4e Fan Creations and House RulesWorking on variant powers? Statting up a PC race or your version of a monster? Creating or converting an adventure? Put it here!
Depends on what you want. I use Scribus because I'm not going for any autocalc...just creating a form for my players to use.
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The reason I think that I am "right" and they are "wrong" is because my view of the world includes them but somehow theirs doesn't seem to include me.
Yeah. What kind of functionality do you want the sheet to have? That's what really determines what you should use.
I want sheets for DM use, that don't require printing, So I'm going with the complex route of making a Visual Basic character sheet program. If you don't want to be that in-depth about it, Word or Excel work just fine.
A lot of people seem to use Excel. I'd think, if you know how to use it, that's probably the most straightforward option. If you don't need autocalc or anything of that nature, hell, you could even use Paint/Photoshop/The Gimp/whatever image editing program you wanted. There's also Microsoft Publisher from MS Office, or some equivalent program (I'm not really sure what's out there). Hell, any word processor would work. Really you could use whatever you wanted, though if you want auto-calculation that's a bit tougher (not that you can't just convert it to pdf and do it from there with some PDF editor or another).
Back in 3.5 I made two character sheets. One was for the purpose of being printed out and used. One was for use on the computer. I made the printable one in paint (yes, I'm crazy) and the other one in excel. The excel character sheet had multiple tabs organized very well over time, along with auto-calculating everything from power points, to multiclassed BAB to penalties due to negative levels.
In 4e, I haven't found a need to make one on a computer yet, but I do have one that I made printable. I also made it in paint. Both of the printable ones were converted to pdf.
I've never met anyone else who uses paint like I do, but I played with it a ton as a kid. I'm more comfortable using it than the multiple layers of a more advanced program. In fact, I haven't ever figured out how to change just a few pixels on a specific layer of a more advanced program. I guess if I knew how to do that I'd be able to use them, but the essentials that paint does so well for me, are lost on me in other photo programs such as adobe photoshop.
I've uploaded the 4e character sheet I made as example of what I made in paint through extracting images from other things. Shado's character sheet was a source of a lot of the art or my sheet, as shado extracted the art from the PHB somehow. Like I said though, I'm crazy. I wouldn't recommend paint, it just happens to be the thing I know how to use the best.
I don't think it's technically legal, but I highly doubt WotC is going to go out of their way and sue you for damages or something over a character sheet. In 99% of cases I'm sure people will have a copy of the PHB anyway. The character sheets available really are no substitute for having a PHB. Pirated copies of the PHB are probably a much bigger concern of theirs, though the majority of regular D&D players probably have a hard copy and not just an illegal PDF.
Out of interest, what's the consensus on the legality of fan-made 4e character editors/sheets?
I don't understand the question. There's something missing to make that question make sense. It's possible you might have meant one of the following:
What's the consensus on what you think the legality of fan-made 4e character sheets is?
What's the consensus on what you think should be legal regarding fan-made 4e character sheets?
What is the legality of fan-made 4e character sheets?
The legality of it is not an opinion; not something that you can have a consensus on. The law just is, whether or not people have an opinion about it.
That being said, you can make 4e compatible character sheets that don't break any copy right or trademark law (Yes, I just said it's legal if you don't break any laws). For specifics you should see a lawyer, but in general you can't include a trademark such as the D&D logo without mentioning who owns that trademark. I am not very versed in copy right law, so I don't know about how much information on feats you can include, but you can make auto-calculating character sheets as copy right laws don't protect the mechanics of a game, just the text of a book.
Almost any printable character sheet that contains text only will be legal because it won't have a database of powers, but rather columns that can be filled in and it's titled something called "powers." Simply being compatible with 4e is not illegal.
The legality of it is not an opinion; not something that you can have a consensus on. The law just is, whether or not people have an opinion about it.
Fair call. I guess I was coming from the angle that this question has come up before, and I was wondering if there was a consensus on the discussions. I phrased it in such terms because I felt that the chances of a lawyer wading in with a definitive answer were slim.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sphyre
Almost any printable character sheet that contains text only will be legal because it won't have a database of powers, but rather columns that can be filled in and it's titled something called "powers." Simply being compatible with 4e is not illegal.
But, hypothetically speaking, say someone had written an HTML/CSS/Javascript 4e automated printable editable character sheet, and put it up in some obscure corner of the web. In said hypothetical sheet, you could select, say, "Twin Strike" from a drop down, and the full text of the Ranger power Twin Strike is inserted into the sheet, with the flavour text, Hit and Damage lines, etc., verbatim from the PHB. In other words, the sheet is backed up by a database of powers.
