I am Liking the WotC Character Builder

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.

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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