New Pro Member -- In Over My Head

Hi all, (not sure if anyone will even read this.) In today's age of online-based RPG (when my preference would still be to gather around a table, but safety and physical distance of players prohibits this) I have turned to Roll20 to bring my world to fruition. I thought it would be as easy as pen and paper. It isn't. I am not a coder.  In my head, what I want to achieve is simple. I want to use a modified version of D20 Modern (basically D&D 3.5) but use Palladium-style percentage-based skills for a homebrew game.  I have purchased the Pro membership. I have access to the Sheet editor... and I am immediately swamped with all manner of stuff I know nothing about. Can't I cut / paste bits of the already-existing sheets I know and use regularly, and put them together into a usable format for my players? Can't it be that easy? It seems like you need a degree in coding to make a character sheet.  I just spent $100 so that I could make custom character sheets. Nobody said it was going to be functionally impossible, unless I am an employee of (insert video game company here.)  Help?

Like, is there not some sort of "Roll20 for Dummies" template that I can use? When I see an editor for html, css, translations, and preview, this is not what I signed up for. Let me cut / paste, take bits from other sheets... that's what I thought I was buying. 

Welcome to pro and custom sheets Dan! Creating character sheets is indeed a complex endeavor. Many new users think that it is as easy as uploading a PDF or doing no code. Unfortunately, it requires html, css, and JavaScript. We (the community authors) are happy to help anyone get started. There's is also comprehensive documentation on the wik i, although if you are jumping into coding for the first time, it'll probably feel overwhelming. For a guided walkthrough of how to build a sheet, I've been writing a weekly series of forum posts about how I build sheets, A Sheet Author's Journey.  It's a guide to go from no code at all to a full sheet. It's also possible to edit the code for the existing 3.5 sheet. You can find that code in the roll20 character sheet repository . Unfortunately, that sheet code will not be compatible with my sheet tutorial.

Hey Scott -- thanks, I will certainly endeavour to read your series. Off the top of my head though, even after a quick scan of the first entry, I already have to educate myself on what these things mean:  thj2e ,  scaffold , Json, SCSS, PUG... I know this is supposed to be an easy entry into making character sheets... but if you have no clue about what any of this means... it's just a crash course in the purgatory of coding and web design. I am not looking forward to it. 

Dan, if you do find out that this is more than you are willing to invest time and effort into, you can always contact Roll20 with a  Help Center Request , and explain your issue. They have a pretty liberal refund policy. That being said, there are some pretty nice perks to being a Pro user, most popular being the transmogrifier (being able to move things freely between games you have created, and the API, which allows you to run any number of useful scripts to provide automation or information, most of which require no programming knowledge, being plug and play.

To add to other replies, if there is a single, specific thing you want to do, post a question here in the character sheet forum, and people will likely explain how to do it. You can ask multiple questions. For example, if you made a thread something like, "I want to modify this sheet (give link) to replace d20 skill rolls to percentages, how do I do it?" its very likely you'll get an explanation showing you how to do that thing for one or two skills, and you can then go off and do it for the rest. You don't have to start out building everything from scratch - if you are just modifying an existing sheet, ask for help and we'll guide you.

Here are few super-simple sheets, which have recently been submitted to roll20. <a href="https://github.com/Roll20/roll20-character-sheets/tree/master/SalvageUnion" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Roll20/roll20-character-sheets/tree/master/SalvageUnion</a> <a href="https://github.com/Roll20/roll20-character-sheets/tree/master/notequest" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Roll20/roll20-character-sheets/tree/master/notequest</a> <a href="https://github.com/Roll20/roll20-character-sheets/tree/master/Sorcerer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Roll20/roll20-character-sheets/tree/master/Sorcerer</a> They should be more simple starting points than the ones mentioned in: Character Sheet Development Getting Started Using Custom Sheets Building Sheets (Main Page) Tutorials Code Restrictions Examples , Templates Pattern Libraries