And say that the someone in question didn't want to be Cease and Desisted by WotC and have to throw away all that work, and thus had only shared the link with their local gaming group. Are they justified in their paranoia?
Last edited by RobRendell; 26th October 2008 at 11:32 PM..
I really doubt they'd attack you legally. Hell, you can easily find pre-filled-out resources for power cards (particularly the MSE sets). I stand by my original statement that it's pretty much worthless without a handbook in the first place. Worst case, you drop it from the public distribution and... still use it within your local game group anyway.
I haven't felt the need to create a 4e character sheet yet (I have one I like), but if I ever feel the need I'll be using Adobe Illustrator to create the decorative elements (to create nice scalable vector graphics) and Adobe InDesign to layout the sheet, and then export it as a PDF.
The legality of it is not an opinion; not something that you can have a consensus on. The law just is, whether or not people have an opinion about it.
If this were really the case, there would be no lawyers. No law can account for every contingency and the very basis of most legal systems is the concept of precedent, which is essentially past opinions (informed / expert opinions yes but still opinions) that form a consensus and help to dictate how the law will be interpreted in different situations.
By my understanding of IP law as my brother the lawyer once explained it...
With the issue of fair use and liability, the core issue would be if the sheet in question bypassed the need for a user to purchase the books and other supplements that WotC does not provide for free to all users.
A sheet that does nothing more than the sheet available for reproduction in the back of the book or on the D&D Web site can in no way be perceived to infringe upon WotC's intellectual property unless it attempts to claim to be theirs.
A sheet that autofills content that could only be found in the books (or through the paid sections of D&D Insider) is a clear violation of WotC's intellectual property and thus should be constrained to personal use and not made available to any other user that might be able to use that sheet to backward engineer copyrighted material in books without needing to purchase them.
DC
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The reason I think that I am "right" and they are "wrong" is because my view of the world includes them but somehow theirs doesn't seem to include me.
If this were really the case, there would be no lawyers. No law can account for every contingency and the very basis of most legal systems is the concept of precedent, which is essentially past opinions (informed / expert opinions yes but still opinions) that form a consensus and help to dictate how the law will be interpreted in different situations.
Actually lawyers argue at great length about whether a law has actually been broken. Simply put, whether you are subject to legal repercussions based on a given action can be independent of whether an actual law was broken.
Given the nature of language and the ability to create multiple valid interpretations from a given sentence lawyers in this society hopefully are adept at illustrating that (in the case of defense) no actual law was broken or (in the case of offense) that a law was broken, and the offender should be subject to punishment due to having broken the law. Lawyers study the law; which means there is a tangible thing to be studied. While law usually created due to the opinion of the majority, once it is codified, it is, and the opinion merely lead to the codification, it does not further modify it without official action. Therefor, what is legal is based on what was codified and decided upon at the time of codification, not what current opinions are held (with exception to when it is re-codified and revised.) This forum and the viewers are not representative of the official codification of law, and therefor their opinions do not matter when determining whether something is currently the law or not.
So yes, this is the case. What you are legally accountable for is what the current codified law is. You are right that it is derived from opinion, but once it is codified, you are bound by it. This doesn't mean things can't change. For example, someone may have broken the law, gone to court, and even though the law was broken, the pertinence of the need for such a law may be brought into question and the law later changed to amend the for the situation brought forth in the case, but the fact remains that at the time of breaking the law, the law was broken - it was just deemed an unjust law by a court of law, and revised. The fact that it can change like that is exactly why the Ex Post Facto law was put in place by the US government, as when there is a new law, that might have been previously broken, if it was not a law at the time of indecent, it is not a broken law.
And explaining such distinctions requires quite the amount of wording. When it comes to explaining the subtle yet necessary distinctions being as exact as possible with your wording is key. While I understand the gist of your post, it does not completely encompass the relationship between opinion and law.
Thanks for the replies guys. Sphyre, your sheet really looks nice.
No autocalc for me, at least not yet. There are many other Excel-based projects there that do this better than me and I'm thinking of just referring to that when doing a character, but I DO want to be able to input some things such as character name, race, racial traits, etc., but again, no autocalc.
Excel seems an easy way to go, but... I'm not too good with that. It's the program I'm most familiar with among all those mentioned here, but even then, I'm not too comfortable with it do design things properly.
Has anyone done a sheet for 4E or 3.5E in Excel and is willing to share skills and ideas with me? What I want for my sheet is just something basic, with everything the player needs to know (skills, HP, basic attacks, equipment worn) on the front page, equipment and other stuff on the back page, and NO POWERS on the sheet, or maybe just a list of powers on the front page... I want it this way to maximize space on the sheet for the rest of the info since I'll be using power cards anyway.
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