So..um..how's that GSL coming along?

[Henrix]

I'm not interested in 4e, until they have at least the Druid class included, so I'm currently not signed up for DDI.

I suppose it's time for you to sign up then - the playtest version of the druid is set for release on monday.

 

[justanobody]

To me the srd3.5 was one of the main reasons to switch from AD&D 2e to 3/3.5.

Why? Because it allowed Copy&Paste and tools like PCGen to be created.

I have since bought about 60 books and the PCGen datasets for 49 of those from CodeMonkey Publishing.

Works for you, but is no indication that PCGen was needed. I you prefered 2nd edition you could have just as easily picked up Core Rules which was a more extensive package and still a product that eclipses DDI with what all it offers.

Also Core Rules offered C&P from multiple forms either the webhelp or windows help files and over 20 full books (excluding images) with full search capability to aid in C&P.

The only thing really done by the SRD was allow people to market products like PCGen IF programs were allowed by the OGL or STL.

So your reason for choosing PCGen over Core Rules are you own, but are not whole truths unless you were a 3rd party publisher wanting to sell D&D related products.

I have gotten addicted to using PCGen to create my games, and have willingly shelled out several hundreds of dollars to enable the tool to legally use WotC published materials instead of just the SRD3.5 material.

But PCGen would not exist without the SRD, at least not in it's current form.

When WotC made it impossible for CodeMonkey Pusblishing, to provide datasets for PCGen, I stopped buying books because I knew I would be able to use the material in PCGen. I am still very disappointed that some of the books published in 2005 and 2006 never were allowed to be provided with support for PCGen, Like the Magical Item Compendium.

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.

4th edition is just not an option for me without similar options to create and modify characters, items, feats, skills, templates, trade them with the players and so on and so forth.

My point is, that the combination of CMPs legal status and the srd 3.5 availabilty to PCGen allowed me to have the contents of nearly 50 WotC published books at my finger tips in an organised way. Without it, I would not have purchased as many supplements and would have stuck to the core 3.5 PHB/MM/DMG like, I did with ADnD 2e and I might do with 4e, if I even switch to 4e at all given how much more convenient 3.5 is to use.

Wait...didn't you say you stopped buying books because of PCGen?

Edit: P.S. Oh, and it runs on my Mac.

Edit2: And about the DDI, I basically have very little confidence in WotC's ability to support and develop software properly over longer periods of time given their history. The way they pulled support for e-Tools/PCGen still leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Do't they say: burnt once, twice shy?

You are not alone in thinking DDI will fall short of many expectations. I don't think the subscription price with the VTT even is enough added value to what was present with Core Rules for 2nd edition.

I wish I would be able to get exited about 4th edition, I want to buy WotC books, as I want to support them in developing one of my favourite games, but currently they're forcing me to stick with 3.5 and scavenge second hand copies of ebay for those books I am still missing. It also means my local FLGS hasn't seen me a lot lately.

Edit3: And the SRD also made it easy to Copy/paste together a list of all the monsters I can summon and similar such things that are much harder if you only have a hard copy of a book.

See previous mention of C&P if you would like to do so with AD&D 2nd edition, and do not have any intent to merchandise your creations of the C&P material.

So anyway the GSL or even OGL didn't really help any extra than what was present for 2nd edition moving on to 3rd or 4th, and I think it has already been stated that the GSL is taking a back seat to all the other stuff Scott has been dumped into his lap with the firing of Linae.

Well, Roger, the Character Generator from DDI is in closed beta now (only accessible to DDI subscribers) and pretty good so far.

And those people who signed up to beta test it at DDXP who are not paid subscribers to DDI, if I am understanding the WotC forums on the matter.
__________________
So... it is coming along just as fast as the WotC CEO and board are allowing for it to happen with all the excess of work they add to their understaffed company.

 

[ruemere]

[...]So your reason for choosing PCGen over Core Rules are you own, but are not whole truths unless you were a 3rd party publisher wanting to sell D&D related products.

PCGen speeds up creation of characters (not to mention made it easier to produce viable stats) and creation of various forms of character sheets and statblocks.
It also allows to keep a lot of iinformation together.

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.

Er, what? I added quite a lot of my own stuff to PcGen over the course of years. I have also contributed to official PcGen material (though not the part published by CMP).

PCGen required purchasing databases to upgrade your product didn't it? or was that eTools, or both?

PcGen is freely available Open Source product:
PCGen :: Overview

Wait...didn't you say you stopped buying books because of PCGen?

