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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 323603" data-attributes="member: 151">If D&D was purely 'calculating numbers', then you'd use Excel, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.  A chargen program has to handle all the different variations of rules that D&D offers, sometimes from wildly different sources.  It's one thing to calculate a BAB...it's another to figure a person's Diplomacy score while wearing a Cloak of Charisma, counting synergy bonuses from class, feats and multiple skills, making sure you don't have similar bonuses stack and so on and so forth.  Try building a mid to high-level monk/psionic warrior with a high wisdom and artifacts, and then write a program to calculate his AC.  Now do this for every similar situation in D&D.Creating a good PC generator is a sizable undertaking.  With around 600 pages in the core rules alone, people tend to underestimate the task.  Especially if they only look at the part of the rules they are using, and forget that everyone is using the program differently.  If it was as non-trivial as it is constantly represented as being, then PCGen and others would already completed this task, and no one would even look at eTools.  eTools is not what everyone hoped it would be, myself included, but it still has the potential to succeed and be a useful tool.  And to Fluid's defense, what they've delivered is about what Ryan promised when he took over.  By that time, they'd virtually scrapped the entire project and restarted, now that WOTC had completely changed their minds.  Then Hasbro sells the license out from underneath them, which certainly didn't help matters.</blockquote>

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