Campaign Suite

[Twin Rose]

Campaign Suite lets you create from scratch characters for use within the rule-structure of the d20 Game. It is fully featured to handle any number of classes and prestige class, with unique and smooth Multi-class handling. Levels can be gained or removed, spent per class level. With the race-based random name generator you can have a living, breathing Player or Non-Player character with the touch of a few buttons.

Campaign Suite is integrated with the campaign and world designer to let you create custom races and characters, build dungeons, and design whole towns for you or your characters to explore. New items and spells can be added on the fly, or you can limit them for what you want your characters to use if you are running the game.


The smooth interface allows for graphical drag-and-drop within the Windows environment, so you can have many characters and worlds being edited at once for you to switch through. Whole adventuring companies could be populated in just a few minutes with Campaign Suite. Campaign Suite characters can be saved and loaded easily, and printed out in the custom character sheet designed specifically for the programs use.

 

[JoeGKushner]

This review is going to focus on eTools and Campaign Suite in terms of character creation. While both do more than that, to be honest, that's what I'm going to use them the most for.

I'm using a HP 2.0 gig, 512 ram, 64 vram 80 gig hard drive. Installation was no problem. Popped the disk in and done. I uninstalled it though and it did leave behind the icons and shortcuts. Bad clean up. Campaign Suite boots up much faster than eTools. In seconds it was up while eTools was still plodding around in the background waiting to load.

Both games use somewhat archaic icons for making a new character. In Campaign Suite, it's dice while in eTools, it a horned helmet. One thing definitely bad on the Campaign Suite is that the labels for race, class, alignment, and sex aren't labeled. Not a big deal once you learn this but a good interface shouldn't leave the user asking basic questions. This is especially strange since so much of the screen is left open. The code may be good but the design isn't very friendly.

When rolling hit points, I didn't see a method to change them, unlike eTools where it's a simple process. When doing skills, there is no automatic function to max your ranks out like there is in eTools. It won't let you break your limit in terms of raising a skill to a higher rank than the character is capable of handling. Unlike eTools, I didn't see a method to move the skills around, for example, by skill type, class or cross class, by number of ranks, or by name. It's a straight alphabetical listing. Skill points did match out though in eTools and Campaign Suite as a character I made in one had the same ranks I had in the other.

Feat selection was easy. You get a screen with available feats and on another side, your feats. I could double click a feat or drag it to the character side. On equipment, it wasn't so easy. It's a pure sort by name so hemp rope isn't under rope, hemp, but under hemp, rope. Some of the information seems off too. For example, a mithril shirt is listed as having a +4 bonus in eTools and a +5 bonus in Campaign Suite. The software also suffers the same problem as eTools in that if you have a dagger, you can't get the thrown bit into your stats, only the melee value.

For some reason, the creators thought that putting magic at the bottom of the screen instead of with the other equipment was a good idea. Can't follow the logic there but understand that perhaps they wanted to make sure that the end users weren't looking to get all of their equipment from one location? One oddity is that when the control loses focus, it switches from Magic Item to Equipped. Probably not a big deal but it's usually best to stick with one terminology. Another annoying thing is my character switches from using a +1 keen longsword to a +2. Apparently you can't have two items in your main hand, unlike eTools where you just equip a new group. Like eTools, it fails to take into account special abilities like keen, so the critical is still 19-20 instead of 17-20. Armor class also sums up wrong. It shows a bonus of +5 from armor (incorrect), +6 from dex, +2 from misc bonus. Perhaps the amulet of natural armor doesn't stack with said items but the armor class show here should be 23, not 20.

One thing, while adjusting stats in Campaign Suite, if you leave the screen, the focus is lost meaning you have to double click the stat to open it again. Now why7 would I be adjusting stats unless I was a low down dirty cheater? How about I use the point buy system and that doesn't appear to be supported? One weird thing, when I was messing around, the opened stat box said 14, but the actual stat was 12 on the Con line. It looks like it's taking your racial modifier and adding it to the roll so you don't get the old what you see is what you get because its adjusting the score on the total, not the one you entered.

The interface seems a little underused. For example, level is a little button on it's own in the character screen instead of being a separate area like eTools.

One thing that Campaign Suite has that eTools doesn't is templates. You can click on a single monster and then click template. This brings up a separate menu that allows you to select a template to add to your monster. For some reason, all of the templates are lawful good in alignment though and this overrides a creature's normal alignment. It only takes a moment to fix but its annoying. The interface should be invisible to the user.

