Excel tips #1

As said before, Excel is a good tool for building character generators. In this little series, I'll try to provide some tips and hints that'll help you build your own chargen in Excel (or other spreadsheet tools). These will be varying in length and complexity.

Tip #1 Use Names for cells and areas

To make things easier for you, take the extra time to give names to your cells. It's quick, and makes your life easier when it comes to building your spreadsheet. Whenever you select a cell or an area, you can see what you have selected in a small field at the upper left of your screen (image from osx version of Excel 2008, but it's similar in Win-versions as well).

Now, with the cell or area selected, you can type in another name for that cell or area. For instance, if you have four attributes, Muscle, Brains, Cool and Speed, you can name the cells with the values Muscle, Brains, Cool and Ego as well.

You can then use that in later formulas. To continue the example above, let's say that there is a health attribute that is the sum of Muscle and Speed. Normally, you would have typed =SUM(B2;C2) or something like that to add that together. But, since we have named our cells, we can instead type =SUM(Strength, Speed) (or =Strength+Speed)

While it may not seem to make a big difference in a small example like this, when the spreadsheet grows bigger, it will make life a lot simpler. This is especially true when you start to deal with areas instead of single cells.

Excel and Spreadsheets for RPGs

A spreadsheet is a tool that basically is a large grid of cells. Each cell can contain a number, a text-string or a formula. It originated within the business world as a way to build budgets, keep track of transactions and economics etc.

However, the structure of the spreadsheet also makes it a fairly good tool to use in RPG's. Especially for creating characters and other rule-bound artefacts.

To give you an example, a few years ago, I tried to challenge myself with building a spreadsheet to handle the vehicle creatoin rules in Gurps Vehicles. While the result was clumsy and not particulary elegant, it still helped me build a whole heap of nice vehicles (including a tank with a crew of 30).

One of my current projects is to build a character generator for the World of Darkness/ Storyteller-system by White Wolf. Due to copyright-infringement etc I can't publish it. I can, however, give you some hints and tips on how to build your own spreadsheet for use with roleplaying games.

While the core application will be Excell, I'll try to keep it as generic as possible (no scripts, for instance), so that you can do some migrating to Google Spreadsheet, Numbers or Open Office.

Advance over a field

One common occurance in wars is trying to advance over a field under enemy fire. To simulate this, the following rules are used:

A field has two values: How difficult it is to pass, and how dangerous it is (enemy fire, mines etc).

Each turn, you roll 1D10 - danger. The resulting number is how far you advance along the field. If you get a negative result, that results in you getting hit.

When you have advanced along the field a number of steps equal the difficulty value, you have reached your destination, and the next scene starts.

The difficulty value is both a value of how hard it is to cross the field and how difficult it is to traverse.

Damage in War: the RPG

When a character is hit and wounded within the game, several things can happen. Not only does a hit do bodily harm, it also affects morale/ willpower, the equipmant and the cooperation within the group.

Some of these aspects, I will deal with in a later post. In this post, I will mention a little about how to deal with bodily harm.

There are different intensities of weapons, and different levels of protection from armour.

If you are hit by a weapon that with a rank equal to your armor, you are wounded. One more wound or higher will kill you.
If you are hit by a weapon that with 1 rank lower than your armour, you are lightly wounded. This will stun you or slow you down a little, but will not stop you. Unless it's in the same round or the round after that you can take an infinite number of light wounds. Each wound adds to the time you are stunned. However, if you take more than Body number of light wounds while you are stunned due to light wounds, you become wounded.
If you are hit by a weapon with 1 rank higher, you are severly, mortally wounded. This means bodily trauma, mental trauma and technological breakdown (things will stop working for you). One more hit will kill you. Same goes if you are not treated within body number of rounds

Lower damage than that, nothing happens. Higher damage kills you instantly.

A quick discovery about google wave

When I first heard about google Wave, I suspected that one of the first plugins to pop up would be a die-roller.

So, yesterday I finally got my invite to Google Wave, and lo-and-behold, when I look at the short list over plugins I find a bot (script) that can do simple die-rolling. You basically type xdy (x = number of dice, y = type of dice), and the bot gives you the roll.

Told you so! ;-)