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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tristan_tewksbury" data-source="post: 1891487" data-attributes="member: 25994">This is actually the biggest problem I have with all of this. It is such a pain to make a new adventure with all the work you need to do. Once you are out of college, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the time to devote to building just an adventure.WotC needs to get their collective heads out of where ever they have packed them and figure out how to let SOMEONE make a really useful set of computer tools to help the harried DM (who is trying balancing a job and family with gaming) build an adventure for the next game session. PCGen just does not cut it. Dundjinni is a start (for adventure design), but needs to integrate with a really useful system for generating characters - even a database of pregenerated stock characters and monsters would be a huge help.Judging from the PCGen project, this needs to be done with actuall paid programmers and real project management. I have seen some very good tools of late that do bits and pieces, but a full, integrated character generator is going to be very complicated and painful to make. Unfortunately, the complexity of the rules just about demand that one exist if you do not want to spend hours on the generation of each NPC, monster and character.So don't do it. Most likely it will not be that critical to the storyline.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> You need to make up your mind - do you want better or cheaper? The amount of work needed to make a decent tool is going to cost a pretty penny since you need real, paid developers to do the job. I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for a tool that is actually useful. Unfortunately, Etools was not even close to fitting that bill!I hesitated to buy Dundjinni due to the artwork issues, but finally broke down because I want something that is easier to deal with than a tweaked CAD program. (I think that Campaign Cartographer is a great product, but it is not simple to use by any stretch!)SpellGen is a very nice tool, if limited in scope. (Disclosure: I know the programmer and have worked on building several data files, so I am biased). However, it is open and flexible enough to accomodate a lot of the variants that are available.The various "Steve's" spreadsheets were very nice and fairly extensible. Unfortunately, they could not keep up with all the rules variations that are present in the D20 character design scope.Apologies if I have offended any open source aficionados, but my experience with all open source projects is that you may find them useful if you are bleeding-edge enough or happen to agree with one of the contributor's definition of a cool character. If you do not, then do not hope for a great deal of support for your character in an open source character designer.</blockquote>

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