Erik H. said:
I just found the culprit ! xD
Guess I'm busted :S
Glad you liked some of the changes. I am very open for making additional changes to fit to everyone's liking.
Rogues skills
The new Rogue skills table takes much more space than before and I know some of my players will be totally mad when they will see it (due to excessive small screen resolution).
In to order to keep the sheet tight, may I ask you to follow your very first intuition and move the new Rogue skills table fields (i.e. Heavy Armor macro and data fields) to a new 'Custom' section? It may help a lot for low-end computers and tablets.
Just to understand this completely. Would you like an entirely new section for rogue skills, so the selection in the top would be: "Standard", "S.P/D.S" and "Custom"?
I was thinking of shrinking the table size by reducing the size of the input fields a little bit. since they only need to contain 2 numbers, they can be reduced a bit in size. Also if I change the button that says "Leather Armor" to just say "Roll" and the "Heavy Armor" to just say "Armor" (like before) then it would also reduce the size needed. I would be in favor of this solution to start of with, but if that is not an option, then I can look into creating a new section
Melee Weapons
I remember noticing the weapons rows not to be aligned when I first used the CS. That's a good point they are now in row. But I would have kept the 'Ini' button and not renamed it (again for saving space).
I changed the button to say "Initiative", simply because my players kept having a hard time finding the button. I don't think the extra space needed for this is too much of an increase.
I did also change the "Atk Adj." field to say "Attack Adj." which also increases the space needed a bit, but again I believe it to be within reason. The main reason behind changing the name of the field was consistency between the Melee and Ranged tables as they were not using the same naming convention, which really bugged me.
Summing up all the bonuses and penalties in the final calculation is good and bad news: it clearly make the calculation much more readable but it also prevent the DM from inspecting the calculation. Thus, if a player did not clearly understand the rules, the DM cannot explain it (and it denies the player to learn from his/her mistakes.)
Not a game-breaker for me but if you stand your ground may I ask you to add parenthesis around the calculation (like : 20-((18+(-8)) and not 20-((18+-8)) which is incorrect from a displaying point a view).
I am well aware that removing complexity also removes insight. I summed up the bonuses, simply because the huge amount of calculations done, was almost impossible for both my players and the DM to read, thus instead of checking the math to be correct, we gave up on the math and just hoped the black box (the CS) had calculated correctly.
I will of course add the parenthesis around the bonus. I was testing how many parenthesis I could remove, in order to make the readability as high as possible, but I will give that in the case of negative modifiers the current calculations needs the extra parenthesis
I rejoin AquaAlex about custom rules, some players use STR adj. for damage only and DEX adj. for hitting (range or melee). Deleting the DEX adj. macro from the sheet just broke their game.
Moreover, the standard rules allow a character to throw his/her melee weapon at the villain's face... in this case, DEX adj. as STR adj. applies.
The second problem about removing the Dex adj. macro from the sheet is if a player wrote a personal macro for his/her character that used the DEX adj. ability for melee weapon; they are **ed up because the macro is now broken (the DEX adj. has been removed). For this player, it may not be as a great deal as it seems: he/she just have to rewrite maybe up to 3 or 4 macros but think of a DM who must redo all his/her 400+ monsters...
May I suggest you to re-add the DEX adj. for melee weapons: it does not break the game for players that do not use it and still is a huge plus for those that used it for so long now.
As for Dex on the melee weapons, I removed it because the Dex checkbox was not used in either the hit or the damage calculations rolls. Thus it was a dead checkbox, that only added confusion to each row.
As for throwing a melee weapon at an enemy. In this case I have added my weapon to both the melee and the ranged types, thus my Javalin, is added in both the Melee section and the Ranged section. Then I can roll from either section depending on how I am intending to use it. Of course not all players will be adding to the sheet like that. I am aware of that.
As for how big of a deal this is for macro users, I definitely see your point. I am rather new to Roll20, and therefore I haven't really been using macros myself yet. I would like to support those who has made many macros, but I find it hard to justify having a checkbox on every player melee weapon row, that does nothing.
May I ask you to re-add the Mastery check box for the same reason noted above?
For the specialization thing, I use the Combat &Tactics, Skills & Powers and the Complete Fighters & Priests of the Realm (and the Wizards & Rogues counterpart) so, could you add a new section to the character sheet ? ('Standard' as main section and 'Players Options' as a secondary one? The main section would compute by the standard rules and the PO by the Optional ones. A surely difficult and time-consumming request I know.)
Ranged Weapons
Same arguments as above. Would you create a whole new section ? ('Standard' as main section and 'Players Options' as secondary?)
The removal of Dex from the Ranged damage was done because it added the Dex Hit adj. as damage. This I guess is okay if you want to play like that, but I had some players adding this to their damage, causing them to deal way too high damage. I did educate my players, but as they are not as big of a rules nerd as I am it doesn't seem to stick. Therefore I went with the removal, and thus made it impossible for them to make the mistake in the first place.
I would be more than glad to split up the weapon sections into two, a "Standard" and "Players's Options". I would prefer to re-add the Dex and Mastery checkboxes to the Melee and Ranged weapons in the new "Player's Options" section, as I really don't think they have any home in the "Standard" section. I do believe this would still require the rewrite of multiple macros, but for the long term I think this is the best solution.
What is your take? Would a new section with more checkboxes be an agreeable compromise?
Good move on the EXP textbox. As already said by Gold, tracking a character's progression is much more efficient now. I personnally used an handout readable by anyone (but not editable) for this purpose. This addition will help a lot for character's tracking progression.
Thank you for your kind words. It is nice that some of my changes are purely positive :)
Concerning Paul W. request, I am not particuliary annoyed by the ludicrous large table of the Equipment section but I know some of my players use it actively. Maybe moving the actual Equipment tab to an 'Advanced List' section and creating a new main section 'Simplified List' could be a good compromise?
I have thought about this, but as you, I am also not particularly annoyed by the large table. Therefore this change is not on the top of my list of improvements. I will definitely focus on the Weapons section before going into the Equipment seciton.
The EXP textbox is a very good addition, may I ask to do the same for a 'Personal Notes' textbox?
Usually players share information and item gathered during play. But we always have that thief who discovered an useless item at first glance but 'kept' it by intuition. Then, on the next game session which took place 2-3 months afterward, the player forgot where and in which conditions he found the item. A 'Personal Notes' in the character sheet would help him remember about this crucial item.
I personnally use two handout for this purpose: a 'Party Notes' editable by everyone and a 'Personal Notes' for each characters (everybody has secrets after all...)
Sure I can add an extra text box for more notes, however if this box is intended for item notes, why not use the textbox already placed under "Equipment"? If you scroll down under Equipment, then there is a text field labled "Notes". I have personally used this for various items I have picked up, also items that are not necessarily "equipment" but just stuff like, "Funny apple", "magic cookie", "weird black pipe" or stuff like that.
If you don't think that "Equipment" is the right place for this, then I feel like this calls for a different section entirely. So that we have 3 categories for items "Equipment" "Currency/Valuables" and "Miscellaneous items" (names not final). As all the different books, heirlooms, and other random / quest items often doesn't fit into either "Equipment" or "Currency" as they cannot be equipped or sold (or at least should not be sold for plot reasons).
I await your feed back on this before I begin any development.
Thank you for reading and again, thank you very much for the fixes provided.
Thank you for taking your time to give me input and feedback. I was very nervous about making these changes because I knew someone would not approve of them. I am very glad that you overall see them as an improvement. I am only making changes in the hope of improving the character sheet for myself and my friends :)
