Character & Turn/Off-Turn Sheets AKA Easy Action Management w/ PDFs

[MwaO]

Old offline CB could output files into XML. At that point it was possible to modify the XML to build your own output. I played around with back in the day but never got very far due to my limited XML/XSL/coding skills.

What I used to do for tents was make an InDesign file that could import a pdf file in a particular way - then relink the pdf to a new one. It would basically chop up the image to make it easy to display common facts. But never went there for attacks - but probably could make say a really complex PC with 10 pages of powers, do the relink, and then copy the powers into the area where it would make sense.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Old offline CB could output files into XML. At that point it was possible to modify the XML to build your own output. I played around with back in the day but never got very far due to my limited XML/XSL/coding skills.

New online CB doesn't have the XML output, which really limits what you can do. You might be able to take the 'Character Summary' output and do some kind of lookup on the power names, grab the power's action type / frequency, then build a grid to put them into... of course this implies you have a way to get data out of the Compendium (or some other source) which is well beyond my abilities.

Yeah, I did a bit with XSLT and some of the Compendium data, but really it wasn't all THAT structured. There was some meta-data there, and various flags, but to a large extent powers and feats were just HTML and CSS, so you could only do so much with them. Some people did reformat the data into SQL tables, and the old CB/CBLoader can format it for old CB to use, which is basically the same as what Compendium puts out. I think you'd find that you'd have to do a lot of stuff by hand, basically, and that's where people stopped, as 10k+ powers is a little much to play around with.

That's how it originally started, simply as a way for me to tell at a glance if my characters were overloaded on a certain type of action.

When I started using the power grid in play it rapidly became annoying to swap between the power grid and the actual power cards for the rules text. At that point I tried to copy/paste the rules text (from DDI Compendium) onto the power grid itself. However, *that* led to an immensely large power grid. So I finally went with the power shorthand that you see in my examples.

Oh yes, there's a lot of cool work that could be done in 4e to manage information presentation and make things more useful at the table.

Personally I think WotC didn't REALLY go far enough with the data in the Compendium. Had they taken it to the next level of structuring things, then maybe some much cooler tools could have been written. As it was some people in the MapTool macro community DID manage to parse a decent amount of the data enough to pull a power into a macro and have it be approximately correct maybe 50% of the time, but you still had to manually tweak each macro, and some of them were just wildly inaccurate. Also a lot of times a power is just sort of 'out there' a bit. It will do stuff that can't really easily be described in a structured fashion.

Side Note / Rant: D&D character sheets and monster stat blocks have historically been a dysfunctional blend between "build or level up a character / monster, showing enough math that I can audit your work" and "manage information at the table" -- they try to do both and end up accomplishing neither. Late 3e and 4e took a large step towards making monster stat blocks more useful at the table, and 4e power cards got us some of way towards that on the character side. However 4e's default character sheets are still quite bad for at-the-table use.

Yeah, I've designed character sheets for my 4e hack, HoML, but they're not particularly GOOD, just accurate enough to actually show you what the chargen rules are trying to do, not particularly friendly in play. I will say though, the rules are written using ODF, so every power is a table inside a frame. I did discover that they can be lifted directly out into the character sheet, which is ODS (this is all done using Libre Office). That means I have actually got a way to make power cards, though I haven't played with actually writing the scripting needed to make it all automatic (you'd need a copy of the ODF version of the rules, plus the character sheet and run some macros). I've considered building a database table of powers, which would make that process a bit easier, but maintaining it seems like a PITA when probably every power will change anyway.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Early on (when I felt the need to mock 4e for being Magic-the-Gathering-like), it occurred to me that you could put powers (and other actions) on cards, and have a play mat with spaces for each action type, where you array your cards that use that action. On your turn, you play from the standard, move & minor (& free) arrays. Between turns, you keep an eye on the immediate, OA & free arrays.

Unnecessary IMX, the CB sheets worked OK, even at high level.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Early on (when I felt the need to mock 4e for being Magic-the-Gathering-like), it occurred to me that you could put powers (and other actions) on cards, and have a play mat with spaces for each action type, where you array your cards that use that action. On your turn, you play from the standard, move & minor (& free) arrays. Between turns, you keep an eye on the immediate, OA & free arrays.

