I built a mobile friendly character sheet to use in old in-person games before I found this website. One of the nicest things about it was, if I forgot my dice, I could just click on the item (attack, damage, skill, spell, etc...) and it would roll the dice for me.

Has anyone tinkered with a system like that on RPOL to make an item in a character sheet clickable to take you to the dice roller and roll that item?

Example: http://erbtech.com/dnd/belie/

Yes, it's possible to include links to the dice roller in a character sheet.

link to a message in this forum

The only drawback is that it makes a character sheet really ugly and complex in the editing window. Once you get the hang of it, though, the end result looks just fine.

A good character sheet should look pretty ugly in the editing, that's pretty definitively how you get good formatting.

Real problem comes from the double editing that you have to do any time your numbers change. But I don't see a good way it could be better without changing the whole way sheets are handled.

I wish we could use variables in our character sheets... :D

ah, so you could declare your strength mod then just ref strength in the rest of the dice roller formula's?

If you're serious about having a way to go from raw numbers to RPOL character sheet in a specific format, I suggest looking at using Google Sheets.  I've been able to build sheets for Eclipse Phase and Ars Magica that don't look hideous in the editing and produce a fairly well formatted output.  I didn't go the extra step to add dice roller tags to it, but once you have the rest down that's almost trivial.  (Certain string array functions like JOIN and FILTER make Sheets better than most options.)

I'd be interested in learning more about this!  I've been using spreadsheets (mostly .ods and .xlsx format) for character sheets for years.  Is there a great transition from that to Google Sheets?  In the interest of not hijacking the thread further, would you be interested in talking about this in PM or in another thread?

(Yeah... When all I have is a hammer everything looks like a spreadsheet.)

Thanks,
D

In reply to swordchucks (msg # 7):

Or you could wait for a while.  (c;

@Jase:

Oh, teaser!  I would suspect that whatever you're working on in regards to this would be an additive that lets me offload some of the work to RPOL rather than a replacement for what I've been doing with Sheets.  Though... I won't rule out me being shocked and awed by it :)

@horus

Here's probably the best example, mostly for technique.  I was learning what I was doing while I was making it, so it's a bit sloppy.  It gets the job done, but it's not polished or anything.  https://goo.gl/R0tDVc

You'll note down the sheet that there's a theme.  The left side is a generally open character sheet you fill stuff in.  To the right, each line will get turned into a summary line or an X if there's nothing entered on the line and it doesn't need to be printed.  Down around T79, things start to condense, then there's another condense step to make the "output" at A191.

The reason why I prefer Sheets over Excel or the open equivalents is that is has the JOIN and FILTER commands built in (you CAN do this in Excel, but you need to write VBA).  For instance:

JOIN(", ",FILTER(V55:V120,NOT(V55:V120="X")))

This makes a comma delimited list out of all of the cells in the range V55:V120 that aren't equal to X (my placeholder for a cell that doesn't need to be printed).  So ten skills in individual cells would become a single string with "Guns 4, Athletics 9, Jumping 12" or whatever.

Since the above is mostly useful for showing the Sheets side and produces something that does flip a lot of formatting around but DOESN'T really do pretty RPOL formatting, here's another example that does a lot more with RPOL formatting.  The big concepts are the same, but it does a lot more with formatting (including fun stuff like using LEN calculations to make sure the raw view of the output sheet aligns within tables).  https://goo.gl/uWgD3d

Once you're doing the level of stuff that's in the one above, adding in the dice rolling lines is not hard, though it might be a bit tedious.

Thanks for the links.  Will definitely check them out.  (I'm always up for learning new tricks with spreadsheets.)

As an example of my work, see
Traveller Plus Character Sheet

Thanks,
D
This message was last edited by the user at 00:15, Thu 02 Mar 2017.

In reply to jase (msg # 9):

Is there any way you could use the help of a fellow web developer?

Especially on the mobile/responsive front?