hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2373.txt

Episode: 2373
Title: HPR2373: PCGen
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2373/hpr2373.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:55:42

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This is HPR episode 2,373 entitled PC Gen, and is part of the series' tabletop gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 44 minutes long, and Karina Cleanflag, the summary is
Klaatu talks about a PC generator.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Get your web hosting that's Honest and Fair, at AnanasThost.com.
Music
Hi everyone, this is HackerpopRadio, my name is Klaatu.
I want to talk about PC Gen.
What is PC Gen?
Well, it's not what you think.
You think PC is a personal computer.
And generally, in this context, HackerpopRadio, you probably be right to be fair.
But in this case, you're not right.
This is a different kind of PC.
It is a player character.
That's the definition of PC in the 1983 edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which I'm holding in my hands currently.
PC player character in PC non-player character run by the Dungeon Master.
And I'm highlighting that specifically from the source, because I've always heard it said play a bull character.
That's what I've always heard.
It's actually player character.
So anyway, technicality is aside, player characters in an RPG, in a tabletop RPG, especially, are those characters that are controlled by physical people, the actual players.
And that is, as I've said, opposed to NPCs, which are just characters who appear in the world, but aren't played by anyone.
Or really, they're played by the DM.
So PC Gen, therefore, would be a player character generator.
And it turns out that that's the name of a really nifty application, PC Gen.
You can find it at PCGen.org on the internet.
And you can, on the site, you can look at the documentation, or you can download it.
It's a Java application.
So it works on pretty much everything.
And that's actually really, really nice, because it's also portable.
It being a Java application.
It's kind of a self-contained, well, I shouldn't say self-contained, because it's not literally self-contained.
But it's a jar file, so it's fairly contained.
And there are other jar files within that directory that you download from the site.
So it's not completely self-contained, but as long as you take that folder, you know, PC Gen folder,
you could pretty much run it on any computer you happen to be around, probably.
I mean, assuming most computers have Java installed on them, you should be able to run it on pretty much anything.
So that's quite, quite nice.
And yes, you could even use OpenJDK.
That's what I'm using.
So you don't even have to get the Oracle Java.
You can just use the open source, you know, Java install.
So yeah, pretty nice.
You can download these sources from either SourceForge or GitHub.
It's an open source application.
No surprise there.
PCGen.org.
So why do you need PCGen.org?
Well, you don't really.
It's a thing in analog gaming that you don't really need a computer.
It's an analog system.
So what you normally do when you're generating a player character for yourself before you sit down to play a game.
A tabletop RPG or a pen and paper RPG is there sometimes called.
You sit down with the rule book that you maybe got or maybe you just downloaded like a supplement from the internet that explains how to create a character.
And you sit down with that and you kind of read it over and you figure out what kind of attributes your characters are supposed to have and what kind of skills you have to choose from all these things.
And you usually, you know, there are different methods and we'll actually touch on that a little bit as I go through this application.
But there are a couple of methods of generating the stats for your character.
Sometimes people roll dice and whatever the dice, the dice say they'll, you know, they'll go with that.
Okay, dice, I just rolled and it says I have 14 strength.
Okay, well, that's what I get then.
Other people do it a little bit differently and they have an allotment of points that, you know, their DM has given them and they can spend those points on things.
Sometimes there's a sliding scale sort of they're not sliding scale non-linear, you know, a curve where you can buy certain points into a certain attribute and then the more points you're dumping into it, the more the points cost.
So yeah, lots of different ways and it just usually it's in the rule book that you buy or that you that you're borrowing from your DM or whatever you've got to get you started.
Now, there are some rule books that don't even, where you don't even have to build a character. They come with pre-generated characters, not the rule books, but like the adventures.
And you can just play according to, you know, whatever, whatever comes in the book. You can choose from a set of characters and that they're already generated for you.
So in other words, PC Gen is a non-essential application. It's not something that you actually need and it might not even be a road that you want to go down if you're a real purist in your pen and paper RPG and prefer to keep it on pen and paper.
That's fine. You can do that. What I have personally found is that the computer systems of organizing things really help me a lot. I'm not very good with paper. I respect it. I'm okay with the concept, but in terms of actually managing like a notebook.
