D&D 4E UPDATED 6/20/08! kiznit's 4e Fold-over Character Sheet w/ Cards

kiznit · Jun 22, 2008

neolithic said:
Here is the form-fillable version of Kiznit's 4e Character Sheet v1.0. I've taken extra care this time with tab-order and gone right through all 7 pages of the PDF so even the power cards are form-fillable however I haven't thoroughly tested the cards for all lengths of text and detail.

You rock, Neo! OP updated.

Relbanan said:
Kiznit, what program are you using to develop your form? Also, what font are you using?

Adobe Illustrator CS3. I'm a design professional, FWIW.

The serif font (including the scribbly title-designs) is regular ol' Georgia (which I've always liked a lot), the tiny sans type is either Helvetica Neue or Frutiger, I forget which, somewhat famous for being still pretty legible at very small sizes.

WhatIsSol said:
Kiznit, in my opinion your character sheet for 4e DnD is totally awesome! Looks like you must have spent a lot of time on it, either that or you are a layout genius

Yeah, it ended up being a bigger project than it was meant to be, and I'm nursing a few more ideas for alternates that I'm excited about as well.

It's a fairly specific kind of sheet geared towards players who like a more aesthetic, hand-writable, and spaced-out (room for notes!) layout. I fully recognize it's not for everyone, but I guess it speaks to folks like you!

Thanks for appreciating the hard work, I hope it makes your game better. It's certainly improved mine.

neolithic · Jun 22, 2008

WhatIsSol said:
Neolithic, your v0.5 form allowed the completed form to be saved with the data, but the v1.0 form does not? Any chance this feature could be re-enabled? Regardless thanks for the effort making it into a fillable form.

Kiznit, in my opinion your character sheet for 4e DnD is totally awesome! Looks like you must have spent a lot of time on it, either that or you are a layout genius

~~That's weird, I'll look into this now. Thanks for letting me know~~

I forgot to actually publish the form to allow for the information to be recorded. I've now overwritten the old file so if you downloaded it previously, please re-download the pdf. Sorry!

Zustiur · Jun 22, 2008

I noticed a couple of things with the fillable version:
* The font auto resizes in some locations and not others. In some it appears needlessly small (Powers, equipment and class/race abilities in particular)
* The first line of At Will, Encounter and Utility seems to all be the same field.

And in general
* What is the point of having a column for which ability scores are affected by your race?

Essobie · Jun 22, 2008

Edit: /\/\/\ Heh... Just read above. Yeah, how do you get the fields to act differently from each other, neolithic? Please help!

Looking good. I'm still working on mine, and just for giggles I exported to PDF and brought it into Acrobat to try my hand at creating a few text fields in the sections I have done already.

Never used LiveCycle Designer before, and I'm having a hard time getting it to do the simplest of things.

For instance, I'd like to have some text fields resize the text based on how many lines you put in (like your Treasure field). How do you set that up exactly? I've set it to Multiple Lines in the Object/Field tab, but no amount of combinations of other settings in that or in the Font or Paragraph tabs will allow the field to dynamically resize text as needed. All it does is keep the same text size I have entered in the Font tab. Once I start typing too much text in the box, it creates a scrub bar on the right, which essentially means at print time all the extra text won't be visible (i.e. useless to me).

Is there somewhere I can go that has simple help for this type of thing? The help in LiveCycle Designer is AWFUL (just like all Adobe products, frankly). It assumes you know all the made up jargon they created to define their tools... bah, I'm just ranting now. :\

neolithic · Jun 22, 2008

Zustiur said:
I noticed a couple of things with the fillable version:
* The font auto resizes in some locations and not others. In some it appears needlessly small (Powers, equipment and class/race abilities in particular)
* The first line of At Will, Encounter and Utility seems to all be the same field.

And in general
* What is the point of having a column for which ability scores are affected by your race?

I just filled out a sheet and noticed some of the things you are referring to. I've tried to standardise the text size this time around but I guess that hasn't worked out well for you guys so I'll make a move to change them back to auto.

The issue with the power cards has been fixed, the form fields had the same name.

As far as the racial column goes I do use it on my sheet. I put the +2's in there and factor them into the "Base" column. I guess it seems a little counter-intuitive because unlike the Defense section where it lists a series of boxes that add up to a total box this just has the one box for "Base".

Here's a link to the new updated sheet.

kiznit's 4e character sheet v1.0 form-fillable v2

Essobie · Jun 22, 2008

neolithic said:
I just filled out a sheet and noticed some of the things you are referring to. I've tried to standardise the text size this time around but I guess that hasn't worked out well for you guys so I'll make a move to change them back to auto.[/URL]

Now your Treasure field is fixed size limiting to only 9 lines of text, but your single line text fields under Other Equipment still does some resizing. Where do you change that stuff?

neolithic · Jun 22, 2008

Essobie said:
Now your Treasure field is fixed size limiting to only 9 lines of text, but your single line text fields under Other Equipment still does some resizing. Where do you change that stuff?

When I filled out my character sheet as a test I didn't have any treasure so this field wasn't tested. I'll update the v2 sheet, should be ready in 5 minutes.

This will be the last change I make to it for a while, I would like to play test the sheets before making another set of rapid fire changes.

Please continue to note any observations here, I'm keeping an eye on the thread.

Sorry for everyone having to re-download the file over and over. This is starting to become a bigger project than I anticipated. Maybe I should assemble a group of people to take some feedback on the form before it gets released to the public?

As far as how I do the form up, I don't use LiveCycle for the very same reason you have discovered. It makes the simplest task really hard! My recommendation to you is the load the form into Acrobat Pro and then under the "Forms" menu you can choose an option to "Edit Layout" which lets you edit the form within Acrobat.

To do the mutli-line, auto text size field you just bring up the field's properties with a right click and select font auto and click the multi-line checkbox.

Hope that helps

Essobie · Jun 22, 2008

neolithic said:
Hope that helps

Does it ever! Oh my god... I just assumed using LifeCycle was THE way to make forms within Acrobat. I was starting to actually just make my text fields bigger in the layout so that I wouldn't have to use auto font sizing, and in doing so it appeared that making a single sheet character sheet was going to be impossible.

However, I'm not saying it IS possible... that's still up for debate. But at least it isn't a lost cause just yet.

Thanks again.

Frithweaver · Jun 22, 2008

Hey all: I'm really appreciating the collaboration in here - the end product is very nice.

Small bits of feedback

-In the skills section,the column which contains relevant abilities has a column header of "1/2 level + Ability" but no square to fill out. I think this is cognitively dissonant with the rest of the sheet. The column actually just contains an ability, but the header contains.. a reminder on how to do it in your head? I'm also not sold on the column order here, since the most important number is somewhat buried in the middle.
-Typo at the bottom of the skills section: "receive" is misspelled.
-Neolithic: have you considered adding the feature: fields which calculate themselves? There's an example of this at the Something Awful boards: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2872872 (linked at the bottom of the first post.)

neolithic · Jun 23, 2008

Frithweaver said:
-Neolithic: have you considered adding the feature: fields which calculate themselves? There's an example of this at the Something Awful boards: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2872872 (linked at the bottom of the first post.)

I have actually Frithweaver, I'd really like to look at automating the sheet at some stage but I have limited knowledge on how to do this and also limited time to spend on learning how to make it work right now.

It is definitely on my list of things to do

In the mean time you'll just have to persevere with some extra typing