The PCGen team made an announcement this morning that the project is becoming inactive. The open-source character sheet project is a competitor of Herolab, and lets players manage their characters through a desktop application. Although we haven’t covered it here, it appears that the team has been requesting new contributors for some time and has not gotten a strong response.

It is with sad news the core team members of the PCGen BoD are stepping down (or handing off the reins to any new blood that wish to take up the challenge).

As of the release of the Pathfinder 2 datasets for 6.08.00 RC7, Andrew Maitland, the Data Lead (the core driving and unifying member of the BoD) will be ceasing any ongoing upkeep and direct involvement with the project. We hope this is accomplished by the end of the year (2019)

Paul Grosse the PR director will hang around and provide advice to anyone attempting to keep the project alive, but will also be limiting his involvement.

The core reasons for the project going dormant are the same as have been stated multiple times in the last year. The core Code Team have had attrition due to RL and nobody willing (or able) to pick up the code and run with it, and without the old time members to explain the code things are continually breaking, gating the releases. And the expected new math library to replace the woefully outdated JEP has never been able to get fully implemented (see above).

The Data team is in better shape because the data is generally easier for new users to start with. But again Andrew was the driving force and repository of why things were done the way they were.

We have had a fine 20 year run from the heady days of Bryan releasing hourly, then daily code updates, to the original D&D 3e SRD being released, through the choppy waters of getting hammered by WotC’s refusal to consider the non-SRD info being included (prompting the formation of the separate corporation, Code Monkey Publishing), through the explosion of third party materials causing PCGen’s code base to grow by leaps and bounds, though the formation of the 4e and the simultaneous rise of Pathfinder, Starfinder, and now the release of Pathfinder 2e.

Our website will remain up until such as a time that the host decides to quit maintaining it. Our forums have transitioned from Yahoo Groups to groups.io which are free and will continue, our discord channel will continue as long as there are people talking there, our old & broken wiki will be availible, and there is also a sub-reddit

If anyone wishes to they can take a look at the code here.

Paul Grosse (PR Silverback)

Posting on behalf of the Board of Directors.

Bryan McRoberts (Benevolent Dictator)
Martijn Verburg (Chair Monkey)
Andrew Maitland (Data Silverback)
Tom Parker (Code Silverback)
Gwen Thebich (Data 2nd)
Eitan Adler (Code 2nd)