Character Upkeep Module

[Iceman]

One of the biggest problems I have seen in DnD over the years is that players NEVER get their character right in terms of skill points, synergies, etc. In fact, in all my years as a DM I have only met one player EVER who had his character correct from the start and kept him properly up to date over the course of the campaign.

So I have developed several character creation and tracking programs, primarily in Excel and Access, though I recently made an NPC exporter for FG2. My point is that FG2 DESPERATELY needs a character creator/updater that keeps the correct values and will only accept 'incorrect' values from the DM. At the very least I would like to see a comparison script where a DM module of PCs could be compared to the actual PC, allowing the DM to question the player on any differences. However this would entail both the player and the DM updating the character, so it still seems that the best option would be a structure that would CORRECTLY level characters in-game.

[Moon Wizard]

A character creation/updater program is an entire application in itself. With all the strange interactions of the rules, we have focused instead on providing a flexible character sheet in the rulesets we provide.

There are several good character generation programs out there, especially for 3.5E and 4E. I have used PCGen in the past for 3.5E, and used the Wizards character builder for 4E. I've also heard Hero Lab quite a bit. I typically use those to verify the build, before I update the FG sheets.

In the future, I'm hoping to shortcut this process by allowing FG to import characters from a file. With the v2.8 release, there will be import and export character commands added. It makes transferring characters between campaigns a breeze. As a side benefit, if we can get some of the character generators to export to the FG database format, then we could directly import from those exported files as well.

Regards,
JPG