Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Modding the old, offline character builder

After switching to a new computer I had a problem - I wanted house rules in my character building, the online one doesn't support them and I no longer had the install or update files.

The obvious solution was to find me a torrent that had them, and that I did, no real problem there. But as I was looking for it, I saw this page and I learned about CBLoader, a little app that wraps the character builder, and loads custom rules, stored in xml files into the builder.

On the minus side, you need to hand code the xml, but there are some extensive examples and collections of mods that can be downloaded from their wiki pages. After a little bit of experimentation, I can see how to do most things that I've thought of, and many more besides.

The best part, of course being that this means that I can build house ruled characters that have the right math applied to them. I can give everyone free weapon expertise and give out magic items that have combinations of bonuses not found in cannon products, and have the character builder calculate all the math correctly.

What does this mean for me now?

Quite simply, I can make all sorts of new, custom content, that can be loaded into the character builder. I love it.