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<blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 2159643" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yes, but I allow the players to use any of the books I own when making their characters and the DMs I play with also allow the same thing.&nbsp; I hate restricting player's choices based on the fact that the tool that we are using to generate characters doesn't yet have that book available or I didn't feel like paying to download a dataset that had it in it.I don't currently use any programs for character generation for this one reason.&nbsp; I used to use PCGen continuously back in the day it had all of the books available at the time built into it.&nbsp; I still maintain that legally, it's dubious as to whether or not the small amount of information in these datasets actually counts as breaking the copyright.I was one of the developers of PCGen when they made the deal with WoTC and the code monkeys decided to trash all the datasets at the time and tell everyone on the developer list to get rid of all copies of the datasets and never to distribute them.&nbsp; I understand that WoTC offered them a deal where they might be able to legally distribute these datasets if they played along and got rid of them temporarily.&nbsp; I agreed with the decision because I thought they were making a deal to distribute datasets for free by being licensed by WoTC.&nbsp; It didn't happen that way, they instead got a deal to fix e-tools and sell datasets and became licensed to sell datasets for PCGen as well.&nbsp; However, the fact that the datasets cost money is what makes them useless to 90% of people who are fairly broke after buying ALL of the books that we need datasets for.Sorry, I don't mean to sound like a rant.&nbsp; I still think that sales of e-tools or RPG Toolkit would probably double or triple if the datasets were free, thereby making up the money they'd be making from datasets currently.&nbsp; Of course, I could be wrong.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Majoru Oakheart, post: 2159643, member: 5143"] Yes, but I allow the players to use any of the books I own when making their characters and the DMs I play with also allow the same thing. I hate restricting player's choices based on the fact that the tool that we are using to generate characters doesn't yet have that book available or I didn't feel like paying to download a dataset that had it in it. I don't currently use any programs for character generation for this one reason. I used to use PCGen continuously back in the day it had all of the books available at the time built into it. I still maintain that legally, it's dubious as to whether or not the small amount of information in these datasets actually counts as breaking the copyright. I was one of the developers of PCGen when they made the deal with WoTC and the code monkeys decided to trash all the datasets at the time and tell everyone on the developer list to get rid of all copies of the datasets and never to distribute them. I understand that WoTC offered them a deal where they might be able to legally distribute these datasets if they played along and got rid of them temporarily. I agreed with the decision because I thought they were making a deal to distribute datasets for free by being licensed by WoTC. It didn't happen that way, they instead got a deal to fix e-tools and sell datasets and became licensed to sell datasets for PCGen as well. However, the fact that the datasets cost money is what makes them useless to 90% of people who are fairly broke after buying ALL of the books that we need datasets for. Sorry, I don't mean to sound like a rant. I still think that sales of e-tools or RPG Toolkit would probably double or triple if the datasets were free, thereby making up the money they'd be making from datasets currently. Of course, I could be wrong. [/QUOTE]

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