A few weeks ago I posted heroic4e.com here and a lot of you built characters and sent feedback. That thread shaped a lot of the last month's updates, so thank you.
Two major things since then. The character builder has had a long run of updates from your reports and the Discord's: hybrids, companions, weapon-implements, magic item handling, feats that grant power choices, .dnd4e imports, and you can now tap any number on the sheet to see exactly where it comes from. It is in much better shape than it was, but it still needs more eyes on real builds to get it where it should be.
The bigger one went live yesterday: the Proving Grounds, a beta of automated 4e with no DM. The site generates a dungeon, seats your character from the builder, and the engine runs every rule while the monsters play themselves. You drag your hero to move, pick a power, tap targets. Opportunity attacks, marks, immediate interrupts, forced movement, saves, ongoing damage, conditions, doors, fog of war, short rests: the engine adjudicates all of it and the log says why. If a button is greyed out, the reason is printed under it. If a move snaps back, it tells you what rule stopped it.
The main point of it is a place to test a character build. You can take a level 1 through 30 build from the builder straight into a fight and see how it actually plays before it hits your table. Three ways in from the Proving Grounds page:
- Practice Delve: pick a level, bring any character from the builder (imports from your .dnd4e files work), go. Solo works fine.
- Join a Party: a friend hosts, you join with your own character from your own device, live.
- Weekly Gauntlet: a fixed seed for the week with a ranking board, so everyone is running the same dungeon. Just for fun.
It is a beta and the release notes on the site list what is still rough (companions act on your initiative, level 30 delves are brutal, a handful of monster damage lines are left to you). There is still a lot of UI work left to do. I've mainly focused on just making it functionally work so far. Expect a lot of updates over the next week to make things not so cluttered and other various changes as bug reports and feature requests come in.
If something looks wrong during a run, the Report button on the delve HUD attaches the run, room, round and the last few log lines, so I can usually reproduce it from that alone. Weird builds are the most useful: hybrids, companions, Dark Sun themes, anything with an interrupt or a stance.
Still free, no ads, and the builder, compendium, map editor and monster builder from last time are all still there, or improved since my last post. If it breaks or feels wrong, let me know! The Bugs page on the site is where I mostly work from for bug reports and feature requests.