The new online CB has taken a lot of heat recently for all the things it can’t do. Those things have been discussed to death, as well as why WotC should be burned to the ground for not including said options in the first place. Instead of more discussions in that vein, I’d like to use this space as a place to compile suggestions and workarounds to solve the problems of those who’d like to use the new builder now, but don’t feel it yet has the functionality for them to do so.
There’s no question that the CBO is not perfect, but I think it is useable. If you disagree, I respect your opinion, but please refrain from posting it here. Instead, let’s use our combined brainpower to figure out a way to get the results we want from the CBO despite its shortcomings.
Here are mine:
Inherent Bonuses – My group (which uses inherent bonuses) discovered that the CBO can calculate and use inherent bonuses, it just lacks a way to turn them on (thanks RadiatingGnome, also an ENWorld poster, for the discovery). If you want to make a character with inherent bonuses in the CBO, it’s a simple matter of importing a character file from the old builder that has them turned on.
However, to keep it really simple, use the old builder to create an empty character. Turn the inherent bonuses on and save the character file. Now, any time you want to create a character in the CBO with inherent bonuses, just import this file and build from there. The character in the new builder will have inherent bonuses, and they will calculate and grow correctly as you level.
Bonus Feats – My group also gets an Expertise feat free at 5th level. We can’t add house ruled feats, so what we do is include mathematically significant feats (like expertise) to the CBO (so that it calculates them into the character sheet). The other (bonus) feats we type into the Campaign Notes. For all intents and purposes, the end result is the same as it was with the old builder except 2 feats show up in a different spot.
If you want all feats together, you can take advantage of a bug (while it lasts) that prints out feats on the character sheet even after they’ve been retrained. Simply retrain the mathematically significant feats over ones that aren’t. They’ll all be printed in the Feats section, and your Expertise will still total correctly.
Exporting – I’m sure most people have done something like this as well, but we needed a way to be able to e-mail our character sheets to our DM and to one another. To achieve this, we print the character sheet to a .pdf (I use PDFcreator) at a much lower quality (150 dpi – you can find this by clicking "settings", then "advanced" when printing to the .pdf). The resulting .pdf of your character sheet is not only small enough to be attached to an e-mail, it’s also easy to print, solving an issue I’ve read some are having with printing the CBO character sheets.
House Ruled Items – Admittedly the wonkiest fix of the bunch, but DM-created items are really just words on a page. If you create a +3 Sword of Awesomeness for your player, the +3 is the only part that makes any change to the character sheet. Equip a +3 magic sword, and type the properties into Campaign Notes or write them on the item card.
Please post your own suggestions, improvements, and workarounds here (assuming there are some) as well as other CBO sticking points that you’re having trouble resolving.
[FONT="]Clearly none of these solutions will work for everyone, and if they are not for you, that’s fine. But be a pal and don’t pop in just to let us all know that. This thread is about making lemonade, not throwing lemons at one another. [/FONT]
There’s no question that the CBO is not perfect, but I think it is useable. If you disagree, I respect your opinion, but please refrain from posting it here. Instead, let’s use our combined brainpower to figure out a way to get the results we want from the CBO despite its shortcomings.
Here are mine:
Inherent Bonuses – My group (which uses inherent bonuses) discovered that the CBO can calculate and use inherent bonuses, it just lacks a way to turn them on (thanks RadiatingGnome, also an ENWorld poster, for the discovery). If you want to make a character with inherent bonuses in the CBO, it’s a simple matter of importing a character file from the old builder that has them turned on.
However, to keep it really simple, use the old builder to create an empty character. Turn the inherent bonuses on and save the character file. Now, any time you want to create a character in the CBO with inherent bonuses, just import this file and build from there. The character in the new builder will have inherent bonuses, and they will calculate and grow correctly as you level.
Bonus Feats – My group also gets an Expertise feat free at 5th level. We can’t add house ruled feats, so what we do is include mathematically significant feats (like expertise) to the CBO (so that it calculates them into the character sheet). The other (bonus) feats we type into the Campaign Notes. For all intents and purposes, the end result is the same as it was with the old builder except 2 feats show up in a different spot.
If you want all feats together, you can take advantage of a bug (while it lasts) that prints out feats on the character sheet even after they’ve been retrained. Simply retrain the mathematically significant feats over ones that aren’t. They’ll all be printed in the Feats section, and your Expertise will still total correctly.
Exporting – I’m sure most people have done something like this as well, but we needed a way to be able to e-mail our character sheets to our DM and to one another. To achieve this, we print the character sheet to a .pdf (I use PDFcreator) at a much lower quality (150 dpi – you can find this by clicking "settings", then "advanced" when printing to the .pdf). The resulting .pdf of your character sheet is not only small enough to be attached to an e-mail, it’s also easy to print, solving an issue I’ve read some are having with printing the CBO character sheets.
House Ruled Items – Admittedly the wonkiest fix of the bunch, but DM-created items are really just words on a page. If you create a +3 Sword of Awesomeness for your player, the +3 is the only part that makes any change to the character sheet. Equip a +3 magic sword, and type the properties into Campaign Notes or write them on the item card.
Please post your own suggestions, improvements, and workarounds here (assuming there are some) as well as other CBO sticking points that you’re having trouble resolving.
[FONT="]Clearly none of these solutions will work for everyone, and if they are not for you, that’s fine. But be a pal and don’t pop in just to let us all know that. This thread is about making lemonade, not throwing lemons at one another. [/FONT]
