The second DDI was great.
I dunno if you actually ran 4E, but I did, and it was tremendous. Countless hours were saved by having a character builder that worked really well (managing to do things Beyond's one can't handle),
Are you comparing the tools at the end of their life to D&D Beyond, which has barely been out for six months? Shouldn't you be comparing each toolset during that same window?
My first 4e game died before the second tools were released. I do know that they completely effed my game by cancelling the downloadable builder, as my group was level 10 and brought in a replacement player and I really, really needed the Essentials cleric, but they held that back for the online tools, which took several more months to come out.
It was also extremely problematic, being a Windows only site that required Silverlight to run, making it useless if you tried to use it on a cellphone, let alone one of the newly released iPad. The DDI site was a 2005 website released in 2010.
For my second 4e D&D game in mid-2012 I "fondly" remember having to use my iPad to remote desktop onto my PC across town to pull up the online character builder to update my character after we levelled mid-session.
a monster builder that was really fast and effective (if Beyond has one, and I presume it does, I can't find it).
You just couldn't find it:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/homebrew/creations/create-monster/create
Admittedly, it doesn't do the math. But 5e monsters don't work the same as 4e monsters where the math is easier to do. Really, the only math a 5e monster builder would be able to do is calculating the final CR, but that would still require you to enter the average damage per round, since so much of 5e monster design is based on text boxes that would be super hard for a program to parse.
Regardless, the first 4e Monster Builder was okay. Up until mid-2010 when they launched an update that pretty much broke that program, riddling it with bugs. I remember regretting getting the update and having to
continually revise the outputted PDFs to correct the little errors it made.
And the second attempt was just a monster renamer. Did they ever finish that?
But don't forget, the first Monster Builder was one part of planned DM tools that were never finished and never made it out of beta. And the monster builder came out a year after the player tools. Possibly longer.
I'm not sure why you're claiming it "couldn't incorporate homebrew", because it sure as hell could in terms of monsters and so on. It couldn't incorporate homebrew rules, maybe, but I didn't use any in 4E, because honestly, it didn't really need any (and the big flaws it did have couldn't corrected by anything like that, sadly).
I meant homebrew PC subclasses and spells and feats and related content. To say nothing of 3rd Party stuff.
(Why would I give a damn about incorporating homebrew monsters into a player character builder?)
Re: DungeonScape, I am going to fault WotC for taking so long. It's not like they didn't have good choices - they absolutely did. They consistently made bad choices with licensing of D&D though, and Beyond appears to be another one of those.
They partner with the people who came to them. In 2012-13, when they partnered with Trapdoor, D&D was less of a name and not attracting great programmers. They had few choices but the rookie developers.
At the time they had two real choices: take a risk and partner with an untested unknown
or not release digital tools. They did the first and it failed, so they opted for the second for a year or two.
People forget how software licencing works. Companies get investors to give them money, which they use to approach WotC and buy the right to make the app, paying for the IP. WotC takes the money and throws it into their pile. The company then builds the app and sells aspects of it to repay their investors and then generate profit.
If no one decent approaches WotC and offers them money, then an app doesn't get made. WotC isn't going to
pay someone to make the program, because that's literally the exact opposite of what they want, as it costs them money. You only hire out a software company if it's essential to the product, which a character builder is not.
Re: PF, does it require you to buy them full-real-world-price (i.e. Amazon price - Amazon own Curse and thus Beyond, note)?
Associating the price D&D Beyond charges with Amazon prices seems arbitrary. Twitch/Curse is owned by Amazon but they're still different companies. It's not like Curse gets any money from the sales of D&D books on Amazon.
The price HeroLabs charges is often less. Or rather, buying
accessories on Hero Labs is roughly half what D&D Beyond is charging. However, you need to buy the program, which comes with one ruleset, and is roughly the same as what D&D Beyond is charging for the PHB. So the initial cost is the same. And both are still less than the physical books from a game store.
But the big difference is HeroLabs requires you to buy the entire book. You can't just buy the subclasses and elements you want. To make my 5e character, which uses a bunch of scattered options, I can just drop $10 and get the background, subclass, and spells. Which, IIRC, would be LESS than the per month cost of DDI and only charged once.
Plus, D&D Beyond has options like the ability of the DM to buy the content and get a subscription and share it with their players, negating the need for everyone to buy it. Unlike HeroLabs where everyone needs to buy everything.
Does it give you PDFs/offline copies?
Nope. Why would it give PDFs? That's an entirely different service. I also doesn't give me background music or host the game on a VTT or fully manage a campaign.
HeroLabs does work offline. Which is nice. However, the number of times I'm offline is pretty much during a blackout, when I'm unlikely to be gaming anyway. AND unable to use HeroLabs anyway since it's a desktop program and my PC doesn't function well during a blackout. And because it's a desktop program, I CANNOT use it on my tablet. Which also makes it useless as a character manager during play. And I can only install on the one desktop, since I can't upload it to multiple platforms.
Also, I dunno what kind of wizardry we used because I don't run PF, but I paid nothing and got to use a character builder that had all the options I needed build my character last time I played PF (mid-2016). It didn't appear to be an official one either, but hadn't been C&D'd or anything.
Citation needed. I would need to know the name of that app/program.
There are no real "official" Paizo/ Pathfinder apps beyond a crit and fumble app. HeroLabs is the closest, being officially licensed.
Of course, it might have been someone's app using the SRD. You can absolutely get 5e SRD character builders. Those exist. But they're rare because *gasp* running a program and website is work and costs mosey. Most only get C&Ded when they include non-SRD options. (Which, incidentally, happened to the Pathfinder site
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/ when they started including ads in an attempt not to operate at a loss.)
I'm literally on the site right now... that's why I was discussing it. It's pretty pathetic.
Where's your character builder app? From the way you're talking, I'm assuming you could do better.
D&D Beyond looks pretty slick to me. And I've payed $0 to D&D Beyond and I can make a level 15 aarakokra druid. Or a freakin' blood hunter. The amount of content available that isn't behind the paywall is surprisingly large.
And since I can create homebrew content for personal use, I imagine I could just ADD most of the content from the PHB that I want, such as feats, spells, and the like. The only thing I can't create is apparently subclasses. But I imagine that's in the works.
It won't even show you what content it's not showing you, as it were.
And if if did, people would select them unknowingly and get upset that they were suddenly being charged. It's much better to hide that stuff and reveal additional content after purchase.
That's just incompetent! It's slick, but I'd rather have functional than slick, and it's behind where even the earliest iterations of the DDI were in functionality.
You're looking back at DDI with some serious rose coloured glasses and forgetting how often it would crash, how long it would take to start up.
You're completely forgetting how limited it was at first, and how the only content included was the crunch and none of the flavour of the books. How it didn't include the adventures, and how it wasn't useful at the gametable unless you had a laptop.
And how if you were a 15yo kid without a credit card you literally could not gain access the program.
Further, it doesn't give you any PDFs - that may well be "On WotC", but it also means charging large one-off charges is just unreasonable, and charging the entire real-world price of a book you can't use offline is just laughable.
DDI didn't give you PDFs either. Neither does HeroLabs for Pathfinder. This is whining about a program not giving you a feature it was never supposed to provide.
It's a character builder/ manager, not an ebook reader!!
You want to complain about the lack of PDFs from WotC. That's cool. I agree. I would like official ones. But that's a topic completely and totally unrelated to D&D Beyond. And if the lack of PDFs from D&D Beyond is an automatic fail, then the
exact same thing could be said about DDI.
(and no, I'm not sharing it). Could we do better? Well with the access to the same resources, I absolutely guarantee it.
