Does anyone have E-Tools yet?

[EricNoah]

Nah, nothing official -- I have just been a fan of the idea of Master Tools for some time and have been following its development, providing feedback since last September, and I did end up writing a draft of a couple of parts of the manual for fun, which they ended up using a lot of, so that was cool. So far hanging around at the eTools forums has been fun and informative.

My impression... I may be too close to the product. It has some drawbacks, some areas where it doesn't go far enough, many areas for improvement, and some bugs that are yet to be worked out. Still, it was an invaluable asset to me as a DM in my home game, even with the early versions that didn't have the customizers, etc. As it is now, it's a great first step. If it turns out to be the only step, well, it will be one of many tools in my electronic arsenal and one that I will use frequently.

The best part of all of this has been kind of having Scott Mathews's ear. He's not above taking a good idea, and he listens. And I know as long as he has the resources (i.e. funding, the go-ahead from WotC, etc.) he'll keep working on this to make it better.

 

[herald]

Wand making.

I found the the process of making the wand and then equiping it fairly intuitive.

I would really suggest people visit the boards at Fluidnet to see what kind of work can really be done.

I find that I prefer e-tools over any program I have used so far.

P.S. As always Eric Noah is ever helpful and ready to lend advice over on the other boards. Pretty cool since he doesn't ever work there.

 

[Rooer]

Considering their (Fluids) boards died the night of E-Tools release, it was just very bad timing indeed.

Wands, yeah, not so bad, but since they went to the trouble of adding and sticking to most of the other tables... why not do the Wands too?

NPC's ... totally worthless (cookie cutter out of the DMG, no cross-classing allowed).
Still lots of bugs with the database (open, close, crash, etc...)

Should have been much easier to customize certain magic items (why not have a skill list that a magic item can affect, as well as resistances to energies, etc...).

Yeah, I'll probably compile this and post over at Fluid's board.

If they're willing to fix stuff I have issue with, I'm willing to give them stuff to fix.

 

[Christian]

I've started checking my order status at RPGStrategy.com about every few hours. "Shipped yet? Darn." "How about now? Blast!"

My order# on that new website was 3, so I expect to be near the top of the list once they get it in stock.

(I don't know if I'm more excited about the program or about having order# 3 from an online retailer. If I'd only placed the order as soon as the e-mail announcement came instead of stopping to complain about it here, I probably could have had order# 1. Hindsight is 20/20! )

 

[Abdul Al Hazrad]

Well, I got mine this afternoon. First impressions -- very mediocre. On the up side, it loads much faster than PCGen and can do a number of things very quickly. On the downside, virtually everything else. Granted, I've only just gotten my hands on it and haven't tried it out, but there's a great deal that I find totally unintuitive, and I am having difficulty finding several features.

Case in ponit, I've got a half-celesital paladin character that I'm trying to put in E-Tools. Can I find the 1/2 Celestial Template? No.

I looked up how to change the color scheme. Is there an "options" menue to let you do this kind of thing quickly? Not that I've found. Instead You've got to go monkey around with code. I like computers, but I'm not into getting under the hood for somethign that should be located on the dashboard.

Maybe it will grow on me. As for right now though. I give it a C- (and it could go either way as I experiment).

 

[Abdul Al Hazrad]

Well, having fooled around with this for a while longer, I am SEVERELY underwhelmed. There is nothing this does that PCGen doesn't do better. I grant you, the speed of the program is nice, but I can't do half of the things I want. No templates? Non-Intuative displays? Lack of Options menus? Poor quality Character sheet print out? Bugs like you wouldn't believe? Man, after all this time, I really would have expected SO MUCH MORE!

Alas. Maybe the patches will fix the bugs, and maybe they'll release some of the material I need to reproduce my characters in E-Tools. But frankly, with only the bare bones database, one can really only create very vanilla characters with this.

 

[Imnop]

I got my copy yesterday and installed it without a problem. And that is probably the only good thing I can say about this piece of software. After two days of using E-Tools it got uninstalled.

I will be returning E-Tools tommorow and getting my money back. I don't mean to sound too negative, but the spreadsheet I use for my campaign does a better job for me than E-Tools. (And what is with that horrible default color scheme. Ugly! Is someone at Fluid colorblind?)

Maybe, my expectations were to high, (sigh), but E-Tools in it's current form is almost useless to me as a DM.

 

[dreadnought]

As it is now, it's a great first step. If it turns out to be the only step, well, it will be one of many tools in my electronic arsenal and one that I will use frequently.

What other tools are you using, Eric? (Just in case I've missed something good). Aside from PCGen (Which is clunky) I've found every other "e-tool" out there to be . . . well, lacking. I don't have time to master Java or the finer points of Excel and many of the fan-created encounter planners and DM's aids out there are just too frustratingly complicated to use.
So, what have you found that's really useful?
Thanks
dread

 

[theoremtank]

I am very concerened about this product E-Tools. I ordered mine from Svgames, and it should arrive any day, but after reading all the user-reviews I don't know if I want this product.

 

[EricNoah]

What other tools are you using, Eric? (Just in case I've missed something good). Aside from PCGen (Which is clunky) I've found every other "e-tool" out there to be . . . well, lacking. I don't have time to master Java or the finer points of Excel and many of the fan-created encounter planners and DM's aids out there are just too frustratingly complicated to use.
So, what have you found that's really useful?
Thanks
dread

Right now the only other electronic tool I use with regularity is Steve Mulhern's Spell Spreadsheets. With a little work and some copying and pasting and deleting of extraneous columns I can wind up with a sheet that looks like this:

http://webpages.charter.net/ericnoah/noahrpg/vangkor_spells.htm

Other than that I use some electronic resources like angramainyu's combat reference sheets, and the big master list of monster stat blocks (though now with eTools I won't need that).