For the past few months I have been taking advantage of Dungeons & Dragons Insider, which is, as of now, free. It offers a huge amount of new content such as races, character classes, and guides on how to play and run Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. In the near future, access to the website will cost money, and the occasional PDF of new 4E traps isn’t really enough to justify the $4.95 subscription cost. Luckily,  the D&D Character Creation tools will soon be live, with the Virtual Game Table soon to follow for slightly more money. These functions were supposed to launch alongside of 4th Edition when it came out a few months back and have been delayed relentlessly ever since. As of now, word is we can expect to see Character Builder this year with the Table a little into next, far from its original landing spot. I had a hands-on with both, and despite going in optimistic I left wondering if I will end up spending that money after all.

It isn’t that the tools they plan on giving are bad, just that they already seem dated. The Character Visualizer offers the current base races, and the demonstration shown was the Dragonborn, which I was told was the furthest along. The amount of customization was embarrassingly low, with the person showing the person running the demo trying to explain to me why turning on or off the glowing of the eyes was “a huge amount of detail.” Looking at someone mess around with it and getting some hands-on time myself had me wondering if the character creation was better suited for Dungeons & Dragons circa 1998 then they were for 2008.

Wizards of the Coast has consistently missed the boat on technological revolutions, which hasn’t effected them much because they have stayed on top of their game where it counts. Now that they plan on hurdling into the current generation I feel like they should have hired an external team, possibly using their contacts at BioWare or Turbine, to create a fantastic user interface and a set of tools that will bring in people who otherwise might not play D&D. The only aspect of character creation that seemed to live up to my expectations was the actual Character Builder, where I was able to pick stats, feats, skills, and a class. It even came with power cards – looks like I’m not the only one who thinks that the regular character sheet is insufficient.

The actual Game Table looked nice, but its slip to 2009 isn’t promising. At the show I was told about the ability to use 2D maps in the program, actually changing them to 3D. This could be useful for anyone who has already used their dungeon creation tools, and is a step in the right direction for WotC. I feel bad being so hard on them, but when the person showing me the demo acts like being able to make the Dragonborn’s weapon float about his hand is a feature it’s hard for me to muster up any sense of excitement. I still have some hopes for the program, and with a few months until they need to release the character customization tools it isn’t too late to push changes through, but the dream of a Wizards created set of tools with the D&D game table might be out of reach for a few more years after all.

 

Reposted from Pen and Paper Portal, be sure to check it out for all of your nerdy RPG needs.

 

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