AnotherCrappyDM
Explorer
What you have to understand is that you're having fun the wrong way. /s
D&D 5E ForgedAnvil D&D 5E Character Generator
- Thread starter ForgedAnvil
- Start date
What you have to understand is that you're having fun the wrong way. /s
Oh man. I've been using Orc Pub2 for awhile now and it's a great resource, but they got taken down too a few months ago. I didn't realize this excel sheet was a good resource too. How do people make characters these days? Are we back to calculating everything by hand now?
Dannyboy7702
First Post
With the push of D&D Beyond (DDB) by WotC, they are essentially trying to eliminate the competition. Even though it is just character sheets, content providers are using material created by WotC within their CS. DDB is an online D&D 5e character builder and gaming platform for DMs. I am not going into details about the system, but it isn't hard to figure out that WotC wants people to use DDB instead of third party content providers when it comes to character creation.
MixedGoobers
Villager
What a bummer, I really love this generator. ForgedAnvil if you are able to find another host for your great work let us know.
Yeah, and they want everyone to pay out the nose for every piece of content. Want to use the 'Heavy Armor Master' feat? "That'll be $1.99." For one, I repeat, one feat! Or you can pay only $4 to get every feat! Or if you're feeling really spendy, you can pay $30 to be able to use everything from the PHB, even though the actual, physical, hardbound Player's Handbook is only $35! Oh, you'd like to be able to use all the books? $360. And keep in mind, this is just to be able to look it up on the site and put it in a character. No PDF, no way to download, except for your character sheet, you have to be online to use it. So if you want to be able to reference the material offline, or, god forbid, read the book, you have to buy everything twice.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Or rather, there's less until you fork over some more of your hard earned cash. You see, even after you've been gouged just to access the material, you still have to deal with ads. That's right, you're paying to be able to access the content digitally, but you still get to deal with advertisements. And you get a limited number of character slots. But, of course, for a low, low, monthly fee of $3, you don't have to jump through those hoops to access the content you already paid for, twice!
Quite frankly, this is a toxic product, and WotC should be ashamed of themselves for even putting it to market. What makes them think anybody's going to want to use this hot mess when it's more restrictive and cumbersome than doing the calculations and referencing by hand? And for god's sake, I think I'd feel less used playing BFII or subscribing to Comcast, with all the nickel and diming they're doing here. Worst of all, it spits in the face of everybody who ever put a pencil to a character sheet or clattered dice on the table. All these great tools that players use, that the creators charge nothing for and that get people pulled into the game that would have otherwise been intimidated by the minutae and mechanics, have been stomped out and left for dead in the name of the almighty dollar, and it doesn't do them a bit of good, because nobody who was on the fence about playing is going to shell out $80 plus a monthly subscription fee when they're probably still borrowing their GM's books because they don't know if they want their own yet. As for the players that were bought in, and were using things like ForgedAnvil's fantastic sheet because it made setting up clean character sheets a breeze? Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm angry. Angry that WotC thought they could pull the rug out from under us and sell us a $360 hand back up. Angry that, like so many other industries, the big players are looking for ways to squeeze every last penny out of a fanbase that's been nothing but good to them. Angry that their response to their best customers, who loved and enjoyed their products so much that they'd spend their free time making it more accessible to others, was to crush them under the heel of their big corporate lawyer boots in the name of the almighty dollar.
And I think that's what makes me angriest about all this: It'd have been better for overall sales if they had just left it alone, let people like ForgedAnvil continue to create great tools to play their games. I hear people say "Well ForgedAnvil's sheet just gave you all the information that WotC worked hard and spent money to develop! They need to be able to sell the product!" I already own the books. Everyone I know who uses the sheet also owns the books. You know why? It's hard to pick your character out from a drop down list if you don't already know what they are. You don't know classes, races, backgrounds, feats, spells, items, and archetypes right out the gate, and looking through them using just the character sheet is cumbersome. It's not designed to replace the books, it's designed to make your sheet look professional and clean after you've made all those decisions, usually after picking them out using the books. Make no mistake, The very existence of this sheet has helped promote and sell 5e. And they just went and killed not only this valuable tool, but every bit of goodwill surrounding it.