You know, I don't understand how people, you turn to page one and you think, okay, well, I'm going to write a note and I predict that this note is going to be two faces long.
So I'm going to side one and side two of the single page is what my note is going to take. So you start writing something and then you think at some point, well, I think that note is done.
So I will turn to page two, physical page two, and start writing another note. And then some other time you realize that on page one, your note wasn't finished and you have to make a dendoms to it.
So now you're writing and you come to the end of that page one and you go to page two and oh, you already started another note there.
So I don't understand how people manage that kind of thing. I guess the analogy would be on a computer hard drive. You know, you've got I-nodes and there's a certain allotment for, okay, the data is going to go here.
And if this file gets any larger than this, then we'll have to go to a different place. And the computer can do that because there's a file system and it can figure out, okay, I've filled up page one.
Page two was already filled before. So just skip over to page five and continue this note. And then when you're done with that note, just get back to page three to continue the second note.
You know, it's just, I don't know. I cannot figure that out for the life of me to problem. So I like digital notes. And that's why I use PCGen.
There's also another little killer feature PCGen is on the fly adjustments. So we'll talk about that in a few moments or in many moments probably.
The other thing to say about PCGen is that there is no Linux installer. I mean, there's, I don't think there's an installer at all, but there's no Linux installer.
It's, it's just one of those applications that you can download. And then you can either run it from the command line by going to the directory that you've downloaded. So let's just call it PCGen.
And then doing Java, dash jar, or Java space, dash jar, space, and then dot slash PCGen.jar. That'll launch that application.
But the thing about that is you have to do it from within that folder, right? So you can't, you couldn't even put that line into like a shell script or something or a dot desktop file and have it work because it won't know where to find its data files.
And it refuses to launch.
Well, I mean it launches, but then it says, hey, I can't find my data files and it ceases to launch.
So they have luckily included a startup script within the folder. So if you download it, you look in the folder.
And you'll find PCGen.sh. That's the startup script. Super easy. You can use it from anywhere.
Hey, if you have questions, just go to slackbuilds.org, look up PCGen, and there's a build script in there.
More importantly, the dot desktop file, PCGen.desktop, and that's the one that you'll want to look at to refer to create a desktop file if that's what you want to do with yours.
It's not complicated. It's just something that you have to bear in mind with how the application is structured.
So anyway, once you've got it and once you've figured out how to launch it correctly, again, two different ways either with Java or with your startup script, start the thing.
And when it starts, the first question you're asked is where you want it to store your options, your settings, your preferences.
The default, at least on my machine, is free desktop configuration subjectory. Use for most Linux slash BSD default.
So if you just accept the defaults, you're good. It saves it in your home directory slash dot config slash PCGen.
And that's where all of your personal data and all your personal settings will get saved too.
You get a tip of the day. You can close that, read it, and then close it.
And then it kind of intercepts your activity with a select sources screen.
And this is one of the really, really neat things about PCGen is that it's not just built for one or two systems.
It's actually really flexible in terms of how it structures the data that you feed it.
In other words, if you're building a character for a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition game, then you can tell it, hey, when calculating all of the different values,
and when giving the options for different classes, different races, different gods, use the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons system reference document.
It's an open game license, so software developers can actually use the rulebook, the system that you're playing, when structuring their applications. It's really, really nice.
You can also use standard or system reference documents for Dungeons & Dragons 3.0, for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, and for Pathfinder, for Pathfinder with all the core supplements,
and even Pathfinder for Game Masters in the event that you might be planning a game, and maybe you're generating non-player characters for your players to come up against.
There's also something called Fantasy Craft, which I don't know what that is. I've never looked at that, but the point being is there are lots of different options for how you want PCGen to validate your choices.
And I don't mean validate emotionally, I mean validate. Like, you say that you want this much strength for your character, is that legal within this rule system, and depending on what rule system you've told it to follow, it will either tell you, yeah, that's fine, or no, that's too high for this level, or whatever. I'm just using an example.
So, I'll just all, for this example, I'm going to take Pathfinder RPG core supplements, and certainly if you wanted to contribute to PCGen, you could take another open game licensed property, and structure it such that you could load it into PCGen, and maybe publish that for others to use as well.
