The Role Playing Public Radio Forums
General Category => RPGs => : Herrigold April 04, 2011, 10:46:30 PM
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Hey all.
I've only had sporadic time on my hands since the birth of our son, so I've been studying how RPG's roll up characters. I decided to use my iPad to make neat and tidy sheets in Apple's excel knock-off called "Numbers". I started with Traveller, and the Judge Dredd supplement, and decided to make it auto-roll the base characteristics. Didn't take long, and was a fun task. Next I did one for Call of Cthulhu, which auto rolled many more characteristics and this time I thought I'd make an auto name and profession generator too (profession loosely based on characteristics rolls for realism). Keep in mind I'm doing this all on the iPad! I was pretty proud of that. So then I wanted to make one for Trail of Cthulhu... but there wasn't any rolling for that, just spending. That's an entirely different problem! But, after nearly two weeks of an hour or two a day, I've finally got it doing what I wanted. It was no easy task, a bit mind bending at times and you should see some of the calculations! Here's a screen, making it look all too easy:
(http://idisk.mac.com/tobynmanthorpe/Public/TrailOfCthulhuAutogen.jpg)
All you have to do to get a new character is change the seed number under the health stat. Next I might make it auto choose drive and pillars of sanity. If there's interest, I'll post the whole doc when it's fully complete.
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That's pretty sweet. But I'm a Mac hater so you better make it PC compatible somehow..?
For the computer crowd there is another trail generator out there http://www.claphammassive.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=56
But yours looks sexier. Nice job!
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Thanks! Yes, it all works splendidly now, but I still want to add the drives etc.
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when you do post this, I'll put a shout out to it on the next RPPR episode
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You've scared me... now I have to make it perfect! Were there ever any male nurses in the 1920's? Should I include females in the military? Is that sexist? Are my points spent exactly correctly? Should I do the basic pillars of sanity or should I expound on them? Argh!
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Oh, and how do I account for all the sub-classes of the military without skewing the probability? That one makes my head hurt.
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have you thought about contacting Peregrine Press about this? I'm sure they could answer your questions.
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Nice work, dude! I don't do any apple dev myself, but I've always wanted to crank out a solid web-based character generator/gaming tool on the side. This is some nifty inspiration.
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Thanks! Yes, I wouldn't call this dev, it's just like a spiffy excel sheet.
@Joe, Pelgrane wouldn't be able to tell me much, it's all in the books but just a difficult thing to make random because there are so many choices.
If you like this one then I'll show you my CoC sheet which doesn't do any skill spending, but looks nice too. Maybe I'll put my spending system back on that one next.
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Here y'are:
(http://idisk.mac.com/tobynmanthorpe/Public/CallOfCthulhuAutogen.JPG)
I've also got ones for Traveller and Judge Dredd, but those ones have really fun character creation systems, so making an autogen kind of defeats the purpose.
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OK, the file is ready for the one or two people who will look at it! It's perfect for the iPad version of Numbers, and I can only assume that it works for the other versions of Numbers as well. It's fun!
http://idisk.mac.com/tobynmanthorpe/Public/TrailOfCthulhuCharacterSheet.numbers (http://idisk.mac.com/tobynmanthorpe/Public/TrailOfCthulhuCharacterSheet.numbers)
Ross, we're getting close to finishing our iOS game, so maybe I'll start showing you some screens or movies of that. If you're impressed with this sheet, wait'll you see what I do for my day job!