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Everyone’s time comes eventually. Eventually bad tactics, story, or cold dice kill a character. I’ve lost a couple and I’ve killed a couple.

But what happens next? I’m not talking about the long tunnel with the bright light or passage to the Shadowfell, but what happens at the table. A character just died and there are two or three hours left in the session. What do you do?

What Came Before

Below are some options and discussion on what to do when a PC dies at your table.

The Watcher

The baseline action for a PC dying unexpectedly is that player sits around bored, watching events unfold.

4th Edition was sold with the digital tools. Much of the initial hype was predicated on the suite of digital offerings. The initial presentation had demos of the tools. WotC cancelled the printed copies of Dragon and Dungeon so as to tie them into their electronic offerings. The print copies of all of the Core rulebooks advertised the existence of the e-tools & magazines wrapped up in a package known as "Dungeons & Dragons Insider" or DDI. The little red DDI logo is pretty synonymous with 4th Edition, being attached to users and articles.

But DDI had troubles before it even launched. While WotC continued as if nothing was wrong, months before the launch they scrapped everything that had been done and started again. When the tools were released they were good, but two never made it out

Alright. I've had it. Flood gates grinding open.

With my laptop being stolen in March and the other computer I use to do D&D prep work upgraded I am finally without the original versions of the Character Builder and the Adventure Tools. Wizards used to have the executable file still online, just hidden and there was even a 3rd party that was working to keep the old builder up to date. Well it would seem they've taken that away and now I'm stuck with only the online Character Builder. The Adventure Tools are still available to download, but I'll get to that.

This wouldn't be so bad for the most part. The Character Builder seems to have a lot of the worst bugs worked out and now that there has been time to play with it I've even gotten used to its idiosyncrasies. There is still a lot to

As I know have gone trough the compendium some more I like it more and more.
I found the Essentials content in the compendium as epic and normal Deities, classes, races, feats, items,
paragon paths and powers. When I didn't find it last time I just did a search for Essentials now I know that
You can find the Players Essentials in the source tab.

I'm a big podcast listener, I probebly listen to about 6-7 hours each day as i work as a mailman.
When i listen to podcasts I start at the first episode so I get some information trough there
some time later so I though that D&DI character builder diden't have a export option, But it does and
I love it!!.

Knowledge is power // Gondrick

Geh.  I've been here for about a day now, and all I seem to be doing is QQ'ing about the state of the new WebCB.  I really do need to browse around some more. 

I finally subscribed to DDI since I wanted the new browser-based Character Builder. I'm a long time Mac user and was frustrated by the fact I had to install Parallells just to run Character Builder in WinXP.

While I've got some issues with the web-based character builder - though none that really overshadow being able to run it in OSX - the biggest thing is the loss of the journal that was part of the Windows application.

The long and short of it is that until they add the journal to the web-based version - if they ever do - I think I'll use this blog to jot down my post-session notes in the interim. Unlike my first blog here, which was semi-in-character, it'll just be my quick notes on the session after the fact.

So I have to give credit where credit is due. I will do that, I have no problem with that.

Now mind you the new Character Builder has been out roughly 36 days depending on how you look at it. So they had major stability issues, many bugs, lots of missing or broken content (depending on who's view you listen to) and it took 36 days to get a few things fixed.

Onto the praise...

They updated the character builder today and fixed one particular bug that annoyed me to no end. Mage At-Will's, you could not pick from other sources just the first essential book. I wanted my players Pyromancer to have more than just the couple of fire spells available to him. Oh there was a work around thanks to dbmeboy over on the DDI forums but that was a fan work around, not official as much as the imported