OMG .... WOTC does it again

[Talroth]

Well, looking at the other tools they're offering.
"The D&D Character Visualizer is client application that allows you to build the character you want to play, either for your D&D tabletop game or for your game on the D&D Game Table. You select your race, gender, class, and equipment, and this tool allows you to customize your character as you see fit. Once you've built a character you like, you can create a digital miniature of the character for the D&D Game Table or include a snapshot of the character on your D&D character record sheet."

That actually doesn't sound half bad really. I likely wouldn't buy a subscription myself, unless it was like $30 a year or something, in that case I might be willing to drop a bit of cash for it.

[GlennZilla]

I likely wouldn't buy a subscription myself, unless it was like $30 a year or something, in that case I might be willing to drop a bit of cash for it.

It's $10 a month if you prepay for the year in full. So it's $120 a year for everything.

The Character Creator is the only app that I am excited about. Being able to quickly (Please God!) select a few options and print out an NPC or new PC would help me greatly.

The Character Visualizer is nice if you've never heard of Daz or Poser. The output looks about like Poser a decade ago.

The Rules Compendium is expected to be the first app released. And according to the Gamer Radio Zero Podcast it's probably going to take the form of excell spread sheets. Too late, I got a player building an access database for me of all the races, classes, skills, feats, powers, equipment, and monsters. She really likes that kind of work and it helps her with memory and comprehension of the rules. God Bless her!

The Dungeon Builder sounds neat but it's probably going to end up being dungeons only, I dunno how much I'd use it. It's a natural extension of the tile mapper WoTC released before.

Dungeon and Dragon magazines will now be online and electronic versions. They seem to drop the ball on collecting the issues into one single PDF file. The last one I saw was Dragon #360. That's disapointing, but not a deal breaker. I have enjoyed the content so far since they took them in house, somewhat. But frankly, I miss the ads from the Paizo days. Now I have to try to find out what Crystal Caste is pushing directly.

[Badger]

Sorry ... I kinda lost my cool back there... I'm not cool or hip or whatever the kids are saying these days, to what goes on or whats coming out, so it was news to me... here I am ... working on an adventure (3.5) for print/PDF and battlemaps and tokens to go with it (primarily to be used with map tools... but I'll hopefully be able to get them working with Vdale as well.) ANYHOO ... working a little extra hard, so much so that I hadn't even stepped foot into the challenge this month... and there is WotC ... with a little itty bitty teensy weensy link for a (3d even) VTT .... I almost puked on the desk...

I love D&D, been at it since I was a pup. After NK posted up that little comic ... I decided to suck it up and go ahead and give 4e its due ... and quit b!#$$*&% about it. Even to the degree of jumping on the bandwagon and developing the favorite flavor of the month "Point Of Lights" idea... (Posts to come later on that) I love the game .. I love to map.. I love RPG's ... but I LOATHE WotC ... and sure.. its business... if I owned a quadzilliongazillionaire company .. I'd want more!.. Monopolies are a tradition in this country, but quite frankly .. I hope they choke on it... I think RRobes may be right though, WotC doesn't really want to corner the VTT market .. if they did.. we'd all be suited up in our virtual chairs, walking around in some MMP RPG killing things.... oh wait.. Blizzard already beat them to it ..

All for one... None for Them!

Torstan.. how is 4e going to affect MAPtools? what kind of impact will it have?

[jfrazierjr]

I love D&D, been at it since I was a pup. After NK posted up that little comic ... I decided to suck it up and go ahead and give 4e its due ... and quit b!#$$*&% about it. Even to the degree of jumping on the bandwagon and developing the favorite flavor of the month "Point Of Lights" idea... (Posts to come later on that) I love the game .. I love to map.. I love RPG's ... but I LOATHE WotC ... and sure.. its business... if I owned a quadzilliongazillionaire company .. I'd want more!...

Ditto your first sentence.

I personally would expect that 99% of the strong arm tactics comes from the Hasbro lawyers rather than the executives from WotC. Remember that they were the ones who opened up the core rules in 3.x in the first place. I believe WotC understood the importance of the fans and giving them choices to play the game in the way that best suites the players, while allowing the company to be innovative and still make money.

Torstan.. how is 4e going to affect MAPtools? what kind of impact will it have?

I don't think that much. I know the movement rules will have to be customized for the new diagonal rules. Perhaps someone will want to use the deck tool (not sure how it works) to kind of store up a players powers in some way and that would probably need some work to accomidate. I really can't see any hugh changes needed by Maptool based on what I know of the 4e game at this point.

