::A Geek in Korea::

My D&D gaming has turned digital. While I’d love to have time to meet with the guys, roll some d20’s and hang out, the best we can do at the moment is play through Maptools online Play-by-post style. We pass around the maps, take our turn, and the send it to the next person, all while posting to a board for role play moments. It’s working pretty well. We’ve already reached level 2! My Orc Paladin is about to fight some undead for the first time. I loathe the Undead.

While it’s fine between levels to work with a computer to play, when I needed to level up my character and send it to the DM, I had a hard time because the Dungeons and Dragons Character Builder program has stopped working on my machine at home. I keep a spare Windows virtual machine installed to run that program, and a few others, that simply will not be ported over to Linux any time soon. When I go to install the monthly updates, there is a 50% chance the program will crash and be irrepairably broken. Uninstalling, upgrading, doing a dance to damn Windows, the entire “Why I hate Windows” routine continues on because of this damn program.

When it works, the Character Builder is an AMAZING program. That alone prompted me to buy a subscription to play Dungeons and Dragons for a year. It saves that much time, and makes the game that much more fun! You simply check off boxes, choose your idea of a character and all the mechanical grunt work is calculated automatically for you. It makes the detailed mechanical character creation of tabulating bonuses and sorting through materials bearable.

Sadly, the installer’s problems have left me unable to use it this month. You don’t “own” the content despite having a subscription, so you are limited to 5 installations of the Character Builder per month. I tried, and failed, to install the program successfully on my machine five times this month. Whoops! No September update for you! The demo didn’t even work reliably, which means I have no means of updating or leveling my characters digitally for my campaign! I’ve had to pencil in things on their original character sheets and track it all offline (deep shame!).

I’m waiting for the customer service people to extend my installations so that maybe, possibly, the next five times I try to install it there MIGHT be a chance I can use the program with the content I paid for through the next year. Otherwise I get to wait for another month to update my characters. Each month I get to hope it will upgrade successfully. It’s infuriating that their model of lock down prevents me from using material I should have access to if it wasn’t for THEIR program crashing. I can still use their books thought, and do it the old fashioned way.

Anyway, I’ve had to work on my characters offline, without up to date materials, trying to find where particular bonuses might appy, or where a feat or ability might improve my character or prove redundant. It’s very slow and annoying, and it can’t be shared with my DM, making it useless since we don’t play at the table any more. We’re going to add “second string” characters to the campaign eventually, but I’ll have to be content polishing up my back story and character motivations a bit longer before I can post the mechanical “meat” of the character sheet. This has helped me refine my ideas a little, and slowed down my desire to push on to a new character after working so hard to make my Orc Paladin interesting, but it’s frustrating to know that I’ve paid for something I can’t use for no good reason and it’s holding back sharing my creative ideas.