What program to use to create character sheets?

[Campbell]

I haven't felt the need to create a 4e character sheet yet (I have one I like), but if I ever feel the need I'll be using Adobe Illustrator to create the decorative elements (to create nice scalable vector graphics) and Adobe InDesign to layout the sheet, and then export it as a PDF.

 

[DreamChaser]

The legality of it is not an opinion; not something that you can have a consensus on. The law just is, whether or not people have an opinion about it.

If this were really the case, there would be no lawyers. No law can account for every contingency and the very basis of most legal systems is the concept of precedent, which is essentially past opinions (informed / expert opinions yes but still opinions) that form a consensus and help to dictate how the law will be interpreted in different situations.

By my understanding of IP law as my brother the lawyer once explained it...

With the issue of fair use and liability, the core issue would be if the sheet in question bypassed the need for a user to purchase the books and other supplements that WotC does not provide for free to all users.

A sheet that does nothing more than the sheet available for reproduction in the back of the book or on the D&D Web site can in no way be perceived to infringe upon WotC's intellectual property unless it attempts to claim to be theirs.

A sheet that autofills content that could only be found in the books (or through the paid sections of D&D Insider) is a clear violation of WotC's intellectual property and thus should be constrained to personal use and not made available to any other user that might be able to use that sheet to backward engineer copyrighted material in books without needing to purchase them.

DC

 

[Klaumbaz]

i use this site.

Ema's Charsheets

makes it pretty easy.

 

[Sphyre]

If this were really the case, there would be no lawyers. No law can account for every contingency and the very basis of most legal systems is the concept of precedent, which is essentially past opinions (informed / expert opinions yes but still opinions) that form a consensus and help to dictate how the law will be interpreted in different situations.

Actually lawyers argue at great length about whether a law has actually been broken. Simply put, whether you are subject to legal repercussions based on a given action can be independent of whether an actual law was broken.

Given the nature of language and the ability to create multiple valid interpretations from a given sentence lawyers in this society hopefully are adept at illustrating that (in the case of defense) no actual law was broken or (in the case of offense) that a law was broken, and the offender should be subject to punishment due to having broken the law. Lawyers study the law; which means there is a tangible thing to be studied. While law usually created due to the opinion of the majority, once it is codified, it is, and the opinion merely lead to the codification, it does not further modify it without official action. Therefor, what is legal is based on what was codified and decided upon at the time of codification, not what current opinions are held (with exception to when it is re-codified and revised.) This forum and the viewers are not representative of the official codification of law, and therefor their opinions do not matter when determining whether something is currently the law or not.

So yes, this is the case. What you are legally accountable for is what the current codified law is. You are right that it is derived from opinion, but once it is codified, you are bound by it. This doesn't mean things can't change. For example, someone may have broken the law, gone to court, and even though the law was broken, the pertinence of the need for such a law may be brought into question and the law later changed to amend the for the situation brought forth in the case, but the fact remains that at the time of breaking the law, the law was broken - it was just deemed an unjust law by a court of law, and revised. The fact that it can change like that is exactly why the Ex Post Facto law was put in place by the US government, as when there is a new law, that might have been previously broken, if it was not a law at the time of indecent, it is not a broken law.

And explaining such distinctions requires quite the amount of wording. When it comes to explaining the subtle yet necessary distinctions being as exact as possible with your wording is key. While I understand the gist of your post, it does not completely encompass the relationship between opinion and law.

 

[11lon]

Thanks for the replies guys. Sphyre, your sheet really looks nice.

No autocalc for me, at least not yet. There are many other Excel-based projects there that do this better than me and I'm thinking of just referring to that when doing a character, but I DO want to be able to input some things such as character name, race, racial traits, etc., but again, no autocalc.

Excel seems an easy way to go, but... I'm not too good with that. It's the program I'm most familiar with among all those mentioned here, but even then, I'm not too comfortable with it do design things properly.

Has anyone done a sheet for 4E or 3.5E in Excel and is willing to share skills and ideas with me? What I want for my sheet is just something basic, with everything the player needs to know (skills, HP, basic attacks, equipment worn) on the front page, equipment and other stuff on the back page, and NO POWERS on the sheet, or maybe just a list of powers on the front page... I want it this way to maximize space on the sheet for the rest of the info since I'll be using power cards anyway.

Any help appreciated. Thank you in advance!