WOIN character sheet formatting issues and other possible improvements

Hi, I recently opened two github issues related to the characters sheets for the What's Old is New system (WOIN).

The first issue is a small but important formatting bug, where the sheet displays the values for the main attributes offset a significant amount to the left. The leftmost value is off the edge of the page some of the time. This is purely a CSS problem, no knowledge of the game system is required to fix it.

The second issue is a request for a bunch of more general improvements to the sheet's functionality, and probably requires at least some knowledge of WOIN to work on (though I'd be happy to help anyone who doesn't know the system but does know Roll20's character sheet systems well). I don't know if all of my suggestions are practical. Some parts (such as updating the status tracks to the versions described in the 1.2 edition of N.E.W. and the erratas for the other books) should be pretty easy. Some others may need some discussion before the best solution can be decided on. Here's a few of the more complicated parts:

• Should the sheet try to calculate movement speeds automatically based on the character's attributes and skills, or just let the player type them in? The challenge here is that exploits can change the calculation in some cases (and encoding the rules for all exploits is surely not something we can do in the sheet). That said, we can probably support *most* exploits with just a few kinds of modifiers (additional base speed, alternative movement types becoming primary movement types, and percentage based modifiers to jump distances).
• How should the various modifiers for attacks be entered on the sheet? The basic attack pool is (Attribute (STR or AGI for melee, AGI or INT for ranged) + Skill + Equipment Quality (capped at skill level)), all of that capped at grade level +/- Modifers (e.g. range/flanking/cover penalties, and exploit dice). The damage roll includes both dice and flat damage. It is Weapon Damage Dice + Modifier Dice + Weapon Flat damage + Size of STR die pool (as flat damage, for melee weapons only).

Okay, got a test game here.  I fixed the first issue in the test game.

I know a little bit of the Roll20 character sheet rocess- I made the WOIN sheet- but I won't claim to be the most skilled here.  I will gladly help where I can, but I've never played the game. 

Thanks so much for working on this, both now, and before when you first created the sheet!

I think you've definitely solved the larger formatting issues. The only small further improvement I can see would be to hide the increment/decrement arrows for the uneditable die pool fields (the ones with "d6" after them), both for the attributes and in the skills section below.

A big question I have about the remaining improvements is whether the skills entered on the character sheet can be used in calculations elsewhere. Some places can use a hard-coded skill name, e.g. the "running" skill gives a bonus to speed. In other situations though we'd want the player to select a skill. For instance, if I enter a skill "rifles" with a value of 3 (giving a 2d6 pool), it would be nice if we could have a dropdown in the "attacks" section where I could select "rifles" to get that 2d6 added to my attack roll (like we already do with attributes). The game doesn't exhaustively define the skills that can be used for combat (and players are free to make up new skills, with GM approval), so the list for the dropdown would need to be based on the list of skills entered in the other part of the character sheet, not hard coded.

So by coincidence I was looking into figuring out how to edit a character sheet tonight and stumbled onto this thread. Specifically, I wanted to edit the WOIN sheet to include the Vital Defense added in the 1.1 errata last year. While tweaks are being made, would it be possible to add this in?

I can.  But, uh...can you explain what the errata has changed?  Again, I have never played the game.

Vital Defense is a new category of defense, to go along with Ranged Defense, Melee Defense and Mental Defense (which the sheet already has).

Let me try to reorganize my thoughts on changes to the sheet:

• I think the "Movement" section at the bottom of the main section of the sheet should be extensively changed. There are sort of two directions it could go: either just a simple version that lets the player fill in the values (but adding buttons to broadcast them to chat), or a more "fancy" but harder to code version that additionally tries to compute the values for you. The latter may be hard because it needs to look up skill ratings and the associated die pools, though the skill names can be hard coded ("running", "climbing", etc.).
  In either case, I think the "Carry" field should move to the Equipment section, and "Actions", "Initiative" and "Perception" can be eliminated.
  The useful fields that already exist are "Move", "Climb", and "Swim". The "Jump" field should be split in two giving "Jump (horizontal)" and "Jump (vertical)". We might want to add "Zero-G", "High-G" and "Low-G" as alternative movement types. Those are only for NEW though, and "Low-G" is less used than the other two (it's not used in the main book, but is in a bunch of EONS stuff). It wouldn't be the end of the world to leave them out.
  
