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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 5347378" data-attributes="member: 1300">I have no idea what's going on inside WotC, but I know what I'd like to see, and I have an idea of where WotC dropped the ball.When I speak of dropping the ball here, I do so in the context of some very, very successful e-tools. The DDI is a huge success and, like Encounters, is a major source of positive press for the game. I've seen posts from dozens if not hundreds of users who cite the DDI, or the Character Builder specifically, as the thing that hooked them on the new edition. So I'm in no way accusing the e-support of being a failure.But the one thing WotC should have been concentrating on is user-generated content. If you give the users the tools they need to create and share and modify their own content, you will create a hugely robust player base for your product.The CB has a lot of virtues, but the fact that it's not online means that if I want to make, say, a Human Templar Sorcerer-pact Warlock, I have to do it all myself. In spite of the fact that dozens, if not hundreds, of players have already done it. In this age, that's criminal. A criminal waste of time and duplication of effort. WotC's highest priority *must be* the ability for players to share and collaborate on content so I don't have to make the 5,000th Warlock, especially when he's no different from several hundred other Warlocks.I should be able to go online, search for builds that match my criteria, and see what's popular. What are the most popular Warlock builds? What are the most popular Sorcerer-king Pact warlock builds? I should be able to compare the most popular ones, vote on them, create my own version and share it and let it compete in the marketplace of ideas.Why can't I easily browse through all the PCs in the campaign I'm playing in? Because they're not all online. If they were all online, using collaboration software that let me create groups and control public/private settings, I could join my friend's campaign, see all the existing characters, and make intelligent decisions about what I should be playing. Work to make my character complement, or contrast, the existing characters. Some free tools already do this.That's just for players. You do the same thing for GMs, and now you've got the ultimate GM tool. Something that would make Dungeon and Dragon content look paltry by comparison.The zeitgeist of the pre-90s RPG era was the DIY nature of everything. GM's spent hundreds of hours creating volumes of content, dungeons, adventures, house rules, campaign settings that only a handful of players ever saw. I don't know if they still do that, I think kids today spend their free time somewhat differently than we did (though not worse, I'm not saying there's a difference in quality, only type), but if you had these kinds of tools, I think we'd see a sea-change back toward that stuff.If I can create my own Encounters, Dungeons, Adventures, and upload them, share them, vote on them, copy them, modify them, if I can create my own monsters, modify existing monsters, create level-appropriate versions of existing monsters, then I have effectively become an unpaid WotC employee. They, for free, leverage *at least* my time, if not also my skill and experience. And maybe what I create is crap. Ok. So you give the users the ability to make that determination and communicate it to others. Reviews, votes, tags. These are proven winners. They work. My GM friends and I have done a phenomenal amount of work on our games, spent hundreds of hours on custom-content. WotC should be *desperate*, really genuinely going INSANE to find a way for me to get that content out to the widest number of users. I'm doing their job for them, for free, and it's in their best interest--and more important, I submit, than anything else right now--for them to give me the tools to do this online in the first place (i.e. not create the content locally, then find a way to transfer it to an online app, I should be making this stuff *in* the tool) and then share it and let it compete in the marketplace of ideas.There's a free app someone kludged together called the Combat Manager. I believe there's a newer app that's even better. The Combat Manager is, in my opinion, the most important e-tool we've ever seen. And it's free and easy to use. It makes running D&D4 so easy, so *ridiculously* easy and fun that you can run the entire game on the fly, with zero prep work. It's so liberating that I can't really describe it, you have to just get a laptop and download it, and use it.But even that tool is nothing like as powerful and useful as a WotC version could be. Because while the Combat Manager lets you copy monsters from the Monster Builder and paste them into the CM, slowly accumulating a local library of monsters for the CM, and lets you import CB files preserving all the powers and stats, that's still *some* work on your part. How much better if you just logged in and *all* the monsters were at your fingertips? *All* the characters were already there because it knew which campaign you were playing in?This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. The Combat Manager is real, I've used it. One guy did it on his own for free. There *must* be a WotC version and it *must* be online and allow me to share and collaborate information. It should be the most important thing WotC is working on, and my only fear is not that they don't think this is a good idea, it's that they don't realize how important it is.</blockquote>

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