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Has lack of an insider account kept you from playing 4E?
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<blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5218576" data-attributes="member: 32740"><p>For 1st & 2nd we always dreamed of having some kind of PROPER character generator and tracker but never came even close. Everything was done by hand with pen, paper, and character sheets that we would design ourselves on a TYPEWRITER, draw a few lines with a ruler, and then photocopy.</p><p> </p><p>3rd Edition came with character creator on CD tucked in a sleeve inside the back cover. Not the ultimate, in fact slow and limited to 1st level characters - but you could at least create any 1st level character with it and after that just had to transfer data to a new character sheet (and the sheets it printed up were gawdawfully slow to print, wasted tons of space, weren't well organized, but hey - you're ready to play in 10 minutes.) The limitations of that creator chafed but we managed just fine for a long while. Then we settled on PCGen when it came along. Still not the best you could ask for but it worked, and we LOVED it.</p><p> </p><p>Then something interesting happened. One day we didn't have access at all to PCGen for reasons I now forget and which don't matter. The thing is that the players forgot ENTIRELY how to do something so simple as to level up their characters. They didn't know what to change, where to find the rules telling you what to change... They had become TOTALLY reliant on the software. Even calculating bonuses they had been relying completely on the software. They just read the total bonus but had no idea where this or that +1 came from or why.</p><p> </p><p>I found that EXTREMELY enlightening and the incident was the beginning of what was a growing distaste for the complexity of a system that was SUPPOSED to be SIMPLER. In 1E/2E the rules may have been a hodge-podge of patchwork stuff that was unintuitive, but the thought of players being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of abilities of a high-level character was laughable. In 3E they may have streamlined those rules and made things intuitive but the higher level the characters the more complex the entire game became. That wasn't laughable - it was an unavoidable irritation that sucked fun out of the game.</p><p> </p><p>Use of software for anything more than initial character creation is a dangerous crutch. We're not quite there yet but there IS a point where you may as well be playing a computer game rather than D&D if you can't live without the software to play it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Man in the Funny Hat, post: 5218576, member: 32740"] For 1st & 2nd we always dreamed of having some kind of PROPER character generator and tracker but never came even close. Everything was done by hand with pen, paper, and character sheets that we would design ourselves on a TYPEWRITER, draw a few lines with a ruler, and then photocopy. 3rd Edition came with character creator on CD tucked in a sleeve inside the back cover. Not the ultimate, in fact slow and limited to 1st level characters - but you could at least create any 1st level character with it and after that just had to transfer data to a new character sheet (and the sheets it printed up were gawdawfully slow to print, wasted tons of space, weren't well organized, but hey - you're ready to play in 10 minutes.) The limitations of that creator chafed but we managed just fine for a long while. Then we settled on PCGen when it came along. Still not the best you could ask for but it worked, and we LOVED it. Then something interesting happened. One day we didn't have access at all to PCGen for reasons I now forget and which don't matter. The thing is that the players forgot ENTIRELY how to do something so simple as to level up their characters. They didn't know what to change, where to find the rules telling you what to change... They had become TOTALLY reliant on the software. Even calculating bonuses they had been relying completely on the software. They just read the total bonus but had no idea where this or that +1 came from or why. I found that EXTREMELY enlightening and the incident was the beginning of what was a growing distaste for the complexity of a system that was SUPPOSED to be SIMPLER. In 1E/2E the rules may have been a hodge-podge of patchwork stuff that was unintuitive, but the thought of players being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of abilities of a high-level character was laughable. In 3E they may have streamlined those rules and made things intuitive but the higher level the characters the more complex the entire game became. That wasn't laughable - it was an unavoidable irritation that sucked fun out of the game. Use of software for anything more than initial character creation is a dangerous crutch. We're not quite there yet but there IS a point where you may as well be playing a computer game rather than D&D if you can't live without the software to play it. [/QUOTE]
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