Character Builder Copy and Paste

[Riley]

I made a character on the online CB, exported it over to my downloaded CB (making sure to put it into the correct folder) and then went to the manage tab/summary tab and it's in text the way you were speaking of to be able to place it in a wiki for your campaign.

Does it work with characters that couldn't be built in the Classic CB, such as Essentials characters?

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

Does it work with characters that couldn't be built in the Classic CB, such as Essentials characters?

The summary will be incomplete. See below for an example (Thief in Dark Sun):
[sblock]====== Created Using Wizards of the Coast D&D Character Builder ======
Valna, level 1
Elf, Thief
Background: Elf - Urban Elf (+2 to Thievery)

FINAL ABILITY SCORES
Str 10, Con 12, Dex 17, Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 16.

STARTING ABILITY SCORES
Str 10, Con 12, Dex 15, Int 10, Wis 12, Cha 16.


AC: 15 Fort: 11 Reflex: 11 Will: 13
HP: 12 Surges: 1 Surge Value: 3

TRAINED SKILLS
Streetwise +8

UNTRAINED SKILLS
Acrobatics +3, Arcana, Bluff +3, Diplomacy +3, Dungeoneering +2, Endurance +1, Heal +2, History, Insight +2, Intimidate +3, Nature +4, Perception +4, Religion, Stealth +3, Thievery +5, Athletics

FEATS
Level 1: Bardic Dilettante

POWERS

ITEMS
Short sword, Dagger (3), Leather Armor, Adventurer's Kit, Flute, Climber's Kit, Filter mask, Fire Kit, Thieves' Tools, Survival Day, Waterskin, Poisoner's Kit
====== Copy to Clipboard and Press the Import Button on the Summary Tab ======[/sblock]
Note that the trained skills aren't correct; she should have Stealth +8, Thievery +10, Acrobatics +8, Athletics +5, Bluff +8, Insight +7, Streetwise +8. Probably an import/export bug.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's not a sacrifice of being an online app, it's a sacrifice to bad design. As implemented, character sheets are basically big images. That's why you can't copy/paste. Wizards didn't have to do this, there's no such limitation imposed by Silverlight, but they did it anyway, and so I have to think it's on purpose. To keep you from copy/pasting for whatever nefarious purposes they think you're going to use it for I guess.

YEAH! WotC doesn't want you posting its potential IP to your blog and having people accessing it without paying the piper! You evil infringing pirate you! How dare you give away stuff for free to your other players! The designers worked hard on this! &c.



My guess is that it's more likely to be part of the whole "functionally borked" part of the online CB, rather than an IP thing.

Though the printing-to-images is more likely to be an IP thing, though not necessarily a WotC IP thing. Silverlight often presents itself as a "more secure" way to do stuff over the internet, so as to ruin those evil infringers' days for that precious, precious IP. Printing to images (so you can't easily copypasta text) might be a part of that.

Though if you'd like to use some crafty work-arounds:

Print to a PDF, then slip it into Evernote, which automatically OCR's your images, turning images of text back into text.

There's probably more than one way to skin this cat, though, IMO, we shouldn't have to skin it at all.

 

[moxcamel]

YEAH! WotC doesn't want you posting its potential IP to your blog and having people accessing it without paying the piper! You evil infringing pirate you! How dare you give away stuff for free to your other players! The designers worked hard on this! &c.



My guess is that it's more likely to be part of the whole "functionally borked" part of the online CB, rather than an IP thing.

Actually I was being sarcastic in my use of the term "nefarious," as I too think it's likelier that WotC really just doesn't have a cohesive plan in place. Saying they're using it as part of a larger plan to stop us evil-doers I think is just giving them too much credit.

 

[Mad Hamish]

It's not a sacrifice of being an online app, it's a sacrifice to bad design. As implemented, character sheets are basically big images. That's why you can't copy/paste. Wizards didn't have to do this, there's no such limitation imposed by Silverlight, but they did it anyway, and so I have to think it's on purpose. To keep you from copy/pasting for whatever nefarious purposes they think you're going to use it for I guess.

it depends what you're doing.
In this case I think the idea is that the character sheet is meant to be used solely as something you display and print out rather than something that can be edited.
In that case it makes sense to generate it as something that silverlight can display and print out without any additional steps.

 

[Mad Hamish]

Interesting. Last time this subject came up, I seem to remember people saying that Silverlight basically prints using images. (I.e., the limitation was a Silverlight issue.)

That's a different issue, I think it was largely people complaining about the size of the printed character sheets on the print queue and the time it took to print in some situations.
Based on a quick reading anything you print out of silverlight is done as an image. Even if you've got things setup so that it's printing a plain text area it still renders it as an image and sends it to the printer.

So whatever you do it will still be sending bitmaps to the printer.
What people are suggesting is that with silverlight the developers could set things up so that people can access things as text but even if they do so you will still need to have the results converted to an image to print.

So you're probably adding a lot of time and work for not a huge benefit.
They should be able to create something similar to the old character builder where you could get a text copy of the character without too much trouble but a fully interactive character sheet strikes me as unlikely to be worth the effort.

 

[moxcamel]

it depends what you're doing.
In this case I think the idea is that the character sheet is meant to be used solely as something you display and print out rather than something that can be edited.
In that case it makes sense to generate it as something that silverlight can display and print out without any additional steps.

Absolutely, an editable character sheet would certainly be out of the scope of the character builder. But I don't think it's too much to ask for the character sheet to be copyable to the clipboard.

 

[Mad Hamish]

I think having a plain text output that's copyable (like the stand alone builder was) is very reasonable

 

[Prestidigitalis]

It's not a sacrifice of being an online app, it's a sacrifice to bad design. As implemented, character sheets are basically big images. That's why you can't copy/paste. Wizards didn't have to do this, there's no such limitation imposed by Silverlight, but they did it anyway, and so I have to think it's on purpose. To keep you from copy/pasting for whatever nefarious purposes they think you're going to use it for I guess.

Another possibility is that they did the "simple thing" in order to make the deadline, and will do the "right thing" later. This happens all the time in software development. ALL. THE. TIME.

 

[Mapache]

Another possibility is that they did the "simple thing" in order to make the deadline, and will do the "right thing" later. This happens all the time in software development. ALL. THE. TIME.

Except "later" never actually happens, and the "simple thing" remains as an ugly hack with a TODO comment forever. This happens all the time in software development. ALL. THE. TIME.