PCGen

PCGen is a character generation and RPG playing aid program. It is intended to be used with d20 System-based games, such as Dungeons & Dragons (both 3rd edition and 3rd edition revised). It is written in Java and distributed under LGPL.

The primary use of PCGen is to simplify the player character creation process (once the player is familiar with how the character creation works in the game), and make it easy to keep track of the character's statistics. The characters data is saved in text files, making them easy to archive or store in revision control systems, or edit by hand. The character data, once edited in program, can be exported in XML, HTML or PDF formats, making them easy to share and print. The source data is also plain text, and the format is quite straightforward and rather well documented, so converting existing books to PCGen format is not very difficult.

Traditionally, the stumbling block with computerized RPG play aids has been the publisher's reluctance to allow their published rules to be redistributed in another form. In PCGen's case, this is alleviated by the fact that most of the rules and statistics it uses are already under an "open-source-like" license, the OGL. Furthermore, a lot of d20 and OGL content publishers have been happy to allow their content to be used in data sets shipped with PCGen. So far, there have been a few license disputes, but these have generally been resolved somehow; Wizards of the Coast allowed Code Monkey Publishing to work on commercial versions of the WotC book data sets, for example.