• The section with "Defenses" at the top of the Combat/Equipment page is mostly good, but it could be even better. Adding a field for Vital Defense is definitely needed. Moving the Carry rating from the movement section to here would also be a good idea, since this tab is where all the equipment weights are listed. Maybe the sheet could total the weights listed below up for us in a "total weight carried" field? It would also be good to have buttons to broadcast these stats (especially the defenses, as the GM needs to know them).
• The "Attacks" rows on that tab are a little bit awkward to use. In thinking about this a bit more, I think the ideal solution is to replace the Attribute dropdown field with a Skill dropdown (which would add both the skill die pool and the attribute pool associated with the skill on the Basic tab). This may be hard to code. In any case, the remaining columns should be "Weapon Quality" (a die pool modifier), "Attack modifier" (for after-die-pool cap modifiers), "Damage" (die pool), "Damage Modifier" (also a die pool, but temporary), "Static Damage" (flat damage) and "Range Increment" (though this is the only field not actually used directly in the computation of attack rolls, so maybe it could be removed if the row is too long).
  My goal here is for the values that are specific to each shot to default to zero (that's Attack Modifier and Damage Modifier in the list above). Maybe there's a better way to add them (e.g. a popup each time you click the button to roll)? Modifiers that remain the same baring level ups and so on should be separated from the temporary ones, so you don't accidentally keep a modifier that was situational, or remove a permanent mod who's origin you momentarily don't recall.
  Its a bit tricky because the attribute+skill+quality die pools are the only ones that are capped. Extra dice from other modifiers can exceed the cap.
  It might not be unreasonable to remove the range field from the attack line, since it's not used directly to roll the dice (it just informs the choice of modifiers). On the other hand, if we have more than enough room to fit the crucial weapon stats, it would be handy to include the weapon's weight and damage type along with the other stuff.
• The status tracks section at the bottom of the page are very confusing, and they appear to be partly obsolete. The 1.2 edition of NEW changed the tracks from having four levels to two temporary levels and a somewhat separate third "persistent" level. The current sheet seems to be mixing up the old four level tracks with the damage types that cause the conditions (it's not unreasonable to associate them, but it's not one to one). I'd suggest two separate columns. One column is for the status tracks which I listed in the bug report. Each condition should have four settings (e.g radio buttons), None, Temporary, Severe and Persistent. This replaces the five buttons and the dropdown on the existing sheet.
  The second column lists damage types, and gives a button to roll on the crit table to pick a status. You can see the table in the WOIN rules reference here (that page also has the full list of conditions). Alternatively, the damage types table could just be dropped from the sheet completely, since it's not a thing specific to the character.
• My last request is definitely only a "nice to have" thing, not a bug. I think it would be a very nice improvement to the Advancement tab if it had two columns, one for XP rewards (adding up into the Total Earned field), and the other for XP expenditures (this one already exists, and adds up into the Total Spent). It might be nice to also list the XP costs of different kinds of advancement at the bottom of the page. A new grade costs 10x the character's new grade level. An extra universal exploit costs 5x the character's next grade level (half the cost of a new grade). Incremental advances to attributes and skills cost 3x the new attribute or skill rating.
  

Sorry - to clarify another form of defense was added with the errata - Vital Defense. In the Combat/Equipment tab it just be another box in the same line as the Melee Defense, Ranged Defense and Mental Defense boxes. 

Thank you very much for your time - the character sheet has been a huge help for my group, especially since the system isn't one that is terribly popular. 

I decided to try to work on one of the simpler improvements I'd suggested above, and I've had some luck updating Advancement tab. It now lets you enter XP awards, just like you could add XP spending before. They each have one column, and get totaled up automatically.

I'll take a look at the movement and defense tables some time tomorrow afternoon. You can see my progress on my github fork.

Hey all.  I ran a NEW game a while ago and my group is getting ready to come back to it, but we noticed the issue with the attributes offset and its making things difficult.  I see you have been working on this and it sounds like you fixed it, but for some reason the sheet still shows wrong in my game.  I wont pretend to understand how all the stuff he works, but is there something I need to do to get the correct sheet to be present in my game? 

Some one else already was submitting a fix, and I don't want to step on some one else's toes. 

I've made some changes to the sheet, that actually got merged already. I have more changes planned, but I'm not sure when I'll get them in.

I didn't try to fix the layout issue, as I'm pretty useless when it comes to CSS. I did see your test game a while back that seemed to fix it.

If you can push that in github, @CoalPoweredPuppet, we can try to get it merged in too. Don't worry too much about conflicting changes, git should take care of that for us when the changes need to get merged.

Added my code on top BlckKnght's code.  It is show cased here.  Anything else while I have it open?

This is only a css change, so it should be easy to merge...I think?

One of my players asked for a "notes" section, but its certainly not necessary.  Just fixing the Attributes would be great.  Thanks again, its much appreciated.

Pull request submitted.  The player does have access to the Bio and Information part of the character journal.  

Thats true. I will remind them.  Thanks again.