With less than a week to go before we start our D&D4e game set in the Nentir Vale, the Discord chat channel is now full of posts about characters and forging a team of heroes to right the wrongs and turn the tide of this tucked away northerly province.
The players have used a mix of tools to get the characters created, including the offline Character Builder, now maintained by the community. It’s a Windows app, a snap to load, and contains much of the 4e corpus, providing a rich array of options to create your character and to maintain through the levels.
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| Character Builder Splash Screen |
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| Creating a character |
I’m excited by the characters. An elf wizard with something of a past that makes her nervous of other elves, a half-elf hexblade who works power through his blade, a dragonborn warlord who has seen and knows much of battle, and a rarely seen goliath, down from the Dragonforge Mountains, to help keep everything in order.
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| Four heroes are ready with a possible fifth on the way |
For online play I am preparing to use the Role VTT for some light touch tools, mostly a dice roller, but with the option of using the 4e character sheet that I have created. Part of me would very much like to go with a VTT that is more feature heavy, providing integrated 4e rules, token management, Fog of War, music, integrated chat, etc, but for now I’m happy to try a light VTT and see how we go. Many of the features mentioned will come to the VTT over the course of this year.
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| D&D 4e on Role VTT |
To keep me busy between now and Saturday I am researching the fan compiled history and gazetteer of Nentir Vale and, you know, actually learning the rules of the game! I have three old hand players who are happy to help with the rules lawyering, and I’m happy to let them. 😊
I have the scenario path prepared in that I’m running a blend of two official, pre-generated, scenarios to get us going and take us towards about 4th level. I really don’t know if we are going to be able to keep the sessions running, but I am fully committed to do so if there is interest and it is fun.
Ah well, back to my research and preparation.