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[RogerWilco]

Originally Posted by Mustrum_Ridcully

Well, Roger, the Character Generator from DDI is in closed beta now ... and pretty good so far.

Thank you for replying to me.

As I said, given the history WotC has with their various past software venues, I'm very reluctant to trust them to get it right this time. Not so much their initial effort, but more how long and well they'll support it during the entire lifetime of the product. They have a history with the interactive atlas, MasterTools/E-Tools, Gleemax, MtGO.

(only accessible to DDI subscribers)

Well, that would be problem one. I'm not interested in 4e, until they have at least the Druid class included, so I'm currently not signed up for DDI.

But of course, it will never run on a Mac

This would be an even bigger obstacle. If you use a Mac, do you have to pay less for the DDI as you can't use the Character Generator?

My point was, that under the old SRD3.5, if you could not use or didn't want to use the tools provided by WotC (E-Tools), you could write your own. Through CMP, you could even buy the datasets legally for the books you owned. With the new system, you have no options, if you can't use what WotC provides, you're out of luck.

I have no insight into how much datasets CMP sold, and if WotC made any money of those, but I wanted to make it known that the availability of both the tool and the datasets in a legal and supported way, has made me buy a lot more books and spend several hundreds od dollars in datasets.

I appreciate CodeMonkeyPublishing a lot, that they have continued to support and bugfix the datasets over the past two years, without making a dime, as WotC didn't allow them to sell anything anymore already 1.5 years before the release of 4e. Unfortunately even that's going to end now.

The way WotC pulled the plug on E-Tools and PCgen support almost overnight has left me with very little confidence that they\ll do a better job supporting their new tools. "Once burnt, twice shy" I tihnk they say in America?