In Which The Warlock Becomes a Doomsayer...

When Wizards of the Coast first announced their Digital Initiative, I was skeptical at best. It was hard to believe that a company so focused on print role-playing materials could put forwards a quality online application that effectively summarized their work.

However, upon closer review, I was pleasantly surprised. The downloadable Character Builder and the later Monster Builder quickly became invaluable tools for me, as I both ran and played D&D. Character generation time dropped from the hours it had become in 3.5e, down to mere minutes. I’ve often been quoted as stating that I could make a 30th level character, fully-equipped, playable, and reasonably optimized, within a 20 minute timeframe. The Monster Builder, similarly, allowed me to print out sheets with chosen creatures—both custom-made and pregenerated—reducing the amount of time that I spent preparing for games.


RIP--The Downloadable Character Builder (11-16-2010)

The down side to this functionality was the reliance on updates. As August and September rolled on with no update—and no word of an update—DDI customers grew frustrated. The revised version of Dark Sun came out in hardback…but had no support via DDI. Whole articles and books were being left out of DDI, with no word from Wizards of the Coast on why or when.

Then, the announcement: Wizards of the Coast would no longer be supporting the downloadable Character Builder software, choosing instead to implement an online-only toolset. The online-toolset debuted yesterday to much outcry amongst the gaming community.

With that in mind, I’d like to get on record now this thought: If the D&D brand is set to fail within the next decade, it will be because of Wizards of the Coast’s utter refusal to commit to either a set online plan and, through that, their customers.

Having examined the new Character Builder, it has several fundamental flaws that not only defeat its design intent, but also harm the gaming community as a whole.

• The Character Builder is online only. This is the biggest problem, yet one that WotC refuses to address. The company line is currently one that states that the online-functionality of the CB software makes it accessible from anywhere that has an Internet connection. There are two flaws with this logic: not only does this make the CB harder to access, but it also makes it less available overall.

o Online-only MEANS online-only: For some people this may not seem to be a problem, but when thought through thoroughly, cracks emerge. If I go to play at any of my 3 local game stores, there’s no wi-fi available. My characters, saved on my computer, would be inaccessible, whereas with the Downloadable CB, they were at my fingertips. Similarly, if the WotC website goes down or crashes, my characters are inaccessible. This limits access, rather than making it more available.

o Silverlight is left in the dark. The new CB runs on the Silverlight framework, put out by Microsoft. That’s all well and good, but most mobile devices—including the iPad, most palmtop computers, and any smart-phone that doesn’t use Windows 7—can’t run Silverlight. Considering that these were the target users of the new CB, this design precept is utterly a failure.

• Your characters are no longer yours. This, as a writer and blogger, angers me beyond belief. Not only does the new CB have an absurdly-low limit of 20 characters, WotC has now made it expressly clear that the characters—despite the fact that you, as a player, assembled them—are not yours. With no ability to export a character to your hard drive (and no ability to even view it, once you have done so!), you will have absolutely no access to your own creations, should you choose to cancel your subscription. As someone who runs D&D at conventions and uses pregenerated characters, this limit is crippling—with 6 seats at a table, a mere 3 games fills out the limit, and that doesn’t even count any ‘home’ characters that I might have!

WotC has framed this as the ability to store these characters “in the Cloud”, implying that storing them on a hard drive or flash drive is somehow an inconvenience. Such is not the case. Again, it’s much easier to port over a character via a USB drive than have to log into a website, which may or may not be available/functioning.

 

Maybe this can tell me why new the CB crashed 4 times in 15 minutes...

• The Character Builder is buggy beyond belief. Admittedly, it just debuted yesterday, but when WotC already has a fully-functional product that performs the same function, the idea of having basic, fundamental sections of the new version unworkable. The current “Known Issues” list on the WotC Character Builder site reads like a laundry list, with basic class features—such as the use of a weapon as a implement, which is core to classes like Assassin, Swordmage and Warlock—left to be totally unworkable. When a product already exists that fills this niche—one already produced by WotC—switching horse midstreams is foolhardy at best.

• WotC’s Track Record: Promise Much, Produce Little. We’re told, through the occasional forum post or the CB FAQ, that the ability to export characters will be incoming. We’re told that core components of the game, such as the ability to house rule items, to include inherent bonuses, and to modify the character sheet on a fundamental level…all that “has not yet been implemented,” but it’s on the horizon. We’re told that all of this is coming.

But, I ask this: what about the rest of the functionality that was promised us? What about the rest of the Monster Builder updates, which have gone untouched? What about the much ballyhooed Virtual Tabletop, which would allow you to play with your friends across the country, with full chat utilities and stylized virtual minis? What about open communication, within the gaming community? Anyone remember GleeMax, WotC’s utter travesty of a social networking site?

