Character Generators: What are people using?

[treetoad]

doublepost

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[treetoad]

I've liked etools

because it does so many calculations and saves time in the number-crunching area--the recent 3.5 data sets have seemed to work pretty well too; it's easy to share .htm chracter sheet formats too; however, I understand people wanting to go with other programs that allow more customization/house rules (in theory, etools has this, but its not super user-friendly to use)

so I'd recomend it heartily if you play a lot of 3.x d&d without major modifications

 

[Agamon]

Ever since I found HeroForge, I don't use eTools or PCGen anymore.

 

[Silvanos]

OK, so the next question is...

Which is the most accurate. No stacking bugs, no synergy bugs, etc?

Etools 3.5 is cool, but having just come out, it is also wacked out in a few areas. Try making armor with the 3.5 rules.

Anyone?

D

 

[Theocrat]

data sets

Hi all-
I started a new thread asking for data sets for either CS or eTools. Anybody have non-WotC datasets they can share for eTools, for home use and not published as to break any OGL?
I guess I'm really looking for AEG's Mercenaries book and the Kalamar Players Guide. Which since that's official D&D stuff, shouldn't / couldn't that be part of eTools easily?
Thanks-

 

[Dimwhit]

I play with my laptop at the table, so I created my own excel character sheet. It handles all the calculations for me, and it's a breeze leveling-up character. Fastest method I've used.

The rest of my group uses e-Tools.

 

[MaxKaladin]

I've tried PCGen and DMGenie so far and I can't say I'm terribly happy with either.

DMGenie seems to treat that combat manager as the "front page" and that just strikes me as making the program kind of awkward to get around in. I have no need for a combat manager and really don't want to have to deal with one to use the character features. Besides, it doesn't have a number of the features I like in PCGen.

PCGen, on the other hand, is rather slow at times and seems awkward when doing some functions. It also seems to have almost too many features at times since I sometimes find myself scrolling through hundreds of races (for instance) because of all the options open. Other than that, I really like the functionality of theprogram.

The HUGE minus for me with either is the lack of any real character generation ability. These are really databases. They store data for you and make computations, but you have to make all of the initial selections yourself. DMGenie will roll your stats for you and both roll hit points, but neither will generate a complete character for you to fiddle with. That feature would save me huge amounts of time.

Combining the Jamis Buck NPC Generator with PCGen would seem ideal, except the output to PCGen doesn't seem to work very well anymore. It generally outputs skills that aren't in PCGen and this causes problems with skill point totals in PCGen that aren't easy to fix. Yeah, I could edit the files but that rather flies in the face of time saving.

 

[kingpaul]

PCGen, on the other hand, is rather slow at times and seems awkward when doing some functions. It also seems to have almost too many features at times since I sometimes find myself scrolling through hundreds of races (for instance) because of all the options open. Other than that, I really like the functionality of the program.

The speed issue does come up on many occasions. From what I understand, not being one of the coders for the project, this is due to the fact that its written in java, since PCGen is a cross-platform application.

As for the 'hundreds of races', PCGen allows you to not only create characters from the standard player races (human, dwarf, elf, etc), you can also create statblocks for the monsters and/or animals that are available as well.

The HUGE minus for me with either is the lack of any real character generation ability. These are really databases. They store data for you and make computations, but you have to make all of the initial selections yourself. DMGenie will roll your stats for you and both roll hit points, but neither will generate a complete character for you to fiddle with. That feature would save me huge amounts of time.

Combining the Jamis Buck NPC Generator with PCGen would seem ideal, except the output to PCGen doesn't seem to work very well anymore. It generally outputs skills that aren't in PCGen and this causes problems with skill point totals in PCGen that aren't easy to fix. Yeah, I could edit the files but that rather flies in the face of time saving.

There is a request already in to have this kind of functionality implemented into PCGen. Once again, I'm not a coder, so I don't know where it stands on being implemented...or if its even been started.

 

[MaxKaladin]

The speed issue does come up on many occasions. From what I understand, not being one of the coders for the project, this is due to the fact that its written in java, since PCGen is a cross-platform application.

I've heard a lot of people say that it is Java and that is a possible reason the program is so slow. Then again, there are fast Java Apps out there, so that may not be it. I don't have enough information to know.

As for the 'hundreds of races', PCGen allows you to not only create characters from the standard player races (human, dwarf, elf, etc), you can also create statblocks for the monsters and/or animals that are available as well.

I understand this. My sole problem with this could be expressed by saying I wish that having every possible race appear in the race selection window was an option that defaulted to OFF rather than ON. That way I would get a list of the standard PC races and could click a button or check a box to see the whole extended list. Or, at least, the standard races could be at the top of the list like the Jamis Buck generator does. I just get frustrated trying to dig out human, elf, dwarf and so on from that huge list of possible races.

I was just looking at the filter option there, but was unable to find a filter that just gave me the PHB races. Even so, the filter option struck me as powerful, but somewhat awkward. Even if there was an option to filter by race, one would have to go through several extra steps to select it each time they used that program for the first time in a session -- open filter screen, find the right option/options and select them, apply filter. That's three steps and it seems like it could be reduced to one or two for tasks that are probably quite common for a large number of users like this. It could be done either through a hard coded option like I described above or some sort of saved custom filter buttons that can be set up by the user to allow for his own preferences at the click of a button. Even setting a default filter that the user could then turn off would help. Anything to make working through the program as easy as possible for users.

I'm a programmer but I work closely with my users and there is a general rule of thumb to go by: The fewer steps the better. Users just want to get from A to B as easily as possible. Lots of powerful options are great if they don't interfere with easily accomplishing a typical task. If you can give them powerful and versatile options then do it, but if they will only need them a small part of the time then make sure they don't have to use them the rest of the time.

Hmm, getting ready for todays game I think I can add that the class screen has the same problem, but at least has a "Type: Base" filter you can use to shorten the list to the stuff you need most of the time. Now if I could just make that the default...

There is a request already in to have this kind of functionality implemented into PCGen. Once again, I'm not a coder, so I don't know where it stands on being implemented...or if its even been started.

I'm glad to hear it is at least on the list of things to implement. I know it won't be easy since the structure of PCGen gives it so many options it has to take into account, but I think it will be a huge boon to GMs everywhere.

In fact, it seems to me that the Jamis Buck generator is a popular enough option for GMs that a good interim solution would be to simply add an import feature that can read the output from it even though it isn't up to date with the current standard for PCGen input files. I suspect the problems one would encounter with the files generated by the JB Generator are common enough that they could be fairly easily identified by someone familiar with what the current incarnation of PCGen is expecting and dealt with in an import wizard.

 

[Kristian Serrano]

DMGenie will roll your stats for you and both roll hit points, but neither will generate a complete character for you to fiddle with. That feature would save me huge amounts of time.

From what I understand, the roll ability score aspect of character generation is not open content, thus cannot be implemented freely. E-Tools features true (not random) character generation.