Character Sheets and Software

[Dregg]

It's that time...
I need to start doing Character sheets for "Bad Muthas" and I'm going through a Dilemma. Besides the Design/Layout Torment, I'm haveing thoughts as to what programs to use. I was thinking Printshop 12 or Word, but I wanted to pick brains (Mmmmmm Brains) and see what the others are using?

Thanks in advance

[Andrew Martin]

It's that time...
I need to start doing Character sheets for "Bad Muthas" and I'm going through a Dilemma. Besides the Design/Layout Torment, I'm haveing thoughts as to what programs to use. I was thinking Printshop 12 or Word, but I wanted to pick brains (Mmmmmm Brains) and see what the others are using?

Thanks in advance

Our group uses large MS Excel spreadsheets on PCs, but then we're using (min-maxing) ICE Rolemaster and Spacemaster with a goodly sized chunk of the optional rules. Otherwise we use plain or lined paper. In most conventional RPGs we've found that normal characters sheets soon become worthless after the third or fourth session.

When technology advances enough to make it cheap enough, I want to put character sheets and supporting information on tablet or slate PCs, probably using custom software, perhaps using a wiki and a browser or similar. So, I'd like to see information stored in XML, then with the aid of XSL stylesheets, I can arrange to transform this information into HTML and browse it with a browser, or manipulate it in custom written software.

To get your information into XML format, I'd suggest using MS Word or Office 2003, or Open Office 1.1.

Just some thoughts.

[Marhault]

I've always found Excel (or any spreadsheet program, if you don't have Excel) to be excellent for character sheets.
 
I guess the main reason is that you can easily format your information, leave blanks where you need them, and have everything look pretty nice with a minimum of effort.

Of course, I've never used much in the way of graphics on any of my character sheets, so I don't know how well it works for that sort of thing. . .

[DevP]

I've previous laid out intensive things with Word Processors (MS or OpenOffice.org) or Adobe PageMaker (which is good but pricey). Doing layout in Word is pretty annoying, but it works, and you can make it go pretty.

[MachMoth]

The best thing about doing OpenOffice.org (starting in 1.1, and in older unix versions) is you can send it's wordprocessing docs to PDF.  Good for web publishing.

[Kester Pelagius]

It's that time...
I need to start doing Character sheets for "Bad Muthas" and I'm going through a Dilemma. Besides the Design/Layout Torment, I'm haveing thoughts as to what programs to use. I was thinking Printshop 12 or Word, but I wanted to pick brains (Mmmmmm Brains) and see what the others are using?

Thanks in advance

Depends on what you want to do.

I used OOo (OpenOffice.org) to create the character sheets for Crystal Spheres, but they are minimalistic.  OOo, while a free alternative office suite, is roughly a 60 MB D/L, if you're on DSL/Cable modem no prob.

Of course you could use whatever word processor you are most familiar with and print to PDF, if that's your worry.  There's quite a few good free print to PDF utilities out there.  Search the forums, should be a thread or two with links.