So, how long did GleeMax last?  6 months?  A year?  Did anyone care?

All of this adds up to bad news in my eyes. It’s been mentioned—unofficially, of course—that WotC made this move to keep more nefarious gamers from cracking and subsequently bit-torrenting hacked version of the downloadable CB. If this is the case, though, it’s a paranoid attempt to deal with a minority of the gaming community, which only harms the majority’s ability to enjoy a product as a paying customer.


WotC has dropped a fully-functional, smooth program in favor of trying to rebuild their image. This, on a fundamental level, is a misstep. While I doubt that this would bring the D&D brand on the whole to a collapse, it does make for poor tidings for the world’s most popular RPG.

I, for one, will not be witness to this pratfall. Upon the completion of my already-paid year of DDI subscription, I’ll be cancelling.

In Which The Warlock Tries to "Make it New"...

Bear with me here. Back in the day (the early 1900s, that is), when the Modernists roamed the Earth, poet Ezra Pound wrote "Make it New!". In the book, he set forth the concepts of a revolution of language and literature, in which even the smallest concepts are revisited, resulting in drastic changes to fundamental ideas. Pound himself was a devotee of Dante Alighieri, and produced his own Cantos centered around The Divine Comedy, but with massive alterations in structure and in metaplot.

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

Therein lies the rub and, for that matter, our subject for today's blog: newness! If you've been following along, I've been working diligently on my Deadlands game, trying to blend it with Stephen King's Dark Tower mythos and his larger, gestalt world. You'd think that'd be an easy task--toss in an Overlook hotel here, a creepy sewer-dwelling clown there, and the task is complete, right?

Wrong. In the postmodern era, King himself has assembled a pastiche of thematic concepts that started with Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, to the spaghetti westerns of yesteryear, to the venerable (and immensely gamed-out) Lord of the Rings, to Pound's Modernist buddy T.S. Eliot. Ask any "sane" reader, and an assembly of this magnitude seems schizophrenic on a good day.

The Dark Tower

So, of course, on top of all of this, I'm trying to fit the themes of alternate history (a la Harry Turtledove) as well as elements from Deadlands' own canon. Difficult? Monumental! To say that one cannot serve two masters is something of a misnomer here, but it becomes a massive challenge to provide more than lip service to the combination of canon, inspiring works, and ones' own ideas.

But, it's gaming "work" that needs doing. I was originally drawn to Deadlands for its uniqueness in gaming--in a medium slavishly attached to fantasy cliche, it was a breath of clean winter air in my lungs. Similarly, while still in classic D&D, the Eberron setting inverted so many generic fantasy tropes that it could hardly be recognized as D&D until you broke out the d20s! World War II-era Berlin, dropped into a fantasy world? Zombie "Soviet" soldiers, marching to war against dinosaur-riding tribal halflings? Sentient robots fighting psychic spies aboard lightning-driven trains? Sign me up!

It's this concept of 'newness' and originality, even when (as a GM) you're pulling from other sources, that keeps people pulling up a chair to your gaming table every week. Games that center around only one central pillar, be it mechanical or thematic, are destined to fail, simply due to disinterest. Players want more, and it's our job as a GM to give it to them!

The same can be said for games that are linked too closely to the idea of 'canon'--which, in some ways, tips my hand in terms of my relationship with the RPGA. In a medium that supposedly values and rewards creativity, the "Living" campaigns reward mediocrity and repetition. Similarly, I have been openly lambasting Wizards of the Coast's D&D Essentials line for being overly slavish to nostaligic ideas, many of which were clung to without rhyme or reason. Instead of embracing the mechanical creativity of 4e--which, even within its own mechanics, had been evolving!--the design team took a deliberate step backwards, which will leave the game worse for the taking.

John, over at World vs. Hero expounds on this idea, as he was providing contest advice for some of the entrants on his website. There, John breaks it down in terms of a combination of "Originality" and "Allure". The neat thing is, though: originality does not necessarily mean 'without inspirations'. Rather, he elaborates that:

...originality is a rather fluid state, and we should not be paralyzed into inaction for fear of being unoriginal. When honesty precedes the presentation of creativity, the quality of “being original” becomes “being true to a fresh vision of old and new ideas,” and, under this definition, our art may be judged fairly for what it is...

John, brother--Ezra and Thomas would be proud!

The core of gaming, if it is to ever be taken somewhat seriously as an artistic medium (or to continue on into the "Twitter" era), is to blend new ideas with the fundamental archetypes that serve as the foundation of our collective hobby. Slavish devotion to canon, for whatever reason, leads only to stagnation and, eventually, dismissal. In the end, we're a jaded group. We've been there, and done that. We've killed the orc, taken his pie, and moved on.

Give me something new!

Six-Gun Alien Banner