hafrogman's World of Character Sheets

[hafrogman]

Q&A Q: What's better than making a character sheet template for RPGX? A: Making two character sheet templates for RPGX!

I recently built a character sheet for the Cypher System to be used with RPG Crossing's own built-in profiler, and I had so much fun, now I want to do it again. But there's no need for a second sheet for the same system, so I need other systems to build sheets for. That's where you come in. What would you like to see a sheet for?

Disclaimers:

• I am not an RPGX Staff Member nor affiliated with management in any way.
• Requests are not guarantees anything will get done.
• All uploads and installations are entirely at the discretion and availability of Birched.
• The CS Wishes thread is still the best way for Community Supporters to let the RPGX team know what is in demand.

This is a wholly private venture for my own amusement. Any projects that are picked up will be based on what grabs my interest, not first-come-first-serve. That being said, there are a few thing that will help.

• Familiarity: Have I played the system? Obviously you may not know the answer to that question.
• Demand: Are there active or recruiting games for the system?
• Simplicity: Not always. Sometimes the challenge is the point. But if I think I can knock out the sheet in an afternoon...

 

SYSTEM	STATUS	NOTES
Cypher	Powershifts update Launched	Working on support for The Strangerecursions
nWoD	WIP	1e? 2e? Both?
Cyberpunk Red	Online testing	Can I make it work for 2020 as well?
D&D Basic	First Stages	More or less just thinking about it for now.
Starfinder	Troubleshooting	Working through a list of documented bugs
GURPS	Initial Investigation	Autocalc for 4e, off for other editions?

 

How to Build a Template Perhaps you're sitting there thinking to yourself, "Hey. I'm also bored and know just enough PHP, HTML, CSS, JScoding to be dangerous. Could I do what he does?" The answer might be yes! Or perhaps you're already a better programmer than I (not a high bar). In that case, you probably don't need my help. Anyways, did you know the code for the character sheet tool is linked at the bottom of your character list? Yeah, neither did I until someone pointed it out to me. RPGWebProfiler™. This is the base code for the system that powers the character builder tool. It doesn't have all the sheets that Birched (or yours truly) have built, but it lets us see how everything fits together. Originally Posted by INSTALL =================================== 1. Requirements =================================== PHP v4.3 - There are reports of the profiler working on PHP v5, but at the time of writing, PHP v5 is not officially supported. Apache 2.x - MySQL 4+ - If those requirements have got you justifiably scared, then you're probably in the right mindset to begin. Feel free to reach out to me with questions about how I got my environment set up.

[hafrogman]

 

Cypher I've got a working release candidate with support for the Resilient descriptor And Power Shifts for Claim the Skies and other super heroic genres. Further out is work on Recursions and support for The Strange. Do you play The Strange? Can I pick your brains about draggable foci and how skills and abilities shift with translation?

 

Cyberpunk RED Info, Stats and Main skills for now.

 

Chronicles of Darkness New World of Darkness / Chronicles of Darkness. I had this idea for a dynamic sheet that would swap variable names around for each different game. This has ended up being a major undertaking, so I'm holding this in reserve for now. But it was a lot of fun figuring out how to get the Dots to behave how I wanted them to.

 

D&D Basic I saw someone request this and I had the idea to try and mimic the old Red Box character sheets I remember from my childhood. Is this something only I would want? Do you still play D&D Basic? Do you want a modern sheet for an old-school game? Or do these shapes evoke memories for you too?

[zevonian]

I would personally be interested in a sheet for Cyberpunk Red. There's a free and legal Character Sheet PDF courtesy of the game publishers, R. Talsorian Games. The bulk of what's needed for game play is on page 1.

Is there a high demand for this on site? Nope, I only know of one active game here currently. But there's a chance I will try to sort out the feasibility of Cyberpunk Red as an option for the New Player Solo Games later this year.

---

As for more requested sheets, if I am remembering this properly, there are requests in the Community Supporter Wishes thread for Pathfinder 2.0. Any familiarity with that?

[Humble Athena]

The site could use a GURPS sheet that can at least do some basic calculations. I've been saying for years that I need to learn to code, but unfortunately, I just haven't been able to.

Likewise, while there's very little in the way of calculations, a fillable FATE/Dresden Files/etc sheet would be pretty sweet

[jj_wolven]

I'd like to see a L5R (4th ed) character sheet...7th Sea...maybe Exalted.

-me

[hafrogman]

• Cyberpunk Red - That's a pretty extensive sheet, but also pretty straightforward. Seems like most of it would just be iterating through the skill list. From poking around through some examples it seems like Base = Lvl + Relevant Stat? Does the armor penalty get mixed in there, or just handled separately? Any other calculations that might be needed?
• Pathfinder 2e - I don't have any experience personally. But I know there's a full SRD online. I expect this one would be a major project akin to the scope of the other D&D style sheets.
• Existing Requests in the Wish Thread - There are a number of these, but for the most part I thought I'd wait to see what bubbles to the surface again. Some of those requests are over a decade old. Is there still demand? Are the requestors still on the site? Etc.
• GURPS - Another system I'm not really familiar with (I experimented with it in High School, but we won't discuss how long ago that was). What kind of calculations would you want it to do? Would this be GURPS 4e? Or would a single sheet more or less serve all editions?
• L5R, 7th Sea, Exalted - Three more systems I've heard of, but haven't really touched. If there are free character sheets anywhere, point me in their direction and I'll at least take a look.

