Ha, that's lucky! We were so poor we lived in a rolled up newspaper inside a sceptic tank and sucked water out of a damp rag!
Bah!
I was so poor, to roleplay, I had to cut myself open, cover my innards in butter and put myself on a plate!
Ha, that's lucky! We were so poor we lived in a rolled up newspaper inside a sceptic tank and sucked water out of a damp rag!
I'm not sure I get the distinction you're making. They "rely" on the CB in that, all of their characters are built and maintained using the CB per my request. This is convenient for both them and me.So, in other words, your players don't rely on the CB, they merely use it for convenience?
If the distinction is whether they would be unable to create a character by hand, without access the to the CB, I'm sure they could. It wouldn't be as easy to check for mistakes that way, but we're not incapable of playing without the DDI.
I would agree to this if is actually DID print out everything you need. But it does not, not even on the full pdf sheet. Feats especially, though sometimes it omits odd things. I have seen the sheets before(some people used them in my games).
In my group, no one uses DDI and it has not hurt our game at all. Most of our character sheets are a single page, because the book to look it up anything we need to is in the same room, but mostly we do not need to.
As for requiring hte sheets to play. I would steer clear of such gamers.
Agreed.That was the distinction I was making, yes.
You can, to a sharply limited extent, get the CB to acknowledge house rules and homebrewed elements... but since it doesn't factor such things into the math, you have to adjust the numbers manually. I can't imagine how you'd do that without knowing how to build a character by hand.
I'm pretty sure any group interested in house rules won't ever get themselves in a situation where no one in the group is familiar enough with the rules to create a character by hand. If a group goes around tweaking rules they are so unfamiliar with that they can't use them without computerized help, the likely have larger problems than whether they got their +1 to hit added correctly.Dausuul said:If it reaches the point that no one in a group can build a character without the CB, then that group will be incapable of applying house rules or homebrewed elements to chargen.
Wow, that's just...wow. How old was this player?
I haven't had any really bad CB experiences, but I have very mixed feelings about it too. I use house rules, and the CB has a way of passive aggressively making that more difficult.
Most of my group really likes the CB, and one guy really should use it, but I feel like it's a crutch that I myself am better off without.
Obryn said:I can say that I'd probably ban all Dragon content if I didn't have DDI to keep track of it all. I'd restrict the players to a few core books, just like I did under 3.5.
That seems to be another unspoken side effect of Dungeons & Dragons Insider that I hadn't considered. I have noticed that many players assume that all Insider content and all supplemental content is allowed by their DM.
How we do what particular things?This player is in their mid-forties, introducing their children (late teens to early twenties) to the game now. They actually have tried their hand at DMing and I'm curious about it. I'd love to sit in on a session to see how other DMs do things.
Well the decline in house ruling isn't directly attributable to the CB, but it definitely is responsible at least in part.I have noticed that very few 4E games use house rules of any sort, and some 4E players find it strange that I house rule things in 4E. I don't know how much of this is directly attributable to the character builder.
Agreed.I have mixed feelings about the character builder myself. I don't personally like it enough to use it, but I can see how other people might find it useful. It's certainly not cool enough for me to get an Insider account for.