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Gamers Opinion of PCGen (No Rants)
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<blockquote data-quote="GothMogh" data-source="post: 343041" data-attributes="member: 7055"><p><strong>The Good and Bad of PCGen</strong></p><p></p><p>PCGen: Good or Bad? A bit of both.. though maybe a bit more bad.</p><p></p><p>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...</p><p></p><p><strong>Good:</strong> </p><p></p><p>*Free, no cost, gratis!</p><p>*Excellent support of material (just use the 2.7.3 lst files)</p><p>*Excellent tool for NPC generation with lots of special features.</p><p>*Resulting save files can be tweaked.</p><p></p><p><strong>Bad:</strong> </p><p></p><p>*DM Tools are next to useless... But hey, it's PCGen, not DM's Familiar.</p><p>*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.</p><p>*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..</p><p>*Version 3.0: a real release? Yes, it is a genuine good effort. No, I do not consider this a stable release.</p><p>*Gui? What gui? Oh that?</p><p>*<strong>Noisy Messageboard</strong> 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. <strong> Please moderate this board. </strong></p><p>*Slow, even on FAST machines. (As a matter of fact I removed 3.1.0 for this reason..)</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p>* 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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin :D" data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />)</p><p>* XML support (which would make it easier to edit lst files, and thus make that part less error prone)</p><p>* level based saving of a char, which makes rolling back one or more levels a lot easier and less error prone.</p><p>*slicker interface</p><p>*performance tuning</p><p></p><p>I can probably think of some more burnng issues, but those are formost on my mind.</p><p></p><p>Cheers,</p><p>GothMogh</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="GothMogh, post: 343041, member: 7055"] [b]The Good and Bad of PCGen[/b] 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... [B]Good:[/B] *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. [B]Bad:[/B] *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? *[B]Noisy Messageboard[/B] 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. [B] Please moderate this board. [/B] *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 :D) * 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 [/QUOTE]
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