a review of a character sheet

Crothian · Feb 14, 2005

SSA-X2_D&D_CharSheet_v25.zip

That's the name of the character sheet, it can be found over in the download section of EN World. Above it is a more advanced version for people one of the cooler version of Adobe and not just the reader.

http://www.enworld.org/downloads/index.php?cid=11&sb=filename&so=ASC&sh=full&pt=f&page=1

That is the downloads section. One will find all sorts of interesting tools over there. I will admit to rarely ever going over there and seeing the hard work that people do in these files. So, check it out and see what your are missing.

Now I'm the guy who has the paper character sheet at the gaming table. It has beer stains, soda stains, pizza stains, and perhaps a few drops of blood on it. I've ripped parts of it erasing too hard, I have notes in the corners, the whole thing looks like a science project gone bad. Heck, I've been known to still use blanck sheets of paper as a character sheet and not even bother to get these cool printinble ones that have been around for ages. And now I'm looking at one of the new high tech character sheets that allows one to enter the information on the computer, it does the calculations, and it problably makes the easy life of a player that much easier.

The most important thing about this character sheet is it is free. And who doesn't like that? So, really there is no excuse for you all to not go over and take a look at it. But I'll still ramble on about it some more just so you can say you got your money's worth. The first thing that really impressed me was the size. I was not expecting it to be five and half megs unziped. That's a big character sheet. It is seven pages long and seems to have drop downs for most of the important things like alignment, character portatis, spell information, psionics, where you carry your items, etc. There is a lot there and it does most of the work for you.

It is items like this that make me want a laptop for gaming, even as a player. It is a bit scarey to see what the computer age has done with this little hobby of ours and how different it can be since many of us started way back in the stone age. I remeber when my players where amazed at the mechanical pencil and how that seemed to revolutionize the character sheet by always being able to write with a sharp tip. So, go on over and take a look at this character sheet. IT has full support, web pages, forums....some one is damn serious about making this one of the best character sheets out there.

Pasus Nauran · Feb 14, 2005

Just to add a bit more detail, there are two versions of the sheet available:

The Standard Edition of the sheet requires a commercial version of Adobe Acrobat (such As Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional), though it offers somewhat more functionality (such as the ability to adjust the number of visible pages in the sheet). A direct link to the file listing in the download section is: http://www.enworld.org/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=293

The ReaderSave Edition of the sheet is optimized for users of the free Acrobat Reader software, and has special features enabled to allow you to save the form data you enter directly into the sheet. However, due to limitation within Acrobat Reader, the sheet is fixed to display all 27 available pages, and has a large (though relatively unobtrusive) watermark on each page. A direct link to the file listing in the download section is: http://www.enworld.org/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=294

For more detailed information on the sheet, as well as help documents and a user forum, visit my website: SSA-X2.com.

Crothian · Feb 14, 2005

Thanks, you all have some good work there

Brain · Feb 14, 2005

Crothian said:
It is a bit scarey to see what the computer age has done with this little hobby of ours and how different it can be since many of us started way back in the stone age. I remeber when my players where amazed at the mechanical pencil and how that seemed to revolutionize the character sheet by always being able to write with a sharp tip.

Minor Hijack alert.

At one of my games recently, we were discussing the future of character sheets. I postulated that in 20 years there would be little hand held hologram generators for character visualizations and a remote control for character movement on a computerized battlemat.

Impeesa · Feb 14, 2005

I came to appreciate the virtues of a self-calculating character sheet when I played Rolemaster. Making a Rolemaster character above 1st level in about half an hour should give anyone a warm, fuzzy feeling. For D&D, though, I find it just isn't the same without a sheet scanned from the back of the PHB and filled in with pencil.

--Impeesa--

Treebore · Feb 14, 2005

Well, I downloaded it. Went to open it, couldn't find it. I then copy and pasted the file name into my search window, and still couldn't find it. Wierd.

Found it. I had to search everything, not just files and folders.

MonsterMash · Feb 15, 2005

Crothian said:
Now I'm the guy who has the paper character sheet at the gaming table. It has beer stains, soda stains, pizza stains, and perhaps a few drops of blood on it. I've ripped parts of it erasing too hard, I have notes in the corners, the whole thing looks like a science project gone bad.

Sounds like me, but when my science projects go bad they lurk in dark corners waiting to ambush me.

Thanks for the link and info, but I think I'll stick to paper in the short term

Pasus Nauran · Feb 15, 2005

MonsterMash said:
Thanks for the link and info, but I think I'll stick to paper in the short term

Just to note, you can print the sheet out. My gaming group uses it as their standard sheet, and we all print them and use them on paper. The nice part, is that when you need to make changes (such as when you level) you only have to enter the changes, and not re-write the entire sheet as you would with one filled in by pencil or pen.

reveal · Feb 15, 2005

I think this is a great sheet but my biggest complaint, and the reason I don't use it, is that it's sloooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Because it has so many calculations to make, it takes forever to fill out.

Pasus Nauran · Feb 15, 2005

reveal said:
I think this is a great sheet but my biggest complaint, and the reason I don't use it, is that it's sloooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Because it has so many calculations to make, it takes forever to fill out.

Yeah. This has always been a problem with using Acrobat, as it handles Forms oddly, by recalculating everything any time a field is edited.

I've implemented a few features to try to help out on this issue. If you're using Acrobat 6 or newer (this includes Reader), I programmed things so that calculation events will only occur if you edit a field that is actually used in calculations. Thare are about 400 such fields out of the 10,000 on the sheet. So if you're still using Acrobat 5, and you can upgrade, it'll help.

The other thing you can do is turn calculations OFF. You can do this through the "Calculations" button at the top of every page (as well as in he Bookmarks sidebar). When you turn calculations Off, no calculation events will occur. This'll allow you to enter data without any slowdown. Just make sure to turn calculations back ON, or at least run the "Recalculate Fields" command (also available through the "Calculations" button and bookmark) in order to have the sheet recalculate all fields, which will update calculated field values.