And there's a button for installing more data sources right at the bottom of the select sources screen, so it's pretty flexible. So once you load the sources, it drops you down into the main PCGen window, and one of the things about PCGen that I think is really great is that it really makes building a character really easy.
It doesn't necessarily, I wouldn't say it holds your hand through the entire process. I mean, you have to kind of be aware of the fact that you're building a character for an RPG, you know, you kind of have to be on board with that idea, you have to be willing to think a little bit about the rules, but you don't have to be super familiar with the process.
You need to be vaguely familiar with the concept of this is what a character in an RPG needs and expects, and this is what I have to do, but in terms of like, am I forgetting anything, that sort of thing, it'll actually prompt you and guide you through the process.
So now that I've loaded my sources, I get a quick little thing that says it's the open game license 1.0a, so I get to read that if I want to. I read that before, actually, it's a good little license, so I'll just say yes, so I'll close that, so I've agreed, I guess, probably, I don't know.
And then I go to file and new to build a new character. So when you're building a new character, the first thing you'll notice probably is that there's a bunch of tabs along the top, and it looks super scary, there's a lot of data there, and that's a little bit intimidating.
And the main screen itself has like three different columns within it, and they all have different things that you can choose from and kind of assign to your character.
So it can look overwhelming, but fear not. This application is friendly, I can't emphasize that enough. In the lower left corner of the PC Gen window, there's things to be done list. It's four items at first, it's going to change as you complete things and new things come up, but it takes you through the process, very, very friendly little application.
So the first one is enter a name, and you can even click on it, and it will take you to the field that it's talking about. That's in the upper left corner, it's called name, and you can make up a name. Well, let's not make up a name right now, let's do random. There's a button here for random, and that opens up a little pop-up window that offers to create a name for you.
And you can choose the gender, you can choose the category, so the category might be, for instance, Fantasy Elven, Fantasy Half Work, Fantasy Halfling, Historical, Ancient until about 200, Historical Early Middle Ages, 200 to 800, and yeah, you've just got so much to choose from, and it can be, it can generate a name for you.
Yeah, and it can even choose from different catalogs, so you've got Arabic, English, Flemish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Hispanic, so yeah, lots of, lots of data that you can crunch here, and that's nice, that's really cool.
So I'm Oswin Moore, is the name that it just now generated for me. That's using the Historical Gunpowder Age, which is 1500 to 1900, and it's late English.
Oswin Moore, it's not bad. So I'll take it. So that's the character type is PC, as opposed to NPC, so you can actually, if you're a game master, you can choose to create NPCs, which is kind of nice,
because then you can populate your world with people with stat blocks, and that way if someone gets into a fight, or someone comes into a battle of wits with someone else, you actually have stats for that person.
The player, player name, that's Clat 2, and then the tab label, and the tab label is kind of cool, because you can load a bunch of characters into the interface of PC Gen, and especially if you're a dungeon master, you may have like five or ten characters loaded,
and in that event, you might want to switch between tabs quickly, but maybe their names aren't as meaningful as, for instance, the city that they're a part of, so maybe you do, like I don't know, Candlekeep, underscore Citizen 1, something like that, and then you can customize the tabs.
But for now, I'll just keep it as it's default. And there's all kinds of things that you can add to your character. I mean, you can specify which hand is their dominant hand right or left or are they ambidextrous.
They're alignments, certainly you could, you know, that's kind of an important guidance for your character. You can specify what deity they worship, and again, that's all pre-populated, so if you don't know all of the usual Pathfinder gods or the Dungeons and Dragons gods, you don't really have to, or at least you know where to start, you can look up whatever name you think looks appealing to you,
and find out what God that is, and then figure out what alignment the God is, and see how that affects your character, that sort of thing. So yeah, all pre-populated data, it's really, really nice.
So then let's say that you finish all that, and then you would look down again at your things to be done list, and the next one is Select or Race.
So again, you can click on that, it takes you to the field where that is, and you can select your race, whether you're a halfling, or a human, or a tiefling, or a elf, or a orc, or whatever.