Campaign Suite does come with a lot more base information though. For example, it comes with Librum Equitis, Wild Spellcraft and Arms & Armor. Now that's a sweet deal.

Maybe eTools has set my mind for some things or maybe I just don't find Campaign Suite easy to maneuver through. The lack of physical documentation is disappointing but it does offer somethings that eTools does not.

Between Campaign Suite and eTools you almost have a fully functioning software that allows you to use point buy and templates but in both cases there are data issues. Perhaps when 3.5 comes out and we see some more updates for Campaign Suite and eTools it'll be a little better to compare them again but for now, I'll continuing hacking eTools with Access.

 

[Psion]

Campaign Suite

Campaign Suite is a software package for handling character generation and other central tasks for a d20 System game. Campaign Suite is produced by Twin Rose software. This review is based on the CD version of the software. The CD version I reviewed is for Windows 9x/NT/ME/XP (what about 2000?). The case proscribes a minimum of a PIII system with 16 bit color, 64 MB RAM, and 20 MB of drive space, and recommends and 800 MHz of faster PIII or Athlon, 128 MB RAM, and 32 bit color. I reviewed the product on my home desktop with Win98, an Athlon 1400, 256 MB RAM, and a GeForce MX video card set on 16 bit color.

The disck does not have a MSRP on the packaging, but TwinRose was selling them for around $30 at GenCon, and prices in shops should be comparable.

Campaign Suite is distributed under the Open Game License alone; it does not use the d20 System and Trademark license. This is due to the fact that the d20 STL does not allow replications of some important aspects of character generation, namely random generation of ability scores. One of Campaign Suite's chief competitors, PCGen, is distributed partially under the d20 STL and requires the user to enter ability scores by hand for this reason.

It would seem that the inability to use the d20 logo would be a hindrance in the marketing of the product to the d20 audience. However, the CD case does have a d20 logo on it. What's up with that?

Well, the CD version is distributed with a few data expansions, some of which are based on d20 System products which do use the d20 STL, which are the impetus for using the d20 logo. The CD case advertises Twin Rose's Map Pack 1 being included, as well as data sets for Librum Equitis Volume I, Wild Spellcraft, and Arms & Armor. However, on the CD, when looking to install the expansions, I do not find the Arms & Armor installation file on disk (but it is available as a free download on the Twin Rose website.)

Do My Bidding, Slave! (The Character Generator)

Walking through all the features of such an extensive software package as Campaign Suite is a bit daunting. That being the case, instead of trying to present this review as hitting every point, I will approach it as "putting it through it's paces" and try to see what it can and can't do.

There were no problems when installing the package. However, the setup file for the CD version doesn't install any of the supplemental packages; you have to "explore" the CD and install them separately. The supplemental packages advise you how to import them using the file->config option, but you might miss it if you just rapidly click through the install screen.

Another thing you might miss is that CS comes with is the capability to support D20 Modern characters. If you use the above mentioned config menu, you will notice a modern config file, and after it is installed there will be a "modern" configuration selection that will make modern classes, feats, skills, and equipment available. However, switching to this mode also makes the fantasy options unavailable. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but currently I happen to be playing a Second World Sourcebook campaign, which uses both. On this score, Campaign Suite is on par with PCGen, which also doesn't allow both modes.

Alright, let's take it through the most basic tasks, making a character. There are two buttons/options for starting a character. "New character" opens the character creation client window.

The second way to begin character creation is to click on the "character wizard" option. This also brings up the character generator option, but pulls up a "wizard" window first to pre-fill in a number of options, such as race, gender, class, level, and an optional "profession/templates" (which are listed as class/level combos, with some races specified as well) which pre-fill in some skill and feat choices. When you complete this window, it drops you into the same character generator client window as selecting "new character", albeit with your choices already filled in.

(I got a few crashes if I tried to invoke the character wizard twice in a row. Talking to the TRS folks, it seems this bug only occurs on Win98 and they are working on a fix for it.)

Anyway, once in the character generator client window, you will notice that it is sorted into a number of "pages" with different aspects of the character. Buttons on the right let you access any of these pages, and the "page button" lets you go through the pages one at a time.