Yes, he did since he purchased commercial datasets released by Code Monkey Publishing.

Regards,
Ruemere

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Thank you for replying to me.

That's what forums are there for! It's not (always) us just blabbering about and ignoring others!

As I said, given the history WotC has with their various past software venues, I'm very reluctant to trust them to get it right this time. Not so much their initial effort, but more how long and well they'll support it during the entire lifetime of the product. They have a history with the interactive atlas, MasterTools/E-Tools, Gleemax, MtGO.

Yes, I know. I can't think of anyone that didn't have at least some skepticism. And I do not think that the the brilliant design and flawless implementation of Gleemax helped anything at all.

Well, that would be problem one. I'm not interested in 4e, until they have at least the Druid class included, so I'm currently not signed up for DDI.

Well, the playtest version will be up next week, apparently. Of course, it won't give you a full overview. But as long as you're not playing 4E, you won't benefit much from DDI, at least if you're interested in useful rules content. (Adventures can still be mined for ideas and maps, and other articles still contain "re-usable" fluff)

This would be an even bigger obstacle. If you use a Mac, do you have to pay less for the DDI as you can't use the Character Generator?

At the moment, it's cheaper for everyone. IIRC, once the Character Generator goes to all its 30 levels of character creation glory, DDI prices will go up. But anyone that ordered a subscription before that will automatically be upgraded without having to pay more.

So basically, there would be two ways to test the waters: Get the open Beta sometime in the next few months and see if you like it, or get a cheaper DDI access for 1 year, getting access to the closed Beta.

Beware: At the moment, all subscriptions come with an auto-renewal after they expire. At the moment, you would have to inform Customer Support that you do not want auto-renewal.

My point was, that under the old SRD3.5, if you could not use or didn't want to use the tools provided by WotC (E-Tools), you could write your own. Through CMP, you could even buy the datasets legally for the books you owned. With the new system, you have no options, if you can't use what WotC provides, you're out of luck.

Yes, that's a signifcant drawback, though since the generator actually looks solid this time around, it is "only" a drawback for non Windows users.

The way WotC pulled the plug on E-Tools and PCgen support almost overnight has left me with very little confidence that theyll do a better job supporting their new tools. "Once burnt, twice shy" I tihnk they say in America?

Well, so far the support looks good.

I think this one of the primary reasons for this is because they developed this edition with computer support in mind, meaning that the rules are apparently already fed into a database*. So apps just need to be updated from that database, which makes it a lot easier then having to hack all rules elements already created into a computer readable format.

Note that this is only the information I gleaned from the outside, it might be inaccurate. Maybe they just have hired 200 Chinese Captcha-Solvers for hacking in their rules into the databases.

*) Though I don't think this always means the rules can be also evaluated by a computer, e.g. there is a lot of text that requires human interpretation. But powers for example can easily be _relatively_ easy described in a format so that the computer can it least fill in some variables.

 

[RogerWilco]

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.

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.

 

[Dire Bare]

Well, Roger, the Character Generator from DDI is in closed beta now (only accessible to DDI subscribers) and pretty good so far. But of course, it will never run on a Mac (unless .NET is ported over there, which I would very much love to see.)

The Character Generator will not run natively on a Mac, but if you use a Windows emulation program, you can do it. That's how The Rouse rolls (as he posted to an earlier thread)!!!

 

[malraux]

The Character Generator will not run natively on a Mac, but if you use a Windows emulation program

Virtual machine or native machine (depending on if you are running parallels or bootcamp respectively). There's no emulation of windows, just actually windows. But yeah, any late model mac will run windows quickly and easily.

 

[justanobody]

PCGen speeds up creation of characters (not to mention made it easier to produce viable stats) and creation of various forms of character sheets and statblocks.

Think I may have the two confused, PCGen and eTools.

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.

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.

Some info on it

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Dungeons-Dragons-Core-Rules-Pc/dp/B00002SX0K/ref=sr_1_2/186-3557954-4427739?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1227901047&sr=8-2]Amazon.com: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Core Rules 2.0: staff: Software[/ame]

Core2

corerules2

cr2expansion

AD&D CD-ROM Core Rules 2.0 TSR 2176 - AD&D 2nd Edition Rulebooks - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition - Dungeons and Dragons RPGs

AD&D CD-ROM Core Rules 2.0 Expansion TSR 11543 - AD&D 2nd Edition Rulebooks - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition - Dungeons and Dragons RPGs

About being sold in the Netherlands I don't know, you might need to check eBay or something. But any machine able to emulate windows98 should run it if you can find it....