If I could ask WotC for a few reasonable things...

[SSquirrel]

Why does everyone think electronic versions of the rules books are such a fantastic idea? Maybe I'm just getting old, but physical books made form paper are actually easier to use. Need information from inside the book? Open it! Bam, it's all right there, and you can easily flip between two or more pages, holding your place with your fingers, flip, flip... no biggy. Electronic versions just aren't that convenient, especially in books like RPG role-playing books, where almost everything references some other page.

The character builder, on the other hand, was far more useful than the books, but only when specifically making a character. But screw people who get deployed to Afghanistan, or something, because if your internet connection sucks, good luck with using the new one! Oh, and good luck with using house-rules! No way we're going to allow custom rules to be inputted in any meaningful way!

The amusing thing about your comment as a whole is that deployed soldiers are an excellent reason for electronic versions of books. Stick them all on your laptop to save space in your packing. Only so much room and do you want to take 20 hardbacks into a combat zone?

As far as the online requirement for the tools, yeah I do wish they had decided to find a way that worked to keep the offline builder but still not let everyone have all the content for free. Of course, people take the old builder and side load all the information anyway, so clearly they didn't' have a good way to block that. They have their plans for a revenue stream that requires payment for these services, so either use the OCB and side load all the extra data to be current and don't pay for DDI or pay for DDI and use the web one. I can guess which WotC prefers

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As it is right now today? Yeah, it is actually pretty good now after the last update. Still has a few things that need to be worked on, but you can make perfectly good monsters with it. Really isn't anything much at this point different between the online and offline ones really. Offline is still more convenient, but not really substantially different. One more update will be good, and they seem to be planning to do that soon.

 

[CroBob]

The amusing thing about your comment as a whole is that deployed soldiers are an excellent reason for electronic versions of books. Stick them all on your laptop to save space in your packing. Only so much room and do you want to take 20 hardbacks into a combat zone?

There are those who do, but I also agree that it'd be easier with electronic books if only for the ease of packing. When push comes to shove, though, people make illegal PDFs of the books anyway, so I don't know why the company producing them would not simply sell their own copies. It's kind of like the war on drugs. Not that I want to turn this political, but if weed was not illegal, it could be taxed, and people do it anyway. If the PDF copies exist anyway, why not make money off of them?

 

[Balesir]

Especially with tablets growing in use, it's pretty obvious that the entire of D&D on a tablet is sweet portability personified. Get an actual portable character builder and full campaign tools on there, too, and that has to be the RPG mode of the future.

Sadly, though, WotC's digital offerings have gone from barely adequate to utterly useless. It's ironic that I was happy to pay for the offline CB in an ongoing manner, but now I just subscribe for the occasional month to catch up on Dragon and Dungeon.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Sadly, though, WotC's digital offerings have gone from barely adequate to utterly useless.

I would contend that your statement that the WotC digital offerings are "utterly useless" is a 100% complete falsehood.

Online Rules Compendium.

My point proven.

 

[Dead Scribe]

...this would be what I'd ask for.

1: The Character Builder. Allow anyone to make a character for free. Let people make a character without registering, without giving you their email. They can't save their characters, but so what? Let them make as many characters as they want, up to 3rd level, would be best, but if you want to restrict it more, fine. You may have some arcane reasons why you think this is bad. Like...few games progress beyond level 3, so most people would be getting free use of the tool for most games. Doesn't matter. Means more people will play, that's all that matters. If anyone can make a dude, you convert idle, curious people, into players.

Given that access to the character builder also gives you access to basically every product WOTC has produced for 4e, I don't think this is really reasonable. Level restrictions aren't the problem--product restriction is.

If they could come up with a version of the CB that gave access to a small sliver of the content however, that might be more reasonable--say, access to only content from Heroes of the Fallen Lands. Or maybe a code for free access once you've purchased that book. Enough to play the game, but enticement to get more material.

 

[Balesir]

I would contend that your statement that the WotC digital offerings are "utterly useless" is a 100% complete falsehood.

Online Rules Compendium.

My point proven.

Sorry - there was an implied "to me" on the end, there, that I should have made explicit.

Talking of reasonable things to ask - the Online Compendium might actually become of some use to me if (in the non-DDI version) the source book was included. For real luxury, a page number would be gravy.

 

[mattcolville]

3. No. It is only your opinion that these guy's tool is the "most useful tool in the history of the game",

That's your criteria? Either a product is objectively the best or no help from WotC? I think maybe you hyperfocused on an otherwise trivial phrase.

 

[mattcolville]

Why does everyone think electronic versions of the rules books are such a fantastic idea? Maybe I'm just getting old, but physical books made form paper are actually easier to use. Need information from inside the book? Open it!

Ptolus is an extreme example, but a real one. That book is phenomenally more useful on the iPad as a PDF.

 

[mattcolville]

While the character builder does need a lot of work...they really, really need to do something about the monster builder.

Does anyone really use it in it's current form?

Not me. I can't export entries as RTF, which means I can't use the Combat Manager. And the Combat Manager is, like, ridiculously useful.