what happens if your subscription runs out, and what subscribing gets you.
A subscription gets you access to everything we offer. It also allows you to view other subscribers content that they have chosen to share (either with you personally, with their friends, or with subscribers). Settings (World Builder Districts) are the only things that can be set to Public, meaning anyone, even those people without a subscription, can view them.
If your subscription expires, you, and others, will no longer be able to view and/or edit your content. Your stuff will be retained, with your account, and available to you immediately if you choose to resubscribe.
How does it interact with a group? Will I need to convince my entire table to buy in? Will there be group rates?
You'll get the best experience if everyone is using the system, and that does require that everyone have an account. Having said that, there's no reason everyone needs to use The City of Brass.
As a player, it offers you an excellent resource for storing and managing your characters. You won't need to carry around paper sheets, you can easily track things like hit points, fate points, etc.
As a GM, you get access to both World Builder and Story Builder. Your setting can be made public, allowing your players to view it regardless of whether they have an active account. Your adventures in Story Builder are visible only by you, but that's almost certainly the desired privacy setting anyhow.
What you miss out on is Campaign Manager features. You can use Campaign Manager, of course, but it's really meant to be a shared resource between players and GMs alike. This is where GMs are going to post things such as game recaps or house rules. Players w/out a TCoB account won't be able to view this stuff.
Does the world builder/ campaign manager have a DM/player view?
Yes.
World Builder addresses this through special page sections visible only to the GM (really, visible only to the District/setting owner and anyone that has been given editing privileges).
Campaign Manager has GM only sections. The Campaign originator is the GM, and automatically gets access to a number of things including:
- Character sheets for characters added to the campaign
- GM notes (pages visible only by the GM)
- Story Builder links (for linking the adventure)
What does program offer over other existing sites like EpicWords/ Obsidian Portal?
I'm not an expert on other folks products. The best I can do is try to explain what it does, and answer specific questions you might have. I believe we offer a wider range of functionality than other systems, we will do so at a very reasonable subscription rate, available to you on any device of your choosing.
WOTC has recently issued Cease notices to quite a few fan created online character generator. How will City of Brass avoid this? Do they have a deal or license to produce this?
We are not making use of WOTC, or any other companies, intellectual property without permission.
For games with an OGL, we'll build in stock rules. For other games, the system has been designed to be flexible and useful to any game. Games w/out an OGL will require more work from the user as we cannot provide stock material.