As a side note, when trying to consult the help file to get a few answers to basic questions about the generator, I noticed it mentioned that when you first open the character generation, it will pull up a configuration window. This is not true anymore. The configuration window was how how CS used to get around the d20 license requirements. Since moving away from the d20 STL, this window (while still available) does not pop up anymore. Further, while browsing around the character page with the context sensitive help, I was left with several questions unanswered (like what the different hammer icons mean.)

So the help file is a bit out of date and needs to be a bit more complete. Fortunately, Chris as TwinRose tells me that they have hired someone to work on updated and more extensive help files.

As a sample, let's step through making a character. The first page that new character gets you to is called "main" and has basic details like name, race, class, level, alignment, ability scores, and HP. Most aspects are handled through drop-down window selections; class levels are added by selecting it in the drop-down window and adding it with an associated "+" button. Races and classes available at the time of this writing include all the standard PC races and core and prestige classes in the pre-revised (3.0) d20 SRD, plus drow elf. (Note that you can add your own features in the campaign editor, discussed later.)

When you enter the window, a first set of ability scores are rolled for you. The interface allows you to reroll scores, swap them, or edit them. The bottom of the screen has tabulations of AC, attack bonuses, and saves. These tabulations do not update as the ability scores are manipulated, but they do update when levels are added; to get them to update after you change ability scores, you need to switch to another page and back or add levels.

Other pages let you select feats, skills, and spells.

The skills page allows you to scroll through a list. A drop-down window requires you to select one of your classes. The class you select gives you access to the skills point from that class and determines if the classes you purchase are considered class, cross-class, or exclusive with those points. "Hammer" icons indicate the status of a skill. A white background indicated a class skill while cross class skills use a white background. Exclusive skills are crossed out. The hammer gets a yellow glow if you have ranks in it.

The languages are on the skills page, and the language list is automatically limited to those that the book lets you select from your bonus languages. I wondered how the program handled speak languages, but found that buying a rank in speak language did not let you select a new language, nor did it expand the choice of language.

The feats page lists the number of feats you have by where you derived it (class, race, or levels.) Automatic feats such as armor and weapon proficiencies are automatically added. There is a drop down category list but in my sample, it only displayed "general" as an option. When spending feats, it appears to run through your general feats first, and then when all you have left is class feats (such as a fighter), the list gets filtered to those available. There appears to be no way that the user can control which feats you are selecting first, which could make a difference when it comes to prerequisites.

When running my sample character through (a elven fighter 2/ wizard 2), I was able to take the whirlwind attack feat without meeting the mobility and spring attack prerequisites.

The spells page creates new lists, one for available spells, one for spells known. The list requires you to right click to select spells; the option to add spells with a double click or arrow button would have been a little more straightforward. The list of available spells can be filtered by level using a number of checkboxes. One "gotcha" I ran into: no available spells will display unless your alignment and spellcasting class are selected back on the main page.

The gear page is, similarly, split into a list of available items and owned items. The available list is split into categories with telescoping lists to make in manageable. The page manages purchasing, and also allows free addition of material that you character gets during the game. The gear page also allows access to magic items, though it is done through a button that opens a new window instead of using the gear list at the left. It seems to me it would be simpler to have both magical and normal gear operate through the same list.

Misc and notes page provide additional information. The misc page shows additional tabulated values that some data sets may create. In my sample fantasy character, only spell resistance, stat point costs, deity, and "profession" are listed, though when I did a modern sample character, for example, things like occupation and defense class (which aren't used in fantsy) are listed here.

While the misc page is generally only material that can be added when manipulating campaign options, while the notes page allows the player to add details like character appearance and background, or whatever custom categories you need.

The "print" page actually displays the final character sheet. To actually print the character, you need to go to the file menu or print button on the main window. The program also lets you export the statblock of a variety of characters.

As mentioned earlier, Campaign Suite has an unadvertised "modern" module. Many of the differences, such as defense class and wealth bonus are handled by fields that are on the miscellaneous page. Occupations are handled on the feat page; if you don't look for it, you might miss it.

Other stuff

Though the character generator seems to be the focus of any gaming software, Campaign Suite provides some tools beyond the character generator.

The mapping utility, at its basic level, resembles a simple MS Paint-style pixel drawing program with pens and shape drawing tools that allows different colors. What makes it different is, of course, that it is designed as a GM tool, of more specifically, as a dungeon mapper. As such, it lets you add grids and floor textures to shapes.

