Paul,
It's really not that complicated. No more so, really, than 7th Sea or Savage Worlds. Bookkeeping feels about even with 7th Sea. My understanding is the system has a lot of World of Darkness vibe, but I can't attest to that as I've purposefully played very little WoD/nWoD.
Basic die rolls work like this: Roll # of d10s equal to your skill plus ability. Count the 7s. If you score as many or more successes that the Difficulty the GM has set for the task, you succeed. Pretty much blog-standard dice pool system.
Combat works pretty much the same way: Roll a # of d10s equal to your combat skill plus ability (usually Strength for melee, Agility for Ranged), minus the complication of your weapon (usually 1–3). Count your successes and compare it to the target's Avoidance rating. If you meet or exceed that score, you hit. Excess successes are added to your damage pool.
The Damage Pool: Roll a # of d10s equal to your Ability, plus the weapon's damage modifier (usually 1-4) and any excess successes you rolled in your attack, minus the target's Armor rating (usually 1–3). Count your successes. You do 1 point of damage for each success.
The Dodge/Parry roll: Players get a # of actions they can perform each combat round (1 complex or 2 quick actions). If they have any quick actions left over when the villain attacks, they can attempt a parry (for melee attacks) or dodge (ranged). They roll their Reflexes+Agility dice and count these successes. The villain's damage pool is reduced by this amount of dice, on top of whatever the armor score reduced it by.
If that sounds complicated, it's only because negative modifiers remove dice from your dice pool, not successes from your roll.
So there is a bit of counting involved on the table top. I'm sure an API script could automate all of this and you'd get results instantly. But since we're only using macros it can make for a lot of prompts. I could make a it look a lot less complicated like this:
/roll [[?{damage dice pool|1}-?{defense modifiers|0}
This puts all the figuring on the shoulders of the players and would probably make for a faster process. But since we're all new to the system, it felt better to put all the steps in there.
The macros I have already work just fine. So I don't need any third party fixes (unless you want to volunteer to help do the CSS formatting on our character sheet in about a month and a half! :)). In fact, here's a link to my macro/ability bible:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rltgrywc00kko53/character%20journal.docxYou can see a lot of the work I've put into there. My plan is to use the character sheet design process to clean up all the mess and make things leaner and meaner, which is in part why I started this thread.
See, what I'd really like to do is get rid of all of those abilities – especially for my monster/villain templates – and make them macros. Then, for the ability, it would just execute the macro (ie. Melee-Attack Ability is #Melee-Attack). That way, if I find something that is broken or doesn't work, I only have to fix it once and everything updates. I don't have to remember to go through my archives and update Werewolf v42's abilities because I've tweaked my basic melee-attack ability. Just update the macro and everything else fixes itself.
The catch is, for this to work without some headaches, I'd need to me able to augment a macro while executing it remotely. By that I mean, using the damage macro example, I could set up a pretty basic macro for a damage attack, but add the weapon damage as part of the character ability.
So the melee-damage macro might look like this:
/roll [[?{bonus successes|0}-?{Dodge? Successes|0}]]d10!10
The monster ability might look like this:
#melee-damage+6
I don't think I can do that. But there might be a trick to it someone else has figured out.
