I am not familiar with these Core Rules you talk about. I'm not sure if it was ever sold in the Netherlands. From what I can find on the internet, it did not contain a full character builder, but the information isn't very extensive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by justanobody  Here again Core Rules dwarfs PCGen then if you were unable to add your own material, because within the few limitations it has it could create anything for use with the game and store it in its database.
PCGen required purchasing databases to upgrade your product didn't it? or was that eTools, or both?
Either way Core Rules allows you to create material including but now limited to races/monsters/items/etc and use them directly into the software which would handle all rules and math adjudications for you of the newly created material...and you could trade naterial with others.
Wait...didn't you say you stopped buying books because of PCGen? |
No, I said the opposite. I bought books (over 60 of 3/3.5E, I have about 8 of 2E), because I could get complete datasets to accompany them. I would only buy a book after CMP had announced that they were working on a dataset and then easgerly await its release. I stopped buying books after
WotC pulled the plug on CMP.
PcGen completely allows you to add the data yourself, and of course you can trade that with others. The thing is, that most material has
WotC's copyright, so while you can, you would not be allowed to.
What the
SRD did, is allow for the developement of a good character building program, without violating any of
WotC's copy right, and then have CMP (who maintained e-Tools), to also sell
WotC sanctioned datasets for PCGen.
To me it was the best of both worlds, as it made
WotC and CMP money, saved me the time to enter the data myself, and allowed the PCGen team to make a free program that had all the needed functions, without violating any copyrights.
I will just leave you with an example of a character I've built with the combination of PCGen and the
WotC sanctioned CMP datasets:
http://80.100.122.109:/enworld/Throvannon514.pdf
Please note that if you look at the spell list, it contains a complete list of all the spells of the books I own, with the correct DC's #dice, durations, and page number of where to find them. What is harder to spot, is that I can apply the effects of spells on the fly, the character above has Superior Reistance and Longstrider active for example.
A good character building program just makes things so much easier. I liked the
SRD 3.5, because it allowed the developement of one that I could use. It was free to boot. I had no qualms paying fo it though, as I have for the datasets. (I'm not sure if you legally need to if you also own the book, but I had no problem with CMP making some money of the huge effort they did in entering all this data).
But please if, you have more information about this Core Rules program, and where I can download/buy it, then I'm interested to at least have a look at it, prefereably if it runs on Mac of course.
The
SRD also made other things easier, like making statblocks for all the monsters I can summon, as you can just C&P them from the
SRD.
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