As part of the mapping utility is a random dungeon mapper. A touch of the button fills the window with a randomly generated, numbered dungeon rooms, connected by halls. You can also use an object like a square or other shape and use it to limit the bounds of the dungeon.

I did have difficulty editing with the mapping utility, and found no way to erase or undo what I had already done; each time I didn't like what was there, I had to start over again.

An aspect of Campaign Suite that is probably the most major (and that I have spent a disproportionately small amount of time on in this review) is that of the campaign management utility. The campaign management is very complex and multifaceted, allowing the GM to configure and manage a number of different aspects of the campaign.

By selecting "new campaign", you can create and edit a configuration file that will define you campaign. For example, you can expand on the races, classes, deities, domains, spells, equipment, and other character options that make up your campaign. The process is extensive, and is driven by adding and editing features on various levels, but if there is an effect you wish to add, there is a good chance that the editor can do it for you. As a quibble on a minor irritating point, the developer frequently uses the term "affect" where it should be "effect."

The campaign management acts as a universal record for the GM to manage and track campaign information and handle encounters. The campaign manager is handled as a list of telescoping, extensible entities. For example, if you have a dungeon that you want to fill (perhaps one generated using CS's dungeon generator), you can go to the "dungeon" section of the campaign manager and create room details, roll encounters and associated treasure, and add your notes to the room. Other sections are provided to annotate other locales, generate weather, create and manage lists of characters, and create and use tables.

The creatures management allows you to create and export statistics blocks for creatures and allows you to modify, create and store your own creatures. Unlike Etools, the creatures tool lets you apply templates to the creatures. Unfortunately, most creature information is stored simply as text fields instead of tabulated values. This inherently limits the utility of the template feature, as the consequences of many creature's statistics alterations. For example, if you create a half-dragon griffon, the creature's new special qualities are added and ability scores are modified, and the new constitution modifier seems to be taken into account in HP, but attack and damage modifiers due to new stats are not altered.

Conclusions and Other Observations

So, how does it stack up? Campaign Suite's primary competitors are Code Monkey Publishng's two tools, the officially sanctioned Etools and the freeware PCGen. Campaign Suite has advantages and disadvantages compared to both of these.

In Campaign's Suite favor over PCGen, CS is much broader in scope. Though PCGen has a few campaign management features, for the most part it is just a character generator. Further, PCGen's java-based nature may make it applicable to more platforms, but it also makes it slower. Due to PCGen's d20 status, it lacks native random generation which CS features, which is a real annoyance in a character generator. Finally, CS has fairly user-friendly editors, which is something planned for but not currently implemented in PCGen.

However, as a generator, PCGen has some real strengths compared to CS. PCGen incorporates more than just a few standard races. In PCGen, almost all core monsters can be used as the basis for a character, and PCGen has more robust facilities to advance and add templates to monster characters. PCGen also seems to track more information such as spell statistics, and makes them available for printout.

Etools is a bit more in CS's league in that it has its own campaign management features, but this is still limited to creating characters, monsters, treasures, and encounters; it does not have integrated tracking of campaign features like dungeons and is more of an intermediate generation tool. Further, while I find CS's template implementation a little weak, Etools (as of patch 1.2) still has ZERO template support (which I consider a significant weakness.)

A final point in comparing the various tools is the availability of add-on data. The situation is complex, but in a nutshell, Etools basic sources are limited to the 3.0 core books; more support is slowly forthcoming from CMP. PCGen has a variety of open source data files, but closed data sources are also reliant upon CMPs for-pay data packages. CS also has a few free data sources; this is better than Etools (which has nothing beyond the basics), but nowhere near as good as the numerous open source materials that PCGen has.

However, despite the fact that CMP is putting out a load of closed source data files for etools and PCGen including WotC material, CS has made arrangement to sell for pay data packages of their own with other publishers, and they seem to be getting them out much faster than CMP's sources.

Overall, I believe that none of the currently available tools "does it all." So who would I specifically recommend CS to? Primarily, those who need an adaptable character generator but don't need monster characters, and/or those that are looking for more of a campaign management and tracking tool than a mere character generator. Also, those playing d20 Modern will probably lean towards this tool over Etools (which has no modern support) or PCGen (which has no editors yet and does not seem to handle d20 modern chargen as well.)

Overall Grade: B

-Alan D. Kohler