You know who makes all their content available online for free? Paizo, the guys who used to be WotC before they split and made 3.5 ten times better. No, seriously, check this out.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/
Every sourcebook. PHB, APG, UCa, UCo, UM, UR, MA, PU, EVERY. SINGLE. SOURCEBOOK. And yet they continue to sell books. You know why? The SRD is cumbersome. The only way to reliably find something further than the most basic information is to already know what you're looking for. You know when that happens? When you buy the books. And I have. I've bought every sourcebook they have and read them front to back, because I knew that was the only way to be able to know what I was looking for in the first place. You know what else Paizo does well? Subscriptions. You subscribe to them, not only do you get the full access package and a discount on their books, you get the PDFs for free.
Paizo knows what WotC seems to have forgotten: Tabletop RPGs are like a disease; the more people you expose it to, the more people pick it up, the faster it spreads, ad infinitum. Paizo fosters that goodwill and sharing mindset because they know it sells books and gets people hooked. Ultimately, D&D beyond will flop, and in addition to flushing money, it will have flushed a great deal of social capital with the clear statement this overly monetized launch makes.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Or rather, there's less until you fork over some more of your hard earned cash. You see, even after you've been gouged just to access the material, you still have to deal with ads. That's right, you're paying to be able to access the content digitally, but you still get to deal with advertisements. And you get a limited number of character slots. But, of course, for a low, low, monthly fee of $3, you don't have to jump through those hoops to access the content you already paid for, twice!
Quite frankly, this is a toxic product, and WotC should be ashamed of themselves for even putting it to market. What makes them think anybody's going to want to use this hot mess when it's more restrictive and cumbersome than doing the calculations and referencing by hand? And for god's sake, I think I'd feel less used playing BFII or subscribing to Comcast, with all the nickel and diming they're doing here. Worst of all, it spits in the face of everybody who ever put a pencil to a character sheet or clattered dice on the table. All these great tools that players use, that the creators charge nothing for and that get people pulled into the game that would have otherwise been intimidated by the minutae and mechanics, have been stomped out and left for dead in the name of the almighty dollar, and it doesn't do them a bit of good, because nobody who was on the fence about playing is going to shell out $80 plus a monthly subscription fee when they're probably still borrowing their GM's books because they don't know if they want their own yet. As for the players that were bought in, and were using things like ForgedAnvil's fantastic sheet because it made setting up clean character sheets a breeze? Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm angry. Angry that WotC thought they could pull the rug out from under us and sell us a $360 hand back up. Angry that, like so many other industries, the big players are looking for ways to squeeze every last penny out of a fanbase that's been nothing but good to them. Angry that their response to their best customers, who loved and enjoyed their products so much that they'd spend their free time making it more accessible to others, was to crush them under the heel of their big corporate lawyer boots in the name of the almighty dollar.
And I think that's what makes me angriest about all this: It'd have been better for overall sales if they had just left it alone, let people like ForgedAnvil continue to create great tools to play their games. I hear people say "Well ForgedAnvil's sheet just gave you all the information that WotC worked hard and spent money to develop! They need to be able to sell the product!" I already own the books. Everyone I know who uses the sheet also owns the books. You know why? It's hard to pick your character out from a drop down list if you don't already know what they are. You don't know classes, races, backgrounds, feats, spells, items, and archetypes right out the gate, and looking through them using just the character sheet is cumbersome. It's not designed to replace the books, it's designed to make your sheet look professional and clean after you've made all those decisions, usually after picking them out using the books. Make no mistake, The very existence of this sheet has helped promote and sell 5e. And they just went and killed not only this valuable tool, but every bit of goodwill surrounding it.
You know who makes all their content available online for free? Paizo, the guys who used to be WotC before they split and made 3.5 ten times better. No, seriously, check this out.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/
Every sourcebook. PHB, APG, UCa, UCo, UM, UR, MA, PU, EVERY. SINGLE. SOURCEBOOK. And yet they continue to sell books. You know why? The SRD is cumbersome. The only way to reliably find something further than the most basic information is to already know what you're looking for. You know when that happens? When you buy the books. And I have. I've bought every sourcebook they have and read them front to back, because I knew that was the only way to be able to know what I was looking for in the first place. You know what else Paizo does well? Subscriptions. You subscribe to them, not only do you get the full access package and a discount on their books, you get the PDFs for free.
