Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="ryryguy" data-source="post: 5112659" data-attributes="member: 64945">I have to say, I don't really buy the &quot;standardization makes it easier to check sheets&quot; argument.&nbsp; If we were talking about a half-dozen methods, then maybe.&nbsp; But what we're actually talking about is two or at most three methods, and the DDI summary/Excel spreadsheet method is easier than templates for both players and judges.&nbsp; Extra methods that are easy don't make things harder.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />&nbsp; We only have to keep the templates alive to cover folks without DDI - and maybe not at all, if the Excel method comes up to speed.I also don't think bugs in Character Builder are enough of an issue to prevent its use.&nbsp; How many characters are actually affected by these bugs in practice?&nbsp; Five percent?&nbsp; For those few that are affected, we just put a note about the bug after the summary.&nbsp; I don't think that will be hard at all for a checker to deal with.Finally, while I agree that simply emailing CB files around probably has problems, let's not forget that CB summaries can live perfectly well on a wiki page.&nbsp; We should not get rid of wiki pages for character sheets (though we will have to find a different wiki eventually).&nbsp; The page is perfectly good for tracking, background and other stuff.&nbsp; The CB summary is plain text; putting them on a wiki page will automatically track differences in the summary.&nbsp; If someone tries shenanigans like retraining more powers than they should, this will show up in the page diffs.(In fact, that is a potential problem with the Excel sheet - even if we attach an .xls file to the page, it's a binary format, so we won't be able to track differences in that file.&nbsp; We might be able to get around that by exporting it as a CSV and putting that on the page... or, would diffing the generated summaries be enough?&nbsp; Perhaps.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ryryguy, post: 5112659, member: 64945"] I have to say, I don't really buy the "standardization makes it easier to check sheets" argument. If we were talking about a half-dozen methods, then maybe. But what we're actually talking about is two or at most three methods, and the DDI summary/Excel spreadsheet method is easier than templates for both [I]players and judges[/I]. Extra methods that are [I]easy[/I] don't make things harder. :) We only have to keep the templates alive to cover folks without DDI - and maybe not at all, if the Excel method comes up to speed. I also don't think bugs in Character Builder are enough of an issue to prevent its use. How many characters are actually affected by these bugs in practice? Five percent? For those few that are affected, we just put a note about the bug after the summary. I don't think that will be hard at all for a checker to deal with. Finally, while I agree that simply emailing CB files around probably has problems, let's not forget that CB summaries can live perfectly well on a wiki page. We should not get rid of wiki pages for character sheets (though we will have to find a different wiki eventually). The page is perfectly good for tracking, background and other stuff. The CB summary is plain text; putting them on a wiki page will automatically track differences in the summary. If someone tries shenanigans like retraining more powers than they should, this will show up in the page diffs. (In fact, that is a potential problem with the Excel sheet - even if we attach an .xls file to the page, it's a binary format, so we won't be able to track differences in that file. We might be able to get around that by exporting it as a CSV and putting that on the page... or, would diffing the generated summaries be enough? Perhaps.) [/QUOTE]

Verification