Unnecessary IMX, the CB sheets worked OK, even at high level.

I've always wanted to kind of try something like this though. Like make power cards that can be stacked in a staggered stack so the names and levels show, then stack each type on its action type so they're easily visible but take up relatively little space. Once you use a power and its no longer available, you can stack it in a 'discard' stack. You could also do condition cards, which could be piled up in areas corresponding to duration, so UEONT, SAVE ENDS, etc. I think it would really work. You could have a 'placemat' type of setup (actually if you remember the way the old game Nuclear War works that was always kinda my inspiration, though there are probably other better examples).

 

[Joshua Randall]

That's pretty much what I was going for in my 'power grid' format. Looking to maximize (or at least to spread out) the array of actions I can use on my turn, and off turn.

A more sophisticated 'power grid' would have separate areas, or sides of the paper, for "your turn" and "off turn". This might alleviate some of the spacing constraints and allow for more sophisticated flowchart-style notes on various triggered actions.

I like the idea for condition tracking by duration!

 

[Tony Vargas]

I've always wanted to kind of try something like this though. Like make power cards that can be stacked in a staggered stack so the names and levels show, then stack each type on its action type so they're easily visible but take up relatively little space. Once you use a power and its no longer available, you can stack it in a 'discard' stack. You could also do condition cards, which could be piled up in areas corresponding to duration, so UEONT, SAVE ENDS, etc. I think it would really work. You could have a 'placemat' type of setup (actually if you remember the way the old game Nuclear War works that was always kinda my inspiration, though there are probably other better examples).

Yep. Sounds reasonable, neat, even slick, but we don't get around to actually doing it.

 

[MwaO]

One of the big issues is leveling+damage+to-hits.

That's why a doc that can take a pdf, cut up the power card information and put it off to the side on the artboard works best. Something like this:


You then simply relink the document to a new pdf - you'd want to make a ridiculous 30th level PC with all the options as the base document, then pare down with each new PC.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Nifty.

I wish I could justify subscribing to the entire Adobe suite. I guess it's no more expensive than all the RPG books I buy!

 

[Breaks]

Yeah, I did a bit with XSLT and some of the Compendium data, but really it wasn't all THAT structured. There was some meta-data there, and various flags, but to a large extent powers and feats were just HTML and CSS, so you could only do so much with them. Some people did reformat the data into SQL tables, and the old CB/CBLoader can format it for old CB to use, which is basically the same as what Compendium puts out. I think you'd find that you'd have to do a lot of stuff by hand, basically, and that's where people stopped, as 10k+ powers is a little much to play around with.


Personally I think WotC didn't REALLY go far enough with the data in the Compendium. Had they taken it to the next level of structuring things, then maybe some much cooler tools could have been written. As it was some people in the MapTool macro community DID manage to parse a decent amount of the data enough to pull a power into a macro and have it be approximately correct maybe 50% of the time, but you still had to manually tweak each macro, and some of them were just wildly inaccurate. Also a lot of times a power is just sort of 'out there' a bit. It will do stuff that can't really easily be described in a structured fashion.

Yeah. I've been working on and off for the last 2 years on an iOS 4e character builder using the SQL table used by the [you'd have to google it, i'm not risking anything], and even on there, the flags really just aren't robust enough.

It's a massive project to manually add in rules to each element, and it absolutely explains things such as why even the official CB misses so many bonuses to atk/dmg when its parsing the cards. And since the game is under such restrictive licensing, it's not something I could ever release to the public, only keep for my own use...which makes the work even more daunting and not worthwhile.

I'm coming up on a slow season at work so may well dive into it again, but it's a pretty arduous project for not much gain at this point.

 

[MwaO]

Nifty.

I wish I could justify subscribing to the entire Adobe suite. I guess it's no more expensive than all the RPG books I buy!

I'm faculty, so I get the educational discount. Though at this point, Adobe should just give me the software for free given how long I've taught Photoshop...