I'm in the same boat as you goatunit. I picked up 4th edition because I was wow'ed by all of the videos of their virtual tabletop. The entire GenCon preview of 4th edition focused on that virtual tabletop. And nothing materialized......

Crazy.

It's a bummer, because Neverwinter Nights was a huge leap forward in bridging the divide between PnP and CRPGs. It should have been the technological forerunner to a dynamic virtual tabletop. NWN1 shipped with a multiplayer component that included a basic, but promising, DM-client feature.

Hopes were high for NWN2, but unfortunately, it was a bug-fest, and WotC surrendered the field to Dragon Age Origins (which itself was disappointing, because they talked up their toolset, which was so shitty that it was unusable at release, and never properly patched).

Had Wizards stuck with it (and stuck with Bioware instead of Atari), we'd not only have a kickass successor to NWN1, but they'd be able to reverse engineer the software to support PnP sessions.....the same toolset that was used to create modules for NWN1 (and NWN2) could have been used to create settings and encounters for tabletop games.

As the tutorial shows, you could throw together a module in 15 minutes.

that does help clarify a few things. Mutant builds tend to be the most fun for me. It has the same feeling as customizing a characters appearence or background. Only in this case, I get to tweak and tinker the character mechanics to my liking.

How do you feel about how the ITGD effects progression. In 3.5 it seems that the higher you go, the more the game demands that you take specific builds survive in combat. Admittedly good GM would tailor the rules to fit the group, but there is something to be said about a game that requires certain abilities to be effective.

"Certain builds"? Um... Okay, I saw HUNDREDS of effective builds in Living Greyhawk and Living Arcanis--and Living Campaigns, by their very structure, tend to promote very aggressive build-tweaking. If there were only a few limited builds that worked, every table would've been cookie-cutter, especially at high level--and that simply wasn't the case.

Rather, in 3.x, there were a handful of ~easy~ builds that were still effective. However, if you had a more esoteric concept, you could run with that concept and still be effective, either in or out of combat, by knowing the system and how to work it.

But at the same time, it was entirely possible to build a character that was worthless in 3.5 without meaning to. Although I attribute that to the amount of baked in immunities with various creature types and how damage resistance worked.

Agreed--it was perfectly possible to build an utterly horrible character. That was counterbalanced by making concept supreme--you could build virtually anything you wanted, given enough system-mastery. 4e sacrificed concept on the altar of ease--which had both upsides and downsides, like a large number of the changes between the two editions.

But what I was objecting to was the notion that there was a finite number of 'good builds' in 3.x, and that implication that that finite number was small.

Well in theory there is. There are a finite number of options, so there are a finite number of builds. OK that's a big number of builds and if we assume 1% are good and 10% don't suck you still have plenty of characters that are playable, a few million at least.

And Monte Cook's off the team.

Really. . . after he was announced on the podcast. Interesting.

Their podcast is truly terrible. Content-free, infrequent, with stale information.