Character Sheet Tool

Emryys · Post by **Emryys** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 8:24 pm

KingMonkey suggested on a different thread the idea of a Character Sheet Tool. It could integrate with the other tools and be customizable to be used with various games. GRiP has Great character sheets that are totally customizable and can look just like the FTF ones, but they'll do all the math and rolls for you...

Would others be intereted in an App like this?

It could have other uses besides in combination with these tools, like in IRC games and such...

Thoughts, comments

Post by **trevor** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 9:00 pm

How extensible is the Grip tool ? can we build a plugin that talks to it or something ?

Emryys · Post by **Emryys** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 9:24 pm

trevor wrote:How extensible is the Grip tool ? can we build a plugin that talks to it or something ?

Don't know...It appears to be VB or something... it's not open source, but if you could! Take a look and ask away for help. If you want to connect up on GRiP to see what it's like let me know...

rkathey · Post by **rkathey** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 7:37 am

I looked through the sites on the rptools.net link page and found pcgen. It appears to be open source and written in java.

Any character tool should be written so its information is available/launchable from map tool. Something that would let the DM mouseover and see combat stats, saving throws and hit poitns would be nice.

My 2 cents,
rAk

brisingre · Post by **brisingre** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 4:46 pm

there is redblade too, and heroforge if you can find it, but pcgen does something fancy where you choose which books of options to include, and this is irritating, it's list is incomplete, and pcgen is horribly slow to use. Redblade is customizable by the user, but it is slow to use too, won't support psionics or epics, and is generally annoying. HeroForge is a spreadsheet I haven't ever really used. I still just do pencil-and-paper characters, not only because none of the programs in existence are good, because they are quite good, for the difficulty of what they do, but also for one big reason: you can't edit a printed character sheet in-game.

Post by **trevor** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 4:58 pm

Hmm, didn't someone mention something about an online character sheet tool ? Does OpenRPG do that ?

Zulithe · Post by **Zulithe** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 7:37 pm

trevor:

Here is an online character sheet database that a LOT of people I run into use. Especially at the Wizards of the Coast chatrooms.

http://www.sylnae.net/3eprofiler/index.php

It's not perfect by any means (for example it isn't smart enough to handle class/cross-class skills when you are multiclass) but it does the job.

I don't know how useful it will be but it's something you can look into.

Post by **trevor** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 8:31 pm

The neat thing about web applications is how easy they are to integrate with.

rkathey · Post by **rkathey** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 12:52 pm

My group uses http://www.roleplayershome.net

It has the ability to assign a character sheet to a dm, create custom weapons/items/spells, and they intend to open source it some day.

I tried the 3eprofiler and liked it but rph and some fairly strict rules enforcement and the dm gets to view/approve any changes to the character sheets by players. This helps for my group that has played D&D since the original brown book box set days and sometimes has issues remember rules.

Post by **trevor** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 2:46 pm

These are good links, I'll add them to the links page

avataru · Post by **avataru** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 1:34 pm

I tested most of the available tools and all have pluses and minuses:

DM Genie - $35
This is the best IMHO, it can do almost anything you imagine, including character sheets. There are no data sets available officially but since the user base is pretty big you can find most of them online (most are incomplete tho).

E-Tools - $30
This is probably the oldest character generator, developed for/by WotC and now by CMP. You can buy data sets from their website.

PC Gen - free
This is not as good as the above because it's slow but, as with E-Tools, you can buy data sets from CMP.

Redblade - free
I think this is a good software but it's not flexible enough yet and it has a small user base so I haven't seen any data sets available anywhere.

Fluid Generator - free
Also an official WotC software. I can't say much about it since I didn't test it yet. The screenshots look good

Pathguy.com Eberron Character Generator - free
This is actually a website so it's really slow but it has support for most of the Eberron related books. There is also a more general 3.5E Lite version. See the homepage for even more generators including d20 Modern, CoC.

Enjoy

Emryys · Post by **Emryys** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 8:35 pm

These are all good "Character generators", what I was originally suggesting for this tool is a way to have your character info/stats etc. interact with the game/maptool/dicetool etc.
Since PCGen is Java, it may be a candidate to take the data from, but since it is a generator you wouldn't want it running in the background, so a seperate tool the stores the data and feeds it to the chat output or sends it's own chat output.
I think it would also be good to have a "system neutral" tool as well

rkathey · Post by **rkathey** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 8:39 pm

Perhaps something that simply allowed the user to create custom fields to associate with tokens. Then we could have templates for D&D or any other games systems that we could auto fill with data from something like pcgen or the xml monster data from srd.

Post by **trevor** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 9:05 pm

Actually, with a recent change (remember the saved campaigns failing?) we can now put arbitrary properties on the tokens. We just have to build a UI for it

Emryys · Post by **Emryys** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 10:52 am

trevor wrote:We can now put arbitrary properties on the tokens

I would make these values "visible" based on ownership, so only those that own the tokens know it's vital stats. I certainly don't want my players knowing how tough the enemy really is... It spoils all my bluffing