Official ICE Forums
Systems & Settings => Spacemaster => Topic started by: JimiSue on July 20, 2012, 01:22:48 PM
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Like most RM/SM GMs with any knowledge of spreadsheets, I've made my own to facilitate the game... and of course *none* of the work on this happened during work time. Version 2 offers:
- All professions from PB, SpaMCo 1 & 2
- Automatic calculation of stat bonuses
- Automatic assignment of level bonuses by profession
- Calculation of stat gain results when levelling so you just have to record your results and copy/paste your new stats to the relevant area
- Every skill listed (except for some obscure break out skills like medical science specialisations - RM weapons also not there although all SM ones are. The players are muttering about playing Rolemaster so I may need to include those too)
- Automatic calculation of stat bonus
- Automatic calculation of skill rank bonus
- Automatic assignment of similar skills, extended from the RM similar skills rules to cover all SM ones too
- Automatic Skill bonus calculation
- Ability to mark how many ranks of which skill to improve at level up (with protection from entering more skill ranks than you can train)
- Automatic calculation of DP spent towards next level
- Automatic calculation of hit points
- Automatic calculation of movement speed, including gravity as well as encumbrance
- Automatic calculation of skill penalties in variant gravity fields
- Ability to assign weapon groups so that weapon costs propagate correctly
- Size of the character pages reduced from v.1 so almost all look up calculations are performed elsewhere, meaning you can keep track of a sheaf of PCs (and/or NPCs) without neeting Terabyte level storage
Unfortunately, it doesn't make the coffee or order in pizza. But it does make levelling up take about 90 seconds if you know what you're doing... so creating and levelling up NPCs with genuine stat blocks becomes a breeze, and also the players can level during play without it marking the end of the session.
v.2.1 to include some love for telepaths and DP spend on psion lists
Things to be included in V3 (if I ever get the time)
skill calculations - primarily for calculation attack roll - so all the player has to do is select the weapon and type in his roll, any special ammo used, penalties from the GM and AT... and it will do the lookup for the final result and tell you what kind of critical table to roll on. So someone using a conventional rifle (mk 4) with HEAPDUCIC ammunition against AT 12 (+1 mark, +10 vs AT 9-20, secondary internal disruption critical) might get a result that would say 12 hits, C puncture critical, C internal disruption critical. And so on. That is a quite daunting level of data entry though.
V3.1 to expand that to cover all skills - easy job that if weapons are cracked.
V4.0 will require me to remember how to do macros so I can do a "Level up" button that will do all that stuff for you.
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/me points at the Vault Downloads section, "Where is this marvel you have created?"
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Still being tweaked. Just noticed today that something had happened to the stalk/hide skill so it wasn't working out the stats properly - that skill has it's own challenges since Stalk and Hide are the same skill of "sneaky" but with different stats depending on stationary or moving.
Also, it contains some house rules coded in which I know not everyone agrees with. For example
- I play a rule whereby if the player rolls a stat gain roll of 99 they get to improve potential by 1, and 100 = pot and temp +1
- Almost all the similar skills are house-decided, especially similar weapons - I have arbitrarily split weapons into groups for similars, so that for example, ultrasonic weapons like stunners and disruptors are 1/2 similar with other ultrasonics of the same type, but 1/4 with other energy weapons - so a stun pistol is 1/2 with a disruptor pistol but 1/4 with a laser pistol; flamers/cryoguns similar, and so on
- I always round in the PC's favour (so a DP total of 39.1 gives them 40 to spend - it makes little material difference in game but makes them feel better about life
I also want to look at the way it works out stats - I got into terrible troubles when writing v.1 when I tried to calculate out a statistic which was a negative number that had to be divided for an average. I ended up with a very tortuous logic of seeing if the calculated value was the same as the ABS value (i.e. forcing the positive) and if it wasn't, making the calculation in the positive and then making it negative by subtracting itself from itself twice. I am thinking that the AVERAGE() formula will almost certainly do what I want it to do much more simply, but I've been too busy trying to get my head around all the lookup tables to give it much attention.
I also want to make it so it recognises racial types as well, so those can be selected and the spreadsheet will populate the racial stat modifiers as well as tell things like the hit dice used, max hits, and so on and so forth. That's a pretty simple lookup so won't take long, but since I do most of my work on this while at work, I have to find a way to get the table to copy the info from into work without it being obvious! I self-justify that by saying I'm the go to person for Excel in my department and I need to do some more advanced stuff to keep my hand in! Not tried that line on the boss yet though.
I would need to do a 'how to' sheet for some other things as well, so if the PC decides they want to develop Athletic Games (Field Hockey), a prospective GM knows how to add that in and adjust the similar skills coming off/going onto it, and stuff like that. Some of the formulas used are quite horrific - some of them took me hours to get right and now I don't know how some of them do what they do. I would need to explain them though in case as GM needs to change them!
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/me points at the Vault Downloads section, "Where is this marvel you have created?"
This spreadsheet has just been uploaded - awaiting a moderator to approve, but should hopefully be available soon!
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Everything has been approved.