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Best tools for character sheets? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by Nariom@lemmy.world to c/rpg@lemmy.ml

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Each time I try to find something (website, software, ...) to edit and automate character sheets, I go back to spreadsheets because nothing else seems good enough. Am I missing something?

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[–] Andonome@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For online-usage, nothing will ever beat spreadsheets. They exist to crunch numbers and compare values. They work with both text and numbers. And they're flexible.

Want to add +2 to perception for elves? Check if race = "Elf" and if so, add +2.
Want to add a fixed list of weapons for the player to choose from? Stick the entire list on a secret sheet, then reference them in a drop-down menu.

If a bespoke tool ever came out, it would only do one system, badly. Spreadsheets do any system, and the skills you learn with them are transferrable to almost all other spreadsheet programmes.

There's my indie RPG character spreadsheet (requires Libreoffice Calc). Fill in your name, and it'll use numerological constants to find your race and stats, then tracks your XP every time you buy a skill.

People want to use something like a pdf because it looks like paper, but this instinct is wrong. PDFs are for printing. Their fill-in text boxes are ugly, and programming them is clunky.

[–] Nariom@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah that's why I often end up making a spreadsheet. I'd love to use LibreOffice for them but often find google sheet more flexible. I'm not very happy about that but that's how it is. I was curious to know if I missed something new that didn't come up through my searches.

[–] Andonome@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Something new with Calc? Not to my knowledge, though I've never found something I couldn't do. What additional features do Google Docs have?

[–] Nariom@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some functions like QUERY, SORT, CHOOSECOLS that makes it easier. I tried to understand how merging several columns into one would work in Calc and gave up. There are workarounds but no legit way to do it outside scripting, but I'd like to keep my sheets script free. Also there are no in cell checkboxes in Calc, but I guess you could just use a boolean. Overall I'm often frustrated by Calc and shamefully go back to G.

[–] Andonome@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tried to understand how merging several columns into one would work

It's this button.

Also there are no in cell checkboxes in Calc,

Checkboxes:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/uploads/short-url/biHcqD9rpmk0V92ShVFWZwDVIUD.ods

[–] Nariom@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Sorry I meant getting the union of two ranges, concatenating two columns, putting the data of two different columns into one. Don't worry about it though, I found you can do some stuff with INDEX, but then you can't sort it, so I arranged my data in another way and color coded it... The whole process was quite annoying tbh but I got what I wanted. On your example with checkboxes they don't behave as part of the cell, idk how they work but that's weird compared to gdocs. I can use true/false instead. Also I didn't want to turn this thread into a Calc stackoverflow one ^^ Thanks for the help all the same.