And there are lots of races here, especially if you load in one of the beefier rule sets, like the Pathfinder with all the core supplements, you've got a lot to choose from. You could even be a whale.
Like I just saw it as I was scrolling through it. Yep, a whale. I'm going to be a whale. And then you can be a certain age, and so on, and then once you're done with that,
that whale is actually really complex. It's popping up a bunch of windows for me to choose attributes of this whale. I've been backing out of being a whale. I'm just running to the relative safety of halfling.
Oswin Moore, that sounds like he could be a halfling. Like a taller halfling.
Anyway, so now that's done. So now it's telling me, okay, well, you've chosen your race, so now choose your skills. And your skills are the main, I guess, skills, I would say, are kind of the main baseline for your characters' abilities, like for what they can do in the game world.
And there are a couple of different methods to assign skills, and you may not have heard them called skills or abilities, but they're pretty common in both video and analog games. It's like strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma, that sort of thing.
And I'm mentioning this specifically because I want to highlight how many different methods PC Gen offers you to find these values out.
One method is to roll it for the user to roll, and that literally means like you break out your dice and you roll for yourself. And that's sort of a manual override. And you can do that.
You can also set it to being all the same, so just set all the numbers, all the fields to some value. I've never heard of anyone doing that, but let's assume that that's a thing because it's an option here.
There's also the option to have the computer roll for you, and there are a couple of different methods within that. There's the classic style where you roll three D6s, and then you add those D6s up, and that's your score.
So you can basically, if you get a really good roll, you could have 18 points in some attribute. There's the standard, which I think is the one that Pathfinder rulebook actually advises, which is roll 4 D6, but discard the lowest.
So again, you can get a maximum of 18, but you have a little bit of flexibility in there, a little bit of a manual override.
And then there's a heroic, which is you roll 2 D6, and then just add 6, so you get an automatic maximum value on one of your die.
Or you can do a purchase mode, which is not a literal purchase, but it's where you are assigned a pool of points, and then you get to spin those points.
And there's usually not, maybe at first there's a one-to-one relationship, like if you want to increase your strength by one point, that costs one point.
But then at a certain point, once you hit some, it's not linear, so once you hit a certain amount of some ability, it costs maybe two points from your pool to increase one more point.
So it starts to get a little bit more expensive, the higher you get, the better you get within one ability.
And I think the goal there is to avoid people just blatantly, you know, spending all of their points on one or two attributes, because it becomes more expensive, the more you contribute.
So it doesn't really matter how you do this, it's just your choice, and that's the fun thing about building a character is kind of seeing the randomness of some of your roles, and then thinking about who you want your character to be, and maybe going in and kind of tweaking some of those settings.
So that's the ability scores. And again, I mean, I'm going to stop there, because I could just step through the whole process with you, and it would be pretty boring.
But the things to be done list, down in the lower left, keeps updating with, you know, okay, well, what can you do now?
And it modifies it changes as you change certain things, like if you're a human, rather than a halfling, maybe you only get, I don't know, one bonus language, and if you're a half-elf, or if you're a rogue, maybe you get two bonus languages, you know, whatever.
So it will adapt and tell you what you need to do, depending on what you have told it that you have, you know, the choices that you make, and that's kind of nice.
You can choose classes, you can choose your level, your starting level, you don't have to start with level one if you're starting a game that assumes all characters are at level three.
Sometimes, you know, your DM will say, hey, just create a character, make it level three, so you've got a lot of the points to spend up front, and that's good.
And you can do that, and it works. Now, the cool thing, well, one of the cool things, is that once you're finished, once you're finally finished this process, you can go over to the final tab on the right.
And really, that's kind of the only, the two tabs that you'll generally interact with, is the summary when you're first building your character, and then you'll kind of be sitting in the character sheet for most of the time.
There's one other tab that you'll, well, a couple of other tabs that you will sometimes dart out to to make some kind of change.
But generally speaking, the character sheet is where you go, because I mean, that's what you're looking at. That's the overview of your character.
And there are several different views of your character sheet. The standard one, it resembles more or less the sort of a typical character sheet that you would find in the back of any RPG rulebook.
It's kind of got a bunch of tables in it, and they tell you certain things about your character, whether it's their ability scores, or their specific skills, and their bonuses on skills, or their attacks, or their initiatives.
