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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9420247" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I mostly used paper sheets during my years of 4e.  I rarely printed out characters from the character builder with power cards; maybe a couple of times for short games. I got used to hand-filling out all my own power entries on printed sheets, and summarizing the descriptions accurately.  It helped me commit a lot of the details to memory to write them myself (in addition to using them over and over).Some truth to this.  Although most of the calculations are adding HP and recalculating Surge value at every level, and adding +1 to nearly everything at even levels.  Adding a new power means filling in a new entry on your power sheets, and the math on that will closely match your other powers. Your attack and damage bonuses with a weapon power will generally be the same for all of them, for example.I always found the character builder a convenience but not a necessity.  I definitely needed my rulebooks, though, and the CB helped me find options.I did a lot of drawing with wet erase markers on battle mats, that's for sure.  And using poster battlemaps from 3e, 4e, and Pathfinder.  I have a lot of dungeon tiles but I always found them slower and more annoying to use.My 4E groups did have large miniature collections, both the D&D Miniatures pre-paints several of us had collected during 3rd ed, and wargaming miniatures since I was a wargamer and one of my groups was comprised of people I met at a WH and 40k club.The last 4E game I played in, a year or two before the pandemic, had two brand new players.  One of them took to it easily, working with PDFs of rulebooks and no digital tools at all.  The other, a guy who never finished high school and has a lot of substance use in his history, continually had to be reminded of how basic powers and options and math worked.My experience with 4E and new players was that it was a bit more accessible and understandable than 3.x or 1E AD&D, trickier to learn and less accessible than B/X and well-designed/cleaned up OSR systems, and more or less equal to something like 2e AD&D.</blockquote>

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