House Rules in the Character Builder

[wedgeski]

I won't disagree with anyone who says the online tools still fall short of their predecessors, but personally I don't stress about it. I get so much *else* out of DDI that I still consider it awesome value.

But, it will be a great day when the MB is complete (for the moment I resort to screen-grabbing), and an even greater day when the CB has fully flexible house-rule support. Quite apart from "just being a front end on a database", as someone in the business I can appreciate how delicate a job it can be adding that kind of flexibility to a data-driven app. I think the bottom line is manpower rather than technical difficulty though.

 

[Echohawk]

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 get the unhappiness about the delays and WotC's general handling of the online versions of the CB and MB. I also find it incredibly annoying that the MB still doesn't have a RTF export. (Although after the last update, I did finally start using the online version, and I just do screen grabs of the monsters I need to paste into my adventures.)

However, I have also become weary of the fact that every thread about either the CB or the MB provokes exactly the same complaints we've already read a few dozen times. I do understand that people are displeased. Really I do. But I would dearly love to be able to participate in an occasion discussion of the online tools without having to read those complaints yet again.

And to try to practice what I preach, please could someone explain to me exactly how I go about adding a custom feat or power? I have clicked on the little house icon, and that lets me add an extra feat/power, but all my efforts to edit the new item to do something useful fail. I can't figure out if I'm missing something, or if there's a compatibility problem again like the non-US language setting which broke the CB horribly when it first came out. Whoops, and there I let a small moan out. Hmmm... it does seem to be surprisingly tricky to talk about these tools without some negativity occasionally slipping into the conversation.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Perhaps we should always open two threads when a new feature is added. One called "new feature is added! Finally!" and another one called "new feature is added! What took them so long?"

Because i seriously do no longer want to click on threads like this because it is nearly impossible to discuss the new features. After page 2 it's basically all about how long and not enough and CBXXXXXX and so on.

And yet, i still always click on the threads. Strange.

 

[Zaran]

I was one of those people who bitched and moaned about not having free feats. I am extremely happy that we finally have it. I now feel like there is no reason not to have a subscription.

 

[Scribble]

In this case, speaking for myself...

U mad bro?

 

[Quickleaf]

So with adding extra powers...is it from anywhere or is it restricted by character class? Or is it no holds barred allowing you to select powers from other races, themes, and such?



See, I resisted my knee-jerk bashing of DDi! Aren't you proud of me?

 

[Scribble]

So with adding extra powers...is it from anywhere or is it restricted by character class? Or is it no holds barred allowing you to select powers from other races, themes, and such?



See, I resisted my knee-jerk bashing of DDi! Aren't you proud of me?

I haven't done a ton of testing but from my quick glance over it looked like from anywhere.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

And to try to practice what I preach, please could someone explain to me exactly how I go about adding a custom feat or power? I have clicked on the little house icon, and that lets me add an extra feat/power, but all my efforts to edit the new item to do something useful fail.

While you can add new feats and powers, you cannot edit them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Exactly! As a guy who's day job revolves around doing exactly the equivalent of what some guy at WotC is doing who decides what things to address on CB and MB etc I know this to be so utterly true.

There are basically 2 types of customers. The ones that are pleased with what they get, and the ones that are never ever pleased by anything. Group 1 certainly are going to be more willing to come use your software if it has more features and of course they deserve to get their money's worth. Likewise with group 2, they deserve a good product, but they NEVER are satisfied, and in fact the more you do for them the more they tend to be NOT satisfied. Any argument that revolves around "well if we just RAM out some hack version of feature X those guys will be happy!" is crap frankly.

The stupidest thing you can do is pump out some half-assed broken version of some feature. ALL that happens is group 2 becomes enraged because you've got their expectations up now, but you have fulfilled them. Group 1 meanwhile is just confused and inconvenienced by the inferior crap you've handed to them, and may simply decide to go use some other product.

This all comes from near 25 years of product engineering user applications. The rule in our industry is better, cheaper, faster, pick 2 and "cheaper and better" isn't an option. If you want to pay $25 a month for DDI then I bet you get your updates and your enhancements fast. Oh? That's too much? You can't justify that? Well, then DON'T COMPLAIN (or that is do complain, politely, maybe 'suggest' is a better term). Honestly, the service is cheap, and programmers are expensive and programming is VERY time consuming.

There's a very good reason no other RPG has ever had anything close to the DDI tools, they're expensive and take a long time to create and only a large game with a huge customer base can possibly support them. As we can see, even D&D 4e is barely big enough scale to allow for it.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

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.

As somewhat of a programmer, I think this is more about management decisions than it is programmer decisions. I bet the programmers are just as frustrated with the choices as we are.

Problem #1: Silverlight. I think it would have been faster and better to program from scratch than rely on this hog. This is the one reason why the print files are so huge.

Problem #2: decision to make it un-editable. With Silverlight you can present text as a 'TextBox', which allows direct editing, or 'TextBlock' which doesn't allow editing or copy/paste operations. This is good in that a monster file doesn't get printed different than how it is built in the builder. This is bad in that we can't really export the monster without printing to huge PDF files.

Problem #3: funding. WoTC is not a software company and the DDI interfaces are not where they get their money. They really should have outsourced instead of hiring their own. Odds are the programmers are also acting as system admins, trouble shooters, business analysts, and program managers. Its like at my work, we have 5 'programmers' on staff in the IT department but only one of them actually does programming.

Its a pretty good bet that these decisions, along with the whole 'don't sell PDF' come from higher up the food chain.

But back to the OP at hand...AWESOME! I get to give my player the free feat they earned through role-playing!!!