House Rules in the Character Builder

[Nahat Anoj]

Link or I don't know what's up!

When using the CB, on the power and feat selection screens there's a little house icon at the top that you click and it adds an extra power/feat slot.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

There is also an interface for it from the tabs at the top of the page.

 

[the Jester]

Praise teh LORD! Hallelujah!

It's nice that they put in the "math fix" as a house rule option, but that's hardly what I call "house rules support".

Just playing with the powers thing, looks like it just adds the ability to assign extra powers to the character correct? (IE there isn't a feature that lets you build said extra power from scratch right?)

Custom powers = house rules support. The math fix doesn't do anything to make the CB useful to a game with custom powers and items for most or all of the pcs.

Much like being able to export from the MB and actually paste your monster into an adventure, the tools don't serve me at all without certain capabilities.

Why has it taken so long to go from the fairly good, fairly stable, fairly usable tools we had to... ehh, not quite where we were over a year ago. "We have your Monster Builder right here (except it can't build monsters)! Oh, now you can (except the math is wrong, and you can't paste them into your adventures)! Oh, you will be able to soon (I promise, and look how good our delivery has been so far)!"

Aargh. For all the talking up of DDI as a major component of 4e, WotC sure keeps shooting it in the leg. Every time there's a new announcement about the tools, it's a step in the right direction, but it's like reading the first (great) book of a trilogy and then finding out that book 2 is an inferior version of the same story that doesn't even get as far as book 1!

 

[Scribble]

My guess is still that they're building the different features into different areas of the tool.

I'm still guessing they will put the functionality to build stuff from scratch into the Adventure Tools. The two will link allowing the player to pick stuff from his DM's custom creations.


As for the speed, I'm guessing they have a small team and want to release it with as small a number of bugs as possible.

Judging from the past, people will gripe and complain about not having X or Y a bunch, and talk about how horrible WOTC is for not including it NOW NOW NOW but as soon as X or Y shows up they move on.

When something doesn't work, they then have to listen to the griping AND go back and fix it anyway.

 

[Raunalyn]

This is good news. Is this already implemented, because I'm having a hard time finding where and how to do this?




Edit: Nevermind, I found what the problem was. You can't customize or house rule Encounters characters.

 

[Kzach]

Judging from the past, people will gripe and complain about not having X or Y a bunch, and talk about how horrible WOTC is for not including it NOW NOW NOW but as soon as X or Y shows up they move on.

To be fair, it's been three and a half years since 4e's release and we're still waiting for basic features of what is really little more than a front end for a database.

"NOW NOW NOW" isn't an unreasonable demand when the developers are outpaced by snails and dead tortoises.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

"NOW NOW NOW" isn't an unreasonable demand when the developers are outpaced by snails and dead tortoises.

More to the point, it's not unreasonable to expect the "new shiny" tool to do everything "NOW NOW NOW" that the "old busted" one did at launch, and we've been waiting a year for that one thing alone.

Also, I found a dead tortoise this summer. It was pretty gross.

 

[Scribble]

I'm not judging anyone, or indicating if their complaints are justified or not.

Just stating what happens. People cry bloody murder about X not being here, but then pretty much forget about it all once thing does arrive. (And tend to get happy at least for a bit.)

So you can either listen to bitching about the length of time it takes or listen to bitching about that AND how busted it is when it arrives.

 

[SSquirrel]

Sadly my 4E group just got canceled till probably May due to our DM's grad school classes kicking his butt hard. When we get back to our nearly 14th level game I'll make sure to point this out and try to get an Expertise and Imp Defenses free for each of us. My Rogue will be very happy to pick up a couple more of his wish list feats

 

[the Jester]

Judging from the past, people will gripe and complain about not having X or Y a bunch, and talk about how horrible WOTC is for not including it NOW NOW NOW but as soon as X or Y shows up they move on.

In this case, speaking for myself, X and Y are things that the old tools did over a year ago, before WotC chose to discontinue supporting them (and they were well-received tools getting better and better that were largely functional) and switched to supporting new tools for at least the same price that did... far less.

And did it far less usefully and accurately.

As soon as X or Y are implemented, well of course we'll move on; but as long as the state of the "new and improved" tool remains "new and noticeably worse" than the old one, people have every right to complain. In addition, for some of us, the near-utter collapse of DDI (crap content in Dragon and Dungeon; month after month of expectations built up only to find them unfulfilled; the replacement of the tools with inferior versions) was a dealbreaker. It caused me to cancel my sub, and I have seen posts by a number of others saying the same.

I have been waiting for a functional, usable Monster Builder that isn't significantly worse than the old one ever since, wanting to re-subscribe but unable to justify paying more or the same as I was for something inferior to a tool that I already have on my hard drive. I mean, as a dm, the MB was the biggest draw for me to DDI; I don't need the Character Builder, since I don't play except once every three years or something, but I dm and custom build monsters constantly. And right now, it's more practical for me to do it in OpenOffice and just format and do the math by hand than it is for me to screw around with a MB that still won't let me stick a monster it builds into my adventures.

I think people would stop bitching about the length of time it takes for it to arrive if it wasn't such an unreasonable length, especially when who-knows-how-many people are paying for it.

I started out as a DDI booster; I subbed very early, renewed it and maintained it until half a year of crap DDI had gone by before I gave up. Since then the online mag content (if you even want to call them "mags" anymore) has risen markedly in quality, but it isn't enough for me. I want the damn Monster Builder's quality and usability to be better than the one on my hard drive, but instead we've had something that started as a joke (the Monster Builder that can't build monsters!) and has gradually turned into.... a little less of a joke (hey, it can build monsters now, you just can't actually put them into an adventure with any level of convenience!).

Isn't the whole point of these tools to make my life as a dm easier? Like I said, it's actually easier and more practical for me to do a monster up in OpenOffice, so the MB still isn't up to snuff.

And I have no idea what is taking so much time. Is "export to rtf" something super technically difficult? I admit, I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that if the old MB could do it and if the new one has been built on its back (which, according to many who have looked at the source code, it is), it shouldn't be 14 months hard to get it working.

Yet, 14 months after WotC kicked the old MB out of the house, here we are.