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Message: <blockquote data-quote="merton_monk" data-source="post: 286422" data-attributes="member: 4361">PCGen's PhilosophyPut simply, we are not OGL or d20 compliant, so the requirements for those licenses are completely irrelevant.  We have been taking steps toward that direction which is why we contact all the publishers for the permission - particularly PI permission for names of items - which is completely unnecessary if we don't ever become OGL or d20 compliant. However, gaining permission from a company/group/individual is the professionally polite thing to do and is a good way to start a dialog even if we don't ever become OGL and/or D20 compliant.We are under copyright/trademark laws.  Under Fair Use we can include mechanics (the "crunchy bits"), we cannot include "flavor text" verbatim as that would violate copyright.  We satisfy TradeMarks by giving proper attribution - everywhere in PCGen it is very easy to determine from what book/group/URL/individual an item came from.  We do this for a number of reasons:1. to satisfy trademark requirements2. to help out d20 publishers who put out wonderful material - we want people to know who created that class/feat/spell that they like and where they can go to purchase it and find other products by that same author!3. we want to make it easy for our users to remember which of their books they need to look up the details about it in.  All DMs will want to know the details about something (more than PCGen provides) and having a reference in hand is a typical requirement.The way this balances for us is that PCGen is useful as a character generator and mainenance application because it handles all the math.  It gives you all the options you have, let's you know what you qualify for and what you don't qualify for.  In this way it really lowers the learning curve on using new d20 material (especially for those compeltely new to d20/3e!).  It also works as free marketing for all the d20 publishers who don't have to worry that our product will make theirs unnecessary.  I have received numerous email from people and seen posts on our yahoo message board that many groups will only allow players to use books which PCGen supports in their character generation.  This means that publishers who let us include their material in our application are generating more sales than they would have this includes a number of people who have bought Wotc books because they're in PCGen!).  No one has *not* purchased a book because it was not necessary due to the information included in PCGen.  That means we're not costing any publisher a dime.I have contacted Wotc several times seeking their permission to specifically include their books in PCGen.  Again - technically it isn't an absolute necessity, but for many reasons it's the right thing to do.  I have never tried to "fly under the radar".  I have exchanged email with Ryan Dancey, and with other Wotc employess after his departure.  None of them have indicated that Wotc has a problem of any kind with PCGen.  I'd like to gain their official permission, but they're obviously very reticent to do that.  It isn't necessary to have their official permission, but I'd be very happy to enter into negotiations with them in order to obtain it.I don't expect PCGen to affect E-Tools sales at all.  Our purposes have some overlap, but our audiences are very different.  Our audience is completely on-line, and due to our cross-platform nature we have a large userbase among non-Windows users.  E-Tools will be distributed nation-wide in Wotc retail stores for Windows-only and will have instant name recognition among those who are not on-line.  E-Tools is focused on the core rulebooks, will run on Windows (so it *should* run somewhat faster than PCGen which is java based) and will do what a lot of gamers need.  At around $30 it's not like it's going to break anyone's budget.  We're free (no budget necessary!) and we support somewhere around 60 sources at last count.  Not everyone needs that versatility.  The learning curve for using PCGen is probably higher than E-Tools, though we're slowly lowering that - Mynex's great work on the documentation should go a long way to rectify that!  The GUI has taken big steps forward and we're constantly working on optimizing the speed as much as we can - moving to Java 1.4 in the next month or so should help tremendously.  The comparisons between PCGen/E-Tools and all the other character generators are inevitable - in the case of retail generators the users will vote with their checkbook.  I haven't figured out how people vote for us, except that lots keep helping to enter the data files and we have publishers ask about getting their stuff entered.  Without that kind of vote of support, we wouldn't have gotten to where we are today!I think that should about cover all the issues. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Bryan McRobertsBenevolent Dictator and Chief Code Monkey of PCGen</blockquote>

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