A couple of years agi I started writing an automated character sheet to document fictional characters. I wanted to change the character in a story that I am writing so I found it and finished it.
It collects a bunch of information about a character and even does a couple of psychological profiles. It produces a single page character summary that you can copy into your story work in progress pages.
I did it very quickly and it has no formatting. Some of the information it collects is not that interesting, and I keep thinking of new things to add. I am hoping that users will start sending me ideas for features so that by the time I get around to polishing it up, it will be a real useful tool.
One thing I have to do is make a way to save the character for later retrieval. Right now all the information is kept in a cookie, which expires in a day or so.
3 Comments
I cut my character sheet teeth playing AD&D pen and paper games in the 1980's and latter plaing the computer FRPG. As you may know I'm getting "Morrowind" today.
AD&D had pretty good prime requesites. You had your basic, strngth, endurance, health (hit points)and other things like diety, was the charcter good lawfull good, lawfull neutural that kind of thing.I remeber these character sheets were almost 2 pages long.
Some things you might consider in making a character sheet (and maybe you have) are things like parents, brothers and sisters, ones environment political affiliations (if any) clubs organizations, charitible causes hobbies etc. All these to give characters layers. My character sheets are pretty elaborate.
Your thinking is exactly right. I need a "sociological" page that has family unit information. Educational, military, and job information. I was thinking that last night just before I went to sleep.
I hope others come up with some additions. I know that I have thought about this over the years, but I am not feeling creative right now. Perhaps by the time I get back to work I'll have a couple of more pages of information to add.
D&D, as I remember, had some good stuff, too. I will google that and see if there it leads to more information. D&D was geared toward the game characters and as such was not as "real world", but perhaps there is something that will help with a fictional character.
The danger here is that I'll spend my time working on the character sheet program, and I'll stop working on the story that triggered the character sheet idea. Programming is very addictive.
I have somewhere a visual story line program that lets you plot high and low points in a plot an then show a graph. Perhaps, I'll produce a suite of writers tools, but never finish a story.
I'd like to see this.
Incidently, I played "Chivalry and Sorcery" a local game system that was trying to enhance the D&D system back in the mid 1970's.C&S had beter character sheets then D&D did at the time but D&D ended up being more robust then C&S.
Here's an EBay link to some titles of C&S still out there. I recall in the late 1970's having more then a few conversations with Wilf Backhaus (the games co-designer) about the game. Wilf was and may still be a practicing Lawyer. I haven't talked with him in years and he probably wont even remember me.
http://toys.shop.ebay.ca/items/Toys-Hobbies__Chivalry-and-Sorcery_W0QQ_sacatZ220?_trksid=p3286.c0.m94
Wiki link to C&S is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalry_and_Sorcery
I thought C&S was better then D&D only because Wilf myself and others were in our local Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) group at the time. Wilf drew up the legal papers for our local Chapter of the SCA back in those days.C&S was more receptive to SCA types like myself back then.
Holly Lisle also has some intersting character sheets in her create a character clinic books (so I've been told)I haven't seen them yet myself but I hear they are well thought out.
BTW, "Morrowind" isn't compatible with the Xbox 360. EB games has the collectors ed' of "Oblivion."
I tried calling about half a dozen places around the city here and nobody has even "Oblivion" availible. Strange. EB games is only a block or two away from me so I'll be running out before noon to pick up "Oblivion".
One more thing avout Holly Lisle's "workshops" a lot of people on Forward Motion rave about them. She probably "pays forward" more then any other author in our genre to date. FM is an amazing resource for writers. You can access FM through a link on my site.
Just go to links menu and hit "Pocket full of words." Holly's site (not hers any more but that's another story)