Feb 8
The developer of D&D’s online tools needs to go back to school
In prepping for a new campaign I’m working on (a 4E translation of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path from Paizo), I’ve been trying to make use of the “Bonus Tools” offered by Wizards of the Coast. I say trying because, frankly, they’re kind of embarrassing. I developed web-based applications in college that had better functionality than some of these things; at the least they were more user-friendly.
Encounter Creator
- Incredibly intensive application for a Flash product; can’t run it on my laptop.
- Tons of monsters aren’t tagged properly, resulting in the sorting mechanisms being useless.
- Given that the box of monsters is super full because of this, the slider mechanism needs to be helpful; it’s not. It’s far too twitchy. Clicking once on the ‘down’ or up arrows on the slider doesn’t work. The mouse needs to be held down and the monsters move slowly.
- All options are dropdown boxes, not checkboxes, so you can only sort on one descriptor at a time (EITHER Solo, Elite, Minion, or Standard, not more than one descriptor.)
- There is not a single piece of information about their stats displayed in this application. All we know about each monster is what tags they deigned to apply to them. You have to have the compendium open at the same time to make it useful.
- There’s no way to specify if you want a Solo or Elite version of any of the monsters that aren’t already specified that way. You also can’t apply Elite templates to any monsters.
Monster Creator
This thing is almost useless. It will do the math for you to specify pluses to attack, and will of course do the math for making something Solo or Elite, but it doesn’t tie into the Compendium at all. IE: There’s no “use an existing power” option, so you have to come up with or input all the details of your power yourself.
Compendium
- Tags are equally broken here, but there’s an actual search so that somewhat alleviates the issue. Entering “goblin” into the search field returns all the goblins available, unlike using the goblin keyword in the Encounter Creator.
- Once again, almost all the options are dropdowns instead of checkboxes. Can’t sort on multiple criteria.
- WotC is thoughtfully dropping all the information from monsters into the Compendium as they’re relased in articles, modules, and new books. The problem with this is that (as I just mentioned) IT”S ALL IN A DROPDOWN. So if you want to see all the Zombies from Open Grave AND the Monster Manual, you have to look at the results from one source and then the other.
Recommendations
- Tie the Monster Creator and the Encounter Creator into the compendium. Allow us to see synopsis of monsters in the encounter creator, and allow us to pick and choose from existing powers in the monster creator.
- Finish tagging all the monsters and content. Tag the monster powers so they’ll work with the monster creator.
- Turn all the dropdown boxes into lists of checkboxes.
- Make the encounter creator less hitchy.
8 Comments so far
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I’m not sure if you’re just using the free portion of the Insider for this, or have a subscription, but if so, you failed to mention the authentication issues with the Compendium, as noted here.
The issue with their software doesn’t come entirely from incompetence, some of it is their business model. The reason they don’t have any information online that is in the book is because that is how they make sure you have to buy the book. 4th edition D&D was designed more from a sales point of view then a game point of view in my opinion. Restricting information to just the books is one way this manifests.
All of which doesn’t bode well for the (eventual) unveiling of the virtual tabletop. On current experience, it’s likely to be a bug-filled mess that hinders any kind of effective gaming session rather than aids it.
It’s all moot anyway if you can get Skype video working around your table – anyone not present can just join in that way.
I’m not so pessimistic about the table, which is odd for me. While their Flash apps leave something to be desired, I find that their downloadable tool, the Character Builder, is actually pretty solid. I’ve hit a few little bugs, when making some complex characters up to level 30, but otherwise, it’s levels above their Flash products. If the virtual tabletop is a download, then there’s hope for it yet.
A couple of years ago, I lurked on a few sessions run by former guild mates where the GM ran a D&D campaign using ventrilo and a program suite called Fantasy Grounds. It seems like it worked out reasonably well for them.
You might check out http://www.obsidianportal.com/ My DM has been using it for our 4E game and it’s been a very useful place to store information related to the campaign.
Along with merging the tools, they can add the one freakin feature I really want: generate stat blocks of the sort found in their adventures. The modern stat blocks are wonderfully efficient while simultaneously being easy to use. But making them by hand is time consuming and error prone. When I experimented with doing them by hand, it took about a 30 minutes, in exchange for saving maybe 15 minutes of time at the table. Of course, with 5 players and myself, that works out to saving 90 man-minutes of time, but it’s hard to justify spending more of my time to save my players time.
Mind you, he fscking Core Rules CD-ROM Volume 2 for 2nd ed did this a decade ago! (Egad, a decade? I was one of the programmers for the CRv2. I feel old.) You got a searchable database of monsters. You could create new monsters or copy and edit existing monsters in the exact same database. You could print out a terse stat block for a monster. It made actually preparing an encounter easy.