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Dec 9, 2012 -- 5:53PM, DaBugbear wrote:

Dec 5, 2012 -- 8:43PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

    I've played both extensively.  3e was fine to play by  hand.  4e is much better with machine help.  A prime reason is that most 3e classes were just "I attack." while 4e is "I use one of 10 powers this round."

Eh, I did up a character by hand a few weeks ago and played it. Didn't have any real issues. Seemed no harder than back in the 2e days. Heck, I even used a theme and some power book options. Of course I know the system fairly well. I'm sure there are 100's of options that I could have fiddled with in CB for hours if I had felt like it. Still, the character was exactly what I wanted and took 30 minutes to build. I could probably have done it in 10 in a pinch.

My biggest concern, truthfully, isn't that I and the 3 other "high system mastery" focused folks in my gaming group can't build a character by hand with dead tree products; my concern is for the 2-3 people in my regular gaming group that can't. We have a group of 7 (6 players and 1 DM, with rotating DM duties) and in that spread, we have a couple of folks who are lucky to make the monthly game session, let alone have time to surf the boards, read through the power guides, etc.
For those players, the online resources are much more important, since it allows them to build much quicker and more concisely than dead tree would, if they even knew where to look for the feat/power/theme/background they had in mind.

Sure, I guess the question is what would make 4e worse than say 3.5 or PF etc in that regard if WotC shut down its tools. Surely the tools ARE convenient (hence the DDI logo under my avatar), but without them 4e doesn't turn into a pumpkin, and in fact there is the old CB and I believe a Hero Lab module, as well as MANY spreadsheets which can all at least do some of the work, like for other games.

In other words there's no reason 4e's fans will disappear because CB isn't there anymore. It would be a tragedy to lose it, but...

Dec 11, 2012 -- 3:15PM, WhisperMagellan wrote:

The biggest handicap to using Dead Trees is you can only use what has been published, and you might have to flip through the books. Just like you had to do in 2e, 3e, and 3.5. In 4e, it is mildly simpler, since several races did not get race splat-books. In fact, only 2 races got splat books.
"High-mastery?" pffft. It is difficult to build a bad or unworkable character. And there is a lot of disagreement about what ratings powers have. Some people swear by powers I think are useless, and vice versa. "What that? That's feeble." "Dude! that's an encounter-breaker."
So, unless you are totally munchkining, not having access to absolutely everything is not that great an impediment. Just having the book in which a class is introduced should be enough to run the character all the way to lvl30. Maybe not perfect, but still pretty good. (OK, if you are using a build from a different book, it certainly won't be optimal, but still should be playable.)

That's what I like about 4e. I haven't seen anyone make a really bad character accidentally or if they pick the powers they like. I have one player in my campaign who built his character for high roleplaying value, yet he is still very effective in combat. Best of both worlds!

I'm glad someone else feels that the power ratings aren't exactly cut and dry. I browse Character Op a fair bit, looking for advice and the guides there helped me with my first character ( Archer ranger). But my girlfriend wanted to play an Ossassin (Shroud assassin) which isn't considered crash hot as a striker, but she liked the idea. There were powers listed that weren't very good, so I suggested things based on their rating. She preferred to take powers for the flavour and everything runs fine. I'm even tempted to play that class because of how well she has run it.