A primary goal of D&DN is modularity; you can use the parts you want and discard the rest. Lately I've been wondering how this will be addressed, or not, in DDI.
While DDI was a very useful tool in 4E, there were a number of things that bothered me about it, and one of them was the difficulty of filtering content. For example, when selecting monsters for adventures, I typically wanted to limit my search to monsters published in or after Monster Manual 3 (when the math was adjusted to reduce grind and make higher-level monsters more competitive). The only way I could find to do this was to search, one by one, inside each post-MM3 source. Likewise, if I wanted to allow certain sourcebooks for PC material and disallow others, it would have been very useful if I could distribute some kind of "campaign settings file" to my players, so they could just switch their DDI to "Dausuul's Campaign" and see only the stuff that was present in my game. Given that D&D trends inevitably toward bloat over the course of each edition, the ability to limit what material is used in a campaign is very handy.
I presume that D&DN will have a DDI-equivalent. I would like to see this DDI-equivalent include the option to create and distribute customized campaign settings, which would include the following:
What sort of filtering capabilities, if any, would you like to have in D&DN's digital offering?
While DDI was a very useful tool in 4E, there were a number of things that bothered me about it, and one of them was the difficulty of filtering content. For example, when selecting monsters for adventures, I typically wanted to limit my search to monsters published in or after Monster Manual 3 (when the math was adjusted to reduce grind and make higher-level monsters more competitive). The only way I could find to do this was to search, one by one, inside each post-MM3 source. Likewise, if I wanted to allow certain sourcebooks for PC material and disallow others, it would have been very useful if I could distribute some kind of "campaign settings file" to my players, so they could just switch their DDI to "Dausuul's Campaign" and see only the stuff that was present in my game. Given that D&D trends inevitably toward bloat over the course of each edition, the ability to limit what material is used in a campaign is very handy.
I presume that D&DN will have a DDI-equivalent. I would like to see this DDI-equivalent include the option to create and distribute customized campaign settings, which would include the following:
- Source filters. You can make a checklist of which books are allowed and which are not, as well as setting a default behavior for when new material is released (either "allow new material by default" or "forbid new material by default"). Material from disallowed books is not displayed while you've got those campaign settings active.
- You can also go item by item, marking specific classes, races, feats, spells, magic items, or whatever as unavailable.
- Rules module filters. If you're not using feats, for example, you can uncheck the "feats" box, and players creating characters in this campaign won't be asked to select feats. Likewise, if you uncheck "skills," then skills disappear--both from character creation and from monster/NPC statblocks.
What sort of filtering capabilities, if any, would you like to have in D&DN's digital offering?