Hi, first of all I have to say that I really like this website, it's the best I changed all my games to this website (which aren't many)
Here is the idea, I am not a programmer and so on but how useful or how much would people like it if there were a character generator or standard character sheet for some games that would assign certain changes automatically?
I know that it is possible with MS excel, (I have a SoIaF excel creator) and online there is a great Javascript generator:

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Pathguy.com

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You might can talk to him about how to do it. Maybe a link between the two sites? Or just something like the excel sheet that the people still have to type in the numbers but the computer would calculate certain changes automatically.

I would guess that some (more experienced players) are probably not that interested in it. But I (as a relative new player) feel it's sometimes a daunting task to write up a new character sheet because of a lot of micromanagement.

If that's too much, then maybe some pre- designed character sheets so that I don't have to count how often I pressed the space bar.

Thanks for your time.

RPoL hosts far too many different systems to make automated sheets/character creators practical.  At best we could produce sheets for just a few of them, which would just lead to other people clamouring for their favoured system  to be included.

Pre-designed text character sheets can be found in the Heaven forum.  link to a message in another game

That's silly.  I'm pretty sure if you just set one up for TORG and Underground, you'd have at least .00000001% of the market covered!  Hardly anybody'd be left to complain after that!

Not to mention people that use nonstandard character generation.

I know how this can be done, though not whether it would fit the compatibility requirements.

Make a form creator, each field can be given a name and comes in three types.
Type 1 is a pure fill in the blank. Two subtypes, words, and numbers.
Type 2 is a formula field that can read numbers from other fields and do math to get the answer.
Type 3 is a dice field which rolls dice and provides the answer. (this would be based on a seed that can be altered or set by the GM)

The GM can set each field to be editable by the player or not.

Have each set up save as a text file or something that can be posted in a public thread, and then be editable by each GM for each game.

In this way, the creation work is mostly on the GM and allows the GM to modify the sheets to suit their needs.

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Not likely to happen but this could work depending on the compatibility of the code required.

Personally I'd rather less work on the GM's part.

Well, it is more like work on the community's part. A GM can take and use one that was made and saved by someone else, just like finding text ones in the Heaven thread.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 5):

That's a lot, lot of work to set up - a very serious development effort.  Just pondering it now... I mean it'd be great for someone to do, but on top of maintaining RPoL it'd be a major undertaking for our unpaid (and underappreciated) developer.

One of the sad realities of world.

I don't know enough about web stuff to help unfortunately, but maybe someday when I know more...

For many games there are already programs designed for character generation.  I've seen them for Shadowrun, various versions of Traveller, and a few other systems.

Could an all expansive character generator be made?  Sure.  You need to get a programming team together.  Preferably at least two programmers for each system.  They all have to be able to program in the same language and pretty much be experts in the game they are programming for.  Some could do double duty if they know multiple systems, but you are then increasing the time it takes to get a finished product.  You need a few extra programmers to combine all the code.

Oh, and you need all the game books.  Anything that has anything to do with character generation.  And you need to keep some of the programmers on staff, at least the ones for games that are currently published.  And you need to provide new books for them.

Do you see where this is going?  For an idea of how intricate a character generator can get, google Chummer.  It's for Shadowrun.  Just look at all that it needs.  And it's for one version (3rd Edition) There is still three other versions with slightly different (to completely different) rules.

Now you are getting a little crazy.

My suggestion wasn't some all encompassing program with all the possible feats and abilities and game system restrictions.

My suggestion was something in the middle and generic that would make some of the general math and common stats easier but would still require players to enter things like feat choices and such.

For example, a DnD sheet could be made with the ability score modifiers be automatically calculated and added to the skills, the bab would be automatically calculated by level, etc, but while the sheet might easily calculate how many feat choices are available, the player would have to enter their actual feat selections with short descriptions.

And that D&D sheet would be considered a total waste of resources and programming time by a large number of site users: http://beta.rpol.net/charts.php

RPoL is open to ANY system, and all possible variations and house rules, which is why we have made no attempt to program sheets that auto-calculate stuff, simply because - well, which ones do we set up, and which ones do we ignore?

There are already sites (or even programs) out there which do that sort of thing really well, then let you save the sheet into a format that can be imported to RPoL (usually some sort of image file).  When you want to change the sheet, you go to the site/program, make the changes, then save it again before putting it on RPoL.

Why reinvent the wheel, when other places are car manufacturing specialists?
This message was last edited by the user at 08:28, Sat 09 Aug 2014.

The programmer isn't making a DnD sheet.

The sheet and calculations are editable by the GM rather then being set by the programmer.

The idea is that the programmer isn't making a anything related to any game system, merely an interface for a GM to create a sheet with fields and calculations, then share those custom made sheets which can then be edited by other GMs.

The idea here is to make something that can be easily altered and customized instead of using a pre-made set-up that is static for only the default system it was made for.

The weakness of the idea is that feat selections and similar must be entered manually, while the strength of the idea is that the sheet can be easily made to fit any system with any quirks the GM wants to toss in and will do all the common and basic math behind the scenes.