Yes, not. I've had GCA for a year. and paid a whopping 15 bucks for it. What's the going rate for a year sub to ddi? And once you cancel do you still have access to the character builder.
~$70-ish. (About the same as a sub to Pyramid over the same period.) A single month's sub to DDI for $10 gets you access to the character builder forever, plus an issue a piece of two PDF magazines. So if you want the builder only, the GURPS builder costs about $15 and comes with free updates, and the 4e builder costs about $10 and comes with two PDF magazines and a month's worth of updates.
I think that's a fair price for what you get, either way.
Sure, but when a new book comes out that has something you want to play you're gonna have to go resubscribe for at least another month if you want to add that class to your program, which at least doubles the cost. Not to mention the DDI exclusives that you can't play unless you buy access to them.
Me, I'll be sittin pretty with my $15 purchase, fully updated and including the houserule systems my GM has made for us until GURPS 5e comes out. (Oh yeah, hows the customization on that DDI Character builder? Can ya put your own races in it? Classes, feats, equipment, spells? If you can that changes things significantly, because you could technically update it yourself... which is why I'm betting you can't.)
You can certainly come up with things your builder can do that the one we use can't, just as we could come up with things ours can do that yours can't. But I think just leaving it at "The Character Builder is an awesome program that I would pay the subscription price for even if it was all I got," ought to suffice for us.
I think Pathfinder can learn a lesson from Wizards and DDI, and license a solid character generator. I am not sure how that hits the bottom line in regards to selling hardcopy rule books, but it is the last remaining piece for me to decide to play any roleplaying games.The good folks at Lone Wolf Development have a Pathfinder enabled character generator that is pretty amazing called Hero Lab. We will be working closely with them to make it even better. We are also talking with d20 Pro and Fantasy Grounds about Pathfinderizing their various digital tabletops. Lots of cool stuff, if only I had a couple of clones to get it all done! :)
-Lisa
I've used Fantasy Ground for a CC game, works well.
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The good folks at Lone Wolf Development have a Pathfinder enabled character generator that is pretty amazing called Hero Lab. We will be working closely with them to make it even better. We are also talking with d20 Pro and Fantasy Grounds about Pathfinderizing their various digital tabletops. Lots of cool stuff, if only I had a couple of clones to get it all done! :)
Oooh exciting. I really like Fantasy Grounds.
Fantasy Grounds is a pretty great tabletop system.Haven't used it for awhile since my CoC game stopped, but I enjoyed it while it lasted. MapTools is nice too.
Surely we can't be done with the owning of 2009.
Revel, revel.
What's rpg.net? ;)
I know you're joking but I've actually never been there. That's not a slam against them, I just don't hang out on RPG forums all that often...which brings me to my next point related to the OP reguarding the "hype".
Guess how I found out about Pathfinder (and Paizo for that matter). Go ahead, take a wild guess.
I added almost all of the 3.5 WoC DND books to my Amazon wishlist. 4E was rumored to be coming out and 3.5 books, most of which I didn't own yet, were dropping in price down to $7 - $12 a piece (shipped) for new or like new copies. I couldn't pass up buying them up since I knew that once supply ran low, the price would go back up. Even though I was excited about and fully intending on switching to the new edition once it came out, I was buying them up anyway particularly because I wasn't really expecting 4E to come out until 2010. Anyway, because I had a bunch of 3.5 books grouped in one of my wishlists, Amazon said "you might like this" referring to Pathfinder Beta. I clicked on it, saw what it was and went "meh". I read the reviews and learned more about what it was and found out that you could download the PDF for free. Now my group plays Pathfinder. If it weren't for Amazon's recommendation, I wouldn't even know that it existed.