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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5393470" data-attributes="member: 58197">I agree. Everything I'm seeing strongly suggests that the Character Builder and its ilk are the way of the future. My group used to be fairly sophisticated gamers who had no problem juggling complex character stats. We played high-level 3.5; we played Iron Heroes; for quite a span of time we played White Wolf's original "Aberrant," complete with three different flavors of point buy for the same stats.Now my players are totally dependent on the Character Builder. Any time I propose any sort of character option or house rule, the first question I hear is, "Is it in the CB?" I'm not immune, either. I recently tried making a 4E character by hand--an Essentials hexblade--and I forgot feats. As in, no feats at all, for a 15th-level character. Not some obscure modifier nobody ever remembers, but feats.Some gamers will continue to play pencil-and-paper, and I think WotC will continue to supply them for quite a while to come, if only because a lot of the staff grew up in the days of Gygax and TSR and will go to great lengths to make a business case to the Hasbro suits that PnP needs to be continued.  But as time goes by, it will become more and more of a legacy operation. You'll know the focus has truly shifted when material from new books starts being released online the same day (or earlier!) as the dead-tree version hits stores.So what will the electronic face of D&D look like? Well, you can pretty much see the shape of it now. It's a web-based, integrated suite of player and DM tools, designed to be used either as electronic aids for tabletop play or for purely online gaming. The players have the Character Builder. The DM has Adventure Tools (the new web version). It'll be a lot fancier, with more bells and whistles, but it's the same basic framework we've got now.</blockquote>

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