PCGen

I've just started using PCGen for maintaining Lori's character in my D&D game. Overall, I'm very pleased with it.

In particular, I like how extensible it is. It has let me add my customizations to the druid spell list (and I was able to buy the additions for Masters of the Wild for $2.50), and add Liandra's proficiency with a bow. I could add a definition of the rat-kin race without too much trouble, and have the bonuses be well-integrated. And for really quirky things like the chalice of healing, it will allow me to just assign a name, a weight, a cost, and a description of its effects. I highly appreciate this extensibility--since I do come up with wacky ideas and variant rules, it's something I really need in a character generator.

It's also proved very useful for creating monsters. It's very easy to choose a monster race, advance it a bit, add some templates, and whatnot. This will let me use a lot more advanced monsters in my game.

Down sides: it's open-source nature is showing. The installation wasn't too bad once I understood how to do it--but that information was hidden in the last pages of the documentation. (The answer: unzip all three zip files into the same directory. Use an empty directory, not one with a previous install.) By the same token, the user interface is a bit crufty in places--it seems somewhat characteristic of open-source.

PCGen is available at http://pcgen.sourceforge.net.

Room Design Fantasy

Last night, I figured out how I'd like to arrange our TV room if money were not an object.

This is the structure of the TV room that I have to work within:
- The room is a 15' by 20' box, oriented vaguely north-south. (I'm not sure it's north-south at all, but that's the way I'm going to describe it.)
- The 15' wall contains the doorway to the kitchen near the west corner, a shallow niche with shelves in the center, and a closet near the east corner.
- The 20' west wall contains a door to the entryway with a small set of stairs in the center, and a door to the powder room in the south.
- The 15' south wall has a large window filling most of the wall.
- The 20' east wall has two evenly-spaced normal walls.

The current layout of the room:
- There's a futon-couch along the center of the south wall.
- There's a cheap IKEA recliner in the southeast corner, and a massive oversized comfy chair from Sean and Jeliza in the center of the east wall.
- The stereo equipment is in the niche, with CDs on the shelves; the speakers are freestanding, to either side of the stereo.
- The TV is north of the door to the entry, facing the couch and the comfy chair.

The biggest problem with this setup is that having the speakers flank the TV would interfere with the traffic flow of the room.

Given this, my fantasy layout:
- Get a big flat-panel TV. Put it in the niche in the northern wall.
- What to do with all the tapes and CDs, then? I want to put them in cabinets in front of the TV that can swing out to reveal the TV when the TV is in use.

Thus, we don't lose CD storage space, the TV can be flanked nicely by the speakers, and the TV can be seen conveniently from everywhere in the room. (Though we might have to adjust the position of the comfy chair.)

There's another problem of how to put another chair into the room while preserving access to the powder room, but that can wait until another day.

Now, all I need is the several thousand dollars this plan would cost, without any other need for that money... maybe in 2006.