Living Spell Six-Pack

For those of you with a DDI subscription that also want more monsters–specifically living spells–I have uploaded six heroic-tier threats here:

• Living magic missile
• Living magic missile mote
• Living magic missile salvo 
• Living storm pillar
• Living acid mire
• Living fireball

Adventure Tools Lets You Build Monsters Now

It looks and builds like Character Builder, but for monsters. To give you a thorough look, I’ll go mostly step by step through the process of updating a monster.

You start out by picking the role and whether the monster is a standard, elite, solo, or minion. A radio button at the bottom lets you toggle the leader sub-role.

Then you can name your monster and determine its level, origin, type, and race and keywords (if any). In this case, our raggamoffyn is a Small natural animate with the blind and construct keywords.

The default values for hit points and defenses are already filled in, but you can fine-tune them as before. When entering new movement types, you can select the drop down menu to adjust the speed and add details like “(hover)” to fly or a range on different senses.

When choosing powers attacks automatically got set as Standard actions, while utilities seem to get set to Minor. I have already created slam as a basic melee, but let us take a closer look at the menus.

This is what the power editor normally looks like. If you want to add in details like range and targets, you have to choose Power Body on the left-hand side…

Which looks like this. This is kind of annoying that I have to go to another section to add what are often routine details, but whatever.

Skills is fairly spartan and straightforward. I have added Stealth, making it more likely that the raggamoffyn will get the jump on characters.

Finally we wrap things up with ability scores, alignment, languages, and gear.

And voila, we have a new monster ready to challenge (or embarrass) your players.

DDI: Monster Builder "Update"

I was pretty excited to get a message at work that the “brand new” Monster Builder was launched today. Unfortunately, when I got home and fired up Adventure Tools, I was pretty bummed to see that it not only still has the graphic indicating that it’s Beta software, that–aside from perhaps an Import feature–there is nothing about it to differentiate it from the beta software. Naively I hoped it was a mix up, and checked back a few hours later to discover that, no, same old beta-build. Fortunately directly beneath it is a link to download the older, yet oddly more functional Monster Builder, so DMs with a creative itch still have an avenue.

What I don’t understand is why it is taking so long for them to simply take an existing software application and transitioning it to another platform. I know why they want to–mitigation of piracy and hopefully integrate it with Virtual Table and other tools–but it’s been in a second beta for months. At this point, we have a monster viewer, with limited ability to rename a monster’s name and powers, and to adjust its level (again, same as before). In terms of utility, this places it far beneath D&D Compendium, which has the added benefit of being able to view any content. 

Adventure Tools Beta

The Beta was opened last night, but there’s not much to see: you can browse monsters, change their level and power names, and print them. That’s it.

Adventure Tools Update

Adventure Tools got updated to include both all the content from Monster Manual 3 (including the block layout) as well as a slightly improved interface, by which I mean that the buttons are larger and have text along with the graphic. Everything else is basically the same, until you try to create and/or edit a monster. 

Powers are automatically ordered by either traits or its action-type (if you switch the action type while editing a power, it gets moved to the appropriate category). The power menus also got some changes to reflect how powers are now written. For example, if the power is an attack, there are buttons that let you cycle between the power’s hit, miss, and effect…effects. For damage, the drop-down menu has normal, limited use, and none options (limited use actually tells you by how much it is increasing the damage by), and there’s also an average damage field to calculate it for you.

Ultimately, most of the changes are just organizational. There’s a few extra fields here and there, which might confuse you for a sec but if you’ve used Monster Builder before then it won’t take long to get the hang of it. In the end you get a monster that follows the new layout conventions, and as a plus it automatically updates all the existing monsters to follow it as well. Here’s a comparison between the two blocks on one of my custom monsters.

Before…

…and after…

The block’s a bit longer, but narrower, and for me that’s good because it’ll fit better in column layouts in Microsoft Word (the old one fit snugly in two-columns, but not so much when in threes). Otherwise, I haven’t had a chance to try them out so I can’t say for sure if they are more efficient. They do look better organized, though.