BRP Computer Tools (multi-platform for preference...)

[pansophy]

Printing without the BG pic will be available soon, no worries. Character portrait will be printed soon as well.

How would you want this automatic skill deployment be done?

 

[clarence]

Ok, this is what came to mind:

 

- Choose profession. 

 

- Choose power level (lo, mid, hi). 

 

- Generate: Skill points distributed. Small part of the personal skill points allocated randomly. 

 

- Option to go completely random. 

 

Sorry if I'm asking for too much : ) One idea would be to make it list-based, just as the skills. That way anyone can add the professions from their favorite setting, reducing the amount of work for you. 

 

How to go about the actual skill levels I'm not sure. Perhaps something like the D101 games: Two most important skills at 75%, next three at 50% (the numbers are just from the top of my head) and so on. With some controlled randomness added to the number crunching I think it would work fine. 

 

For the different power levels, I suppose someone here will have a good guess how many skill points will be needed. And the levels of the "top five" skills...

 

And let me know if I can help you in any way. 

[rsanford]

Pansophy,

Related to skills, would it be a lot of work to support other BRP rule sets? I am thinking of things like Mythic Iceland, Magic World, the excellent Rome book, etc...

I only know the rules for magic world and they might be problematic given how they split skill allottment between culture and occupation but flexibility is good.

No pressure from me though! I'm just happy such a useful app is available.

 

 

[tooley1chris]

I think you can edit the skills available already? character sheet looks like it was dipped in awesome sauce.  

Edited July 17, 2015 by tooley1chris

[rsanford]

I think you can edit the skills available already? character sheet looks like it was dipped in awesome sauce.  

Pansophy indicated you could edit the skill list but I am not sure the tool will force some number of points to be allocated to cultural skills and others to occupation skills. Also it's likely complicated to allow "any" skill to be allotted points as part of a character's occupation personal specialty. 

But if it does do that - that's awesome!

[Questbird]

Thanks Pansophy. I got your program working on Linux (Debian 8) with the addition of one more library: pyqt4-dev-tools, which provided pyuic4. It looks good -- great work. Do you have a github (or similar) account to enable people to make code contributions? I've worked with Python but not so much with Qt. The only suggestion that came to mind when I looked at it would be to allow different groups of BRP options to be enabled for particular games. For example I believe Swords of Cydoria, Rubble and Ruin and maybe Classic Fantasy (I) have lists of Big Gold Book options used.

Thanks again for putting in the time for this, and for delivering a real cross-platform solution.

[pansophy]

Hi,

no, the tool is not 'forcing' to do anything. I would say it is more like a 'guide'. You can put in values as you see fit and press the calculate button. Easy as that.

Thanks for all the offers to help, I'll come back to that if the opportunity rises. So far it is just plain 'adding buttons' and 'calculate stuff' actions ... nothing anybody can really help with. You can, however, help in finding bugs and find missing options. Also, once the Character Sheet is finalized, you can let me know what could be done better.

In regards to fast character creation, I would suggest to create a character 'template' for each profession you want (including the skills and values) and save them to a folder. If you need one of those characters, just load the pre-made one, press the 'roll' button for random Attribute values - done. Could not be faster than that. Don't see the point in an automatic-character-skill-point-allocation system; too many settings are different and as pointed out there are so many rule systems that handle stuff different, I do not see the use of it.

I am a bit behind schedule. The printing works fine, unfortunately it is not easy to get the new version running as an additional package is required to be installed on the computer. To get around this, I wanted to create executable binary files, but unfortunately my Windows machine is not willing to compile them at the moment. Maybe I have better luck with the Mac version later this week.

I could make the new version available and let you guys try to figure out how to get it running, but I would be unable to give any support. And that is just not my style. So be patient and a nice hassle-free version will be up in a few days - at least for OSX. To get it running on Windows should be easy and currently it is just not worth the headache it is giving me. Be with me and instructions will follow soon ...

@QuestBird: thanks for letting me know - I'll put it in the install instructions later.

As far as Options for settings go: most are just rules options. The BRP Options for character creation are already implemented (Options tab). Let me know if you miss anything particular. Later on, once the program is finished, I plan on supporting additional rules from Monographs (e.g. the Luck Attribute from Mythic Iceland or the way how Firearms work in Rubble & Ruin) - but I'm not there yet. The base must be solid and flexible, then I can plan on the rest. Most of that are simple substitutions of existing values/things anyway and are only relevant when printing the character. But that is what the tool is about: creating and printing characters and maintaining them during a campaign. It is not meant to be a live character sheet that can be used during a game session tracking HP's, PP's, Fatigue and stuff like that. I will, however, include a tool to prepare and print combat encounters. Nothing fancy, but I like to re-use my though-out gangs and street-robbers and I do not like to write the needed stat's down time again and again. So it will show the minimal combat stats needed together with the PP's and HP's, similar to the NPC sheet, I reckon.

Edited July 20, 2015 by pansophy

[clarence]

I had no idea you had made a NPC generator earlier! Tried it very quickly and found it really useful. Seems to solve most NPC related problems I have. 

Looking forward to the next version of the character generator. 

[pansophy]

Quick update: the printed character sheet now changes in layout depending on which options are selected. As an example, if you do not use Fatigue Points, you will see the Equipment list instead. If Sanity is not used, the Distinctive Features will be shown.

The Hit Points have moved from top right to below the Hit Location diagrams. If no Hit Locations are used, my "critical/special" table will be shown, and the character portrait is sitting in the top right corner now. If no portrait is selected, the BRP Logo is shown.

