Giving Credit where Credit is Due

            Giving credit to the proper source from which a specific class, feat, spell, race, etc. came from is crucial. It not only gives the creator credit for their work, but it also lets the user know where it came from. Hopefully PCGen will be used as a sort of marketing tool by both gaming companies and by users - you can load sources based on material you don't own, and can generate characters based on that information, but you don't quite get enough information to use it accurately or completely without actually buying the source material. This way PCGen can whet your appetite for the kinds of options that are available if you purchase book xyz. My hope is that users will not have given much thought to purchasing some book until they decided to play with it in PCGen, and discovered that they really liked what they saw and went out and bought that book. Since PCGen doesn't give all the details about the various options, it's important that it be easy to look up for those who do own the books. Giving credit to the creators and letting users know where the option came from if they want to look it up is all accomplished via the SOURCE: tag which is available in all the main lst files.

            The SOURCE tag in all list files and comes in 3 varieties;

SOURCELONG - This is for the full company and source material name

    SOURCELONG:Wizards of the Coast - Core Rules I - Players Handbook

 

SOURCESHORT - This is the books 3-10 letter short name

    SOURCESHORT:PHB

 

SOURCEWEB - Is the URL of the publisher/source material

    SOURCEWEB:HTTP://www.wizards.com/

 

All 3 of these tags MUST appear in ALL pcc and lst files*.  These tags can be separate lines;

SOURCELONG:Wizards of the Coast - Core Rules I - Players Handbook

SOURCESHORT:PHB

SOURCEWEB:HTTP://www.wizards.com/

 

Or they can be all one line, separated by a | (Pipe) delimiter;

SOURCELONG:Wizards of the Coast - Core Rules I - Players Handbook|SOURCESHORT:PHB|SOURCEWEB:HTTP://www.wizards.com/

 

            *NOTE - There are a couple of files that are special cases, any xxxspecialist.lst (playerhbspecialist.lst as an example) can not have ANY source tag information in it and the xxxtemplates.lst can ONLY have the SOURCE tag information at the end of the entry line, NOT as a 1st line.  The combined, | (pipe) delimited method is the recommended way to add the source information in the templates list files.