How to thank you guys for answering my entry level questions...

[missmvicious]

I feel bad that I'm asking all these questions, and don't really have much to contribute in return. I'd like to try to give back, if I may.

I don't have much knowledge, by way of game mechanics, but I do have a lot of homemade resources (mainly spreadsheets) to help with auto-calculations of the more mundane aspects of gaming. I have:

1. A Carrying Capacity Calculator. I built it myself based on core rules for carrying capacity and some 3E rules for object carrying capacity (sacks, backpacks, etc.) It's useful for the DM who doesn't see how their party is carrying 92,000 lbs of coins, art items, and wondrous items in a belt pouch. It adds a new dimension to the game, in the aspect that sometimes heroes have to bury their treasure and protect it with traps and wards once their packs get too full.

2. Initiative and HP Tracker. It helps keep track of the HP, AC, standard attack, and any other etceteras (spells in effect, duration, blah, blah, blah).

3. Town Population Generator (late stage work in progress). After you've rolled up your "who's who" it'll calculate the demographic breakdown based on core DMG rules.

4. Mapmaker. There's way better tools out there than this one, but it's not a bad resource for people who don't have money to spend on mapmakers and are willing to google the occasional graphic.

5. Generic NPC Stockpile (early stage work in progress). For people who are like me and need a full character sheet to use an NPC, I'm building some bland, cookie-cutter NPCs that have preselected skills, feats, etc.

6. Skills Chart. Just enter your Ability Score Modifier, input your Ranks and let the Skills Chart do the rest. It's not super handy, but it cuts out the tedium of doing all the math.

If anybody wants any of these, post here and tell me which ones you want. They're all just simple spreadsheets (except the NPC stockpile, those are PDFs) that I've built based on things I wanted to streamline, and they're based as much on RAW as I can get them. In fact, if I did break some rules, and you discover them as you play with the spreadsheets, please let me know. I'd prefer them to be by RAW anyway. It's all simple formulas, no crash happy macros, controls, what-have-you. It's just a handy tool. I've been toying with various ideas for an encounter generator and a treasure generator, but there are far better free resources online which already serve that purpose.

[Geigan]

Well that's very thoughtful of you, thank you. You may want to sig a link to the thread if you want get the word out faster.

I'd love #3 & #5 personally. How do you plan to get them to us? Should we PM you our emails or what?

[missmvicious]

Hmm... PM me the e-mail is probably the best way. Is there no place on the forum where I can just upload a file?

If not, then PM me, and I'll get it to you as my T-Day gift to the Playground.

[suhkkaet]

Alternatively, you can use any of the free places online to post files. I, myself, dislike files in my inbox.

I'll vouch for Dropbox.com where you have a public folder, and can subsequently post the links to the files.

Edit; It's free and useful for a lot of things.

[missmvicious]

Well that's very thoughtful of you, thank you. You may want to sig a link to the thread if you want get the word out faster.

I'd love #3 & #5 personally. How do you plan to get them to us? Should we PM you our emails or what?

There you go. I e-mail a lot of stuff to you.

I think I'm going to go with what Suhkkaet suggested and just drop them onto Dropbox here in a few hours after I've finished tidying up my NPCs.

I've amassed a fairly big stockpile of them, but many of them have been re-edited for specific campaigns. I want to wipe them clean so they can be used anywhere at any time.

[gbprime]

Tell us more about the mapmaker. I assume its not a spreadsheet as well, right?

[missmvicious]

The mapmaker is, in fact, a spreadsheet. I know... sucks.

There are so many programs out there that are better. I just don't have much money to spend. So, I downloaded some scaled GIFs of mapping images; your typical collection of doors, traps, treasure chests, bookshelves, benches, desks, cupboards treasure piles, etc etc.

It's decent enough for two purposes:
1. Dropping a really cool image into the background of it to give it a battle grid.
2. Designing a lair.

I originally built it to handle entire settlements from pre-tribal settlements to metropolises: which it does pretty well, actually. But unless you are willing to transcribe that onto a wet erase map, all 20 some-odd pages of them, it's not all it's cracked up to be.

It serves my purposes for the most part, though.

The best two things I have are the Skills Chart and the Carrying Capacity Calculator. I use those skills charts a lot because I'll sometimes roll up 20+ NPCs for a single session. It got to be a logistical nightmare. Which is why I've started "washing" my old NPCs and converting them to generic NPCs. It's going to take me a couple of weeks to finish building the stockpile, but once it's done, I just grab the sheet I need, roll up it's gender, alignment, weapons, armor, shields and random trait, and bam. I'm ready to go. Or pick my favorite of these on the fly if I forgot to prepare. Either way, if a PC wants to get into a skill challenge with an Expert, I'll be able to easily apply all necessary ranks and applicable feats to serve up a believable debate.

