Using the Fate Core rules Character sheet to drive generic macros Is there an easy way to do this?

Hi, I am using the Fate Core character sheet and I want to access the sheet to feed into a set of macros that perform rolls for each of the skills. i.e. I want to click on a "Notice macro" that does a random 4DF roll and adds the current player token "Notice skill" value to the roll. Currently I have a list of attributes associated with the character, (Notice, Investigate,Fight etc) and numeric values for each one. However this means that when a player changes the value for a skill, you have to go into the attributes section and alter it manually. which means that the pretty pyramid on the character sheet is no real use at all. I am sure I am missing something blindingly obvious, but I cannot work out how to access the content of the pyramid fields,(Great1, Great2 etc) which contains the name of the skill and use that as to determine the actual value of the skill. One idea I had was to use the Max_value field and fill that with 5 for all the superb skills,4 for all the Great skills and so on down to average. But that still leaves me with the problem of using the contents of an attribute field to identify which particular attribute I need to apply in my macro. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I suspect my problem is one of not seeing the wood for the treed ;>)

I'm a non-Fate player, so the character sheet is confusing to me. It sounds like you already know to use %{Great1} or @{Great1} depending on where you want to place the macro/ability. Under the Skills thing, do actual Skill Names get input into those white and gray boxes? So, if my above understanding is correct, then what you are asking for is, if I have Notice in the @{Sup1} box, you'd like a macro/ability that would say essentially: 4DF+Sup1 (where Sup1=5). Is that correct?

Yes the skill name is input into the boxes you describe , and dependent on which horizontal row the box is on will determine the numeric value of the skill, so a skill name in the Great1,field would have a value of 4 likewise something in the Great2 field would have a value of 4 while a skill name in the Superb1 field would have a numeric value of 5. All players have all 19 possible skills, but only those with a numerical value above zero are displayed in the pyramid. what I want is a macro that does the following.:- When I want to test against a players skill I click on a macro for that particular skill and it checks the pyramid for that particular player (identified by selecting their token) and if it finds the relevant skill in one of the pyramids boxes it uses the boxes position to determine the skill level, and then adds that numeric value into the macro, if it doesn't find the skill it returns a zero and does the roll using a skill value of zero. I am not sure if that is identical with what you said, so I thought I would explain it again in my own words,(far too often have I had long discussions with people online only to discover that we had misunderstood each other in the first exchange ;>)) hope that makes it cleared.

I messed around with this a little bit yesterday. I tried putting a 5 in the Great1_max field, but that didn't work for some reason. So, at this point, I almost feel it might be easier to modify the FATE Core character sheet to change the input type of each of those boxes. You could make them Drop Down Menus that display the Skill Name with the appropriate value for each box. Thinking through this there may still be problems, but I'm struggling, because I don't really know FATE and that grid still confuses me, because it sounds like skills may move from box to box? Hmmm...yeah, sorry. I'll keep thinking about this a bit and see if there's a creative solution that will work, but right now...I'm not sure that my solution above would even work. At least not without a bit more effort. EDIT: Ok, one last thought...perhaps it would be easier to have a tab or a section with all the skill names where you could track the actual values. That Grid may be useless at that point, but at least there would be a mechanism for keeping track of what value each skill currently had. Then you could reference skills in a macro and it would always be updated.

Yes over the course of time the skills in the individual boxes would change as a particular skill was improved and moved higher up the pyramid, because of that you really need a dynamic system that checks the values each time the macro is used, A section with a list of all skills would certainly work, I just thought that the creator of the sheet may have developed it with an idea of how to access the details I need, but perhaps they were purely interested in the appearance of the sheet and getting it to look as much like the original Fate character sheet as possible, As a final check I need to see if there are any Roll-templates attatched, but I, am not sure they had been implemented when the sheet was written.