Wizards of the Coast Continues to Disappoint

I have been playing D&D for a LONG time (over 25 years) and it saddens me that Wizards of the Coast has disappointed me as a customer so many times as of late. I recently stopped playing 4E and sold off my books (for a variety of reasons) but I still hadn't completely given up on the new edition of the game. Why? Well, as an adult with a job and family, it's hard for me to get a group together to play very often. But WotC has promised the game table so I could at least play online occasionally. For that reason, I have kept my DDI subscription active.

Then I read the following post yesterday on the DDI forums (emphasis mine):

So last week we announced that we were working on a set of Campaign Tools with the intention of helping players manage and run their ongoing games and campaigns. These tools will focus on encounters, monsters, mapping and adventures.

Previously, we focused all of our energies and effort into making the Character Builder the best tool it could be. We're going to continue that focused effort as we move forward - we're just shifting our attention to the Campaign Tools. This means that we're not actively working on any other unreleased tools, which includes the game table and the character visualizer. Once we have the Campaign Tools out and we're as happy with them as we are with the Character Builder, we'll have a better idea of what our next step is.

This means that the game table will not be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Just DAMN.

On an unrelated note, Wizards finally posted a gallery of all 18 miniatures from the Player's Handbook Heroes Set 1. While I haven't seen them in real life yet - color me unimpressed.

Printing to PDF With Character Builder

For those of you that might be interested in printing your character sheets from WotC's 4E Character Builder to PDF, I have had success with CutePDF Writer. It seems to work flawlessly (albeit a little slowly) with my Vista laptop and I am pleased with the output quality. Even better is the fact that it is FREE! Now you can save all those characters you have been generating to a USB stick and print them out at work! (Of course I would never condone such a thing...)

Character Builder Success - Finally!!

After deleting every file that even sounded like DDI or Wizards of the Coast on my hard drive, I was finally able to get the full version of Character Builder downloaded and installed. However, I am still a little irritated by the whole affair. If it had not been for the kind people that posted their own workarounds on the WotC forums, I might have just quit in disgust.

The whole process was a real pain and I consider myself pretty darn computer savvy. What do you think the 'average' user would have done? I don't think this bodes well for future electronic releases from WotC, but I'll just have to wait and see...

Character Builder Woes Continue

My problems with Character Builder continue. I still cannot get the darn thing to update correctly to the full version and it looks like I am not alone. I came across THIS thread on the WotC discussion forums and it looks like lots of other people are in the same boat. At least I have Hero Lab for my 3.5 game...