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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6347898" data-attributes="member: 58197">I found bloat to be a massive problem in DDI. It was my single biggest issue with DDI, in fact, and considering that the thing was built with friggin' Silverlight, that's saying something.I was mostly unperturbed by 3E bloat, because for it to affect me, somebody at my table had to go out and buy a book. There was an understanding that anything from a splatbook was subject to heightened scrutiny, splats with major issues (Book of Vile Darkness, etc.) could be banned outright, and you bought splats at your own risk. If I wanted to tighten things up, it was trivial to say &quot;These books in, everything else out.&quot; Bloat was a hypothetical problem encountered on Internet forums, not something I had to wrestle with much at the table. (I'm not saying it wasn't an actual problem at other tables, just describing my own experience.)4E before the electronic tools was much the same, but everything changed when my group went over to DDI subs. DDI didn't provide any means to permanently exclude sources you didn't want. The moment you opened up 4E's electronic tools, you got to drink from the fire hose. You could filter a search by source, but you had to re-enter the filter from scratch every time; I got plenty of experience with that from trying to filter out pre-MM3 monsters, and it was a major headache. The bloat was in all of our faces, all the time.My hope is that 5E's online options will offer more control to both players and DMs. They could give us the tools to control bloat very well. But if they don't, e-tools are going to make things worse, not better.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 6347898, member: 58197"] I found bloat to be a [I]massive[/I] problem in DDI. It was my single biggest issue with DDI, in fact, and considering that the thing was built with friggin' Silverlight, that's saying something. I was mostly unperturbed by 3E bloat, because for it to affect me, somebody at my table had to go out and buy a book. There was an understanding that anything from a splatbook was subject to heightened scrutiny, splats with major issues (Book of Vile Darkness, etc.) could be banned outright, and you bought splats at your own risk. If I wanted to tighten things up, it was trivial to say "These books in, everything else out." Bloat was a hypothetical problem encountered on Internet forums, not something I had to wrestle with much at the table. (I'm not saying it wasn't an actual problem at other tables, just describing my own experience.) 4E before the electronic tools was much the same, but everything changed when my group went over to DDI subs. DDI didn't provide any means to permanently exclude sources you didn't want. The moment you opened up 4E's electronic tools, you got to drink from the fire hose. You [I]could[/I] filter a search by source, but you had to re-enter the filter from scratch every time; I got plenty of experience with that from trying to filter out pre-MM3 monsters, and it was a major headache. The bloat was in all of our faces, all the time. My hope is that 5E's online options will offer more control to both players and DMs. They [I]could[/I] give us the tools to control bloat very well. But if they don't, e-tools are going to make things worse, not better. [/QUOTE]

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