Monday, August 18, 2014

Geek/Nerd Overlap

Ok, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying geek. But, I don't really consider myself a "nerd" per se. One is social, the other is academic. Basically, I love geek culture, but I suck at science and math.

However, due to my work experience, I'm kind of a whiz at MS Excel. On Friday, I had some downtime at work. So, I opened Excel and proceeded to create a spreadsheet using forumlae that would generate the bare-bones of a 5e character when you hit the F9 button. The results are hit or miss. I gave the abilities a spread of 6-18, rather than 3-18, to reflect rolling 3d6 and re-rolling 1's. Here are a couple of the better outcomes.



I'll probably flesh both of these out into full on characters, just because. Right now the sheet only randomizes what you see here. The racial modifiers to Abilities are not factored in, but are listed in case you decide you don't like the race it gives you (plus coding that to automatically calculate would be a pain). I might add in some other things like Starting Money and Backgrounds.

What's the point of doing this? Well, to get your ball rolling, of course. How many times have you sat down to create a new character, and realized you have no idea what you want to make? Well, open this puppy up, and start hitting F9 until something grabs you. It'd probably also be good for generating NPC ideas as well.

I did this sort of thing ages ago. Back when 2e was out, The World Builder's Guidebook was a really neat tool. So, I basically took a bunch of the major tables for world generation, and put them into an Excel sheet. In that one, hitting F9 would generate the bare bones of an entire campaign setting. Including races, geography type (no maps, though), a pantheon type, and other niceties. It was pretty cool, and I played around with it a lot.

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