Joe

[torstan]

The developers over at maptool have added in the diagonal measurement rules for 4th edition that can be swiched on/off in preferences. There are discussions about using the deck tool for power cards and a load of people have been creating their own macros for the 4th edition powers. The tool itself won't change much but it has the flexibility for users to ad 4th edition content just as Hero gamers or Savage worlds people can adapt the tool for those systems.

I think the diagonal movement rules were the only thing that actually required a coding change and that's already in (but the path finding algorithm is still being tweaked to deal with it - non-Euclidean geommetry unsurprisingly screwed with it a bit!).

As for gametable - I was pleased to note that none of the rules are hard-coded in. In principle this means you could use it for 3.5 or even 1st edition if you wanted. This surprised me a little from WotC. Okay, so its not exactly system agnostic, but it's better than I expected.

[Badger]

I think it was a choice of bogging down the game with hard coded rules... or hitting it fast and loose ... which 4e pretty much does... once a DM gets his bearings that is...

Those who loved all the rules of movement and combat and how the mechanics of 3.x covered everything from sneezing to water hockey ... are going to have the hardest transition into 4e (and probably whine the most ... you hide and watch) this time at least they got the part about fast play in ... (not fast character creation... )

As a DM ... I found that Monsters are a bit harder to deal with ... its a lot of info and things changed up .. vastly in some areas... I can't open my MM and find Kuo Toa's to throw at a couple three second level players... cause they level off at 15th .... ?? things like that... I don't care much for their Encounter Generation Method... (confusing at first, buying your creatures like you would buy an army ... for a miniatures game... ) ... still its all mechanics ... just a different way to deal with game functions...

I"m just gonna come up with my own System.... Market that.. lol

[Valarian]

More on the WotC dice graphics piracy. SmiteWorks have issued a cease and desist order on WotC, who responded by saying that they were from an "early design document" and that they used "3d models not 2d images".

Links:
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums...ead.php?t=8457
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1043881

Interesting "apology" from Scott Rouse at the end of the gleemax thread

[NeonKnight]

I think it was a choice of bogging down the game with hard coded rules... or hitting it fast and loose ... which 4e pretty much does... once a DM gets his bearings that is...

Those who loved all the rules of movement and combat and how the mechanics of 3.x covered everything from sneezing to water hockey ... are going to have the hardest transition into 4e (and probably whine the most ... you hide and watch) this time at least they got the part about fast play in ... (not fast character creation... )

As a DM ... I found that Monsters are a bit harder to deal with ... its a lot of info and things changed up .. vastly in some areas... I can't open my MM and find Kuo Toa's to throw at a couple three second level players... cause they level off at 15th .... ?? things like that... I don't care much for their Encounter Generation Method... (confusing at first, buying your creatures like you would buy an army ... for a miniatures game... ) ... still its all mechanics ... just a different way to deal with game functions...

I"m just gonna come up with my own System.... Market that.. lol

I will admit, the game is FAST, way FASTER to play than previous editions. I tried to create a 1st level Paladin PC last night, and I will admit, I scratched my head a few time to try and find correct answers to some internal questions as some things just did not seem very Intuitive.

As to the Monsters and building encounters based on an 'XP Budget' as they called it. It makes an internal sense to the game concept. The game is built around 10 encounters (on average) providing enough experience for a PC to level up. You take the number of players in your group and multiply that number by the XP value for a standard monster of their level to get your encounter budget.

So, if you have 6 1st level players, an average 1st encounter should provide 100 XP to each PC, so each encounter should have 600 XP worth of monsters. I too took a few minutes to digest that, but it became clear when I sat down to adjust the encounters for my players knowing that sometimes not all of them show up, so I needed to figure out how to scale each encounter based on their being anywhere from 4 to 7 players.

I honestly think this new game is at first glance mush more balanced than previous editions. I still have a hard time figuring out the 3.5 Challenge Rating versus Encounter Level concepts to build challenging encounters for my PCs.

[RPMiller]

Update on the effect DDI is having on MapTool... We are starting to see new members coming over to start using MapTool because WoTC is missing its release dates... We even had our first new member tell us straight up that that is why they were there.

:snicker:

[Redrobes]

Update on the effect DDI is having on MapTool... We are starting to see new members coming over to start using MapTool because WoTC is missing its release dates... We even had our first new member tell us straight up that that is why they were there.

:snicker:

At the iCon2007 round table this was predicted - well predicted that GameTable would be tried, and discarded in favor of the existing VTT's - but people mentally groomed with oodles of marketing lolly to expect play over the net would eventally find the best resources to do that job. I have always maintained that WotC doing a VTT is good news. If it does indeed turn out to be absolutely brilliant then, well, thats great too - actually probably the best possible outcome. I just cant see a down side to them trying, other than if they balls it up so bad that it ruins the whole experience so much so, that the game dies with it, taking everyone down with it - and I think thats really unlikely.