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Stat Block Templates
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A character in D20, for instance, could have a template which allows them to enter in all the pertinent information for their character, and have a pretty HTML sheet output. Rather than plain-text for the "Crunch" section, the character would appear on a sheet.
I've built systems like this before, and would be happy to help work out some of the technical details of how it would work (I'm thinking perhaps an XML template which could be parsed for display, or passed through a system-specific handler to create the desired output). I guess my real question is - does that seem like the type of thing that any other members would find valuable enough to spend time on? Or are we, as a community, less-concerned with the numbers - to the point that we wouldn't feel benefitted by a character-sheet tracker?
Personally I care more about fluff than crunch - I mostly include crunch to make it easier for folks to translate my characters into other game systems. Bigger = better for most game systems now, so folks can look at Nicole's 1 dot of Dex and 3 dots of Wits and correctly conclude that she's fairly quick on the uptake, but not so quick on the draw. Those same folks could then translate that to a 10 Dex and 15 Wisdom in the d20 system, or whatever.
But this is just me. =)
jason: that looks like an interesting program. Too bad it's Mac only :\ Also - it seems to only support D20? Is that true?
Anyways, I'm leery of trying to add more structured data to the character sheets. It's not a bad idea, as it would make indexing and searching more accurate, but would require that I make some hard choices about what to support. In the beginning I had planned to be D&D centric, but there's a lot of great non-D&D (and non-d20) material on here. Plus, the structured data can get EXTREMELY complicated. Try looking at PCGen and you'll see what I mean. Besides, just reading the few people that posted in this thread, several choose fluff over crunch. Heck, the more I play, the more I head in that direction myself.
One halfway solution would be to provide stat block templates that are pre-formatted Textile templates. Each template would be pre-formatted Textile text that you could copy and paste (or click to insert). Then, you go in and fill in the actual values for the stats and such. Click save and you've got a nicely formatted character sheet without having to learn or fiddle.
Now, no promises on timeline, but what do people think of that?
Another quick-and-dirty fix for some folks would be to upload digital character sheets to their webspace and link to them in the "crunch" section for the character on this site.
*Name, gender race ClassLvl:* CR #; Size ? (X ft., Y in. tall); HD
XdY; hp X; Init +X (+X Dex); Spd X ft.; AC X (+X Dex); Attack +X (weapon
XdY); SA ???; SQ ???; SV Fort +X, Ref +Y, Will +Z; AL AB; Str X, Dex X,
Con X, Int X, Wis X, Cha X.
_Languages Spoken:_ Common.
_Skills and Feats:_ Skill1 +X, Skill2 +Y; Feat1, Feat2.
_??? Spells Per Day:_ X/Y/Z. Base DC = X + spell level.
_Possessions:_ Equipment
A set of textile stat blocks that are preformatted would be great. :) That is actually very similar to what I was proposing. I hadn't realized until tonight that you guys are using a pregenerated textile parser - which is likely a little more limiting than what I had imagined. However - perhaps we could find a way to let users create a template, and then re-use it? So that for a particular game, if you wanted your NPC stats formatted a certain way - you could just throw together the sheet a single time in textile (or edit a pre-existing textile block) and get standard results each time?
If that doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll try to clarify or provide an example.