Gamers Opinion of PCGen (No Rants)

[CRGreathouse]

Re: I want to like PCGen....

PCGen is the most competent character generator I have used
to date (Others I have tried included Campaign Suite, RPM, and DM Familiar... still waiting on my copy of E-tools)

Would you mind posting a comparison between PC Gen and Campaign Suite (here or elsewhere)? I'm very curious...

 

[wheeljack]

Re: Re: I want to like PCGen....

Would you mind posting a comparison between PC Gen and Campaign Suite (here or elsewhere)? I'm very curious...

Ok I can try my best

I will try to break this out by categories that are important to me, which may not be important to someone else but hey its my illogical opinion that you requested ( I think?).. Keep in mind this is only from using the DEMO version of Campaign Suite

Price : I don't think anyone would argue, PC Gen wins hads down here, for someone that spends all his money on d20 books this can be a very big factor.... that $30 for Campaign Suite can buy me another 3 Encyclopedia Arcanes

Ease of 'extensibility' : I will give Campaign Suite the nod here, I find it pretty darn easy to add a race, language, weapon, etc.

Community : I give the nod to PC Gen, this may be due to being somewhat of a programmer myself and I feel real enthusiasm behind the tool and support from the user community

Now as far as actually generating the Characters, I find that PC Gen is more accurate, and has more information (like where I can look up the detail of a certain feat or spell, support for psionics, and limits feats based on class as examples)... altho Campaign suite does have that nifty Character wizard, nce way to whip up random type NPCs

I guess the two biggest things that I liked about PC Gen over Campaign Suite was
1)The price... Im a cheapskate
2)The shear amount of pre-entered/ community entered data.... ehhh Im lazy

For campaign suite you either have to enter it yourself your purchase add-ons.....I find that just like trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip

Now I totally understand that this could change, especially with PC Gen trying to become d20 or OGL or whateva it is compliant

Looking back over this I imagine you will find this totally useless
I find it exceedingly difficult to put my thoughts down in writing... its one of my many flaws

 

[wheeljack]

eeeep.....

For some crazy reason I just ordered one of the left over GenCon CDs of Campaign Suite off the Twin Rose website

Impulse buy , that and I want to give the full version a shot and see if it can help me keep my ENTIRE campaign organized.

One more thing thats nice about PC Gen, I can share the character files with everyone in my group and they can maintain them without having to purchase software...

I still don't feel like I adequately backed up my statement before about PC Gen being the best character generator even tho I feel that way... I guess it just fits my style best.

 

[Cardinal Aidan]

A caveat...these comments are based off of PcGen 2.6.7. I'm having java issues on my main box, so I haven't been able to try out 3.0.

My opinion? It'll be very useful someday, with a completely redesigned interface. Right now though, its too much trouble to be worth the effort. I dont really save much time over other methods of doing the same thing. Yes, it was sluggish on my box (P433 with 256megs) but that's a minor factor after useability.

I've been curious if anyones' thought about rewriting PcGen under the QT libraries. As of QT 3.0, you're free to use the libraries in open source projects for the Mac or Win32, and would effectively be just as cross-platform as things stand now. QT can also give you a much nicer interface...a sizeable chunk of eTools was written in it. Two of the players in my group do a lot of KDE/QT development, and we've discussed this before.

Think it might be time to head over to the sourceforge page....

 

[Hardhead]

IMO, the great thing about PCGen is how user-configurable it is. Do this: try to enter Moneky Grip into E-Tools or any of a thousand other wierd feats. PCGen can do it. E-Tools can't.

As for the interface, it has a *steep* learning curve, but once you get used to it, it's easy to make a character fast.

 

[WizarDru]

IMO, the great thing about PCGen is how user-configurable it is. Do this: try to enter Moneky Grip into E-Tools or any of a thousand other wierd feats. PCGen can do it. E-Tools can't.

As for the interface, it has a *steep* learning curve, but once you get used to it, it's easy to make a character fast.

Well, since I can't do XML or LSTs, I really can't do it in either, nor can most folks. Fact is, that's why we need the code-monkeys in the community...someone adding a splatbook to PCgen is no different than someone manually creating the MON files for Dragons of different sizes.


[RANT] On a side note: What on Oerth was Fluid thinking, only including one size category of Dragon in eTools? I mean, of all the creatures to make sure you covered, wouldn't Dragons be the one? The FREAKING GAME IS CALLED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS! It ain't Dungeons and Barghests, for crying out loud. Yeesh.[/RANT]

 

[Knightcrawler]

Keeping it alive

Bump

Just looking to keep the thread alove. Keep your opinions and ideas coming.

