Hello OSRers...
I wanted to quickly share a project that I've been working on that was directly inspired by a blog post I read here at The Blue Bard (although I haven't posted much here, I love the blog and have read several of the articles multiple times).
It's an 1E AD&D character generator that is absolutely BTB and very in-depth. You can find more information here: https://www.thepigfacedorc.com
If you're interested, please go ahead and sign-up, follow on social media, give the artist a follow, anything else you can do to help support the project. It's free for everyone.
Here is a sample of the artwork, an homage to the original 1E AD&D races on p18 of the players handbook, drawn by Jenny Hellström (Instagram: jenhelldraws).
The post that inspired it was, "Combat Part I: We Don't Need Segments...Unless They're Awesome". Specifically the two points made therein: Let me tell you the reasons these rules WILL slow the game to a crawl:
The character sheets don't support the rules & all the info is hidden in a book.
The DM is unfamiliar with the rules
So, I set out to remedy that problem, at least in myself. That was almost a year ago, and since then I've certainly learned a LOT of edge case rules, and come a long way to creating a full automated, 100% BTB 1E Character Sheet generator with all the edge cases & 1E weirdness. It's not quite finished, but it strikes me that I might do all this work and nobody will ever know about it! So I thought I'd start promoting it a bit early.
More screenshots & info at https://www.thepigfacedorc.com
Cheers!
My god. This is a thing of beauty. I will share it with my players AT ONCE.
Thanks man, that means a lot, especially coming from the OG. Your blog and by-the-book role-playing philosophy really did inspire me, and I went a bit crazy with this. Gary Gygax certainly did not think like a computer programmer, his rules are very "unstructured". But I like them. Certainly way better than the more modern incarnations. It isn't finished yet, hopefully you will share it with your players again then. :) It's a waaaaay bigger job than I had thought. I thought I'd "whip it up over a few weekends for my players". That was a year and 20,000 lines of code ago.
@The Pig-Faced Orc Followed on all platforms
@Steve Powers Thanks man, really appreciate that support!!
@The Pig-Faced Orc I really can't wait for updates on this project. I don't use platforms like Twitter or fb, but I did subscribe. If I can help further, do let me know!
What you've done already is great! Suggestions as to what exactly makes a character sheet the most useful and convenient I guess is helpful. But of course I already downloaded yours and studied it, so I dunno...
@The Pig-Faced Orc Well, I'd offer to shout about it in an effort to gain attention, but I'm afraid the Blue Bard is a backwater and my voice doesn't carry much beyond this space. I'd back it if it was a kickstarter. Carry on and I'm so glad my excel sheet served as some kind of starting point. Of note, customizable weapons w/ customizable damage and to-hit-AC-type adjusters would be very cool, as would some of the more non-standard dice (d3, d5, d7 off the top). But presumably you have plenty on your plate already. Respect.
It was your blog that was the starting point for sure. The character sheet I just looked at afterwards. I stupidly thought I'd whip it up in a few weeks however. That was a big mistake! :D Not a backwater, it's great. Let's be honest though, everything 1E is a little bit of a "backwater" these days. Although there seems to be a retro resurgence, so fingers crossed.
Definitely building it with stuff like customizable weapons in-mind. The code probably doesn't mean a whole heap, but if the peak attached shows anything, it's that adding another "row" to that heap is not a huge deal. But you're right, I've bitten off a huge chunk (working for free! ... sorry ... for the love of the game. ;) ) I just want to get this finished and released and then I'll think about house rules etc. But defo on the cards, especially if it's used by the community.