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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dan'L" data-source="post: 4946379" data-attributes="member: 68954">From my POV, the software support is part of the current problem.  It has enabled more players to quickly access the game, which is a good thing for sales I'm sure, but it has done so by allowing them to gloss over the rules and enter in with decidedly less than a firm grasp of the rules interactions.  It's certainly not a perfect adaptation of the rules set, but some will treat it as such.Ideally, you'd have players starting with something like the Character Builder and expanding their rules knowledge around their particular shtick through reading the actual rules text and game play, but that won't always be the way things go.  And there's nothing worse than thinking you've got this cool build, only to find out in a game from the other players or the DM that no, that's not how it works despite what you thought the CB was telling you.As far as the monsters go, I can't speak except anecdotally*, but my DMs have commented how incredibly easier it is to customize monsters and encounters relative to 3rd edition, and this was before the software tools were even available.So I have to wonder, perhaps the software has become/is becoming a crutch that players and DMs are perhaps relying on a little too much.  It's a great time saving supplemental tool, but it shouldn't be a substitute for actually learning the system.  Bottom line, you'll get out of it proportional to what you put in, and the software tools allow a player to put in less so they'll naturally come out with less.(*Not so anecdotal, I find that 4th ed is, overall, extremely simpler than previous editions to play, thanks in large part to the streamlining of the class system.  Sure, if you compare playing a 1/2/3 ed. fighter to a 4e fighter, things have gotten more complex.  But if you'd learned to play a 1/2/3 ed fighter and wanted to try a 1/2/3 other class, you pretty much had to learn a whole new rule set; with 4e, if you've learned to play a fighter, you've basically the same rule set you need to any of the other classes (although you'll do well to learn a new set of tactics)  And if you think "hand writing out all the details for even a low level character is a pain in the butt," realize that you wouldn't even think of hand writing out all the details for even a low level spellcaster in a previous edition, you'd just list out your spells and have to look them up each time you'd go to cast them.)-Dan'L</blockquote>

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