Proposal: Allow Character Builder summary sheets in place of EW templates

elecgraystone · Feb 27, 2010

stonegod said:
As it's all one line, it's stretched all entries on the page to at least 3x their normal width. I have to scroll Horizontally to read entries, esp on my phone.

Really? Weird. it wraps normally on mine so i didn't know it was doing that on anyone else's computer. i'll keep that in mind.

Dekana · Feb 27, 2010

covaithe said:
I think it's time for something like this, yes. Someone (JNC?) made a test wiki over at wikia to try it out: L4e test Wiki

Someone should try copying and pasting our templates over there, and a character sheet or two, just to see if it still works outside of enworld.

I'm not thinking about wikia with a mind towards changing our character sheets or improving reviewability or anything like that (so this is a bit off-topic), just thinking of trying to preserve the information content of the wiki for when Morrus gets around to shutting it off.

I went ahead and moved the templates, some images used by the templates, and some character sheets, to the test site on wikia. All I did was edit, copy all, paste onto a new page in wikia. Very easy. For images, I saved them to my computer first and then reuploaded them to the test site.

Some character sheets
Jezebel
Bell Jabson
Kane

It was painless for the most part, but I run into a spam filter whenever I try to enter anything beginning with "[url=". Hopefully there's a way to disable that feature, but I'm not sure how to go about that. I didn't set up the wiki, so I don't think I have the permissions to do that. It's a problem for my mini-statblock since [url= is the bbcode for links.
If we did use wikia for this, I think we'd want to set it up using the judges e-mail and have them share the password as administrators.

ScorpiusRisk · Feb 27, 2010

Yeah, I don't think there's any way to do the math properly for the attack powers, or even keep a consistent format. So basically I agree with you stonegod.

However, using the spreadsheat, you can easily delete lines you don't want or add new ones.

ScorpiusRisk · Feb 27, 2010

Elec, I'm getting some kind of parse error. I dunno, but you definantly gave me a foundation to work with.

Dekana, that looks good. We of course need a wiki no matter what, so we transfer all the setting information. I've always used wikidot but I bet wikia is very similar.

elecgraystone · Feb 27, 2010

ScorpiusRisk said:
Elec, I'm getting some kind of parse error. I dunno, but you definantly gave me a foundation to work with.

Sorry, I'll take a look and see if I can see what it is. I had to type it out long hand since it wouldn't let me copy the whole thing for some reason. Most likely i missed a ',' or a '(' someplace .

elecgraystone · Feb 27, 2010

Ok, I think I found the issue. I put n/a in when I copied it by hand to save time and I think it was trying to divide with it. Replaced n/a with invalid and it should work now.

EDIT: I also figured out how to get it to copy the formula so it's a copy paste that worked for me.

weldon · Feb 27, 2010

ScorpiusRisk said:
Thats very pretty. I wish I had known about it.

It does however validate my point about the problem with these sheets doing the math for you.

On a wiki, the code that makes the tables work is hosted on a separate page. The formulas for this are right on the page. It took me less than a minute to delete a formula and have to revert.

It's nice to be able to revert, but what about when you don't realize you did it till an hour of work later?

I think the solution to this problem is to have one sheet with data entry and another sheet with everything nicely formatted and the results of the formulas. You can lock columns in Google Docs spreadsheets, but not discontinuous cells.

I didn't go that far with the sheet I started, but that would be the next step after the "display" sheet is set. Frankly, I stopped working on it because we had a new baby. I'd be happy to contribute help, but I don't have a lot of free time right now.

weldon · Feb 27, 2010

ScorpiusRisk said:
You wanna help? I need a mathematical formula for figuring out cost of an initial attribute.

So if Strength is 8, it costs 0. If Strength is 14, the cost is 7.

I need a math formula for that.

I created a lookup array going the opposite direction. Enter the initial state value (8 or 10) and how many points you want to spend on a stat and it calculates the final stat. I went that way because it is similar to the way the Character Builder works.

The formula is ugly, but it works.

Code:

=IF(B8=10,IF((C8=0),10,IF((C8=1),11,IF((C8=2),12,IF((C8=3),13,IF((C8=4),"error",IF((C8=5),14,IF((C8=6),"error",IF((C8=7),15,IF((C8=8),"error",IF((C8=9),16,IF((C8=10),"error",IF((C8=11),"error",IF((C8=12),17,IF((C8=13),"error",IF((C8=14),"error",IF((C8=15),"error",IF((C8=16),18,"error"))))))))))))))))),(IF(B8=8,IF((C8=0),8,IF((C8=1),9,IF((C8=2),10,IF((C8=3),11,IF((C8=4),12,IF((C8=5),13,IF((C8=6),"error",IF((C8=7),14,IF((C8=8),"error",IF((C8=9),15,IF((C8=10),"error",IF((C8=11),16,IF((C8=12),"error",IF((C8=13),"error",IF((C8=14),17,IF((C8=15),"error",IF((C8=16),"error",IF(C8=17,"error",IF(C8=18,18,"error"))))))))))))))))))))))

elecgraystone · Feb 27, 2010

Yep that looks like the same formula I used. If mine still isn't working you can try using weldon's ScorpiusRisk.

covaithe · Feb 27, 2010

You guys seem to be putting a lot of work into excel / gdocs character sheets. That's all well and good, but... The thing is, I wonder how easy they're going to be to review. If someone comes up with +8 instead of +7 in their to-hit, how do I know whether they a) made a mistake in their counting somewhere, b) confused the spreadsheet formulas somehow, or c) have it right, and have a bonus that I didn't notice? I'll tell you right now, I'm not going to attempt to debug excel formulas when reviewing sheets.

Or are you thinking of spreadsheets as substitutes for the math section?