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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:03PM
#1
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A friendly welcome to you all! Together Eldritch_Lord and I, Leichenreiter, have created a program that will make life easier on Dungeon Masters and players who want to create their own homebrew material for 4E. Our program, the DM's Toolkit, is essentially a formatting tool that guides you through the creation process of a variety of things for 4th Edition D&D. It allows you to format material either for your own use or for posting on forums, with a special format option for the official Wizards forum. You can save all of your material for sharing with friends, create power cards, and do other miscellaneous tasks to make creation and sharing of homebrew material easier. As of now, the Toolkit includes fully-functional Creators for the following things:
- Races
- Classes
- Powers
- Paragon Paths
- Epic Destinies
We are currently working on Creators for the following for later releases:
- Feats
- Rituals
- Magic Items (incl. Artifacts)
- Monsters
We first planned to release the Toolkit on 6th June, concurrent with the release of 4th Edition itself, but it was postponed by circumstances beyond our control that have since been resolved. We will release the Toolkit 6th of September, offering it free of charge to all DMs and players who would like to make use of this Toolkit. A big thanks to all of those who alpha and beta tested the Toolkit since then; they've helped us improve the Toolkit a lot and suggested a lot of features, and the Toolkit is better for it. We intend to eventually offer the Toolkit for the three dominant platforms: Windows, Linux, and Mac. Unfortunately, at present Version 1.0 of the Toolkit will not be available for Mac, but as soon as we can find a good executable creator for Mac, a Mac version will be available with a later release. The following are a batch of screenshots taken with the pre-release version of the Toolkit. Enjoy! Screenshots:Spoiler:
Show
Main Menu (Tome-Style / Whimsical-Style)
Options Panel:
Power Creator
Show
Class Creator
Show
Race Creator
Show
Paragon Path Creator
Show
Epic Destiny Creator
Show
(On a side note, a big thank-you goes out to Excelsior LLC, who generously provided the Windows and Linux executable creators to support our project; we couldn't have done it without them. You can check them out here if you want to do something similar.)
If you have questions about 4th Edition - don't hesitate to ask me via PMs. Join the Community Monster Manual Group and help to collect a mass of monsters which will make your life as DM easier, and your life as Player pure hell!  I am a cartographer. You can find some of my maps in my profile, free for non-commercial use. Also, if you happen to like maps or make them yourselves, join into the Cartographers Group!
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:19PM
#2
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We've posted this thread to get feedback and/or corrections before the Toolkit becomes available for download. Since neither of us was one of the lucky ones to get the 4e books early (Curse you, Barnes & Noble!), we've been working only from the preview materials, as you can probably guess from the screenshots above.
If you happen to have the books and notice a problem with the input or another mistake, please post or PM and let us know. For instance, Belladonna5012 just let us know that the Fighter has 4 abilities listed as Key Abilities, and so the 3 slots for Key Abilities in the Class Creator won't be sufficient, and I'll have to redo that.
We want to make this as accurate and user-friendly as possible, so any feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:21PM
#3
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Will the source be available?
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:23PM
#4
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To advocate, this is a very well built program and makes the creation of the above very quick and concise. thanks to the both of you for putting it together and I look forward to seeing it completed.
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:25PM
#5
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To advocate, this is a very well built program and makes the creation of the above very quick and concise. thanks to the both of you for putting it together and I look forward to seeing it completed.
Thanks for the praise! 
Quite some things have changed a big deal since you tried the beta-version
If you have questions about 4th Edition - don't hesitate to ask me via PMs. Join the Community Monster Manual Group and help to collect a mass of monsters which will make your life as DM easier, and your life as Player pure hell! I am a cartographer. You can find some of my maps in my profile, free for non-commercial use. Also, if you happen to like maps or make them yourselves, join into the Cartographers Group!
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:32PM
#6
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Will the source be available?[/quote]
Possibly, though most likely not at first; I'll probably be working with it for a little while after release as people find bugs and such. Based on popularity and how many people would want it, however, I may make the source available for tinkering once it's as complete as I can make it.
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:36PM
#7
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Copying the text from the Toolkit to Word kills all formatting.
Is the known bugs in a certain type of Word or all Words programs?
What about Microsoft Works Word? I am making monsters, power, and classes with on M.W.Word instead Office Word.
But looks good if it works.
The power creator looks good so far.
"If you can't believe in yourself, believe in me who believes in you."
and
"Go beyond the impossible, and kick reason to the curb"
Kamina, from Gurren Lagann
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:40PM
#8
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Is the known bugs in a certain type of Word or all Words programs?
On a similar note, how does it interact with OpenOffice?
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:41PM
#9
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Is the known bugs in a certain type of Word or all Words programs?
What about Microsoft Works Word? I am making monsters, power, and classes with on M.W.Word instead Office Word.
But looks good if it works.
The power creator looks good so far.[/quote]
I believe it's an issue with Java (the Toolkit's written in Java to facilitate inter-platform compatibility) rather than Word; I've tried this on a Linux machine with OpenOffice and the same thing happens. I'm working on a work-around at the moment, so stay tuned.
Anyone with Java GUI experience who knows how to fix that is welcome to give some tips.
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2 years ago ::
May 31, 2008 - 2:43PM
#10
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Looks good* but I wonder if those long lines of text being cut short graphically will pose a problem, easy to lose a spelling error or wrong number when you can't see it. FEATURE REQUEST! Printable cards that resemble official DnD 4e statblocks/powers/items, or even better, the ability to save them as a generated image that a DM could import into a folder for house rules or something. *I know it's mostly a non-issue, but it looks like someone threw up crayons. If you can, try mimic the 4e style on those tabs:  Can't wait to try it =D
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