Hey TG what programs do you use to design your homebrew RPG's character sheets?

This thing

nbos.com/products/character-sheet

Looked funky at first, but after I fiddled with it for about 15 minutes managed to make some pretty good sheets. Lines match up and shit too which is great.

Our groups' necromancer uses a regular sheet printed on constructed paper with pasted chicken bones dividing the sections, like macabre macaroni art.

OpenOffice

OP here, thanks TG. I'm gonna try to use notepad++.

How fucked am i?

What part of underfull \hbox (badness 10000) is that hard to understand?

How do I layout a rulebook out well? I can't keep using MS Word with tables.

Look, when you write papers on algorithms, you'll learn to hate Latex's insistent formatting retardation too.
It doesn't come up a lot, but when it does, it's a total bitch.

OpenOffice, Photoshop for sheet mockups.

best answer

Adobe InDesign

MSpaint

GIMP and free fonts are your friends. Open office too is worth a look.

That's wonderful.

OpenOffice is surprisingly powerful if you know what you're doing with it.

See: drive.google.com/open?id=0B20ZFeyGKxcwTFd6QmgxS1NSUWs

I'm also an ADD techtard

>Using anything other than InDesign
fucking degenerates

>adobe products

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What the hell kind of lunatic would watermark that?

Valid question

Really fucking conducive to playtesting and marketing. thanks

I just wait for someone else to do it for me.

Instead of gimp, check out paint.net. It's a little easier to use for novices and just as free.

Note to self, Absurd plot hook n0. 2341: Mad man has replaced every work of art in the land with watermarked versions and demands payment to change it back.

Roll20's custom html coding.

Why? That's not a page layout tool.

How do you use InDesign? I have a copy but I've never used it,.

I downloaded Scribus but I have no idea how to make it look good.

Inkscape and some PDF editing software afterwards to add your own form-fillable text boxes.

I made a prototype rulebook thing in Photoshop ages ago, I need to revisit it to do all the fixes, but here it is. I really think Photoshop is easy to use.

How does that work?

Type tool (t), selection tools (v, a) and paragraph styles (f11) gets you at least 80% there.

What about images and background stuff?

Excel.

you can try LaTeX if you want a reason to kill yourself later, but HTML with CSS is much more approachable, then when you're viewing the page in your browser just print to pdf.

To have images not look like ass enable high performance display setting from view->display performance.

Images are treated as objects, so you're going to need object styles (ctrl+f7) and you probably want to disable all other attributes except frame fitting. You can just drag and drop images on the pages.

Backgrounds are just image objects behind everything else.

If you want to use the same background for multiple pages you create a master page in the pages panel (f12). Create either a 1 page master or a 2 page master if you want a mirrored background for a spread.

When you have your master, just drop in your images and fit them however you want.

When you're done right click a page -> apply master to pages; the master's elements are displayed on all pages you applied the master to, and are uneditable unless explicitly desired.

Humans just know how to think outside the box.

I was wondering if I'd be the only one using HTML/CSS.

Thanks, that's looking a lot better.

No matter what you design, an astute player can substitute it in a heartbeat for far cheaper at their own design specs with a blank sheet of ruled paper.

What will your product bring to the table?

You also said you are a cheapskate.

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When your group learns the system, you can play it without any physical implements. It lends itself fully to the idea of letting the collective story itself having full authority instead of detracting from that. Minimalist design, agnostic from setting.

The reason why I made this thread is so I can make reproducible sheets that I can give to playtesters and to just have a template for, which should be obvious. Making people write it out themselves isn't conducive as a selling point or a first-session teaching tool, from a boardgame perspective.

Cheapskate alluding to I don't want to pay for a program.

InDesign and Illustrator.

Google Spreadsheet and Adobe Illustrator

Notepad.

Vim.

Sometimes I align shit vertically. But fuck it, my players can read. They aren't knuckle-dragging idiots who need pretty pictures to direct their eyes.

So it's basically ASCII art txt files, or do you just mean you have players list things out after :?

Fillable form that does calculations on the fly. And it'll bring in character.

Does anyone have examples of character sheets they've made?

OP here, it's in the OP

40K rpg black crusade sheet

I've been working on this one off and on for a bit, and I think it's finally finished. It's made using Google Sheets, which I absolutely adore. I'm able to automate significant parts of it, display instantly-updated information that I feel is important (those health bars, for instance, or the color-coded inventory), and share it through Google Docs, which allows my players to use it while I retain ownership. It's a huge help to be able to flip through their character sheets on my laptop while we're playing--just in case I need to know who'd holding the alien artifact or whether or not anyone has the ability to actually fly that helicopter in the next room.

I don't know that I'll ever go back to paper and pencil.

kek
Kids can't handle all them lines and spaces these days.
double kek

This is why we are slaves.
No we don't.

I'm still working on this
This looks great, congratulations

I like it. Did you hear that he's going to be making a new edition?

Thanks! I haven't heard about a second edition SWN, but that's great news. When did he announce it?

Form-fillable

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I simply used MS Word to create my own custom 'Mutant Year Zero' character sheets as the default ones waste a lot of space and ink.

The first I heard about it was a few days ago on Kickstarter.

Man, I remember that thread. Good times.
Part of me wants to give them to my players and spend a session filling them out, just to drive them insane

>Google
Hm, interesting.

>Gummi Bears
Are they Haribo?

Hmm, pretty close.
I'd rather use Draw to make a vectorized sheet with style and freer "grid".

I actually made a character generator in Calc one time, when my homebrew was much more complex. Really fun to work with the UI design elements to make comboboxes and stuff

Adobe Illustrator for me

>Inkscape
My melanin enriched comrade.

>LaTeX
I want this meme to die.

Good luck with that. It's entrenched in a number of areas because while it sucks, the alternatives suck even more.

Scanning hand written documents is about three times faster than LaTeX if you're good with LaTeX and if you're not a spastic who can't write it's just as good.

The one true path is just held back by pointless elitism about what "professional work" should look like. LOOK like. In fucking math.

Always this.

Forever this.

Although, I should probably sharpen my PS skills for card mock-ups but I can usually do pretty well in iD too.

>if you're not a spastic who can't write it's just as good.
It really isn't. Even if you're this guy, LaTeX will still be more readable. Try doing first couple steps of 4th order Runge Kutta and tell me how it turns out for you.

Obviously you won't use it to write your shopping list, but for any templates meant to be re-used and distributed it is the golden standard.

Hell, even moot considered implementing [tex] [/tex] tags at one point.

This.

I even have a DM Google Sheet set up to take in the info from the character sheets. Makes everything a lot easier.

I've used this thing for years now, mostly because I already have tons of editing work put into it at this point. It has a decent amount of usability because you can at least edit the grid size, but I'll be the first to say it runs like actual ass -- regardless of your computer's power. (At least if you are trying to use grid sizes smaller than default)

If you can't be bothered to make your own grid, and want something very simple to work with, this is an acceptable choice. However I think your effort would probably be better spent learning to use a stronger program.

Let them know a stranger on the internet loves them.

Also "macabre macaroni art" is a fantastic phrase.

I am, to this day, waiting for a proper argument in favor of LaTeX. The only thing that always gets repeated is perfect preservation of formatting across years and versions and that's demonstrably not fucking true.

Same here. Can do calculated boxes and all that stuff as well with it. For making neat PDF character sheets it's what I use.
Tables from scribus itself suck. But luckily it can incorporate LaTeX, so I use that for making tables, if I need it.
But I still suck at making stuff pretty.