Recommend me some software

[Black Pharaoh]

Microsoft Office. Excel is my favorite program to use for gaming.
Inspiration pad from NBOS software is also useful.
THere are numerous mapping aplications. I use Fractal Mapper, Dundjinni, Adobe illustrator and photoshop, and macromedia fireworks to generate maps and other images.
In my experience, Player Genie is only useful if the player has a laptop sitting in front of them while playing, otherwise it really doesn't do anything better than a pencil and paper. if the DM has a laptop then DM genie is pretty good.

 

[farscapesg1]

Well, the DM took a look at DMGENIE and while impressed with the software he said the data part is too lacking to be of real use to him. We are playing with the core rules + "Complete" series + "Races of ... " series. The software only includes the "core" information and he doesn't have time to enter all the data from the other sources himself.

 

[kingpaul]

We are playing with the core rules + "Complete" series + "Races of ... " series. The software only includes the "core" information and he doesn't have time to enter all the data from the other sources himself.

In that case, there are only two programs that I know of that have licensed datasets of the WotC books available: eTools and PCGen. eTools is a commercial application that costs $30 and PCGen is free. WotC datasets for both programs can be bought from Code Monkey Publishing

 

[Vascant]

Yep, thats why I tell people to make sure you check around, install and test drive every program. Each has pros and cons, so it basically comes down to what has what you are looking for and can live without.

(Warning: I do not use any of these tools, just my own)
Example: As Paul stated there are only 2 programs you can go to for WotC's IP sources however, neither are very good combat managers (ETools doesn't handle it at all). DM Genie does very good in this aspect. Also Mynex of CMP has started a thread on DM Genie's forums concerning CMP producting WotC datasets for DM Genie (I do not know how far this has gone). DM Genie also has a stat block import that works with my favorate tool, NPC Designer (Okay so I am a bit biased here). The point is even ETools has 3rd party tools to help overcome some of the core program's weak points.

I can say this, on my gaming laptop I have pretty much every tool known installs.. but usually only 3 are up and running all the time.. Word, Tablesmith and NPC Designer.

 

[Zulithe]

I go with DM Genie. It's not free BUT it is worth the cash. It is the best all-around solution thus far. Character/monster/treasure generator, combat management, campaign notes, maps, I love it. Since extensive datasets seem what you need, Janik, the DM Genie developer, seems to be working to improve DM Genie's capability in that area before official datasets come out for it (if they ever do).

It may seem like a lot of data is missing that other programs, like eTools, already have. But for my campaign, I've only needed to manually add maybe 5 or 6 races, and you'd be surprised just how easy it is thanks to DM Genie's intuitive race editor. It also has some tutorials that walk you through processes like this. Other things, like adding magic items, are such easy tasks you don't even need to put much thought into it, the GUI makes it so simple.

Some specialized utilities are better at certain tasks though, like Vascant's NPC Designer which can create NPCs in just a few clicks, and in the new official layout too! It's weakness is the lack of races to select from... but most of the major ones (including all the core PC races) are there, and it is expanding all the time. Also the race selection menu is getting a bit unwieldly due to the length of the list, some redesign in that area may soon be needed to ensure swift access to every race. I'm sure Vascant has thought about this though.

Since you're on a tight budget, there are still great tools available. Obviously PCGen for one. My main complaint with it is the insane memory requirements. It can easily eat up more than 100mb of memory with just one PC open. It also used a lot of CPU sometimes. I'll be running winamp and the sound will cut out while it loads sometimes, and I'm not on a slow computer (3200+ AMD athlon xp)

For maps, you're going to get a lot of suggestions. Personally, since we run all of our games on eraseable battlemats It would be a waste of time for me to design battle terrains in a program like Dundjinni. I draw everything by hand on gridpaper, including overworld maps (but I'm currently redesigning the "world map" digitally in Photoshop and am pleased with the results)

No one tool is perfect, and you have to learn to live with the shortcomings of even the best products. Most of them, with a little creativity, are easy to work around.

PS... farscapesg1, check your email. Later.

 

[DMFTodd]

Character Generators need to know the rules of the game. Combat Managers don't - beyond the basics. A Combat Management programs doesn't need to know that Fred gets +1 when attacking abberations, the DM should be able to adjust for that on the fly.

