Though they haven’t gotten a date for it, the pics provided for the first in WoTC’s Adventure Tools series, the Monster Builder, is worth getting excited over.
The full screenshots are over at Wizards, and I’ve gone over them each trying to ascertain basic functionality. Here’s what we’ve got thus far confirmed.:
- Monster Search –Still having access to all those monsters at a glance is huge. By their count, it’s over 2,000 hungry critters…
- Monster Editing –not only search, but you can dissect the little buggers. It’s high school science all over again. You can tweak levels and get full re-calculations on the fly, drag and drop monster powers (your own personal Frankenstein!), and search through the powers by themselves or through the monsters they are attached with. Making variants of monsters just got very very easy.
- Scratch Building –you can of course build a monster straight from your imaginarium, which you’d expect. I don’t think I’d be far off in assuming it will do basic calculations for you based on role and level.
The only thing I’m praying for are multiple output formats. I’d like to see the usual –text, html, xml. For the HTML I hope they have a seperate .css that you can link to (or their own external stylesheet would be ultra-slick).
The short of this is, I am excited about this tool and I think you should be too if you GM at all. This is the GM’s character builder, and if it delivers even most of the way we will get a powerful tool in building our adventures.
What do you think of the screens thus far?
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Depending on the level of editability for existing monsters (scaling levels), it looks like one of those exceeding rare reasons to actually own a DDI subscription. Shame I’m poor and/or cheap. :-S
*Goes back to working on his primitive Monster Cards for MM2*
I agree with kingworks, this looks like it brings back some value to DDI. I don’t really care though, as all the fancy schmancy tools can’t beat my brain and my text editor.
*nerdgasm*
@kingworks I’m pretty much locked in on my DDI, so having this is just icing. I do like getting a sneak peek at the classes as well.
@wyatt I’m not so sure these replace as much as supplement creativity. You get an app thats custom-made to make monsters and that’s sweet. Text editors are nice too! (Which do you use? I’m and EditPlus fan myself).
@wampuscat whoa! don’t make too much of a mess
nice though, isn’t it? I leave the day by day workings of insiders to the experts usually — Questing GM does a great job — but this I had to comment on.
Looks cool. If it’s like the CB, in that I can sign up for a month and keep it forever, they’ll get at least $10 from me. Not adding a monthly bill to rent DnD tools.
I’m really jazzed by the screenshots I’ve seen so far. They look awesome, and I can’t wait to be able to search 2000+ monsters all at once.
Once WotC is done with the Monster builder, they should move on to make an artifact builder program to make it easier. Making artifacts has always been a pain in the neck (in all versions of D&D) and having a tool to help GMs out with that would be nice.
mmmm…artifact builder. That would be really nice, wouldn’t it?
So i can now mix and match powers with a searchable point and click / drag and drop interface?
Holy flaming shitballs! My only question, is why in the hell have we never had this kind of tool before? I mean, what fracking year IS it?
Thank you for pointing this out. The character builder (or evil BBEG generator) was worth the entire price of DDI for me. All this other stuff is freaking icing on my freaking cake!
Lets just not talk about their awful anti-piracy measures.