I’ve been making the rounds downloading every character generator I could find (Redblade, RPGXplorer, PC Gen, etc.) trying to find the one that “fits,” and so far my incredibly fantastic taste has me definitely leaning Hero Lab’s way (though they all have stuff to recommend them), to the point I even got the upgrade. I’ve been using it more than any of the other ones so far, mainly for NPCs, but it’s held up pretty well no matter what I’ve thrown at it – race, class, cross-class, spells, whatever—with no glitches, at least in my experience, so it’s been pretty versatile in that regard. Gimme a couple more months with it and I’m sure I’ll smoke pouring out of hard drive (I will BREAK you, Hero Lab!).
I think it’s still pretty new, so there’s a lot of room for new races, classes, and spells, though so far the developers have been pretty good about issuing updates (they just had one this last week that added a bunch of the demi-human races, classes, and fixed some niggling things from the previous version). There’s a “custom” option under gear and spells, plus an editor. The editor’s documentation is still incomplete (clearly “in-progress”) but it looks like all the info is there if you’re willing to give it a go; presumably (hopefully) more complete instruction on the editor is forthcoming.
Also in its favor is that I can figure out what the hell I’m doing pretty easily (a lot of the freeware stuff is obviously made by programmers in their spare time who have the technical know-how but not the design sense), so I’d recommend it almost for the interface alone.
Code Monkey’s been down a while, it looks like; I never got the ooportunity to download ETools so I’m a little annoyed I never got the chance to try it out, though I, too, heard things were going downhill for them (not sure how bad a sign I should take their site being down as).
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