Journal Character Sheet Flaws

Roll20 Character Sheet Killjoys Players who want to use Roll20 Journal Character Sheets have no way to avoid recreating their character sheets for every campaign they play in. This deplorable waste of time leads to players skirting the feature altogether, making it entirely useless. The only alternatives players are likely to use are for EVERY GM to implement the EXACT SAME Character Sheet themselves, which is ridiculous, because they would need to implement every character sheet variation that each of their players are likely to want to use. To be used at all, character sheets MUST be portable between campaigns. Once you have the character sheet itself, and implement a character on it, the character itself ALSO can’t be ported between campaigns. So not only is your work of creating a character wasted, but you’re ALSO faced with having to re-implement a character sheet from scratch. Players should be able to port their characters, character sheet and all, between campaigns; otherwise, the feature will get no use, because all of a player’s existing characters would have to be re-implemented in each session, and no one is going to bother. In order for players to be able to use their pre-built characters in games across Roll20, both the character sheet and the character data itself MUST BE PORTABLE. Otherwise, the only players who would bother to take the time learning how to use it won’t, and everyone else will remain ignorant about the feature. GMs have similar, not as drastic, but more widespread problems with character sheets. GMs can both duplicate a campaign and duplicate character sheets within a campaign, to preserve their characters and monsters. But, in order to guarantee access to the character sheet of every character or monster he might ever need, he would have to have one gigantic campaign with EVERYTHING in it, duplicate it, and then delete what he doesn’t need. Without this gigantic source campaign, the GM risks coming up short when his players go off the campaign’s rails. GMs need character sheets and character data to be portable too. Character Sheet Inconveniences Players cannot rename their own character; they have to rely on the GM to do so. What the hell? There’s no way to make attributes a function of other attributes. For example, in Dungeons & Dragons, there’s no way to make the Strength Modifier a simple function of the Strength D&D "Ability". This forces a character sheet builder to make an uncomfortable tradeoff between always providing the player with enough information at the cost of making what should be an automatic adjustment a manual one.. There’s no way to implement ceiling and floor rounding, except in a very kludgey way in certain special cases. I know, because I invented the modulus kludge currently found (as of 6/8/2013) on the Wiki. Rounding is very important to RPG games, which eschew fractions at all opportunities. There’s no way to integrate modifiers easily into a character sheet Ability macro. While you can theoretically use % in a similar way to #, the complication of a typical RPG character’s name makes all but the most unimaginative character’s modified rolls impossible. Not even Will Wheaton would take the trouble to embed the correct spelling of his own character’s name into a chat command. An obvious attempt to solve this problem by embedding the % macro into a # macro, and thereby streamline your commands, utterly fails (except, curiously, while testing the macro during editing). There’s no way to assign shading to Attributes or Abilities, to imply meaningful grouping or categorization. This could be used to distinguish skills from powers, or, in the case of Dungeons & Dragons, At-Will Powers from Encounter or Daily Powers. This would not be a problem if we had more distinctive character sheet features to work with.

A few updates: Character Sheet Killjoys Character sheets have no templating; suppose you are building a library of monster character sheets for use in a long campaign. The current process is, start out with a compromise between a universal and a narrow character sheet, duplicate it, and modify the new sheets per monster. But if you failed to implement a feature that becomes important in your original, your new character sheets won't have it; and if you add it to the original, that means that your original library of monsters is now obsolete, and has to be re-done. Whereas, if you had a template, and just modified the template for the feature you failed to implement, then you would only have to make the changes relevant to the addition. Character Sheet Inconveniences The lack of any means to sort character sheets, even by, say, "Players", "NPCs", and "Monsters", is terribly inconvenient. They all just spew together into a big mess, even if they're sorted alphabetically. Duplicated character sheets result in character sheets labeled "Copy of " followed by the name of its original; this is terribly inconvenient, as the duplicate sheet gets placed in alphabetical order, corresponding to "Copy of ", rather than appearing adjacent to the original.

A few updates: Character Sheet Bugs: Character Sheets duplicated, renamed, and handed to another player often have their Attributes and Abilities re-scrambled into the order they were created in, rather than the sorted order as a result of careful character sheet construction. This causes the character sheet to appear differently, depending on whether the GM sees it, or the player sees it. What good is a Character Sheet if what the Player sees and the GM sees is not as identical as intended? “Attributes” with empty values will cause other modifiers in a macro to be ignored. For instance, an “attribute” labeled “Bonus” with no value at all in a macro that executes “/roll d20-5+@{Bonus}” will break its math and only execute the d20 roll, without the -5 penalty that should be included. Recent improvements to reduce the modality of Editing and Saving character sheets are incomplete. If the character sheet’s position has been moved, clicking either “Edit” or “Save” will cause the Character Sheet to move to the position it initially appeared in. Character sheets should not move at any time during the editing process. Character sheets should only move to their initial starting positions if they are deliberately closed by the player. Whenever opening a character sheet, the “Bio & Info” tab is inexplicably highlighted. The purpose behind this is not clear, and thus, not helpful.