First of all, I'd like to thank everyone so far for their input. I had a strong suspicion that this situation was weighted a bit toward one end of the bell curve, and I think I've had that suspicion confirmed.
The situation has surprised me. I've never really had someone tell me that my character sheet had to be standardized before, and I think there are perhaps other factors in play. After all, whenever I DM for 4E, none of my players have ever complained about me not having an Insider account.
Festivus said:
I can say that while the CB helps to ensure there are no errors on the character sheet, making it a requirement isn't something I would ever have. I have offered to plug in a persons character sheet into my CB and print it out for them before (so we could double check his math), but if they would have said no I would have been fine with it.
Doesn't it work like this, you can buy 1 month of CB and use it forever? Sure you don't get new books but if it had everything you needed. Seems like a small investment for every current power book out there.
This is really a two-part issue to me. First of all... Honestly, I feel that relying on a computer to do things for you is a bad thing. For some people, it enables them to shirk responsibility, or at least, indulge in sloth or ignorance. I sort of got turned off to the character builder when I had a player still playing their character at second level when the party level was at fifth--because the player assumed that I was able to update their experience totals through Insider and the application would notify them when they leveled up. Despite the fact that I didn't have Insider at all, it was still construed as "my fault" because I didn't tell someone that I can't give them experience on Insider. But that's only one extreme incident among many...
My single biggest issue with the character generator is that I have no control over the format or layout of the character sheet. I don't like power cards, I can make a simple Microsoft Word document on one or two pages that contains everything I need in a very compact space. I don't have to worry about losing a power card during the week or eat up my ink cartridge printing a bunch of blank lines, much less five pages every time my character levels up. I might consider using the character builder if it ever allows for any degree of control over the layout and formatting. But this is a bit off-topic.
Anyway, I've purchased several hundred dollars worth of 4E materials, and honestly, I don't want to spend any amount of cash (even $1.00) on an application to print a character sheet that isn't intuitive for me and that I don't like. I'm perfectly happy with my own character sheet format.
If you do have access to it but just don't wanna; have you considered that some players are kind of... fudgy?
I've known gamers who were top marks in every category except bookkeeping. And by that I mean extremely poor score in bookkeeping.
It is possible these other dm's are really insisting on the CB because they have one or more of these loosey-goosey gamers present, and it's not at all to do with your skills/ability to maintain a clean sheet.
I hadn't really considered this angle, but reflecting on my own experiences as a DM, there may be a grain or two of truth to this. It is indeed a pretty common occasion for a player to not add a proficiency bonus, or to not add half their level, or to not add something from a feat or whatever. Very insightful and helpful.