D&D 5E Dear WotC: D&D 5, Hero Lab, and the OGL

[Umbran]

Blah, OGL gave us so much crap it was revolting, chief of those is PF *shudder*

Blackwarder, it is fine if you don't like Pathfinder. It is fine to give constructive criticism.

But, you do know full well, do you not, that some folks here love PF, right? And you know that there was nothing at all constructive in this post - in essence, you just told a bunch of people, "your favorite game is the most revolting crap".

If you were aiming at being rude and disrespectful, you hit it dead on target. However, rude and disrespectful is against the board rules, so maybe it was a bad choice of target on your part. We expect folks to keep the color in their comments down to levels that show a modicum of respect.

If this is somehow confusing, please e-mail or PM one of the moderators, and they'll be happy to discuss the matter with you.

 

[Wrathamon]

They made mention of this. Paraphrasing: There will be an iOS version, but they are not allowed to put betas out on the app store.

Correct you can't put a beta on the app store but you can use things like Testflight to do betas.

 

[Starfox]

Having an online rule resource like d20srd.com is a very big bonus for me. I'm not saying its a dealbreaker, but 5E needs to be twice as impressive if it lacks that. If they themselves provide such a service, I'm inclined to be more suspicious of that service than if a 3rd party provides it through a license.

 

[Hussar]

Having an online rule resource like d20srd.com is a very big bonus for me. I'm not saying its a dealbreaker, but 5E needs to be twice as impressive if it lacks that. If they themselves provide such a service, I'm inclined to be more suspicious of that service than if a 3rd party provides it through a license.

Would you accept paying for a rules service?

 

[Starfox]

Would you accept paying for a rules service?

'

I did pay for DDI but found it lacking. No way to directly link or reference the material. It felt crippled by DRM.

 

[Wrathamon]

"crippled" I think people use this term a little much

First, why do you need to link to it?

If its personal use, I found I could just snip it and post what I needed into my notes or just keep the service up on my ipad or computer if I needed to reference\search for something fast.

I found the character builder to be excellent (I wish they had more save slots) after the performance issues were fixed. It was updated at a very good rate.

Felt the rules database and monster builder to be very useful

I stopped when the Dragon and Dungeon material coming out was light and not worth the cost, but never felt anything else prevented me from using it, the same as I used the various D20 SRD sites.

 

[Boarstorm]

Having an online rule resource like d20srd.com is a very big bonus for me. I'm not saying its a dealbreaker, but 5E needs to be twice as impressive if it lacks that. If they themselves provide such a service, I'm inclined to be more suspicious of that service than if a 3rd party provides it through a license.

Honestly, if the rules remain as light and straightforward as what we've seen in Basic, I don't see the NEED for online rules (excepting perhaps for character creation).

 

[Tuft]

"crippled" I think people use this term a little much

First, why do you need to link to it?

Some examples:

• Character Sheets. I prefer using spreedsheets programs to build custom character sheets for each character; currently I use Numbers on my Ipad. In those, I hyperlink each skill, spell, feat and magic item - official versions link to the SRD, house ruled versions link to the house rule wiki ( http://hastur.net/wiki/Apath ) - nicely and quickly referenced as needed, and a hyperlink takes no more space than a label would have anyway. (When we played 4E, some players printed everything - powers, items, and feats - on Magic size cards, ending up with inch-thick decks. Took them forever to look anything up... )
• Houserules - Very nice to privide a link to the original version whenever you put up a houserule.
• Worldbuilding. For example; when you create an organisation with a list of common feats, bonus spells spells, spell domains, etc, it is nice to hyperlink such lists for quick reference.
• Discussions. Such as those here, or in campaign mailing lists.

 

[Ianos]

I'm not a fan of Hero Lab or their software model.

WotC, blow them out of the water with your own (better) tools.

What tools ???

 

[Ianos]

Whatever effect OGL had on product quality by 3rd parties it was the reason that Pathfinder caught on so quickly and its lack was the reason 4e lost momentum. There are always going to be poor products (even from WotC which are in addition overpriced) but OGL at least offers to the rest of us the luxury of choosing among various publishers.