![]() It’s helpful without grabbing the steering wheel out of your hands to take over completely. Primarily, it does this by using an unobtrusive alert system that keeps you updated about any required tasks left in your character build. Well, PCGen manages to strike a perfect balance between guiding you through a character build and staying out of your way as you tinker. On the other hand, nobody wants the character build process to discourage new players. If an application is nothing more than a pregen factory, then it’s one of the most important parts of being a player is removed from the game, and nobody really wants that. In short, the character build process is very precious to me as an adult player.Ī new player might think they want an application to do a build for them, but most experienced players probably agree that the best way to learn is by doing. As a result, many hours of my childhood were spent poring over my friends’ D&D Player Handbooks and rolling up characters I’d never play. Thanks to the infamous “Satanic panic”, I was forbidden from playing RPGs as a child, but nobody ever said anything about building characters for the game. The application you want, of course, is Java or, if you’re asked to input the application launch command manually, java -jar Player Agency You usually do this by right-clicking and specifying what application to open the file in. The application should just run if you double-click the pcgen.jar file, but if your computer hasn’t been told what to do with a Java app yet, you may need to tell it explicitly to run in Java. Since it’s a Java application, there’s no installation necessary (because you’ve already got the Java runtime installed). It offers downloads from two mirror sites I strongly suggest using the Github host, since Sourceforge, unfortunately, has been known to insert adware into its downloads without consent from the publisher. If you’re not sure whether you have it installed or not, you can download PCGen first, try to run it, and install Java only if it fails to run. It’s likely that you already have Java installed, but if not then download and install it from. This isn’t quite the same thing as Java in your web browser PCGen is a downloadable application that runs locally on your computer. PCGen is a Java application, so it runs on anything that has Java installed. While it doesn’t have a mobile version, there is a PCGen viewer for Android, so you can access your build whenever you need to refer to it. If you use your computer to manage your character, you owe it to yourself to look at PCGen. It’s free, it’s open source, and it’s completely cross-platform. We looked into building custom spreadsheets in Libre Office until we found PCGen, a Java-based application that makes character creation and maintenance sublimely simple without taking the fun out of either. We wanted computerized character sheets that ran on our workstations. ![]() When I was working in the film industry at Weta Digital, I formed an after-hours gaming group. They certainly handle it a lot better than scratches on paper worn thin by repeated erasing and scribbling and more erasing. It’s a sensible match computers are great for tracking information that changes frequently. That’s an appropriate analogy, because in fact, as we all know, character sheets have themselves been computerized. Whether you thought it was fun or perplexing, or both all at once if you play RPGs, the process of building and tracking a character is probably something as natural to you now as using a computer. If you’re an avid gamer, it was probably a major milestone for you.īut do you also remember struggling to decipher an empty character sheet, and what you were supposed to write down in each box? Remember poring through the core rulebook, cross-referencing one table with a class write-up, the spell book with your chosen school of magic, and skills to your race? Do you remember the first time you built an RPG character? It was exciting and full of possibility, and your imagination ran wild.
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