Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets
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To me coded sheets and in-game systems are primarily a convenience, especially for more complex systems.
If I have an in-game sheet and a reasonably well-coded dice roller I don’t have to remember or look up what my Dexterity + Lockpicking skill is in order to roll against it, I can just type “+roll Dexterity + Lockpicking” and away we go. It’s just easier.
You might say that it’s not that big a deal to just keep a tab open with your PDF character sheet, alt-tab over to it, look up the stats, alt-tab back, and then roll against them, and you’re right: it’s not really a big deal. It’s especially not a big deal for rules-lite systems or narrative-heavy systems when either I’m not going to be rolling a lot of dice or there aren’t a lot of stats to remember in the first place. But there’re certainly game systems where I’d look askance at doing entirely without.
Of course I’m sure it’s possible to put something in place that’s capable of reading a character’s stats from a PDF document and interpreting them in-game in exactly the same way that in-game sheets work, but – and please understand that I say this as someone whose brain has been permanently warped by MUSH code – that would be a much more difficult project to me than just writing up the in-game systems needed to do it. I’d rather write the in-game systems and something to dump in-game sheets to human-readable text files that get uploaded to the game’s web server than mess around with PDFs.
I do also enjoy a degree of OOC mystery, especially in less-narrativist games, but I can always choose to just not look at other people’s sheets even if they’re publicly available. And there are some game types – comic-book games, for instance – where open sheets seem like a benefit and I’d be happy to have them. It makes sense for characters who’ve been members of the same superteam for a while to have a good grasp on one another’s capabilities in a way that it doesn’t make sense for a newcome to know what powers each member of the secretive vampire coven has.
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I’m not here to do homework.
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@Juniper Unless it’s a creative writing assignment.
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Yes, I would avoid a game with PDF sheets, because I am tired of dealing with them at work.
At least put it in an excel sheet or something so you can run some formulas in there.
Edit: See below!
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A few years ago I was so desperate to run an ares CoD game for my pals that I went the google sheets route. I think I had it so they’d be locked or versioned or something.
Then coder pal went ahead and coded an entire CoD plugin so I ended up pivoting away from this idea. It would’ve been a lot of work managing everything like this, but hey, it’s possible! The sheets were styled from some free resources, then altered so that they handled the formulas.
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I don’t care if all character stats are available for everyone.
But leave histories/backgrounds private. I enjoy a slower burn for learning about PCs and them learning about my PC.
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Just a coder rant being put here because I have nowhere else to do it. LOL
Kind of related to this, I wanted to see if I could create a web-based character generation system based on the upcoming Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition, mostly just for fun. When you look at a character sheet, everything seems manageable. You think, “Yeah, I should be able to do this.”
Then you get hit with all the little niggly things.
Specializations and focuses for skills took me hours to sort out. I’ve been working on powers and their modifiers for going on two days now. Some are flat, which is easy. Some are ranked, which is also easy. Some are flat in certain situations but ranked in others. Some are extras in some cases and flaws in others. Some depend on the overall cost of the power and apply after all the other modifiers.
Several times I’ve sat back, pinched the bridge of my nose, and thought, “If I really wanted to do this, it would be easier just to use PDF sheets.” But then I think about how cool it would be to have this as an actual working system, so I press on.
I’m taking a break now after sorting out what I hope are most of the various modifiers. When, or if, I come back to it, I need to go through each power individually and deal with the specific modifiers that only apply to them.
Then I need to figure out how to do arrays…
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@Raistlin Writing code for an even moderately complex RPG system really hammers home the lesson that not having a robust data structure design before starting on anything else is a recipe for pain.
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The best of all worlds are VTTs.
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A few years ago I was so desperate to run an ares CoD game for my pals that I went the google sheets route. I think I had it so they’d be locked or versioned or something.
Then coder pal went ahead and coded an entire CoD plugin, so I ended up pivoting away from this idea. It would’ve been a lot of work managing everything like this, but hey, it’s possible! The sheets were styled using some free resources, then altered to handle the formulas.
Speaking of CoD sheets in Ares, I went this route (screenshot below) with the plugin I’ve been working on. My two cents on this topic is I hate emailing and doing Google Sheets. I know it’s really no different, but email and shares just feel too personal vs creating a character/profile in a game that’s just for that game/system.
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