The Middle-Aged DM

FYI the character builder still sucks……Let me give you a brief rundown of my recent donnybrook with the turd builder.  Last weekend I somehow managed to get the green light to go to this mini-con around my place (no small feat with a newborn and 2 year-old who thinks he’s the boss of me) so I can, you know, actually play for a change instead of always being the douche behind the screen trying to dick punch your character.  I needed to create some PC’s to roll with on short notice, and by short notice I mean the night before.  I was like no worries right, this is what the online turd builder was made for, it was supposed to make my life easier and dazzle me with its speed and functionality, and for sure after several months any bugs would be ironed out just like they said, right? Well, that night, if the online turd builder was a person I would have beat it with a sack of doorknobs.

First off, not a technical snafu, but the 20 character limit has got to go. I know you can now export them to your hardrive, but this is just an added step that wasn’t there before in the offline builder. After I make some room, so long Ken Benobi my little swordmage/psion, I settle in to whip up some characters only to have the system freeze up and boot me off twice. This might not have been so bad if reloading the turd builder wasn’t actually slower than paint drying.  Once I am back in I settle down and bang out a striker, leader, and defender at various levels so I can fill any needed role at the table (what can I say all the team sports as a kid has rubbed off on me) and go to print, which is where the wheels really fell off as for some reason it refused to let me print in black and white. I couldn’t even get the printer options to come up on the screen. I was tempted to go online and see if Hasbro was now in the color ink business. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, aside from the fact that color ink is more expensive than plutonium, but I was running low on color and I was worried that the pages might be hard to read.  Turns out I was worried for nothing as whenever I tried to print no ink actually made it onto the page as my printer would just spit out blank page after blank page. At this point my rage was percolating around “Hulk smash” levels as I was cruising the forums looking for known issues and fixes. It turns out I just needed to create a pdf of the character file, save it to my hardrive, then print it out, like that’s totally convenient right? Well at least I was able to then print in black and white.

After several months I was really expecting better, especially for a service I am paying for. Instead I really felt like this thing was just pissing in my face. Although having said all that, I will give them this the interface is really nice and slick looking, and I think that if they can ever get their shit together it will be a really solid deal, except for the whole needing to maintain a monthly subscription to use. I will tell you this, all the guys in my online game that I run use the old offline character builder that some dude has hacked and is continuously adding the new content to with way less issues that I am having with the “new” and “improved” paid one.

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Well the new online Character Builder dropped on Tuesday November 16^th with the visual equivalency of a horse taking a dump in the middle of the street. Now I am not the most tech savvy person out there, as I don’t know Silverlight from a flashlight or alpha/beta whatever version, but I do know suckage, and so far this thing sucks balls. In a previous post I mentioned that I would reserve my nerd rage until server issues jammed me up, well this happened after about 2 minutes during my initial foray as I tried to make Ken Benobi, my poor little hybrid swordmage/psion. So did I hulk up?…Nope, instead of the pulsating of gamma irradiated cells, I felt more of an absolute bewilderment that a company who tends to cater to a client base that knows a thing or two about technology can be so repeatedly horrific with their digital offerings. Like honestly, how is it that your fan base can produce quality content, for free, in their spare time that can rival yours in functionality. I can’t quite understand how a successful multi-national company that is a subsidiary of the largest toymaker in the world just can’t’ throw money at their digital content to get something pimp or at least something I don’t have to pay to beta test. I mean look at those dudes that put out that Microsoft virtual surface, why the hell aren’t they making your digital tools? There is nothing like, as a customer, paying for a working and functional product to then have that product discontinued and replaced by an unstable, bug infested one with significantly less functionality than the older obsolete product. I think the only thing missing is someone from Wizards of the Coast showing up at your door and cock punching you.

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“Wars over man. Wormer dropped the big one” a line uttered by D-Day and forever ingrained in my psyche, unleashing perhaps one of the first depictions of nerd-rage, with Bluto shouting “Wormer, he’s a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer…” Well on Tuesday, Wizards of the Coast dropped the equivalent of the “big one”, as they announced that the beloved character builder was moving to an on-line version only and that the current off-line version would no longer receive any support or future updates. I think most of us knew this was coming, but the explosion of nerd-rage and bile that erupted over the blogoshpere, message boards, and Twitter was truly something to behold.  The official thread on the Wizards Community Forum has had over 75,000 views with 1,376 posts, with the majority being negative.

There are various pros and cons to the move that are relatively valid on both sides; you can check out a pretty good article and discussion at Critical-Hits. Change can be stressful irregardless if one attributes the change as positive or negative. Ultimately I think it is probably a good thing as it looks to be the first step in cross-platforming other services and programs i.e. a virtual tabletop. It seems that one of the largest beefs is with the fact that you will need to have a valid and current DnD insider account to access and use the character builder and can only save your character data on their servers. It also requires you to have a working internet connection to access and use, which I can see being a bone of contention for some people. So no more gaming the system by paying for a month to get an update or splitting the 5 downloads between friends or pirating the builder and updates from a torrent site.  Now I can understand being strapped for cash, but blaming a company for trying to make money or capitalize on a successful product is a little ridiculous to me as well as the fact that anyone might be surprised by this strategy. Also surprising or really not so surprising was the mass bamboozling and corporate spin that Wizards pumped out to account for the delays in updating the old character builder that culminated in Tuesday’s announcement, I mean come on man don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Now given that I am “The Middle-Aged DM”, I can also remember a time when you couldn’t get stuff for free so readily, it never stopped me or my friends from gaming. We played years and years of Runequest campaigns with a single red book, it didn’t even really occur to us that their might be other books or supplements that we could get for the game.

For me, my concerns center around feeling dependent on their servers. Perhaps I have some unresolved attachment issues or problems with intimacy, but I hate relying on others to get my needs or wants met. My nerd-rage is reserved for when or if that system shits the bed, like the day I can’t log on, or when it is slower than a government bureaucrat, or the day I get bumped off mid-use, particularly when they inevitably move the monster builder online and I am trying to prep for my game. That’s when I’ll Hulk-up and….well continue to pay my monthly fee and buy every book that comes out….Damn you Wotc.

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