[zevonian]

The main thing about armor in Cyberpunk Red is ablation. If you have torso armor of 9, for example, and your character gets shot for 15 damage, you would take 6 damage to your health...and then your armor gets reduced from 9 to 8. That's the sort of thing I think would be better suited for ooc notes in a game thread. Better to keep the values of armor at their standards on the sheet.

The thing to consider for each Role (class) is that they have separate special abilities. You would want to provide a few lines where the player can just type in what all their Roles allow them to do and the rolls and modifiers that go with them.

[Humble Athena]

Re: GURPS

P.S. I'm talking about GURPS 4e b/c that's the only version I know. I don't think 3e is really in play any more, though. It might still work, anyway, due to the fill in the blank nature of things. I'll have to check with my reference crew. Apparently the skills worked differently enough that if the sheet calculated them it'd need to be different. 3e sounds like a proper mess, tbh.

About the only thing that the current sheet does right now is fill in the Encumbrance, Move, and Dodge sections. It'd be nice if it, at the very least, could add up the character points in the different sections (Skills, Advantages, Disadvantages, Perks, Quirks) to help people see where they've overspent points or if they have room for more disadvantages or whatnot.

The next level would probably be automating the skills. More work to do, I'm sure, but would make it easier on players since the GURPS skill system is probably the most difficult part for newcomers to get down. (Skills can be based on primary characteristics ST, HT, DX, or IQ, or the secondary characteristics like Per or Will, and can be Easy, Average, Hard, or Very Hard)

Third and hardest tier of work would be having the ability to workshop modifiers. (Say I'm playing a vampire. I want to take +6 to my ST score. But! That's 60 whole points, and I don't want to spend that much. I negotiate with the GM that it'll be 20% off if it's Only Available At Night. Having an expandable/retractable section where it can hold the line "Only at Night -20%" and apply that to the 60 point cost to give the final point cost 48 would be nice. And then if we forget three months down the line, why the cost is what it is and not the standard cost, there it is. Technically, that sort of math could go into notes, I suppose. But when every single component can be fiddled with, it would keep it a lot more organized to be able to add that information on a line by line basis.

There is a program, (called GURPS Character Sheet, creatively enough), that does a really good job of capturing all the nuances of the system - but it's a program that people have to download, and export the CS out as PDFs, which makes it more difficult to view and use character sheets across different devices, unlike the nice and tiny sheet collection RPGX has got going.

[hafrogman]

I suppose it doesn't reflect too well on me that I didn't even realize we had an existing GURPS sheet. Okay, so we're looking at adding more/new calculations to the existing sheet. Birched has kindly provided me with the code for the existing sheets, so I can dig into this request now. But backwards compatibility will be an issue (especially if the current sheet works for both 3e and 4e).

[Humble Athena]

Probably best course of action is to use the existing sheet as a base to create a new sheet for GURPS 4e, and leave the first sheet for anyone who wants to play 3e. (For existing sheets it'd still *work* for 4e, the new one will just be better).

Anyway, you are super awesome for looking in to it!

[psuedenim]

@hafrogman Is there a code repo where someone can see the changes you had to make to support Cypher. It might help in determining how much effort is required and whether we have time available to contribute.

The sourceforge repo has seen no activity for +5yrs, perhaps a new one can be set up in Github.

[hafrogman]

@psuedenim

So, this is where the first disclaimer comes into play. Obviously, I have the code that I wrote, but I'm going to leave any access decisions up to management (i.e. Birched). That being said, I'm happy to discuss the scope of what I did as I know he is very busy.

 

• The SourceForge is truly ancient, but the framework is unchanged.
• I developed the Cypher sheet to work with a local copy of that old code and it worked perfectly fine when uploaded to the RPGX server.
• The entire system is modular, designed to take any number of sheets with only a single line DB insert to let it know to add the system to the list.
• Every sheet can be boiled down to three things, two of which are just publicly viewable.
  1. A php/html form, this is where looking at some of the old sheets helps.
  2. Any css styling to make it look good.
  3. A js file to handle any scripting. This is where things can go wildly divergent. The Cypher sheet has the basic save stuff and a few show/hide elements. It's 290 lines (including comments). The 5e character sheet has something like 2000 lines of javascript, split across a bunch of different files.
• For me, who is a web developer first and a server guy dead last, by far the most challenging and time consuming part of the whole process was getting a development environment set up that could run the old version of MySQL required to be compatible.

Sorry about talking around some things, or being overly coy with my answer to your question, but ultimately it's not my site, so I just want to be respectful.

[psuedenim]

Sure I understand - its the php mostly and a bit of the DB side. Last time I looked at php it was for wordpress and it was not fun.