Over the next few days I hope to make a new Hammercalled Character Sheet.
This is a sticking point for a number of the Hammercalled products. The Quick Start, as much as I'm generally happy with it, doesn't have particularly useful character sheets. They're really sparse, and not professional looking.
Three lessons I've learned:
- Just make the darn thing modular. The current design is like 50% of the way there, but I did it all as one big layout, so now I can't move stuff around. Likewise, upcoming changes make adding and removing elements individually desirable (to say nothing of the huge pain that updating the sheet when minor changes happen currently is).
- Consider all layouts simultaneously. The boxes that work really well to add some distinctions to a digital form-filled sheet just squash hand-written or printed sheets, which can't be zoomed.
- For the love of all that is holy, maximize used space. That require precision like I wasn't using in my previous sheets.
The other thing is that the interim form-fillable one I use when playtesting is awful. It works okay if you're using it form-fillable, but not at all by hand. I really want to have one unified character sheet, so that's not ideal.
A poor craftsman blames his tools, and all, but I wasn't using Scribus at the time and I was compromising some of the things I needed in order to get a quick final product.
Another consideration is that with the Rules Reference 2.0, I'm moving away from having a single core configuration as the default mode of play. As such, it might be nice to make the elements for the character sheet by type, then work them into a finished sheet.
My plan right now is to use Inkscape to do at least basic mock-ups of the geometry, making .svg files that are essentially boxes containing elements like the basic name/player/etc. header, and the associated elements you'll want for the Attributes system, the Specializations system, and the Gear System.
These will then be able to be imported directly into Scribus, and dropped into place. From there I can add form elements to make the sheets work digitally.
The idea behind going this way is that I can make the basic .svg templates and .sla templates available for people who want to make their own derivatives.
We're still a while away from something that really mimics a traditional commercial-publication RPG. I'll probably need to fix that by the time Genship Exiles comes out, but Genship Exiles is almost a spin-off in its own right, so it'll have its own branding that comes on the character sheet.
I'll post updates. I might even do an 