Dynamic Character Sheets was our #1 requested feature in our poll a while back, and we’ve had a chance to do some work on it. It’s an exciting time, but we want to get some feedback and iterate a little before we push it out to everyone.
Ultimately, we don’t want to be in the business of maintaining a character sheet (or six) for every game system we support. Besides consuming way too much time, we haven’t played all these games, so we’d probably get the sheets wrong anyway.
To combat this problem, we’re trying to lay the groundwork that will allow for user-submitted character sheet templates, called Dynamic Sheet Templates (DST). A DST is composed of the following:
- An HTML file laying out the markup.
- A CSS file that corresponds to the HTML, styling it up to look nice.
- (Optional) Some image assets that are used by the CSS (or directly in the HTML)
- (Optional) A javascript file for auto-filling values on the sheet (ie. calculate BAB from STR and level). Note: Some knowledge of jQuery will probably be required, but only the very basics.
What we need right now is a handful of beta testers who are skilled in HTML/CSS (and JS/jQuery, if possible) to start playing with the underlying system. We need a couple people to make simple DSTs and tell us how easy it is to work with and toss out ideas of what we could do better. We’ll be releasing a “developer’s kit” (a handful of files + a README…) in a couple days and we’d like to line up some testers to run through the process.
If you’ve got the skillset, and you’re interested in helping out, please send me an email and make sure to note how much experience you have with HTML/CSS. Creating a DST isn’t all that hard, but if you want it to look good then you’ll need some basic positional CSS skill.
Update: The response has been exciting, to say the least. I think we have enough beta testers for now, but if you’re still interested, come to the forum thread and join the discussion.
