excel is your friend :)

[zergnase]

repost from old page :

heya folks,

u need to put togather an NPC in no time ?
(in the middle of a session)

the only thing u have is a huge pile of .pdfs on your laptop and your head ?

go and get excel, it can make your life much easier

a while ago i made a for our group customnized excel workbook, with easy class adding, skill selection, atm i work on modifing it for gestalt PCs without giving up the compatibility for normal PCs...

in the coming weeks i will tell u how i made this project

cya

Z

[zergnase]

repost from old page :


easily selecting class LVLs and to see which are class skills, which class features u get, saving throws, base attack bonus, average hit points

to keep this easy to modify we work with 2 excel files

1. database file
2. the formular

besides normal logical / math commands

IF, AND, OR, SUM, COUNT, COUNTIF, ...

to of the most often used commands are :

lookup and vlookup (hope i got the right commands, i don´t use english excel)

the database file (short DB or DBF) has several sheets one for :

class data
race data
ability modifers (if u don´t want to calculate em in a thousand cells in the project)
carring data
size data
XP data (only if u want to make a campaign progression / estimating project, which realy helps as this also

[zergnase]

repost from old page (user Tristan) :

Re: excel is your friend
You can do some pretty cool things with excel. There was a excel character creator for 3.0 that was really good before Wizards made the guy stop updating it. *sigh*

I've never taken the time to really look into it to figure out how to update it, but I have seen that you can do some pretty good character generators with it.

[zergnase]

repost from old page (user TheElf) :

Re: excel is your friend
Excel has VBA which is essentially a full programming language much like visual basic, and you get a nice spreadsheet control with it, with some extra functionality, this is why excel can be powerful, but real programing languages are more powerful, and excel isn't alone with VBA, almost all office programs share this feature.

[zergnase]

repost from old page :

Re: excel is your friend
yeah excel + VBA rox !!!

personaly i love this combo it is just what i need for my game preparation

VBA makes it easy even for programing n00bs like me, to get fast the results u want (less frustrating) also u already have a very powerfull base which u "just" modify in the way u want (with formulars in cells or Macros (VBA))

Spoiler :













for showing which is a class skill and which just a cross class skill, i programed a Macro, took some time to figure out how and convince it to work, but after some hours ... it is great u hit the buttom and excel looks which class u took then changes the background color of the cells in the skill point placement field, so u can see :

white = no LVL taken
green = class skill
light blue = cross class skill
(red = exclusive skill which u don´t have (in 3e))

[TheElf]

by the way: Most of these things can be done in access with even less work, and in access it is easy to have various forms, queries, etc. but excel is easier to learn and more newbie friendly (with macro recorder, etc.)

[zergnase]

we need following blocks :

Class selection
here we will type in the class we want (or classes gestalt PCs), excel will also show us here, accululated BAB, saves, average HPs, class features, we will also leave some space for feat-selection)

Note :
this project will not check if a combination is legal (feat-selection, class selection), if u can use excel i expect a "tiny bit" of smartness on your side, u can try to include it but it will become very complex and hard to update

Skill selection
a big empty field where u place your skill points and excel will calculate the total rank, later for better useage / performance, we will code a macro to color the background of the cells to show us which is a class skill, cross class skill, exclusive skill u don´t have (in 3e) and where u haven´t taken a class)

General Character Information
stuff like, race, rolled ability scores, how the ability scores develop in the LVLs, it will show us stuff like ability modifer, generic melee / ranged attack bonus, racial abilities, carrying capacity, special sight abilities (darkvision, low-light vision), saves (without racial modifiers) all at maximum LVL

Calculation Block
This block will include most of the calculations we make

Note :
We cloud include this in each cell where we want to show somthing, but it would easily become to complex and a pain in the *** to code (for skill rank calculation, it would pass the 4 meter of code mark on my screen (propably 4,4 meter).

Note 2 :
We do not make an extra sheet for this, so we can have several of this sheets in one excel workbook (one for each (N)PC we plan / use ^_^ )

[zergnase]

Originally Posted by TheElf

by the way: Most of these things can be done in access with even less work, and in access it is easy to have various forms, queries, etc. but excel is easier to learn and more newbie friendly (with macro recorder, etc.)

cool go and teach us

[Otakkun]

Sounds interesting. Any files to be posted?

[TheElf]

Originally Posted by zergnase

cool go and teach us

I tend to use another tool, but I will show you that too. But you can attach zip files with your excel sheets.