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I am Liking the WotC Character Builder

June 7, 2009 By

Until this last week I had not completely made a PC from scratch for 4e that I was actually going to use as a player character. My first 4e RPGA player character was a quick edit of the halfling rogue pre-generated PC from the WotC website. I turned the halfling into a half-elf rogue, by doing a little edit here and a different feat there, and I was finished! One halfling rogue was transformed into a half-elf rogue. That was last fall.

This week, I found making my new goliath warden from scratch a real bear. First off no pre-gen out there for warden to reference. Secondly, I have been super busy, between Tuesday 3e games, work and my sons T-ball practice, I had very little time to really sit down and put the warden together by hand. I thought just googling to see what was out there for help would do the trick. I did find an excellent source, but I still had to dig through books and tweak things. During the game, I found myself fumbling around too much and I had little goofs and errors on my character sheet. The cool part was the other players noticed I missed this or that and helped steer me straight. Yeah it is embarrassing to have a garbled character, but sometimes it takes a village to create a PC. They suggested the Character Builder program from WotC. I downloaded it last night and it really is surprisingly good. I entered in my two PCs and found errors on both my half-elf rogue and goliath warden that I had missed during my more manual pen and paper character generation session. Without a subscription the software is limited to level 3 characters.

WotC character builder in Parallels 4.0 on Mac OS 10.5
My goliath. He kinda looks like Patrick Stewart on steroids.

The wife is going to let me subscribe to D&D Insider so I can get full access. I think that is the only pitfall to the software, I wish they would just sell it outright. I am not too interested in the Dragon Magazine, I stopped reading it in the late 80′s. I used to like Dungeon Magazine, but I stopped buying that on a regular basis around 2000. The other issue is that I work with Mac OS 10.5 now. I do use Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac to run legacy programs like WeatherMaster for my home game. Yes, weather can be a skill challenge or monster in Alidor. The software works quite well in Parallels.

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About shent_lodge

Shent_lodge, AKA Jon, started this website, in 2000, initially as a player's guide to his home game. He has run through, and run for hundreds of players of the Dungeons and Dragons game since 1980. These days he mostly plays the Pathfinder RPG at cons.