 

[GothMogh]

The Good and Bad of PCGen

PCGen: Good or Bad? A bit of both.. though maybe a bit more bad.

I have used PCGen in one of it's very early incarnations and dropped it. Then I gave it another look around version 2.5 and became a bit more enthousiastic. We have susequently then used 2.6 and 2.7 and now 3.0...

Good:

*Free, no cost, gratis!
*Excellent support of material (just use the 2.7.3 lst files)
*Excellent tool for NPC generation with lots of special features.
*Resulting save files can be tweaked.

Bad:

*DM Tools are next to useless... But hey, it's PCGen, not DM's Familiar.
*Too much of the material is buggy. This is mainly an issue for PC's since for NPC's I don't mind if they show an error.
*Subsequent releases had/still have a lot of compatibility issues. My group would create PC's in version x and then find they behave a bit buggy in version x+1. As a solution they would recreate them and then find they have a feat less or more..
*Version 3.0: a real release? Yes, it is a genuine good effort. No, I do not consider this a stable release.
*Gui? What gui? Oh that?
*Noisy Messageboard Come on guys face it: the board on yahoo is used to interface socially between the different team members... Yes, you regularly point out that there should be no flaming. Yes, you regularly insist on freedom of speech. Yes, you regularly ask to stay on topic. But have a quick look at some of the posts (even by core members, i'm sorry to say) and it looks more like an exercise in stand up comedian jokes and one line posting/flaming. A lot of good questions are left unanswered. Please moderate this board.
*Slow, even on FAST machines. (As a matter of fact I removed 3.1.0 for this reason..)

Overall, I think PCGen is being strangled by it's feature richness. After all this time it is still not stable. I would suggest to avoid adding new material until a number of things have been hammered out.
* Focus on DnD material (yes I know this is arguable, but what do you want: a poor tool for everyone, or an excellent tool for some; this is not a request for flaming by the way )
* XML support (which would make it easier to edit lst files, and thus make that part less error prone)
* level based saving of a char, which makes rolling back one or more levels a lot easier and less error prone.
*slicker interface
*performance tuning

I can probably think of some more burnng issues, but those are formost on my mind.

Cheers,
GothMogh

 

[Chacal]

First, I like the project and I really appreciate the work that's done by all pcgen team.

I've tried it at different stages of evolution, and I've seen lots of improvement (except a couple of things I'll point out later)

As anyone who tried pcgen, I can state that you can't use it in replacement for a book.
[EDIT] I just tried 3.1.1 so I edit my comments. By the way I don't see the release info for this on the boards, and wonder why the 3.1.0 has been closed.
[/EDIT]

What I like : free, customisation of data and exports, support.
-the custom equipment is really good (It took me some time to find it, because I wasn't used to rightclick in pcgen )


What I dislike (mainly GUI, but possibly with some repercution on structures)

1 The summary tab lets you select a class,
which prevents you from changing stats with pointbuy.
[EDIT] Fixed by having the stats moved to summary tab. Good job ! The summary tab is finally user friendly and shows what's expected from a Character generator[/EDIT]

[ b]2[/b]Too many questions are asked (via the chooser dialog) upon levelling. This slows down the process of creating high level NPCs (or PCs).

2.1Some of the questions could be avoided:
For instance which spellcasting class do you want to increase when raising level in a PrC. In many cases, there's only one possible selection.

I would really like to have an option that will determine the chooser's behavior when only one selection is possible:
- Choose ( like it does actually: 2 clicks)
- Confirm (the chooser preselect it and you just confirm)
- Skip ( the chooser dialog doesn't show up and the selection is done automatically)

(of course I'll choose the third option)



2.2Even when several options exist, you might want to select them later. For instance, fighter feats are tricky to choose
because you don't have spend the "normal feats" thus some feats which needs several prereq can't be selected via the chooser.

Of course you can cancel the chooser but it's still annoying. An option like:
-Delay unnecessary choices
could help here too.


3 Another problem with the chooser upon levelling is the following:
If Spell Mastery is one of the granted feat to be selected (like for a Wiz 5) , the chooser generates a list of spellmastery(spell) for each known spell, then let only select one, regardless of int.
It should, at least work like in the feat tab.

I hope the above criticisms will help.

[EDIT] Points 2 and 3 still hold for 3.1.1[/EDIT]

Chacal

 

[Chacal]

Bump !

cause Edit wouldn't have bumped



Chacal