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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DPGDarrin" data-source="post: 301953" data-attributes="member: 4949">Well, time to add my $.02.First of all, I get very irritated when people bring their emotions to the table. Now, I'm not a robot, but if you don't like something, a simple "I'm disappointed," or "I don't recommend this," will suffice. If I read through someone panning a product, I want details and specific complaints. If they don't provide me with details, I assume they're trying to poison the well, and I ignore the post altogether.Now, that aside, I have my copy, I've done some playing, and I'm ready to talk about it. I agree that there should be templates. I agree that this is a serious oversight, I don't know how it made it out the door without them, and I hope they are patched into the game in the near future.Mouse overs would be nice, but the number of icons are so few that I think the program does OK without them. Multiple windows can be opened up in the program. Maybe its not as easy as it could be, but its far from impossible.I've read a lot of complaining about the NPC generator. I agree that it should include NPC classes, but as these can be extremely varied in terms of what skills they would need to possess (expert gardenner compared to an expert stonemason for instance), it kind of makes sense why they didn't make these automatc. Also, I feel that its easier to create an NPC classed character than a standard one anyway. Randomly generating NPCs isn't exactly random, but I actually like how it's done. You start with the "correct" NPC from the DMG (which is much closer to actual skill and feat choices a player would make when creating a PC than Jamis Buck's engine generates), and then you click on the "Jump to Character Editor" button to modify it and make it closer to what you had in mind. Its a great way of making not quite stock NPC's. If I really need a completely random character with no thought behind its construction at all, I'll visit Jamis's generators. On a separate topic for just a moment, while I like the initiative Jamis showed in creating the random PC generator, I had to modify the heck out of just about everything it produced to get something I could use.The parts that I really like about E-tools are: its stability, the ease involved in creating new monsters, the painless stat block output, and treasure generating.I do wish that it had more support for prestige classes built in, and I do wish that you could randomly generate characters with prestige classes. Overall, my final grade is a B.  It does everything they advertised it would do, and it is useful both in-game and in the design process. Its interface and its presentation lack the initial wow factor (they could have at least given us a Bink video at the beginning), but it is very utilitarian.Finally, I hear lots of griping, which surprises me not a bit, but I would challenge these same people to look at Jamis Bucks generators or PCGen with an equally critical eye. I know I have, and I find those programs deficient in numerous other areas, though they are incredible offerings because they are online and free. My advice - use whichever program that doesn't have a limitation pertaining to your immediate needs. There are only a few instances where I would prefer to use PCGen over E-tools, but there are some.</blockquote>

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