soulcatcher said:
We don't do this now, we kind of just let you pick stuff here and there, and I do think it's necessary to support that (so that you can alter choices later). I also find that for speed, it's nice to do all the leveling first, then the feats, then the skills. That being said, yes, we do need some sort of wizard, and when our architecture is repaired enough to let us do onw, it's at the top of the list. Upshot: Possible
Since most of what I do is NPC generation, clumping the process in the manner in which I would do it on paper is essential. If I have to go through, level by level, and increase skills, pick feats, etc. I might as well be doing it by hand. If I can just say, "make a fighter 10/ranger 2, and then pick a bunch of feats, throw a pile of skill points at skills, etc., and don't have to double-check my math to ensure that synergy bonuses and the like are taken care of, that will make my job much easier.
We can't control this. Sorry. We have everything we can have, and give people the ability to add that which we can't. In reality, with the tens of businesses involved, no one group will have permission to everyone's system. The only way I see to resolve this at least partially is to make data entry really really easy. That is something that we are trying to figure out how to do. Upshot: Completely out of our control.
This is my major sticking point with most systems. Of course, maybe I don't need the entire Compete Arcane because I'm not going to have any Wu Jens in my game. Maybe I just want to enter the basic Warlock stuff myself and add Invocations as I go along, or throw on a new spell here and there. However, unless I want to learn how to code for the database, there's no way it's going to happen. The purpose of doing all this on a computer is so I can save time and effort. I have no intention of taking the time to learn all this stuff when it's probably quicker if I just do the work by hand right out of my books. It defeats the purpose.
If, however, I can spend 10 minutes working with a wizard to design something like a warlock invocation, not need to learn a new language to do it, and know it's going to function properly, I don't mind taking the time, because it'll save me time in the long run.
I'd call user-added functionality probably the most important missing feature. It's largely what makes these systems unusable to me.
Same here. we already do this. We could probably make the UI for it suck less, but that realy fits more into the above questions. Upshot: We already do it.
And this is the second biggest problem: the functionality is already there but it's a pain to access.
Note: I *do* want to add a treasure chest and party loot tool to pcgen so that you can store items that can instantly be moved to a PC in rooms, chests, horses, or in a mysterious black box of "party treasure" that never seems to encumber any single member of the party
What's the deal with PCGen and networks? At some point you mention that the initiative system is network-aware. If all my players have laptops, can I have them connect to me so that their stats auto-update when, say, a buff spell is cast, or so that they roll initiative themselves and it pops up on my initiative tracker. It's been a while since I've played around with PCGen, so I don't know what state the network support is in. In relation to the above, it would be very cool if you could use that treasure chest tool to move items directly to the PCs (or wherever) remotely, so that they can have their characters on their own systems, but you dole out the loot from the DM screen and don't have to keep track of everyone's characters yourself. Of course, I'd want to be able to view any character on the network and be able to add DM-only annotations.
It would be super if I could give a character a wand that is unidentified, and which a successful UMD roll would activate, reducing the number of charges by one, and also flag with the +2 bonus for that particular character having successfully activated it, but without revealing any information to the character. The DM would automatically see that it's a wand of fireball with 12 charges, and once it was identified, the DM could click a check box to make it visible to the players as well.
While not all my players currently have laptops, being able to interface this way with those who do, by auto-updating changes to the characters, whether temporary or permanent, would be a big help in reducing the amount of information I'd have to manage by switching over to an electronic DM screen.
As for the initiative tracker itself, it would be nice if there was more functionality. I'm not sure what exactly I can do with it anyway, just playing around with it. It would be great if I could, for a cast spell, select multiple targets, and specify some effect that would automatically kick in. For example if I cast a Melf's acid arrow, it would be cool if I could select from a drop-down list that this spell does persistent damage and nothing else, select the damage from a drop-down (2d4) and then have a second drop-down become visible for "2nd round", which would in turn activate a third drop down for "3rd round", etc. That way I can just "fire and forget" a lot of effects. Being able to automatically figure in things like Bless or Mage Armour with dropdowns would also be nice. At the moment, there's the ability to import characters using the character tracker, but no way to update them on-the-fly (unless I'm missing something). I can click on a monster's attack in the initiative tab to have it attack a PC, using the monster's to-hit and the PC's AC, but I don't seem to be able to update with temporary effects. I can't, for example, cast Bull's Strength on the monster and have its Str increase (along with everything tied to Str) or cast Mage Armour on the PC and improve his AC. I can't even manually go in and improve his AC. I have to change it on every attack roll dialog, or I can click over to PCGen and add certain effects to the character using the character sheet, but it's fairly limited and should be easier to access. It's little things like this that get in the way of utility for me.
I know that this is a lot of pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, but this has turned into a thread about that sort of thing. I like integration, automation, and on-the-fly customizability in a DM aid, in addition to network functionality, and I want to be able to specify my own content using a user interface.