Paizo knows what WotC seems to have forgotten: Tabletop RPGs are like a disease; the more people you expose it to, the more people pick it up, the faster it spreads, ad infinitum. Paizo fosters that goodwill and sharing mindset because they know it sells books and gets people hooked. Ultimately, D&D beyond will flop, and in addition to flushing money, it will have flushed a great deal of social capital with the clear statement this overly monetized launch makes.
Last edited:
lycanthropejeff
Explorer
Well said. I feel your frustration and agree with you 100%.
Last edited:
lycanthropejeff
Explorer
brooksgbanks
Explorer
So, I agree with all the comments concerning WotC's decision. But what I want to really comment on is the above. Paizo didn't technically split from WotC. Lisa Stevens (CEO of Paizo) left the company in 2000, and made it know to WotC at the time that she would be interested in purchasing Wizard's magazine business if it was ever made available. She already had some idea that that was a route they planned to go (divesting themselves of their magazine footprint) prior to leaving. She formed Paizo Publishing in 2002, and shortly there after, WotC did cut their entire periodicals department (and one of my very good friends Erik Mona), and Paizo bought the rights to the periodicals (and took Erik on board as well). And, until 2007, that's all Paizo was. When WotC announced they were putting out 4th Ed, Paizo initially was planning to be a 3rd Party Content provider for that edition. However, WotC (in typical WotC fashion) took so long to come out with their OGL for 4th Ed that Paizo turned to a gentleman that many Pathfinder folks might know (and whom I've been gaming with since he was 18), Jason Bulmahn, who was their managing editor for Dungeon Magazine (hired in 2004) until getting the lead designer job in 2007). Pathfinder was originally just a small side project that Jason was tinkering with to streamline some of the 3.5 rules (grapple anyone??). But, when WotC was still dragging their heels 6 months after the 4th Ed announcement, the decided to simply back Jason's "side project" and turn it into it's own mainstream RPG. So, Paizo wasn't a split from WotC (it wasn't formed until over 2 years after Lisa Stevens left WotC, and initially she was one of like 3 employees at Paizo that had ties to WotC at all).
Now, that doesn't change the fact that Paizo understands the actual gaming market and gamers much better than WotC does since most of their decision makers are gamers (I've been gaming with both Erik since 2nd Edition, and Jason since the 3rd Ed announcement), and as such, they understand how to keep their market invested (using all of the things you mentioned). In addition, there are numerous Pathfinder equivalents to ForgedAnvil's sheet (PathForge used to be the go-to sheet and had a cult following and was an offshoot of the original HeroForge D&D 3.0 excel character generator, which I did some work for. YAPCG is the new darling, and the one that seems to be the best maintained and updated) and Paizo has never felt the need to issue a DMCA takedown of either of them or any others out there.
WotC's decision with regards to the various free content creators is disappointing, but given that they ultimately answer to Hasbro, it isn't surprising. Hasbro is vicious in protecting it's IP, and they foster that onto WotC, as a subsidiary. And, given previous editions and the free content creators that thrived under them, I thought maybe that WotC wouldn't be quite the stickler that Hasbro always is. But, I guess since WotC officially partnered with Curse for DnD Beyond, it became more important for them to protect their IP (given that I assume Curse couldn't be happy with other free content creators supplying a character generator with all the licensed official D&D content). Not to mention HeroLabs, which paid licensing fees to WotC to be able to do a 5e character generator in their software.
Still, I'm incredibly sad to see this happen.
Fin Kename
First Post
At this point, would it be permissible to continue to develop the sheet personally? Never feeling the need to bother with the headache before, since the announcement I've begun to fix a few bugs and add the rest of the XGtE content to the sheet so that my players can continue to use it with the campaign they are currently starting. I'm not trying to distribute this, but I don't want to step on any toes either.
SirHardHead
First Post
I just want to say that although I understand why this happened, I am sad that it did. Thankyou ForgedAnvil for all the hard work.
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