Feedback wanted - Game Master's Excel Battlesheet

[Monty Lovering]

 

 

Game Master's Battlesheet

 

So a while back I realized that some DMs playing AD&D in its various incarnations were using an Excel spreadsheet to track NPCs in combat and I thought that this was a rather neat idea.

 

Finally got around to working on one for RuneQuest last night.

 

Below is the block that would exist for each character. Orange cells are calculated by the sheet, MPs and HPs are in yellow cells and the pale highlight is for cells you need to put values in. The column on the far left is designed to allow you to filter extraneous information; each NPC would have a number and the combat important values would be 1a, others 1b, etc.. I have used obvious abbreviations where necessary, and for the column for noting damage have used 'Dam' as some people will insert how much damage has been taken and others how many HP are left. 

 

A few calculated cells you'd have to delete in the blocks for weapons to remove MSRs for missile weapons and missile weapon SRs for melee weapons, etc.

This is actually a 'fork' of the one I will be using as I have various hellish homebrews, but I thought it would be nice to offer to make this available to people in a standard RQG format. But is anyone interested and what feedback do you have? Having done the donkey work and remembered how to use IF functions it would be simple to add non-bipedal hit locations. Would this be better in different tabs or shall I have a stab at adding non-biped columns to the same tab?

 

[resurrected duck]

I would have put the body components (head, left arm...) in columns instead. Like the weapon list. Same for characteristics. The table seems to be too wide for printing purpose. Anyway, nice work!

[Lordabdul]

On 3/12/2021 at 9:12 AM, Monty Lovering said:

But is anyone interested and what feedback do you have?

We'd need access to it to play with it before giving feedback 😉 

My first reaction was "oh, landscape orientation?". I'm used to stat blocks, with a more compact layout. But I guess that could work too depending on how you usually organize your screens and windows.

My next reaction was how "full featured" this seems to be. This may be good for a big bad evil NPC, but I think for the vast majority of combats I would use only a third of what you have there. But if you say you can hide the bottom half, for example, that's pretty good, and solves some of that, for when you just want the party to fight a handful of scorpionmen or wild animals.

Nice work!

[Monty Lovering]

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

We'd need access to it to play with it before giving feedback 😉 

My first reaction was "oh, landscape orientation?". I'm used to stat blocks, with a more compact layout. But I guess that could work too depending on how you usually organize your screens and windows.

My next reaction was how "full featured" this seems to be. This may be good for a big bad evil NPC, but I think for the vast majority of combats I would use only a third of what you have there. But if you say you can hide the bottom half, for example, that's pretty good, and solves some of that, for when you just want the party to fight a handful of scorpionmen or wild animals.

Nice work!

I’m going to share the next version. 

This is only envisaged as a digital version to be used on a second screen for VTT or as a laptop on the side for IRL. So thus the landscape format. 

resurrected duck got me to thinking and I’ve reduced the width by compacting things which means magic is not below but next to weapons stats reducing the row count. 

[Monty Lovering]

OK, here's the updated version. Available to download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_Rgo-diPcwXW5iZnN6xUzjHrd4A_S6dj/view?usp=sharing

Lots of changes based on feedback.

Current HPs now change colour according to the amount of damage, there's less white space, etc. You can use filter to remove the un-needed lines.

The light red highlight cells need input, the black cells with white text auto calculate.

Be good if people can give me more feedback.