How do you program interactive character sheets?

[Blackbrrd]

I have a fairly simple character sheet for 4e that I use. It calculates the most basic items for you, but you have to enter the formulas for attack, damage and so on by yourself. It takes a bit of effort creating the character the first time, but leveling it is very fast if done right.

I ended up using CONCATENATE a whole lot. That way I can have a column saying 2d8+7 damage which pulls the relevant information from the rest of the sheet. For instance WeaponMultiplier + WeaponDice + BaseInt + WeaponEnhancementBonus.

One important thing to do is to rename cells from for instance c1 to Str. That way it gets a lot easier to read the formulas afterwards.

See the 4e character sheet in my signature.

 

[randomling]

...this just makes me want to write a web-based character sheet generator with Google App Engine. (Because I'm sure that's never been done before.)

 

[herrozerro]

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Mg2qpqlQHWQk9MSVdMRl9hUU0/edit

Here is my own sheet, I used a lot of vlookups and data validation to make drop downs that pulled information from other sheets.

I also did a lot of calculations on weapon damage dice and the ability to step dice up or down if they followed the standard progression. I also parse out the damage die from static damage on some weapons and also allow the player to choose the attribute used with the attacks.

I decided against macros because i wanted to distribute this and people seem weary of them.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

The Heroforge folks have made incredible (and incredibly complex) Excel character sheets. You can find their 3.5 files here:

http://www.nzcomputers.net/heroforge/default35.asp

AR