• OpenRPG and PCGEN interaction

PCGen, and OpenRPG living in harmony, can be a beutiful thing. All dorkiness aside, PCGen can save you a lot of time if you are activley using OpenRPG to run games online.

• The last thing I need to be doing when preparing for a session is crunching stats into the program, arranging macros for auto rollers etc... But its not just for DM's , PC's can gain mass benifits as well. Unless you happen to enjoy programming, and really understand .xml(I do not). Or even if you are just filling in blank OpenRPG sheets found on the web, PCGen can eliminate all that tedium, work that you probably do not enjoy. Most of us now a days are using a character generator of some sort allready. PCGen is among the most comprehensive of them, and if you go so far as to purchase the optional datasets(not at all neccesary),you have a powerful generator at your hands, able to handle many different RPG genres, or settings.

  Well theres the "PCGen is great tool, you should use it..." bit out of the way, what will follow is my first attempt at an online guide of any sort, so be gentle. I will just try to outline the basic process of using the two pieces of software together. Theres not much to tell really, so it should be relatively painless.

What can PCGen do for OpenRPG?

• .1 Create PC's
• .2 Create NPC's
• .3 Create Monsters

• Now there are lots of other products on the 'market' that will do the same, but I have yet to find one that can export a file directley to OpenRPG. Now PC Gen does a few other things as well, but I will not get into them.I should also add, I am assuming at least basic familarity with both apps. these are very easy procedures, just a couple of file saves, an exports, and an open... All skills the average windows user has at their disposal.

Getting the newly created PC/NPC/Monster into OpenRPG is easy as :

• .1 When you are ready to proceed with the export of your newly created 'character', or 'monster' to your install of OpenRPG, a left-mouse-clik(lmc or rmc)) on 'file' will allow the menu to drop down, lmc on export....
• .2 when you clik on export you will be given a choice between '....to standard', or '....to PDF', clik the '...to standard',
• .3 then you will be presented with several different choiced, only one of which will work for our purposes. Pick(lmc) on the one, OpenRPG_sheet(name if not same will be very close). There is only the one template for OpenRPG included(so far), so you should not have much trouble finding the proper 'template'
• .4 Once you have selected the proper 'template' , you must decide where you want to export the .xml file too(the 'template'). Myself, I use a folder on my desktop(Misc. Files), which I export the 'template' into . Once you have decided , export .xml file.
• .5 Lastly, you simply copy the .xml file to OpenRPG, into the 'myfiles' folder(or wherever you like), you will find the myfiles folder in your OpenRPG install, usually C:\Program Files\OpenRPG\myfiles\
• .6 That my friends, covers the file transfer. Now you will need to open up OpenRPG and to load the specific file into the game tree, and you will find that it creates a fairly comprehensive sheet.

Of course there are a few things you should be aware of when using the applications together,so the last section will be:

Using the PCGen Character in OpenRPG:

• .1 Once you have opened OpenRPG, clik on your gametree, and leftclik on the insert file option, find the .xml file you exported from PCGen, and OPEN
• .2 Now after the file loads into your tree, as a node, open it up, and chek it out.
• .3 One thing to be aware of; You must have the weapon you are attacking with highlighted, or selected, in the small window below the weaponTABS. If you fail to highlight the weaopon, even if its the only one, your auto roll will not work.
• .4 Now it is a good thing to test out your characters auto roller actions thouroughly. Sometimes there will be minor syntax errors in the dice string, such as a missing closing bracket. While this seems rare it has happened, the dice strings are fairly easy to determine where/if there is a bug, so its not highly technical stuff. Even having to sort a couple of syntax errors out, the time saved is still considerable.

• http://pcgen.sourceforge.net/01_news.php Link to the PCGen Main site, all you want on the technical, and practical side of PCGen and more.

• http://www.codemonkeypublishing.com/ Link to Code Monkey Publishings main site. They produce the 'datapaks' you can purchase for PCgen, again not needed, but handy all the same.

• Last but certainly not the least, remember to enjoy,all the best Grai.