So it's all kind of grouped together. And that's probably one of the, one of the friendlier views of the thing. But it's not necessarily the, it's not always the best view to kind of depends on what you're doing.
You can look at it as a stat block, so something that you would see sort of like what you would see in a book, like in a Pathfinder Adventure book, or Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
And sometimes, I mean, if that's what you're used to reading in books, then sometimes maybe that's the way that you want to read it. I don't know. It just kind of depends.
There are about at least 12 different ways to look at your character. It's pretty nice. And it makes it super easy to just kind of find the one that you find easiest to parse pretty much.
So that's a pretty cool feature. Now you can also export it, and just have it kind of, you know, you could export it as like a PDF or something, and then print it out, and sort of go back to being pinned in paper, or you can keep it on the computer and kind of maintain it.
And I think that kind of probably depends on your personal workflow, you know, if you're playing your tabletop games, and it's okay for people that have computers sitting around, then maybe that's what you'll do is just maintain the thing on the computer.
But maybe you won't. It just, it really depends on what your gaming group does, or whether you even game in real life. Maybe you're, maybe you game on the computer, or, you know, over computer, like video chat sort of thing.
And in that case, yeah, it might be easier for you to maintain it on the computer.
The advantage to maintaining it on a computer is that, as I said, I think at the beginning, is that you can kind of go in and cause temporary things to occur, so make temporary adjustments.
So for instance, let's say I have my character sheet right now. I've got an intelligence Oswin Moore has an intelligence of 14, which means every time he rolls on some kind of intelligence check, he gets a plus two to whatever he rolls.
That's pretty nice. But let's say he gets cursed. He gets cursed by some evil sorcerer or something. And the curse causes him to lose intelligence temporarily. It's just a temporary condition.
So you can go over to the temporary bonuses tab, which I guess is a little bit of a misnomer, because I mean, is a bonus something that goes into the negative? I don't know.
But it's a temporary, temporary something. And in this case, it's a temporary condition. And there's an ability drained intelligence.
So I could add that, and it'll ask me, well, how much of a drain do you want to put on this condition? So I'll just make it super obvious and put 10.
That probably wouldn't really happen. Or if it did, Oswin should not be up against this particular sorcerer, because that's a pretty severe penalty. But let's just say that's what it is for ease of interpretation.
So now if I go back to my character sheet, I flip back over to it. I look at the intelligence table or the ability table down at the intelligence attribute. And he's got 14, which gives him plus two.
But then there's another column, temporary score and temporary modifier. And it shows me that temporarily, at least while this is in effect, his intelligence is four, which I think technically means he can't even make words. That's how low of intelligence that would be.
And that means a negative three on all of his dice rolls. So if he's doing something for intelligence, and he rolls 13, then he would actually only have rolled a 10.
So that's kind of nice, because it adjusts everything. And certainly if there was something, and I don't really see anything necessarily right now, well, yeah, like right here actually intelligence. So his C's got a skill called a praise, which means he can,
he can look at an item that he has found that he's looted from someplace and appraise it and figure out how much it is worth.
Or something that someone is trying to sell him and he can see how much it's worth. So that's a pretty good skill to have if you do a lot of looting and selling and things like that. But it depends on intelligence.
So currently, because there's this temporary effect in place, his appraise skill modifier is a negative three. So that basically means he's useless as an appraiser.
He cannot appraise things correctly. So if someone tried to sell him something, you know, amount of dirt for 10 gold pieces, he would probably purchase that.
When that wears off, when he gets healed or when he gets his wits about him again, you can just uncheck the temporary bonus, which has been added to the left column.
And now everything's back to normal. His intelligence shows his 14 plus 2 again. His appraise, he gets a bonus of 2 again. So he's back in the game.
So that's really, really useful. And the analogy to that on pen and paper, as you can imagine, would be, you know, you've got your character sheet and the intelligence is at 14 plus 2.
And then something happens, so you think, okay, well, now instead of 14 plus 2, it's really at 4, which means, you know, a minus, what did I say? It was a minus 3, I think, yeah.
And so you kind of scribble that in the margin or whatever. And then that effect wears off. So you scratch it back out because now it's no longer valid.
