This is not an article about D&D4 when you play by the first three books (DMG, PH, MM), this is an article about playing D&D4 as it was intended, with all books and options on the table. The game has expanded to include thousands of powers, feats, and equipment choices for each class, so complicated it practically requires the D&D Insider computer program to get a character design correct and ready for play. Add in the tsunami of rules errata for each and every book, and approximately a quarter of the powers and items, and there's no way to generate a 'legal' character without the program.
Of course, you can still play the game without using the program, and hobble along from book-to-book picking powers and building a character. For many of the groups we played with, the time needed to get six players together, through all the books, questions answered, and characters built took an entire session, and even then most players made huge mistakes in creating their characters mostly due to the volume of material involved. We started out with the by-hand method, we enjoyed the tone and flavor of the first three books, and also built a lot of characters by hand. Of course, with just three books to worry about (and one PH), it was simple.
Wizards built D&D4 with powers, feats, and items to exactly mirror the Magic Card format. Each power, item, and feat is its own self-contained card of rules, and there are literally thousands of them, with many revised. In the end, you ended up dealing with something like a huge box of Magic Cards in complexity, and in-play, it introduced a certain type of choice paralysis among our groups. Similarly, many of the powers were slight variations of each other, meant to ensure a certain power type could be used more than once per encounter (all the melee-shift-rogue powers come to mind, plus many others). There are too many powers that are too similar to each other, but that is for another day, another discussion.
Along comes the D&D Insider program, which became the de-facto way to generate a character. It's a great service, and keeps you organized, your characters in one place, and all your rules up-to-date. It also became the only way to play for our groups. Creating characters by hand took too long, and the mistakes made brought the game to a halt when a player discovered their character wasn't right. It was a negative experience for the player, since the player wanted to do the right thing, but preferred the by-hand system. After a while, players didn't like the online generator, because they felt it was the only way to go, and they liked using the books. We also ran into the online program taking longer and longer to use, since the options increased as you leveled up.
For play time, the online character generator was the only way to go - maintaining characters by hand simply took away all of our play time and was too error-prone to even consider (especially for new players). Clearly, the game is to blame here, and this is one of the major mistakes in D&D4. The designers wanted that 'Magic Card' vibe when it came to selecting powers and gear, and they even printed 'power cards' intended to make this easier (and those got outmoded with errata to an extent). This created a necessity to use the program to save time for play, players that used it were happier, did better, and had a more enjoyable play experience at the table.
If that sounds like a pay-to-win game, it sort of does. You are paying for the premium experience, of course, but players who didn't pay ended up with a net negative experience with the game. In most pay-to-win games, you can at least stumble along with the freebies, but your experience is still marginally positive. Here it seems like that, or a little worse off for non-paying players, especially when you get a mix of paying and non-paying at the same table. The differences between the two types of players were striking, and there were issues between paying players who had correct designs, and those who did it by the books and were playing with incorrect and sometimes characters with errata issues. A paying player saying 'oh, it doesn't work that way now' to a non-paying one was the kiss of death to about a half-hour of play-time every time it happened.
Now yes, the service helped, so it had value and was worth paying for. Something in the back of my mind wonders what would happen if the game was easier to play, easier to build characters with, and didn't require such a huge character generator to begin with? The game design of D&D4 in respect to character builds made the D&D Insider service a necessity, and in a way, it fostered the complexity of the game. You could have had the same D&D4 experience with less complexity, but of course, there wouldn't be a need to pay for D&D Insider either. Yes, it's totally within Wizard's right to get subscription fees for a value-add service, but part of me wonders if this was the right way of going about that.
The problem was, you didn't need the books, they were errata'ed away, all you needed was D&D Insider. If you didn't like the program, or you lapsed from playing and cancelled your D&D Insider subscription - you were out. There wasn't a great way to get back into playing without reactivating your account, and it felt like your characters were locked away behind a paywall. It was easier to play another game without the onerous character generation requirements than it was to get back into the program, find out most of your character designs were changed by errata and had to be redesigned, and deal with the constant attention a D&D4 character required.
For many, Pathfinder or the OGR clones provided an escape to a simpler time where you could design a character by hand, and many went that way. Of course, Pathfinder is less simple nowadays for other reasons, and that is another topic for another day. Many other RPGs provide that simple experience, and the interest in D&D4 faded away in our group. People just wanted to show up and have fun, and the stacks of Magic Card like powers and gear got in the way, the character designer becoming the focus of the negative experience.
If it were up to me, character generation would be free and open - anyone should be able to log in and use the service. After all, you want people to create all sorts of fun character designs and dream about the possibilities. What I would pay a subscription fee for is a place to meet up and play, for a RPG-focused social network with virtual tabletops, hangouts, adventure creation and tracking, and yes, a place to share characters, stories, and achievements. I would pay to unlock maps of worlds, party tracking, wikis, and adventures to play online. It seems Wizards went in the wrong direction, locking up characters behind the paywall. To me, it would have made a lot more sense keeping the characters simple, and making the value-add proposition the place to come and play the game with fans around the world.
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