Zio's ChimeraTool for campaign management [In need of advice, 5th edition wip]

[Zio_the_dark]

Last year I built a tool in Excel to help me handle my play by post games and tabletop sessions with my family/friends. I shared the tool here on Enworld but had almost no feedback on it.

It's mainly a tool for GM to prepare and/or use at the table to track almost anything they want from a session and was first designed for a custom game then for D&D 4th edition (probably the reason why it had not much feedback ). Other reason might also be because it was not first designed to be published so it might be a bit hard to understand what's the purpose of all of the options...

Anyway the point of this post is that I'm thinking about adapting the tool to a more recent system (read 5th edition) and by the way tune down the complexity of the thing...if anyone here has taken a look at the tool I'd like to know what could be done to make it better and user-friendly, what functionalities are really important and what is superfluous/not worth the hassle... (and bugs if any ^^)

Thanks for the time taken to read this and thanks to anyone who provides a bit of feedback

The tool can be found under my profile in my resources (use the mediafire link instead of enworld's download the mediafire link is always more up to date for bugs...)

Edit:
mediafire link DM tools
enworld link Custom DM-tool in Excel

The mediafire link is updated more often than the enworld link for now!

 

[aco175]

Sooo, your asking us to go to a random link and download a file?

 

[Zio_the_dark]

Sooo, your asking us to go to a random link and download a file?

You can take a look at the description from here

Zio's ChimeraTool for campaign management

What is this? Last modification: 05 December 2022 (changelog at end of file, please read!) See the included manual in pdf for how to use this! These sheets are designed for D&D4 and D&D5, use at your own risk :p Link to the tool: DM tools...

www.enworld.org

This resource has been posted for more than 8 months and there's more than 470 downloads from my mediafire account (download from enworld's site were reset when the site was upgraded to new version) if there was something malicious in there, someone would probably have raised a warning or something... I don't force anyone to download it just asking for advice if someone is willing to help a bit.

Edit: You can also download from here if not confident with mediafire things. And use an AV to check the file. Nothing is hidden or locked inside (VBA code is NOT password protected!!) and in the readme i already warn that on workbook open the decimal separator in excel is set to "," rather than "." (which should not annoy american users as I think they already use that separator)

Edit n°2: Do you really think a french guy like me would have written such a long readme in english just to send a virus infested file on the net?? Better use e-mail or a site other than ENworld no?
Updated the ENworld download to the most recent version for those not trusting mediafire (and I can understand!!!)

Edit n°3: I work on this on my free time and only for my personal pleasure/use at first (I'm in no way a coder/programmer i'm working in food industry) and just propose to improve it for anyone that could be interested. I've just seen that WotC released a "tracker" or something alike and seen many criticism about it, my tool can just be a free alternative, that works offline from a laptop to track campaign and player abilities and weigh less than 2mb (by the way you can add as much custom data as you'd like to it).

 

[aco175]

Looking at it for a few minutes I can certainly see how much work you put into this. Some of the issues I see may be in translation or that it is not all 5e DnD yet. For example it looks like you list all the stats and it looks like Niv, Con Dex, Int Sag, Cha. I'm assuming Niv is Strength and it is just translation.

I do not know if I would use this. It looks like it has everything, which is both good and bad. I would look for something more simple that I could use to track my home game. I also do not play online or play by post so I'm not sure on how much is directed at that type of play.

Overall I can certainly see it being useful and it looks well put together. I hope some more people look at it and give some thoughts.

 

[Zio_the_dark]

Indeed it's not 5th yet! And you're probably right there's some more effort to put for translating everything.

As for the stats "niv" is for level "for" is strength. It may seems odd but I couldn't translate the combobox menus so it may be translated as "str" on a label and "for" in dropdown menus...it's because some functions check for the name of the column to find corresponding values.

As for the use I used it for live session as well as play by post and I must say that I don't use the automatic formulas, I mostly edit character through the menu to track what's going on.
Without using all automated things it can still have the purpose of being a stat/notes/character manager on the gm side.

Thanks for the feedback

Edit: Also some menus are probably in need of a little cleanup.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Hey @Zio_the_dark I commit to taking a look. Just at work right now (why am I on Enworld at all?!? shhhhh...). Will DL to my home 'puter soon and provide feedback. As I'm considering running a 4e game, please keep this version around, and create a 5e copy. Please?

 

[Zio_the_dark]

Hey @Zio_the_dark I commit to taking a look. Just at work right now (why am I on Enworld at all?!? shhhhh...). Will DL to my home 'puter soon and provide feedback. As I'm considering running a 4e game, please keep this version around, and create a 5e copy. Please?

I laughed I'm at work too

The 4th version will remain in any case it is the base I built upon for other systems (i'm even trying a system agnostic version but it's very very far from being useable for now)

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Ok, first pass - love that out of the box it supports both French and English.

The next thing is - I would give the product a different name from DM Tools. Something like "Useful Chimera Tool" or something. (ForgedAnvil is a good example).

Then, create a thread here on EnWorld with the name of the tool so that , with the MediaFire and any other links right there. Then keep that thread going, post to it as you have updates. So it keeps coming up to the top of the feed. People will start posting questions into it and you will get feedback. Oooh man, you will get feedback.

I need to keep reading this stuff, it looks fascinating.

 

[Zio_the_dark]

Well thanks for the comment! Now I need to find a suitable name (love the Chimera thing by the way) and I think I'll probably rename this subject rather than opening a new one to avoid pollution!
I can still edit the first post to provide link if needed!

I know I should work a bit more on documenting the tool because at first it may be a bit hard to use for newcomers (also presentation doesn't help, the tool was started from a simple XP table made for the PSIV game, I was searching a formula for XP growth of the characters of the game and found nothing in FAQ so with trial and error...then I decided to try to simulate the battle mechanics of the game, then started to build rules to play with my two young sons as it's a world with fantasy, robots and space travel they love that. And it finally become a full tool that was converted to 4th edition because I was also playing by post and needed something to track bits of my campaign).

If anyone has question about how to do such or such thing or about the purpose of a menu/button feel free to ask here.

Also I'm interested on feedback about crashes and bugs if you encounter any (I don't know why but third party users always find the way to find hidden bugs ).

For now I did not start the 5th conversion, but it shouldn't be too hard, just time-consuming!

 

[Zio_the_dark]

Very little update available on mediafire. Just added a menu when starting the encounter manager to allow to reset temporary values or to keep previous stored values (such as round count, temporary ability boost or penalties, etc...), allowing to divide an encounter through multiple sessions if needed.

Also not much documented but for those using the Maptools virtual tabletop, with a little setup the tool allows you to import token as encounters directly into the sheet (Of course you need to setup your database before!)

Will start working on 5th edition in the following days if schedule allows ^^