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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5374859" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't basically disagree with you Solvarn, but there will never be any kind of OSS that does much with 4e. They closed that door when they came down on Master Plan. I mean there are plenty of us that are perfectly capable of building tools that work with dnd4e files, etc. There is simply no real point in doing so for any kind of offline purpose. It isn't even worth wasting time on. It is easy enough to see the reasoning behind that at WotC, but it doesn't make the whole thing suck less. One can talk about playing purely with paper and pencil, but honestly 4e isn't much of a game for that. Writing up a character by hand is not exactly a fun process. You CAN do it, if you have a couple spare hours to spend, but realistically if I were stuck off in a corner of the boonies where I couldn't get access to the digital tools? Forget it, there are simpler games you can play. I'm not sure the paranoia about piracy of DDI content (CB mostly) is really good for WotC. They'd have been smarter to have just made the stand-alone CB a free product. It would require some support still, but as a free download it wouldn't be necessary to rush out an update every month. Realistically people that play at all seriously ARE going to buy some of the books. Like most piracy calculations I really think this one grossly overestimates the impact. Few people that copy stuff would buy it if they couldn't. Sure, you lose a small amount of revenue, but as Bill Gates pointed out about software piracy in China, he'd MUCH rather you pirated HIS software than installed some free thing that works just as well. You're still a customer, albeit a less valuable one. Lots of customers is a good healthy customer base for a product. You have opportunities to monetize that at some point. People who don't use your product at all? At best you have to spend money and take risks to try to convert them.</blockquote>

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