Boarstorm
First Post
It's not perfect, but that's kind-of what an Index is.
D&D 5E Dungeonscape no more?
It's not perfect, but that's kind-of what an Index is.
From following the dungeonscape twitter, it looked like they felt like they were about to release the iOS version for weeks. In fact, my recollection is that they thought they just had to get to an agreement on the pricing structure with WotC. More than once they thought they'd be announcing the pricing for in app purchases and they never did.
It strikes me that WotC may have decided they weren't happy with how trapdoor wanted to price things. Or perhaps they worried about how they wanted to break up the material. Or maybe they got jumpy about potential piracy. Hard to say. But disagreement about how to charge would have been enough to cause a critical impasse. Trapdoor was funding the development themselves. They were going to offer the app for free. I presume they were going to make their money by taking a cut of in-app purchases.
In that scenario, if you can't agree on price or on the cut, that's pretty much the end of the line.
AD
It strikes me that WotC may have decided they weren't happy with how trapdoor wanted to price things. Or perhaps they worried about how they wanted to break up the material. Or maybe they got jumpy about potential piracy. Hard to say. But disagreement about how to charge would have been enough to cause a critical impasse. Trapdoor was funding the development themselves. They were going to offer the app for free. I presume they were going to make their money by taking a cut of in-app purchases.
In that scenario, if you can't agree on price or on the cut, that's pretty much the end of the line.
AD
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A-freakin-men.
It's not just Silverlight, though. IMO, the approach taken by both WotC and Trapdoor on D&D technologies is fundamentally wrongheaded. Both of them tried to program in all the rules of the game; to have the computer not just keep track of your character/campaign data, but also apply the rules to that data. For example, the character generator walks you through the process of creating a character, making sure you only take skills you're entitled to, feats you're allowed, et cetera, et cetera. And then it crunches all the numbers for you as well.
Why is this wrongheaded? Three reasons:
- The software is much more complex, because it has to have the entire rulebook programmed into it.
- Any time new rules come out, or old rules are revised, you have to overhaul the software to accommodate the changes.
- And the real killer: D&D is played differently at every table. People make house rules. People make homebrewed stuff. The more your application "knows" about the rules, the less useful it is to anyone who doesn't play the game strictly by RAW. (And in 5E with its focus on rulings over rules, even playing strictly by RAW doesn't guarantee that a group will interpret the rules the same way the app designers do.)
A tool like this would be vastly easier to build and maintain, and it would also do a far better job of supporting house rules and homebrewed options. There would still be a few areas where you'd do automatic calculation (e.g., skill bonuses); but even there, the option should exist to turn off autocalc and enter the numbers by hand.
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Astrosicebear
First Post
This is from their features page:
A 3.5E fantasy ruleset accompanies the product but the appearance and function can be fully customized to accommodate almost every RPG system. A Full license is needed to create customizations; the host computer automatically distributes the custom ruleset to the player clients. Community created rulesets are available for 4E and many other commonly used rules systems.
Given the timing it seems to me as if certain milestones were not met. Being burned by being to generous and extending deadlines during the company failing with the 4e tools, it seems they learned their lesson and ended the partnership instead of letting history repeat itself
mcbobbo
Explorer
No, not really. A search doesn't show you every time the author thinks the word was used. It shows you all of them.
SilverfireSage
Explorer
It seems as though the app uses the Basic rules as to try and avoid any sort of legal notice. From what I've seen and used, it's very expandable, and I've already added, modified, and indexed several of my own monsters as well as the basic rules.
My point is this: this app is very functional and looks good. It was (apparently) made by one person in his free time. So it strikes me as very odd that a team of 2-5 professional programmers working on this for 20ish hours or more a week wouldn't be able to make a similar but much more expansive product.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
This genuinely made me chuckle, but most indices are generated using a search function these days. While this was absolutely a concern at one time there's no reason it should still be so.
EDIT: In fairness, where human error still screws up indices is in determining which terms are important enough to include. That is a decision that is still very poorly made in many circles.
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Maybe I'm too optimistic, but to me this looks like a setback. I risk to say we'll definitely get an official online character generator and compendium at some time. I doubt the line will crash and burn for a temporary lack of digital tools- most gamers I know IRL play strictly without them.
delericho
Legend
I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but if I'm using a Character Builder app, I expect it to do all that heavy lifting for me. I don't want to have to reference the generation method in order to know how many feats to choose, which prerequisites apply, and so forth.
Now, it's certainly the case that it would be better if the tool could be configured to apply house rules, but the nature of software necessarily limits what can be done here (and didn't the 4e app provide some limited functionality of this sort?). In any case, if I have to choose between a tool that does the heavy lifting for me but 'locks' me to RAW versus one that doesn't have the lock but doesn't do the work, then I'll take the 'lock' thanks.
YMMV, of course.
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