I'm back - sort of

[Cryndo]

I've been away from 4E for a while now. I like the game better than 3.5 by a wide margin, however I'm tired of Wizards overpromising and underdelivering. DDI was very exciting to me. I was looking forward to a virtual tabletop. I liked all the content on Dungeon and Dragon. The Character Builder was cool.

Well, the tabletop never materialized and if I know Wizards, never will. I just re-upped for one month to DDI and am saddened to see two things regarding the magazines. First, unless I'm missing something, downloading the whole magazine is not an option on the last few issues. Disappointing. Also, Dungeon is almost half the size of what it was when DDI launched. Yuck! The Character Builder now sucks too since they went online only. And they raised the price after taking things away? Needless to say I'm disgusted.

Unfortunately, I much prefer the system to 3.5/PF. I switched to PF and it was certainly an improvement over 3.5, but it wasn't as good as 4E IMO. Paizo, however, continues to impress me.

Why couldn't Paizo be the creators of 4E? We'd have the best of both worlds. Anyhow, I'm at a loss. I want to play 4E, but I'd really rather not support Wizards. I don't particularly want to run PF anymore, but I'd love to support Paizo. HELP!

 

[OSEZNO]

You can play 4E at this point without ever having to support WOTC ever again.

Problem solved?

 

[Cryndo]

I'd certainly agree with that if they didn't close off 3rd parties from producing content for their game. I don't have time to create worlds and adventures from scratch. Hence I need to rely on someone for content. Unless things have changed in the last few months, that leaves me buying (or subscribing) to WOTC products.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Use Enworld's War of the Burning Sky for the next year to 18 months (or honestly, probably longer), and by then Zeitgeist will be far enough along for you to use that for the next 18 months. (or more)

 

[Cryndo]

Hmm. That sounds like a viable option. Thank you!

 

[UngeheuerLich]

You can play 4E at this point without ever having to support WOTC ever again.

Problem solved?

No,not solved...

without support 4e will die. Period. Buy some books. Or subscribe. Not all books or most books. One single book you like.

 

[wedgeski]

Buy Paizo's brilliant GameMastery aids. They're good for any edition and you'll be supporting an excellent company!

The online CB is now pretty much sorted, by the way. I think decent house-ruling is now the only must-have feature which is missing.

Wizards' VTT is in progress and if you're a DDI subscriber you'll soon get to try it out in open beta (it's a bit of a pale shadow of its early previews, but looks like it will do its job well).

As for the magazines... well, we can only hope the article count goes back up, I suppose. What's there is often excellent though.

The best advice I can give is not to fixate on some notion of Wizards the company overperforming, underperforming, or anything in between; the game is out there, as good as it ever was, and the game IMO is all that matters.

 

[OSEZNO]

No,not solved...

without support 4e will die. Period. Buy some books. Or subscribe. Not all books or most books. One single book you like.

4E doesn't need (nor is the content being put out of particularly high quality) anymore "books". It can't die. You have the content and ability to run any game you want pretty much. If WOTC isn't doing what you like/want, don't support them. If you like the game, play it anyway.

Solved. You don't have to buy anything.

 

[webrunner]

Well, the tabletop never materialized and if I know Wizards, never will.

The tabletop (at least, the current, 2D version of it.. the 3d one was cancelled) is currently in nearly-complete beta state. It's about to be made available to all DDI subscribers to test.

 

[KarinsDad]

4E doesn't need (nor is the content being put out of particularly high quality) anymore "books". It can't die. You have the content and ability to run any game you want pretty much. If WOTC isn't doing what you like/want, don't support them. If you like the game, play it anyway.

Solved. You don't have to buy anything.

Well, it depends on how much you are willing to work at it.

WotC has some 4E players by the balls now.

Why?

Because it is difficult to create the higher level PC character sheets without a software tool.

The offline character builder isn't up to date. Even if a group wants to use the offline builder, it probably won't work forever (just a fact of life that software degrades over time, for example, on my PC, my offline builder stopped working and errors out, even though it was working fine last month, not everyone was smart enough to set up a recovery, doh!).

Third party software is subpar at best.

Doing it manually is possible, but it's also very likely that someone doing that at higher levels will make a mistake (CB isn't perfect, but it is often accurate).

So, yes, it is possible to not use the online Character Builder. But, it can be somewhat more problematic.