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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2010523" data-attributes="member: 1129">This review is going to focus on eTools and Campaign Suite in terms of character creation. While both do more than that, to be honest, that's what I'm going to use them the most for.I'm using a HP 2.0 gig, 512 ram, 64 vram 80 gig hard drive. Installation was no problem. Popped the disk in and done. I uninstalled it though and it did leave behind the icons and shortcuts. Bad clean up. Campaign Suite boots up much faster than eTools. In seconds it was up while eTools was still plodding around in the background waiting to load.Both games use somewhat archaic icons for making a new character. In Campaign Suite, it's dice while in eTools, it a horned helmet. One thing definitely bad on the Campaign Suite is that the labels for race, class, alignment, and sex aren't labeled. Not a big deal once you learn this but a good interface shouldn't leave the user asking basic questions. This is especially strange since so much of the screen is left open. The code may be good but the design isn't very friendly.When rolling hit points, I didn't see a method to change them, unlike eTools where it's a  simple process. When doing skills, there is no automatic function to max your ranks out like there is in eTools. It won't let you break your limit in terms of raising a skill to a higher rank than the character is capable of handling. Unlike eTools, I didn't see a method to move the skills around, for example, by skill type, class or cross class, by number of ranks, or by name. It's a straight alphabetical listing. Skill points did match out though in eTools and Campaign Suite as a character I made in one had the same ranks I had in the other.Feat selection was easy. You get a screen with available feats and on another side, your feats. I could double click a feat or drag it to the character side. On equipment, it wasn't so easy. It's a pure sort by name so hemp rope isn't under rope, hemp, but under hemp, rope. Some of the information seems off too. For example, a mithril shirt is listed as having a +4 bonus in eTools and a +5 bonus in Campaign Suite. The software also suffers the same problem as eTools in that if you have a dagger, you can't get the thrown bit into your stats, only the melee value.For some reason, the creators thought that putting magic at the bottom of the screen instead of with the other equipment was a good idea. Can't follow the logic there but understand that perhaps they wanted to make sure that the end users weren't looking to get all of their equipment from one location? One oddity is that when the control loses focus, it switches from Magic Item to Equipped. Probably not a big deal but it's usually best to stick with one terminology. Another annoying thing is my character switches from using a +1 keen longsword to a +2. Apparently you can't have two items in your main hand, unlike eTools where you just equip a new group. Like eTools, it fails to take into account special abilities like keen, so the critical is still 19-20 instead of 17-20. Armor class also sums up wrong. It shows a bonus of +5 from armor (incorrect), +6 from dex, +2 from misc bonus. Perhaps the amulet of natural armor doesn't stack with said items but the armor class show here should be 23, not 20.One thing, while adjusting stats in Campaign Suite, if you leave the screen, the focus is lost meaning you have to double click the stat to open it again. Now why7 would I be adjusting stats unless I was a low down dirty cheater? How about I use the point buy system and that doesn't appear to be supported? One weird thing, when I was messing around, the opened stat box said 14, but the actual stat was 12 on the Con line. It looks like it's taking your racial modifier and adding it to the roll so you don't get the old what you see is what you get because its adjusting the score on the total, not the one you entered.The interface seems a little underused. For example, level is a little button on it's own in the character screen instead of being a separate area like eTools.One thing that Campaign Suite has that eTools doesn't is templates. You can click on a single monster and then click template. This brings up a separate menu that allows you to select a template to add to your monster. For some reason, all of the templates are lawful good in alignment though and this overrides a creature's normal alignment. It only takes a moment to fix but its annoying. The interface should be invisible to the user.Campaign Suite does come with a lot more base information though. For example, it comes with Librum Equitis, Wild Spellcraft and Arms & Armor. Now that's a sweet deal. Maybe eTools has set my mind for some things or maybe I just don't find Campaign Suite  easy to maneuver through. The lack of physical documentation is disappointing but it does offer somethings that eTools does not. Between Campaign Suite and eTools you almost have a fully functioning software that allows you to use point buy and templates but in both cases there are data issues. Perhaps when 3.5 comes out and we see some more updates for Campaign Suite and eTools it'll be a little better to compare them again but for now, I'll continuing hacking eTools with Access.</blockquote>

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