Having Fun With Spreadsheets

[alex_greene]

Has anyone else dabbled with using spreadsheets to do things like create tables of all the different combinations of characteristics, e.g. STR+CON, INT+POW, POWx2, POW+CHA and so on, and then created the lists of skills in Legend and used the table to create the base chances of common, advanced and magical skills and combat styles?

Or is it just me?

It's not exactly a character generator - I still have to more or less roll the dice or choose the values to go in - but it's a whole hell of a lot quicker than having to look up each common skill, all the advanced skills and so on.

Beats me why I didn't do this sooner. Like last year. *facepalm*

(If everybody here's already way ahead of me, then my next post will be titled "Hey Guys, I've Just Invented The Wheel!")

 

[strega]

Wheel, meet Alex.

 

[WoeRie]

Hm... I did that the first day I decided to do a campaign with MRQ2
I have made a full character sheet with excel, including all the math and stuff.

I's always the first thing I do when I try to learn a new system. It's a good way to remember and understand everything.

 

[alex_greene]

Wheel, meet Alex.

You misspelled "Axle."

 

[alex_greene]

An unexpected benefit - after generating the characteristics, I can now look over the skills' base chances and determine which skills the character has a natural aptitude for based on those characteristics I just rolled up. A high DEX character could do well at Evade; a high CHA character excel at Influence; someone with high CHA and POW could have a natural talent for Sing, and so on.

I can thus tailor my character so as to provide the best base chances to open those particular skills with, such as putting my highest points in INT and CON if I want my character to be the best tracker, or POW and CHA if I want my character to have a natural flair for Art, Sing, Oratory, Common Magic and Spirit Binding; and INT as well if I want my character's metiers to lie in Evaluate, Insight, Perception, Commerce, Courtesy, Disguise, Gambling, Healing, Language, Seduction, Teaching, Sorcery (Grimoire), Manipulation, Summon or Concert.

 

[Prime_Evil]

It's funny. I've done exactly the same thing too

I used my spreadsheet to help me to quickly design a number of reusable generic NPCs tailored for specific campaign roles (town guard, street merchant, cutpurse, etc). At that point MRQ II was still fairly new and nobody had built a proper character generator. One of the really useful things that the spreadsheet allowed was the rapid design of variants for each NPC type - take a point of the STR of the Man-at-arms and place it into DEX and change the combat style to the longbow and suddenly you've got a feudal archer. The only thing that I needed to do by hand was assigning equipment.

 

[soltakss]

Are you going to post the spreadsheet anywhere?

 

[GamerDude]

Are you going to post the spreadsheet anywhere?

Let me echo that sentiment.

I love using a spreadsheet based CS to handle all the math for me, like Alex said to give an idea of where the character's aptitudes may lie. It also helps to have it add up as I buy skills and what-not, compute armor, look up armor/weapons when I type the name in and get the stats.

I still have to roll the dice make the decisions have the books but this is the kind of thing I would love to have.

 

[WoeRie]

It's a finished character sheet, including all the maths. Though it is an Excel sheet it does not contain any Macros. Meaning you can open it with Open Office.

Have fun: http://riegler.name/Legend_Character_Sheet.zip

 

[Bifford]

This is a very nice crib sheet!

The biggest problem I can see is that in your skills list it has "Basic" and "inc" but doesn't have a column for "Culture/Profession/links" .

Therefore if you include those things into the INC box your tally on the right of the amount of "Free Points" is soon going to hit negative numbers. And because the culture and profession numbers are added in before the free points are allocated this would mean you'd still have to do a manual tally of the free points. And then you add in any player link amounts and it compounds things further.

So this a great start, but I do think it needs that extra column.

Bifford

 

[WoeRie]

Ok, I see your problem, but I don't think another column is either needed nor good, as it would waste too much space. Remember, this is a character sheet, designed for playing with, not only something to calculate everything.

You can modify the total number of skill points (in AM27) and you should add in all values from Culture, Profession and Free distribution (depending on the experience of your char). You then first decrease the fix values for Culture & Profession (and special values like the +30 Common Magic for Glorantha), then the correct amount should be left for your free skill point distribution.

Currently it lists 540 points:
210 Culture
50 Profession
30 Common Magic Bonus for Glorantha (I will upload a new version with 510 points only).
250 Free points (for a beginner character)


However at the end of character creation this should be exactly 0. After improving during game, this will get negative (but I think this doesn't matter as it is not printed on the sheet)


BTW: It prints for Din A4, so maybe you get siome problems during the print-out if you are using Letter sized paper.

 

[Bifford]

ah, yes, that would work. nice. okay, that's sweet then

Well done that person on creating a nice bit of work!

huzzah.

lol.

Bifford

 

[SSWarlock]

Which version of Excel was used to create this spreadsheet? I'm getting warnings from my version that it won't support some aspects of the spreadsheet.

 

[WoeRie]

Excel 2010, in older versions at least the Iferror function is missing.

 

[PhilHibbs]

Has anyone else dabbled with using spreadsheets to do things like create tables of all the different combinations of characteristics, e.g. STR+CON, INT+POW, POWx2, POW+CHA and so on, and then created the lists of skills in Legend and used the table to create the base chances of common, advanced and magical skills and combat styles?

My spreadsheet does that. It doesn't do it with a table, though, it parses the cell text and adds in the appropriate stats. So if the "Stats" cell says "DEX+POW", then it adds in the DEX stat and the POW stat. If it contains "x2" then it doubles the result. So it can't cope with unusual bases like INT+DEXx2, and it doesn't look for multiple occurrences like INT+DEX+DEX.

 

[DamonJynx]

Here's my version specifically for NPC's.

It's an Excel 2007 .xlm sheet with macro's. It's specific for Elric re some advanced skills. I haven't bothered with culture, race or profession as for NPC's those are generally redundant (IMO). I just wanted a simple sheet that lets me choose how 'proficient' an NPC is in a given skill.

What I do is copy the "Blank NPC" sheet and then hit "Generate stats" and change the name of the sheet.

Elric NPC