Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 6580299" data-attributes="member: 7635">I was referring to the unfortunate murder/suicide that derailed the original 4e tools. The later tools did get better, but that's a different tale (like how Code Monkey made E-Tools usable)In regards to E-tools, I remember when Fluid was posting regular updates on the software on WotC's site. There was an article which talked about how "the monsters in the map-make would have sound! Here are some samples!" (Its lost to the memory hole, however). I remember being on WotC's boards at the time discussing with people why "a map maker needed sounds". We'd learn later it was because the map-making tool was working towards a VTT style system, but it was too complicated and ended up crashing the project, and a barely-functional product was shipped with the "promised we'd fix it". Most people wanted (and again, anecdotal reminiscing of message boards long since lost) a char-gen program, DM tool, and maybe a mapmaker program on the par with Evermore 88's Core Rules 2.0. People were confused at the project grew and morphed, with 3d maps and monster sounds eating up precious resources that could have gone to making the bare necessities (char-gen, monster gen, map making) usable. Instead, we got crippleware, nearly 2 years after 3e's release. By then, the Mastertool's demo was forgotten and people had either moved on or given up. So I don't have any sources to cite, but I do know that WotC has been long on promises and short on delivering for three editions now.  Moral of the story: start small and build up, something WotC hasn't learned yet. They tried to give us too much with E-tools rather than build up, they promised four separate programs for 4e and we got 2 1/2, and 5e tried once again to give us everything (content delivery! linked PDF char-sheets!) and every time, we wait years to get a "oh, here's the char-gen program. Will get more stuff later."</blockquote>

Verification