Hey guys. Been a long time since I've been on the board! Some of you old timers might remember me from the XNA 3d engine thread, where I was working on a hex based 3D engine, before Microsoft killed off the whole XNA engine thing.
Anyway was idle on BT for a long time. Recently I dusted off some old books and bought some new books.. and I'm getting a campaign rolling with my buddies.
The character creation process about killed the whole thing before it got underway. 6 hours in a room with scratch paper and at the end of it I had a bunch of confused players. :)
So I've been working on this spreadsheet thingy... Normally I'm a .NET programmer and doing work in VBA makes me feel like a 1995 throwback (where's my flannel shirt and grunge music?)
Ahh I regress. I was going to do this as a .NET program (and still might) but for cross platform functionality (many of our players have Apple stuff) I decided to stick straight with MS Office (Excel, specifically).
In the beginning it was just to help them keep track of XP but it's... growing.
All of the aToW life builder stuff is there (note you still have to, at this point, look at the book and add your skills and track prerequisites)
Started doing an inventory system...
[imgwidth=1024 ]http://i.imgur.com/GfN4blK.jpg[/img]
Which involved a whole lot of data entry (still not done with that...)
Some custom VBA forms code to "buy" stuff... (starting funds works off of Wealth, while inventory selection works off Equipped trait to check availability based on game year, faction, etc.)
Printable character sheets...
So my question is here, there's a LOT of stuff in this spreadsheet which has been typed in straight off of aToW book.
The character sheet, for instance, is a direct PDF print capture with fields overlaid, and it still has the Catalyst logo, etc.
While not a big deal for an in-house thing only for our group... I want to find out from the powers that be what your thoughts are on what needs to done for a more public release? I certainly don't want to step on any lawyers toes. I'm a fan of this franchise (a big one, for multi-decades), and want to make sure that I go about any sort of public domain (read as; free) release of the spreadsheet when it's completed properly.
Thoughts?