the two by doing the paper work yourself. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a handy e-tool to speed up char-gen.

(Just to clarify, I think the CB doesn't accomodate switching between individual rules versions like September 2008 to March 2010 because then it gets 'unmanageable'. That what I was driving at in my first line.)

I have no idea why the character builder doesn't have a change log on errataed items that you could switch between. If nothing else, just to bring peoples' attention to what has changed and how. The fact that a very large number of people will not want to implement a nerf in mid-campaign is important too. But just from a user accessibility standpoint, it's just really messed up that you can select a power that you'd already read and only later notice that the wording has been changed so it does something totally different.

-Username17

Maybe WotC is deliberately obfuscating their screw-ups.