Proposal: remove option to create a character with a spreadsheet

hafrogman

Adventurer

• Nov 18, 2010

• #11

TwoHeadsBarking said:

What happens to the people who already have spreadsheets?

Click to expand...

I guess the question is: How many spreadsheet users are there among the currently active characters? From my admittedly anecdotal experience, there only seem to be a small handful.

I would imagine that if this passed, from now onwards only wiki'd characters would get approved as new, or for new xp/levels/etc. If this causes trouble for those who have the spreadsheets I'd expect we could find volunteers to convert them to Wiki for any players that can't manage it themselves. I'd be willing to do one or two myself, just to gain little more experience with the wiki. After that though, people would need to take over the upkeep themselves, which is even easier than creating them, and not an unreasonable thing to ask of anyone who is already computer savvy enough to be playing in an online PbP game.

 

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Tenchuu

First Post

• Nov 19, 2010

• #12

TwoHeadsBarking said:

What happens to the people who already have spreadsheets?

Click to expand...

The proposal does not address that directly. There would be no immediate effect on existing spreadsheet players. We would simply no longer allow spreadsheet as an option going forward.

When a current spreadsheet went to level up, it would be up to the judges to either grandfather them in or require they update to Wiki format.

 

TwoHeadsBarking

First Post

• Nov 19, 2010

• #13

Alright, then yes.

 

Last edited: Nov 20, 2010

Voda Vosa

First Post

• Nov 19, 2010

• #14

But they are great, I mean the wiki is a pain in arse for players to fill in. The spreadsheet does the work for you, and personally I think it is easier to review as well. I had tons of mistakes with the wiki format, but since I made the characters with the spreadsheets I have had no reported mistakes, except a few details.

Not because something is not as good as you want it to be, the solution is to remove it. In my opinion I think the spreadsheets can be enhanced and improved, instead of discarded, just because it bothers that there are a couple of characters in that format.

Then again, there's just a couple of characters in spreadsheets.

 

renau1g

First Post

• Nov 19, 2010

• #15

VV - if you can enhance the spreadsheet to a more usable/reviewable format then I really don't mind having a second option, but right now I personally don't have any free time to work on them.

 

Voda Vosa

First Post

• Nov 19, 2010

• #16

I could. I just need your vision of how should it be more usuable/reviewable.

 

TwoHeadsBarking

First Post

• Nov 20, 2010

• #17

I've removed my vote on the previous page because I went back over the spreadsheet and I think VV has a point. I find the spreadsheet easier to use. Not in the sense that the wiki is hard, but in the sense that I don't want to type my half-level and stat mods in a dozen times. There has to be a way to pretty it up.

 

Tenchuu

First Post

• Nov 21, 2010

• #18

I'm sure it could be fixed, but until it is, it shouldn't be an option. I think if it's not removed as an option, then the motivation to update will not be done, and it will never be done (and the problems identified never get fixed).

I'd also argue that we should really only have one format unless the summary page in the spreadsheet version looks virtually identical to the Wiki. But, it'd be hard-to-impossible to get everyone to update the format, so I would say shoot for an identical summary page.

 

hafrogman

Adventurer

• Nov 22, 2010

• #19

Tenchuu said:

I'd also argue that we should really only have one format unless the summary page in the spreadsheet version looks virtually identical to the Wiki. But, it'd be hard-to-impossible to get everyone to update the format, so I would say shoot for an identical summary page.

Click to expand...

This is actually a lot more difficult that it first appeared to me. The spreadsheet (and in some cases, GoogleDocs spreadsheets specifically) have a few issues that make it really difficult to recreate the Wiki format, or any other character sheet.

There's a few smaller things, the refusal to format positive numbers as +x is an annoying one. Maybe just stylistic to me.

The inability to create comma delineated lists is vaguely irritating, but could be gotten around with just retyping everything. Which, to be fair, is how the Wiki handles it.

But the biggest issue is uncertainty. Since there is no way of knowing how many powers of each type each character will have, the summary sheet will need to be heavily customized each time it's used. Even the existing version would face severe issues with this past the first level. But add in a few more levels, powers and feats, and everything becomes a tangled mess of cell references, nested if() statements and massive abuse of the concatenate() function.

It appears as is there may be a way forward using customized scripts, but I don't know anything about the programming format Google uses for them, or if they'd be able to do what we need. So this is as far as I can go. This is by no means a functional version:

Spreadsheet vX

 

Tenchuu

First Post

• Nov 23, 2010

• #20

Looks like a pretty good representation of the summary. I hear you on the powers section. When I think about this thing, I think in Excel 07 I could do most of it with help from VBA, but not everyone has access to excel, and you really shouldn't be running macro-enabled spreadsheets you download from the internet.

Hopefully google's scripting works (and is safe), and hopefully someone who knows it well is reading this thread, and ready to step in.