If we're talking about laptop at the game table, then Combat Management is going to make a bigger impact on your game than a character generator is anyways. Your DM is missing the forest for the trees if he's getting hung up on the rules part.

If Character Generation is important, then I'd look for a Combat Manager that can import the results from a Character Generator (DM's Familiar, DMGenie can both do this, so can the others probably).

 

[Vascant]

Some specialized utilities are better at certain tasks though, like Vascant's NPC Designer which can create NPCs in just a few clicks, and in the new official layout too! It's weakness is the lack of races to select from... but most of the major ones (including all the core PC races) are there, and it is expanding all the time. Also the race selection menu is getting a bit unwieldly due to the length of the list, some redesign in that area may soon be needed to ensure swift access to every race. I'm sure Vascant has thought about this though.

Yep, noted and already listed as one of the key focuses for November's list of improvements. First half was done a few days ago as I changed the entire layout of that region, giving it a few days for user comments before moving to the second step which will be a more managable list and racial levels. Last month seen a huge explosion of races available to create NPC's from. NPC Designer is pretty focused at giving busy DM's quality NPCs for his game.

 

[azhrei_fje]

Character Generators need to know the rules of the game. Combat Managers don't - beyond the basics. A Combat Management programs doesn't need to know that Fred gets +1 when attacking abberations, the DM should be able to adjust for that on the fly.

But it's extremely convenient if the tool does know this. After all, the point in having a computer-based tool is for it to do as much of grunt work as possible. And I would greatly prefer if the tool could do everything and I could just concentrate on storytelling.

That said, DMGenie is the closest I've seen so far. With a little bit of prep work, I can set up a complete encounter so that when the PCs enter the area, I click on the "Start Combat With This Group" button while having the BBEGs on the screen, and everything is taken care of: initiative, surprise (and flat-footed), encounter distance, and so on. I let my PCs roll their own initiative (I may change this in the future), so I have to bring up the Init window and type in what they roll -- the program adds the modifiers for me.

The other thing I use a lot is the HTML-ized version of the RSRD. I got it from http://www.systemreferencedocuments.org/ and clicking on the "3.5 SRD" link on the left. I use the Sovelior dataset; I've written some Perl code that finds all HTML <img> references and downloads the actual image, saves it in a subdirectory, and modifies the original <img> element to point to the newly downloaded graphics. The web site can't distribute the graphics (they're WotC's), but there's nothing to stop me from caching them locally if I download them myself.

 

[farscapesg1]

Well, I'm not going to give up the search I like DM Genie and may have to take a crack at scripting some stuff. One thing that I find very frustrating but easy to fix is the Domains. Why doesn't the program add the domains to the list when you create them??? Instead, you have to go into the Rules.txt file and add them a second time to get them to come up in the window when creating a cleric.

It would be really nice if it had some "autoscripting" tools. Maybe just good documentation for knowing what values to change using VBScript would be enough.

The DM is not "a programmer" as he puts it. He just wants a tool that he can sit down and use. He loves SpellGen because of the ease of use and the fact that it has been updated with spells from the supplemental rulebooks on fairly regular basis. This is the sort of thing that he wants, even if it is in the form of multiple programs.

Here are the highlights that he is looking for;

Combat tracker - tracks initiative easily and quickly. Be able to add creatures/characters with just a couple clicks. Either contains all creature data already, or very simple to add new creatures to the database (5 minutes or less per creature).

Character tracker - Keeps track of character information (HP, Ability scores, combat modifiers, etc.). Either contains all class and race data from Core, "Complete", and "Races of.." books, or very simple to add new races/classes to the database (same restrictions as above). Easy to update character information and print out for instances when a player can't make it and someone needs his info to run the character for them.

Spell List generator - got that, thanks to SpellGen It may not have all the spell descriptions, but it autocalculates damage, area, range, duration, etc.

I'm sure there are more, but these are the highlights of what he is looking for. I guess I could break out my limited VB skills and see if I can create something simple and easy for him to use, but that will require a lot of data entry on my part (not to mention coding).

 

[Vascant]

I think you are pretty much looking at either PC Gen or DM Genie. Both will come with a price tag because you will need to purchase CMP Datasets for the WotC books.