Roll20 Data Delve coming 28 May

[Hermes Serpent]

Congrats to forum member Heilemann for his honourable mention on the Character sheet challenge over at Rolll20. From teh 28th May you'll be able to use his sheet for your own on-line One Ring games.

Thanks, Michael

[Heilemann]

Yir welcome. By all means give it a whirl and let me know if it works satisfactorily. I have a pull request pending with a few minor updates (Experience Point fields for one), and I'd like to turn some of the sections into tabs to make it easier to focus on things; but that'll be for later.

Data Delve is a great update; it really opens up a lot of possibilities and makes macros and scripting a lot easier.

[Valarian]

About time they look at character sheets. It's been a major lack for Roll20. Like most VTT designers, they've judged the map and effects to be more important than the most basic and important (IMO) requirement in any roleplaying tool - the character.

If this going to be available to free & backer level, or only the subscribers?
Are you still going to have to set everything up from scratch for each campaign you run?

[Hermes Serpent]

Don't know officially about availability but I suspect from what's been said that adding a sheet will be as simple as selecting a game and dropping down a box containing a list of approved character sheets. When it comes to setting up games you only need to do that once and can spawn as many copies as you want containing all the macros etc., you developed or scripts added.

[Mordagnir]

Great work, Heilemann. This may be the push needed to make me a paying subscriber.

[Heilemann]

About time they look at character sheets. It's been a major lack for Roll20. Like most VTT designers, they've judged the map and effects to be more important than the most basic and important (IMO) requirement in any roleplaying tool - the character.

Yeah, it's baffling. And for the longest time they were very opposed to implementing it. I like their platform a lot, but I also have some quibbles with certain things (as do others). But bottom line is that without Character Sheets it was much harder to write maintainable macros or scripts, because you couldn't even be sure an attribute was available, and if it wasn't, your macros would throw a fit. Big step up.

If this going to be available to free & backer level, or only the subscribers?
Are you still going to have to set everything up from scratch for each campaign you run?

I'm not sure, but I think it'll be available for free, but only the pre-made sheets (of which TOR is one). If you want to build your own, it might be a Mentor thing.

And yes, you have to setup everything from scratch, unless you already did once, in which case you can transmogrif your work from the old campaign into the new one.

It's one-step-at-a-time of course, and software development takes a long time, but that's definitely one of the more annoying things. Not that I start a lot of campaigns, but a framework for letting people easily set up for a certain system would be a lot of help. Most of it is very hands-on. Even when you're off and running, setting up a new creature still requires you to copy and customize macros and what not for each of them, even though they're basically the same (in terms of what the LM needs in macros etc) for a game like TOR.

My biggest issue at the moment is that as we play more and more sessions, the Journal is being absolutely filled with stuff, and the tagging system is horribly insufficient. It's an issue that's been raised many times over, but Riley, the dev, doesn't seem to understand why it's a problem, because apparently he starts a new campaign for every session he runs. Boggles my mind; but such is the nature of the beast.

Nevertheless, it's a great tool, and I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it so far. Best of all, it's very hackable because it's all just HTML, CSS and JS (and Canvas, which isn't).

[Valarian]

As I'm not a subscriber, only a backer, I don't think I can get at the transmogrifier. That also seems to be the only way to copy from one campaign to another. Without it, you have to start from scratch every time. The reason I asked is that, all too often, the new functionality is only coming out for subscribers. I don't intend to subscribe, as I hate that business model. I'd rather pay for something and then get a return on that through use. A subscription means that you're paying, even if you don't get the full use that month. It's why I still use Fantasy Grounds. It not only has the ability to create a new campaign from a template, and create character sheets at will, it also is a fixed price. 4 months of Roll20 gets me a full Fantasy Grounds license, which I can use beyond that for no extra outlay. I've used Fantasy Grounds for 7 years so far. Until Roll20 gives me this, instead of concentrating on map features that I'll never use, I'm afraid I'm less than enamoured of their efforts. To me, those two things are fundamental. I don't mind setting stuff up once, but then I want to save it and use it again. If someone else has gone to the trouble of setting up a game I'd like to play, I want to be able to use their template as a start for mine. I can only do that if I subscribe, which is adding to my initial backer outlay.

[Hermes Serpent]

@Valerian, I'm not a subscriber of any kind to Roll20 and I can copy a campaign and select all or nothing to copy from the existing one. Your understanding of how the feature works seems to be at fault there.

[Valarian]

Thanks, I'll give that another go then. The last time I checked the software and wiki, it looked like it was a subscriber only option.

[pumpkin]

@heilemann, are you taking comments about the character sheet in this thread or through some other method?

I'm new to roll20 but have been setting up the one ring campaign in it plus using your great character sheet

a few comments/questions

1. the combat values section don't seem to auto create an corresponding attribute, which means they don't save until you manually create an attribute for them - although maybe i am doing something wrong? this also means the dice roller for armour doesn't work until the attributes it uses are manually created (head-gear etc)
2. related to the above the formula for generating parry score doesn't seem to work/pick up the wits value
3. Once the favoured weapon box is ticked, that persists (and hence weapon is always underlined) even if tick box is then unchecked... seems to be no way of getting rid of underlining - although again i could be doing it wrong!
4. how do you favour a skill?

overall though, it is looking good and seems to be working well!