Has lack of an insider account kept you from playing 4E?

[jbear]

That's surprising. And surprisingly sad.

All my players are also friends who get together and spend time doing stuff other than d&d as well, so this kind of idea wouldn't even have entered my head.

Anyway, it's probably for the best. Someone with that kind of attitude, whatever the issue, probably isn't someone you want to be spending your free time with.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

As a 4e DM, I find this very odd. I encourage players to join and have/will assist them in getting their characters made.

I do encourage using the CB, but that's just because its easier for the player to end up with a fairly optimized character. I have had group balance issues due to this. {Unintentional suboptimization}

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[ferratus]

We just share our DDI account. You can update the tools 5 times a month with it, so if you have 5 players, why do you need more than 1?

Just make a common email account and password to sign in with.

 

[Chainsaw]

One of the several reasons I don't play 4E anymore is the implication (in a local group) that I was a luddite (or worse) for actually buying physical books and filling out my own character sheet by hand (you do what?!?!?!) rather than using Insider and Character Builder. Of course, when we gained a level mid-session, I was the only person that knew how to calculate any of my new statistics without relying on a computer. We usually had to stop the game for an hour and let people rotate through the host's PC. Fun.

 

[wayne62682]

I could not imagine playing 4E without the Character Builder, but I wouldn't hold it against someone for not doing it. I mean, it DOES make it easier (SO much easier) to make a character, and it means you don't NEED to buy half of the supplements if you just want the rules (playing in a homebrew, for instance), but... I'm not sure I see both sides of the story, to be honest.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

1. It's lack of 4E that has kept me from wanting/needing an Insider account.

2. If it really does REQUIRE an Insider account to be ALLOWED to play in someones campaign then that DM has an approach to the game that I do not care to ever endorse by my participation.

3. As a DM myself I don't let the rules run the game, _I_ run the game. I would vastly prefer that attitude from a DM I play under as well because rules CANNOT know anything about our specific wants or needs.

 

[Festivus]

I can say that while the CB helps to ensure there are no errors on the character sheet, making it a requirement isn't something I would ever have. I have offered to plug in a persons character sheet into my CB and print it out for them before (so we could double check his math), but if they would have said no I would have been fine with it.

Doesn't it work like this, you can buy 1 month of CB and use it forever? Sure you don't get new books but if it had everything you needed. Seems like a small investment for every current power book out there.

 

[Chainsaw]

Seems like a small investment for every current power book out there.

But price isn't always the deciding factor. I like the manual, tactile interaction with my books, pencil and character sheet. I think the OP had to do with whether a "lack of an insider account kept you from playing 4E," not "why don't you just get an insider account/character builder like everyone else, it's dirt cheap."

In my case, lack of those things has kept me from playing, because I wound up with a group that essentially ridiculed me for not conforming. Crazy, I know.

 

[Emirikol]

I let my account lapse in November..I /tried/ to like 4e, but it never caught on with me or my group. 30 years of D&D and we switched to WFRP and Pathfinder.

The only thing I really subscribed to DDI for in the first place was DUNGEON..but even those scenarios de-evolved back into Gary Gygax dungeon crawls.

30 years..and D&D is now dead to me (unless you count 3.75).

jh

Again -- it doesn't matter to us at all what game rules you like, love or hate, but we ask that people not drop that opinion into unrelated threads where it adds nothing other than arguments. Doing so moves even an otherwise post towards threadcrapping. ~ PCat

 

[Dykstrav]

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone so far for their input. I had a strong suspicion that this situation was weighted a bit toward one end of the bell curve, and I think I've had that suspicion confirmed.

The situation has surprised me. I've never really had someone tell me that my character sheet had to be standardized before, and I think there are perhaps other factors in play. After all, whenever I DM for 4E, none of my players have ever complained about me not having an Insider account.

I can say that while the CB helps to ensure there are no errors on the character sheet, making it a requirement isn't something I would ever have. I have offered to plug in a persons character sheet into my CB and print it out for them before (so we could double check his math), but if they would have said no I would have been fine with it.

Doesn't it work like this, you can buy 1 month of CB and use it forever? Sure you don't get new books but if it had everything you needed. Seems like a small investment for every current power book out there.

This is really a two-part issue to me. First of all... Honestly, I feel that relying on a computer to do things for you is a bad thing. For some people, it enables them to shirk responsibility, or at least, indulge in sloth or ignorance. I sort of got turned off to the character builder when I had a player still playing their character at second level when the party level was at fifth--because the player assumed that I was able to update their experience totals through Insider and the application would notify them when they leveled up. Despite the fact that I didn't have Insider at all, it was still construed as "my fault" because I didn't tell someone that I can't give them experience on Insider. But that's only one extreme incident among many...

My single biggest issue with the character generator is that I have no control over the format or layout of the character sheet. I don't like power cards, I can make a simple Microsoft Word document on one or two pages that contains everything I need in a very compact space. I don't have to worry about losing a power card during the week or eat up my ink cartridge printing a bunch of blank lines, much less five pages every time my character levels up. I might consider using the character builder if it ever allows for any degree of control over the layout and formatting. But this is a bit off-topic.

Anyway, I've purchased several hundred dollars worth of 4E materials, and honestly, I don't want to spend any amount of cash (even $1.00) on an application to print a character sheet that isn't intuitive for me and that I don't like. I'm perfectly happy with my own character sheet format.

If you do have access to it but just don't wanna; have you considered that some players are kind of... fudgy?

I've known gamers who were top marks in every category except bookkeeping. And by that I mean extremely poor score in bookkeeping.

It is possible these other dm's are really insisting on the CB because they have one or more of these loosey-goosey gamers present, and it's not at all to do with your skills/ability to maintain a clean sheet.

I hadn't really considered this angle, but reflecting on my own experiences as a DM, there may be a grain or two of truth to this. It is indeed a pretty common occasion for a player to not add a proficiency bonus, or to not add half their level, or to not add something from a feat or whatever. Very insightful and helpful.