A question for PCGen users

[merton_monk]

Well, I've been called a troll (not by you Henry), so why not play the part?

And you're so good at it too! ;-)

I'll go ahead and apply the Half-Troll template to myself and reply.

Making friends wherever I go with my sunny disposition and easy going attitude!

I do not believe that the companies that you referenced sell enough product to represent even a significant fraction of what WotC sells.

Possibly true, though you don't offer any compelling evidence. Do you work at a store where you would have some kind of empirical evidence, or are you basing this completely upon your group's buying practices?

These companies are 'niche' companies that exist solely because WotC created a license that ALLOWS them to exist. If WotC felt that it could sell more products by forcing these companies out of business, it would. As it is, WotC uses (yes, uses) these listed companies to drive the sales of it's core products.

When you ask one of these companies "Who is your daddy?" they had better answer that "WotC" is their daddy. Factual.

That is true, though the licenses allow the D20 companies to produce whatever they want with no Wotc-driven control. Wotc can't single out a company and say "You... you're too popular, or you aren't producing the kind of material we had in mind, or we simply don't like you!" and stop that one company from using the licenses. They could revoke the whole thing, but they realize that the OGL/D20 licenses have been a big boon to them so that would be a very bad move. So the companies do *not* have to kowtow to Wotc nor do they have to pay any royalties. That's what makes these licenses so remarkable!

Furthermore, the very fact that these companies sell small amounts of product in comparison to WotC limits their penetration into gaming groups

Small is subjective... some groups will use certain publishers material exclusively, some will use a mish-mash of everything, some will make up their own material when they require it (who doesn't?)

I'm basing my opinions on a set of ideas that may or may not be accurate. Based on what I've read here (in the news, the polls, and in the forums) I believe that these are accurate.

a) That the vast majority of d20 gamers are involved in D&D campaigns.

AV recently made an interesting comment at CyberCon (there's a link to it over on TwinRose's site) about how D&D is like a 'platform' (computer metaphor). So playing D&D is like saying you use Windows. The 'game' that you play is really the combination of the settings/books/house rules that you use.

b) That the vast majority of D&D games include some splatbook material.

I doubt the splatbooks outsell the popular products by other companies by huge amounts. If the splatbooks were doing really well Wotc would have a lot more reason to expedite putting them on the SRD. People who are upset with the non-SRD material being pulled from PCGen are overwhelmingly FR gamers - I only get occasional belly aches about the splat books, so from my own personal experience I'd say your hypothesis is wrong. YMMV

c) That the D&D games that include splatbook material will continue to use splatbook material even if PC Gen is no longer able to include it.

I wouldn't expect people to change the books available in their game entirely based upon what's in PCGen. That said, there's no reason why people can't add the stuff in themselves. If all you want to do is add the names of the feats, races, classes, etc. that's really easy to do. It's crafting the pre-requisites and bonuses and details like that which proves a bit tricky for some.

If (a), (b), and (c) are all true, then PC Gen WILL be marginalized if they are unable to include WotC's D&D splatbook material.

True - though you have to understand that as a free product our goal isn't market penetration. PCGen's goal was to convert my 17th level 1ed campaign to 3e. With that accomplished we now try to support all D20 material we can get our hands on, and we'll be branching into non-D20 material. It would be nice to include the non-SRD material with Wotc's permission - and I'm eager to see our negotiations with Wotc come to a happy conclusion - but the loss of their non-SRD material hasn't hurt our bottom line. Of course, we don't have one, but there ya go.

You said yourself that you no longer enter list file information because it is too time consuming. That is one of the points that I was trying to make.

I have a career, family, and a life away from the gaming table. My entire existance does not revolve around what WotC or any of these other companies does.

I have no interest in deciphering list creation documentation or entering list entry after list entry, and I don't think that I am in the minority.

I have a career, family, and life away from gaming and PCGen. I've been entirely thrilled to let others do all the data entry so I can focus on coding. As I said before, entering just the names of stuff can be done very quickly - it's just the details that take time, and you don't have to do that part if you don't want to.

Projects like PC Gen depend on being able to distribute the work load to a large number of participants.

This allows a large number of individuals to complete a task in a fraction of the time that it would take a single individual to complete that same task.

If EVERY user has to enter WotC's non-SRD material because WotC refuses to allow PC Gen to use it, the program will be useless to the vast majority of gamers.

Your assertions are correct, but your conclusion is a tad of a reach. It will be useless to those who want an application to handle all the splatbooks for them and they don't want to have to enter it themselves. Most games are based heavily on the core books, which we support, and use a smattering of other material. If you want to use something from book A, which we don't currently support (whether it's a Wotc product or any other publisher) then you can simply pencil it on your character sheet and modify it accordingly. It may be useless to you - it may even be useless to a hundred of your friends, but to extrapolate that to a vast majority of gamers is unsupportable without more evidence.

BTW Mynex, I'm still waiting for an official answer to my question about the creation of a non-compliant PC Gen app based upon your freely available source code and the possible ramifications of that action with regards to your deal with WotC.

Our sourcecode is opensource, so as long as this other application were also opensource (meaning that an opensource license which can be applied subsequently to LGPLed code is being used) then another group could create their own version of PCGen. The name PCGen is copyrighted (I own it) so they can't use that. They couldn't even advertise themselves as compatible with PCGen without my permission. The data is what you would be interested in, and such a group would not be able to include the splatbook material either without Wotc's permission. So at most this other non-compliant (I think you mean non-D20 compliant, right?) application would be able to roll stats randomly. PCGen proper has a lot of developers actively working on it so it's functionality is constantly leaping forward - another group whose sole purpose was to add random stat rolling would quickly fall behind. If the group also wanted to make a non-OGL compliant version of PCGen, I'm sure Wotc would get involved. The D20 compliance is optional (which is why TwinRose recently dropped it, since it is limiting in terms of what functionality you can include) but the OGL compliance is not. The opensource compliance is also non-optional.

Hugs and kisses for everybody. Of course, you'll need to make a save to avoid the effects of my saliva, but that's not my problem. [/B]

I take it back - you weren't a very good troll. Overall you were far too calm and sensible, even if I disagree with you on certain points.