And you do that like one night in that works, but you do that across several games. And pretty soon your character sheet just looks like it's just a mess. It just got scribbles all over it.
And even if you use pencil, which is the obvious solution to that, you know, it just tends to kind of get pretty messy looking, and it's difficult.
Plus in that event, it's sometimes difficult to know what skill depends on what ability. So maybe I do have appraise listed.
But if there's not some kind of cue for me to realize that yes, that depends on your intelligence. So this is being affected right now. It's difficult to remember that.
Which just makes it, it all that makes it a little bit more difficult to just kind of play the game smoothly, you know.
So having something that dynamically updates itself, depending on things that you're adjusting, you know, depending on what's happening in the game, is really, really nice.
It makes it just really easy to sort of add a glance, figure out what you've actually rolled with all the different bonuses and modifiers that you apply to it.
So to me, that's probably in addition to just sort of not being on paper and being easier to manage because I'm better with computers than I am with paper.
That's a big feature, but the other killer feature is the fact that yeah, it can dynamically adjust things depending on what happens in the game.
That's huge for me. It's really, really nice.
So that is PC Gen, and it is well worth investigating if you play RPGs or even if you just kind of like building characters.
I mean, I think I've said it before, but that's how I got started with RPGs before I was allowed to play them.
I just sat around and with friends built characters, you know, and it was, it's a lot of fun actually because the more that you kind of go down that path, especially if it's just a lazy afternoon and you're just thinking, I want to be creative in some small way, then kind of drumming up like, you know, especially looking through all the different races in the Pathfinder with all of its core supplements, you've just got so much to choose from.
You really do. I mean, there's a lot in there that you wouldn't choose from, like probably a whale, you probably wouldn't really use that, a dire ape, probably not.
But I mean, there are a lot of things in there that are traditionally playable characters that you might not have really thought about ever building a character of.
And it's kind of fun because you get to kind of think, okay, well, what would an 8-foot half-centar, half-dorf be like in real life? What skills would it have?
What magical spells might it have learned, you know, it's just, I don't, for the record, I don't believe that there's such a thing as a half-centar dwarf.
But you know what I mean? You can create things and the more that you kind of investigate all of the potential abilities, the more creative you get about what it might have available to it.
And so it kind of compounds upon itself. You start creating more interesting characters just through the act of creating a character.
It inspires you because you are investigating what you could possibly do next, you know, like what else is there to use.
And you come up with some really cool and crazy combinations, and you come up with some interesting builds. And to me, when you build it, that kind of dictates the backstory, you know, like why would this character know this particular spell?
Why would they have that skill? What in their life would have told them you should really learn a lot more about languages, or you should really learn about how to be a shepherd, you know, or a burning hands spell. You should learn that, you know, like why would someone know that?
Were they bullied as a child? Did they have a chip on their shoulder? Did they have to defend themselves? You know, what was their background? And you start, for me at least, that's kind of, that's how I work, is I do the specifics and then sort of fit the backstory to fit the specifics.
Because every time I do a backstory and then try to do the abilities and stuff to match the backstory, it all, I don't know, it all starts to look the same to me.
So I build the character and then I justify the build. That's just kind of how I do it. And it's a lot of fun. It's really authentically, it's an enjoyable experience.
And PCGen makes it really simple to do that, because you don't really have to do a whole lot of, you know, you don't have to set yourself up on a table with books and paper and, you know, you're not looking through them. I mean, maybe that's probably very fun as well.
But limited space I have and limited physical books. So it's kind of cool to just sort of have it all available right here for you. And you can kind of click through menus and when you don't know what something is, you can go and look it up online, because all this stuff is online.
I mean, as I said at the beginning of launching PCGen, these source books are open game licensed. So you can find all this information just on the internet, like on the official sites of the, of the game systems.
You can actually download the rules of dungeons and dragons for free at dnd.wizards.com. It's right there for you to download. You don't have to purchase anything to get started.
And, and so this little application free as it is and leveraging free resources, it's super easy to get started. And I think that it's, it's a valid, it's a valid gateway to just start building characters because you get really familiar with the world and the abilities of people in this world.
