Online Character Sheet - part1

I'm working on a new online character sheet for Beacon on Roll20.  The previous character sheet has been up there since around 2015 and although I'm super happy that I had someone build it for me, it's now old and parts of it don't work right anymore.  I needed to update some things anyway and I really had some ideas on how I wanted the sheet to support online play so I decided to update it myself this time.

I looked a a bunch of other Roll20 character sheets and decided that the one closest to what I wanted was the DCC_Tabbed sheet.  The beauty of open sourced code is you can reference it and so I rolled up my sleeves and started ripping the DCC sheet all apart and hacking together my dream character sheet.

Sneak peek of the new Beacon online sheet

The first thing I wanted to do was to remove all the interactive dice rollers embedded in the sheet.  I understand why these are so popular on Roll20 sheets but honestly I think they are more trouble than they are worth since there are so many modifiers to rolls or different circumstances possible having these hard coded seems problematic.  I totally agree with having the sheet calculate as much information as possible for players, however those calculations should just facilitate the players making a roll, not lock them into anything.  If a player knows they have a +3 bonus from stats and whatnot but they want to try for advantage on the roll, then I would rather they had that conversation in game then rolled the using the dice roller app and verbally add the bonuses rather than spend time hunting down which roller to use and which buttons to press.  I also dislike the rollers that announce success or failure since they have no GM input to determine that.  I would not like to have a player roll and get a exciting "Success" to then contradict that because it didn't have all the info.  What a bummer that would be.  I prefer to have the ability to call for rolls without giving out the specific DC or stop the action to have the players plug a bunch of info into various dialogue boxes.  I can say 'this is pretty hard' or 'should be easy' to keep things a bit mysterious, and in combat I really would rather have them figure out that the monster has pretty thick skin by making a few attacks first.  I don't think you an improve a lot on reaching for the dice to be honest, someone needs to invent physical dice that interact with virtual tabletops.

Inventory tab selected

However where online sheets shine I think is they way they can keep track of stuff for you.  Paper sheets keep track of items really well but not so much the stuff that changes a lot.  The new Beacon sheet has all sorts of spots to list your money and items, but it also calculates your stat and skill bonuses, it calculates the number of attacks you get and your base attack and damage bonus based on your level and class so you don't need to look it up.  If you put on some new armour, it sorts out your AC for you.  One of the biggest issues I had in playtesting was having the players deal with HP because they needed to track both HP and spell fatigue.  In the online sheet if you cast a spell or spend HP to avoid damage it shows you your remaining HP automatically and can display that info in different spots.
I like this sort of thing a lot since it means less time fiddling with the sheet and more time role-playing.

Another thing that the sheets do very well is let you add or remove rows of items and I wanted to leverage this.  If you have a lot of weapons and countable resources they you have that area of the sheet expanded by adding more item rows.  The spell book takes up no space until you start adding in spells, and the spell descriptions can be hidden so they don't get in the way.  That dynamic aspect is very appealing.

One thing that struck me about the online sheet that is how responsive it is to some of the stuff that I put into Beacon to make it grittier but was an actual pain at the table, choosing when to recalculate your bonuses was always an issue with the way that damage applies to your stats.  If you are playing at the table and you take stat damage in a fight I generally don't bother to ask a player to modify their bonuses but online this is automatic so the intended mechanic of making true damage really suck actually works better online.  I also have the idea to have conditions impact things in real time which is in exciting idea.  These things can be pretty vicious and can have a kick-me-when-I'm-down vibe however and I will have to see how that play-tests out to understand the impacts.

I estimate I'm about 75% finished on this.  I need some time to find the bugs and there is a lot of temptation to keep adding in stuff.  The Trail of Cthulhu character sheet in Roll20 has a nice feature where you can lock and unlock the core stats when you 'level up' so that they don't get changed by mistake mid-game and another one that lets you reset your pools between sessions.  Those are features I like a lot but I will probably leave them off the table for now.   I need to get this out and then update the Beacon v7 PDF to go with it so I can start play testing.