Character Generator -Which one to get?

[HalWhitewyrm]

Hello. I am looking to get a character generator that can handle 3.5 rules. My two choices are E-tools and PCGen. I've used PCGen in the past, and liked it, but it is constantly being updated and I need something with rock-solid rules. E-tools I've never used but everything I've heard tells me it is good.
Price is not an issue.

Which one do you recommend, E-tools or PCGen? Or a different one? Please say why.

And thanks a million for your help.

 

[Ds Da Man]

GO WITH REDBLADE. Just look at it here on this sight. It is by far the easiest, and nicest looking character gen around. You can add all your own classes, races, items, feats, skills, etc.

 

[Mynex]

Hello. I am looking to get a character generator that can handle 3.5 rules. My two choices are E-tools and PCGen. I've used PCGen in the past, and liked it, but it is constantly being updated and I need something with rock-solid rules. E-tools I've never used but everything I've heard tells me it is good.
Price is not an issue.

Which one do you recommend, E-tools or PCGen? Or a different one? Please say why.

And thanks a million for your help.

Hal,

PCGen periodically releases Production builds, about every few months. The next one is slated to be 5.6 next week sometime and is being tweaked for 3.5 rules (some minor issues remained - mostly data tweaks, but a couple code tweaks). You don't need to upgrade to the latest beta every time it's released, unless you want to.

The RSRD is what comes with the regular releases of PCGen, so it's OGL clean.

Cost: Free
Learning Curve: Moderate
Bonus: Comes with a lot of OGL material from other publishers
Negative: Bare mechanics only. Very little to no description of items.

eTools supports 95% of the 3.5 rules in the 1.4 patch, the 1.4.1 patch addresses the other 5%. eTools still does not support Templates however, and that's a major problem (hence our rewrite from scratch). The Data Sets for 3.5 are being tweaked and should be ready soon.

The data sets are created directly from the core 3 3.5 books so is not OGL clean, it's the full books.

Cost: 30$ for the program, 6.75$ for the 3.5 core data set.
Learning Curve: Easy to Moderate
Bonus: Full text for the material.
Negative: Must purchase each data set you want, no non-WotC support (at this time).


I don't know the ins and outs of the other CharGen's as well, but support for 3.5 is present in Twin Rose Campaign Suite, and I believe for DM's Familiar.

Haven't looked at Redblade in a while, so can't say.

There are a couple others, but I believe the above 5 are the most advanced in abilities.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

If you're just looking to do character generation, and have MS Excel, I recommend BlackBart's Heroforge -- it's free, fairly easy to use, and has a very healthy range of capabilities.

I use it for all my PCs and complex NPCs; I use eTools for simple NPCs and monster generation for DMing duties. I've found it's much quicker/easier to do things like multi-class NPCs and prestige classes in HeroForge.

 

[DMFTodd]

support for 3.5 is present in Twin Rose Campaign Suite, and I believe for DM's Familiar.

DM's Familiar does not do character generation. It's a combat manager and reference library program.

What else is out there for character generation:
E:Tools - No 3.5 support right now. Coming very soon
PCGen
Campaign Suite
Roleplaying Master
DM Genie
RedBlade
Assorted Excel and PDF forms

I don't use any of them enough to give any recommendation. RedBlade is new, free, 3.5 ready, and seems to have a good buzz going. Being new, I've seen multiple little bugs reported for it but it's being quickly updated.

All of the programs have free demos or are free. So try 'em all and see what you like.

 

[HalWhitewyrm]

Thanks for all the replies. I'll start doing some comparisons and make a decision.

 

[HalWhitewyrm]

Just a quick update.
I downloaded Redblade and I am quite impressed with it. Easy to use, easy to add new stuff, it really is quite a powerful little program. In fact, I only have one complaint about it: it doesn't allow to output the characters created in stat block format (which is mainly what I need for writing). I am going to keep it, though, because in all other facets it is quite good.

I think I'm gonna give PCGen a new try and hope that the current build is 3.5 compliant enough to serve me. I cannot add new material (I just don't know how to program for it) but the version I was using before served me admirably and (very important) it outputs in stat block format.

Thanks again for the help. I appreciate it.

 

[NeghVar]

Daniel,

You might want to post the request for saving the character as a stat block over in the RedBlade thread...

Thanks!