Utterly useless without the book, no? There was a huge discussion at one point on the PCgen list about actually putting in a decription for the feats/spells/skills, but the creator chose not to, to prevent copyright issues from cropping up. the authors of the program went out of their way to create the data files so you need the books to understand what you're doing, because they want to support the companies as well. it's a program that can be used to organise character data. I doubt my mentality is going to put WotC out of business, considering the fact that I own books for at least 3 of their current lines (D&D, Star Wars and WoT), and fully intend to purchase more in the future, including the revised D&D books. As you say, the commercial effort is a lot more professional than PcGen, but PcGen has a lot more features.
#Pcgen custom sources for free
You can download the demo version for free from their website. This compromise wasn't good enough, it seems.Īs another point of interest, Wizards already created and sells their own version of a Character Creator for the d20 system which basically competes directly with the open source PcGen. To try and counter this threat, much of the write ups in the fan created content contained notes such as "As defined on page 231 of the Players Handbook". Wizards is afraid that by allowing the guys at PcGen to distribute their IP for free, people would lose interesting in buying the dead tree versions.
Fans were already filling this gap for free.
They were then hosting it on a system which WotC had nothing to do with, and didn't have to pay for. This means fans of the d20 system already did the work to write up the data files using the dead tree books they already paid for. These closed source data files were already typed up and hosted on sourceforge before WotC stepped in and put a halt to their distribution. They're probably just trying to make ends meet. Hosting files on any popular website is expensive in bandwidth.
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