If progress continues, I can make a new version for testing available on Tuesday.

[pansophy]

Allright, here we go: new version of the tool:

https://share.ldhn.net:81/public.php?service=files&t=55abc00a30351d0611f0f5d7413c9fd3

One thing, though: you need to install a package named 'reportlab', which is essential for creaing PDFs.

- open a command shell (START -> enter 'cli')
- type in: 'C:\Python27\Scripts\pip2.7.exe install reportlab'

You will see the PIP installer will download the needed package and install it. Once that is done, you can open the 'gui.py' as before and toy around with the tool. Make sure you play around with the Options, as they decide what the final character sheet will look like.

Hope you enjoy it!

P.S.: for Apple OSX you need to download and install Apple XCode, then you can open a Terminal session and type in 'pip install reportlab'.

Edited July 24, 2015 by pansophy
OSX edit

[rsanford]

Awesome! Thanks so much Pansophy!

 

 

[Nick J.]

Is anybody else having trouble getting the newest version to work (yes, I was able to get v.1 to work without issue)? Reportlab seemingly installed just fine, but when I click on the gui.py it flickers and then bombs out. I'll try running it in a command line environment and see if I can't get some sort of error message.

EDIT:

This was the traceback message I got from python shell:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Progs\BRP\gui.py", line 18, in <module>
    from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
ImportError: No module named reportlab.pdfgen

 

Edited July 24, 2015 by NAJones

[clarence]

Oh, Apple Xcode is 2 GB… Gotta wait till I'm on my wi-fi.

[tooley1chris]

2 GB??? Sheesh. On top of the rest, that's prolly too much for a character generator...

[pansophy]

Lol, yes, that's because it is a full C compiler IDE. I'll try to make a binary file available at some point, so you don't need to download the Xcode stuff. But at the moment, there's no way around. The tool itself does not need any of that stuff.

Although, you could install Activestate python and then just add the packages needed - I've never tried it, though.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Progs\BRP\gui.py", line 18, in <module>
    from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
ImportError: No module named reportlab.pdfgen

 

no idea... looks as if reportlab is not installed correctly or the path variable to python is not set.

[Nick J.]

no idea... looks as if reportlab is not installed correctly or the path variable to python is not set.

Looks like it was an environment variable issue. Not sure what happened since it seemed I could run the previous version of you tool without a problem. Oh well, thanks for all of your hard work.

Edited July 25, 2015 by NAJones

[pansophy]

Looks like it was an environment variable issue. Not sure what happened since it seemed I could run the previous version of you tool without a problem. Oh well, thanks for all of your hard work.

so, does it work now for you?

 

[Nick J.]

so, does it work now for you?

 

Indeed. I just needed to add the 'PYTHONPATH' %PYTHON%;C:\Python27\ environment variable to my system variables (I also appended C:\Python27\lib and C:\Python\lib\site-packages to make sure that reportlab got picked up).

Works like a charm.

[pansophy]

Hey folks, just to let you know: I did some more work on the tool over the weekend:

• used/allocated Skill points are now shown on the first tab, once you press the 'calculate' button
• you can now re-roll the Distinctive Features and Personality as well as Height/Weight without re-rolling the whole character. Just push the [/] buttons.
• Height and Weight is now randomly rolled as by the SIZ value on the Character SIZ chart on p.26 BGB. You can still edit it to a more pleasing value.
• Experience Bonus is now printed on the Character sheet
• a more logic placement of the right points section on the sheet
• Recovery Rate is now calculated and printed
• Age and experience is corrected. A 'starting Age' box has been added on the Notes tab, make sure to fill in the starting age for already created characters. New characters will get the box filled automatically
• additional Hit, Power, Sanity and Fatigue Points can now be added on the Notes tab if needed
• you can choose to use imperial measurements for Height and Weight in the Options tab
• Attribute starting base chances are now replaced by the characters real base chance (e.g. DEX*2 becomes 14% or such). But only the ones in the BGB are replaced by now.

Hope you enjoy the new version. Download it here, as always.

Please let me know any issues and ideas you have. Next will be the Powers section and the Notes tab, including printing the back of the character sheet - but that will take a while. Also, I will add a few more Backgrounds to choose from for printing the character sheet.

[pansophy]

Again, a new version. This time only a few more features are introduced:

• dice roll numbers for Hit Locations are shown on the character sheet
• some more intelligent placement of some parts on the character sheet
• the Success Chart is printed when no Hit Locations are used
• added three boxes for notes to the Notes tab (Background, Campaign, Family). They are saved, but currently not printed
• started developing of the Power Tab - not saved and not printed at the moment
• introduced the Race tab for roll-up templates (so you can roll dwarfs, elves, kobolts and stuff) - not in use at the moment
• four different background pictures for printing - or go without any

I guess that's it - more stuff to come. Download here, as always.

[clarence]

Looking forward to trying it out. Good work!

[rsanford]

Awesome!

[pansophy]

Thanks for your support - I think I'll leave the BRP version as it is for the moment as I am waiting for announcements in regards of the future of BRP from Chaosium.

Edited July 31, 2015 by pansophy

[clarence]

That's probably a wise decision. Let's just hope for a continuing life of at least the core book. 

[tooley1chris]

Thanks for your support - I think I'll leave the BRP version as it is for the moment as I am waiting for announcements in regards of the future of BRP from Chaosium.

So...starting work on the Magic World version?