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Continuing on from yesterday’s post on 4th edition, I’d like to touch on a bit on the tools that will be offered to both players and dungeon masters. I figure that I could probably cover two sides of an argument, as far as the tools go.

We Don’t Need Your Stinking Tools!
I remember back when 3rd edition was released, there was a little CD in the back of the player’s handbooks that had a cool little character generation program. Unfortunately, it was only a demo. There was some functionality that couldn’t be accessed unless you bought the full program. But for most basic stuff, it worked out just well, and you could still print out the character sheets.

Unfortunately, with the advent of 3.5, there was no CD to be seen on the player’s handbooks. In fact, I’m not even sure if that old program was ever updated for 3.5 rules, since I never bothered checking it out in more detail aside from what we were all given on that 3.0 CD. So the code-monkeys of the community started developing tools that we can all use to create characters with relative ease. Though, admittedly, they did this for 3.0 as well, since the program that came with 3.0 could definitely use some improvement.

Lastly, I’m sure that most of us in the D&D community are used to getting a hold of free tools to use with D&D. True, there were several commercial tools developed, but from my experience most of them had been either lackluster or of the same quality as free tools. Since Wizards of the Coast is going to require a subscription to D&D Insider in order to access their tools, I can easily imagine a lot of people ignoring their tools and opting for those created by fans for free use.

And hey, you can even look at the D&D Software section of this blog to see what some of those free tools are!

Oooo! Shiny Tools!
However, admittedly, the tools I’ve seen offered by the community, regardless of being free to use or not, aren’t the most user friendly tools I’ve seen. And often times, I’ve even found tools that had very poor documentation, if any at all. Kind of defeats the purpose of creating a tool for the D&D community, if everyone else can’t figure out how to use it!

If you’ve watched the GenCon D&D 4th Edition Presentation videos, you’ve seen how nice the tools that Wizards of the Coast is developing. Not only do they look like they’re very easy to use, but they’re very visual. You can see what’s happening, what things look like, what characters and/or creatures look like, etc.

Now, I realize that there are already software tools that already show you what is happening in a visual manner. Heck, MapTool does a pretty good job of doing this. However, Maptool isn’t the most intuitive piece of software out there, though it seems the documentation for it has improved since I’ve last tinkered with it. But for those people who aren’t comfortable with computers at all are quite likely to be confused by even MapTool. And this confusion will just get worse if such a person even looks at PCGen.

The tools that Wizards of the Coast seem to be very intuitive. So much so that I think that even our current president (yes, I’m a U.S. citizen…) could use it. And knowing our current president, let alone the many other politicians in the other branches of our federal government, this is saying a lot.

Enough About Tools! What about D&D Insider?!
I’m afraid I’m going to make you all wait on that. I do have this evil streak, after all.

While you all wait, though, I want to hear your opinions too! What do you think about the tools that WotC will be offering with 4th Edition? And what do you think about the tools that are currently available, particularly concerning their quality and user-friendliness?