Because most of this stuff doesn't happen in real life, certainly anymore, like a lot of the sort of sword and sword and combat styles, not super common now, and certainly magic, not very common at all.
So, playing around with just different characters gets you a lot more familiar with what to look out for in this world. Like, what should you be suspicious of? What, what do you have to look out for? What can you exploit in this world?
So, it's a, it's a great, yeah, it's a great method of learning about RPGs is, is just to kind of build characters who are going to, who are going to live in the RPG world.
So, anyway, once you're done, you should probably save your character build. That's a good idea. And there's one note that I should, I should mention about that.
So, for some reason, when I go to save PC, PC Gen wants to default to its install location, which is slash opt slash PC Gen slash characters.
I'm not really sure why it does that and I haven't really looked into it. So, it's not something that, I don't know, it's something that I don't really mind all that much to be honest, but it is something to know.
And that is, that you cannot, you probably cannot save to that location. I mean, unless you have your permission set so that you can, but I don't slash opt slash whatever is not user writable.
I treat it more like, you know, slash usr slash Ben or something. So, I don't have it writable. And if you want to save your character in a valid location, then you need to click the little home icon in the upper right corner so that you're actually back home.
And then you can save it wherever you want to. Now, once again, strangely, there's, there's no, that I can find, there's no way to, to view hidden folders in this file chooser.
I guess it's probably the default Java file chooser. So, you can't really get into dot config slash PC Gen. Although, frankly, I wouldn't really do that anyway.
I mean, I have a folder full of my game data that's external of PC Gen. And I think it's worth doing and I'll tell you why in a moment. So, you know, when I, when I'm saving, in other words, I go, I click save and then I click the house icon and then I just go into my RPG folder and I go into my PC folder and then I click save.
So, the saved files from PC Gen are dot PCG files and you'll never have heard of that, obviously. And neither had I. And I thought, well, it's probably some kind of fancy database or something. And it's probably not something that I can, that I can look at myself.
But actually, no, it is a, it's a plain text file. It's ASCII text. That's all it is. So, if you do a less on a dot PCG file, you will see that it pretty clearly spells out exactly the choices that you have made on your character sheet.
It's, it's not, I wouldn't say that the layout is super great. I wouldn't say it's super bad either. I will say that it is a lot of, it's a lot of extra terminology that that might not, it doesn't quite flow when you're, when you're parsing it with your head, you know, when you're just kind of looking at it, it doesn't look like a stat sheet.
And it's got like a bunch of things that you don't care about, for instance, the role method for when you were first choosing the ability scores, the game mode, well, that's actually useful because it tells you that that's third edition or 3.5 rather.
But yeah, there's, there's other stuff in, in, in the data that, that isn't super easy to, to, to parse. So, you wouldn't really realistically use the plain text version of this without parsing it or without letting PC Gen parse it.
Although you could, I could see someone who was like really pedantic writing a parser for this to get all of this data into a plain text stat block.
But I've resolved to myself that that somebody is not going to be me. Plus, I think you can, you can basically export, you know, that kind of information from PC Gen.
The important thing that I want to highlight though is that these are just plain text files. So, if you find yourself in a pinch and you just don't have, you don't have PC Gen available to you for some reason, but you saved your, your file to, to your thumb drive and you have that on you, you could, you can still get to your data.
It's a dot PCG file. It is a plain text file. It is completely human readable. It's, it's, it even makes sense. Like, it doesn't take a huge leap for it to make sense.
So, that's another, for me, a hugely, that's a killer feature right there is that it's, that the data files are super easy to find, super easy to manage, and they're usable by both computer and by human.
So, I don't know what else I can say about PC Gen. I'm, I'm clearly a big fan of it. It's something that is open source. It is something that is useful. It is something that is really helpful. It's like, it actually makes things, you know, in a small way, it makes your life better because it's, it's helping you have fun in an easier way.
So, yeah, you should check it out if you play a tabletop RPGs or you just want to kind of start flirting with the idea of playing, playing tabletop PC RPGs.
This is a great way to generate a PC character to, to, to see what the world is like, to see what kind of people dwell in the world. It's a lot of fun. It's really easy and it's open source. Try it out today.
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