I'm sorry... I wasn't sure if any of these things would even be useful to guys who can roll up L20 gestalts in their heads, and already know the settings they're using like they know their own house. These supplements I've built are probably more for low-level and first-time DMs. I should've thought of that before I offered them. :smalleek:

[Analytica]

I think you should place a link to the downloads in your signature; to make as many people as possible who might be interested be able to find out about them.

[missmvicious]

Ok. I put them into the Dropbox thing. I've never used anything like this. What do I do now?

I think this is the link. It doesn't look right. But I can't figure out what else it would be:

https://www.dropbox.com/home#:::

I don't want to add it to my signature until I have it right.

[missmvicious]

It seems to be working from my end when I tested it. Anyway, the characters are messy. I can do some DTP work on it later to clean them up. I'm assuming the Playground would prefer some L17 and up NPCs; I'd be happy to make some of those as well.

I'm going to upload some samples of template NPCs that were used for a previous campaign. They're polished to reflect that specific campaign, so they aren't generic enough, but you'll get the point of how I make them look by the time I'm done.

[missmvicious]

The idea is that they take up one or 2 pages (sometimes more) are easy to customize (weapons, armor, and spells) but still you don't need to crack open a book to use them.

I don't know about other DMs, but I struggle from information overload and desktop clutter when I'm DMing. I'm looking up scenery pictures on-line to help with my description of the environment, picking songs to fit the mood, referencing encounter charts, supplemental books, scripts notes, initiative, all the NPCs, maps, etc. It gets to be crazy. For me, the more information I can pick up on the fly without switching windows on my screen, the better. And the NPCs cause the most amount of window switching.

[Taelas]

That link is just linking to the dropbox website's front page -- in order to use your specific dropbox, you would need to invite people to join it. :smallsmile:

On the dropbox website, go into the folder you wish to share, and click "Shared folder options", then type in the e-mail (or the name, if they are already on dropbox) of the person you wish to invite.

But that is not the option you should use in this case. There is a Public folder. If you copy your files in there, you should be able to check the box next to the file, and select "Copy Public Link" in the "More" box above.

For instance, in my Public folder, there is only an .rtf file -- which tells you how to use the Public folder. I can link to it like this (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14511022/How%20to%20use%20the%20Public%20folder.rtf).

There are players and DMs of all types on the Playground, so it should be useful to people. :smallwink:

[missmvicious]

Okay...

http://db.tt/hiWZpMmy

That should link to the Carrying Capacity Calculator in the Public Folder. It wont let me link to an entire folder, so I'm assuming anyone can navigate their way around from there.

Thanks for the help! :smallsmile:

...

:smallconfused:

...

:smalleek:
Did it work this time?

[Taelas]

You only link to individual files, not the entire folder. So we can download the Carrying Capacity Calculator, but nothing else. :smallsmile:

[missmvicious]

Ok. I'm fixing it.

According to the instructions, I can't link to folders, only files. With my NPC stockpile, that won't work.

I'm building a Link doc that will describe the stuff I have, how to use it, and where to link to it. That way, I only have to put one link in my sig and leave it at that.

If anyone wants an NPC, let me know. They are generic and un-optimized but they're townsfolk; they're supposed to be inferior to the PCs in every way except their specific field. A Cleric who can "blacksmith" better than a blacksmith would just be weird. So, I primarily use Skill Focus feats when possible in order to build my NPCs so that they definitely don't come on too strong but still have something to offer the PCs, and so that modifying the feats to customize would be a quick and easy adjustment, even for me. Essentially, Commoners (farmers and such) get Skill Focus Handle Animal, Craft, or Profession. Experts (shopkeepers and business owners) get Skill focus Craft, Profession, Gather Information (name a shopkeeper in any town in D&D who doesn't know some kind of game hook gossip.) Aristocrats get Skill Focus Diplomacy, Intimidate, Sense Motive, Bluff... so on so forth.

So, if you want one, just ask, but the NPC stockpile I've already got probably isn't going to be interesting for high-level campaigns. I've mostly built stuff for hamlets and villages, and some home-brew tribal and pre-tribal settlements. So, I don't have any generic NPCs above L10 that I'm aware of.

Anyway, the link will be in my sig on the next post. I just wanted everyone to know I didn't forget about you. Thanksgiving dinner knocked me out. I don't remember anything after the second helping except being woken up to go home. Because of that, I didn't get to work on anything from dinner time on.

Still, I hope yesterday was fun for everyone! Even for those who don't live in America, which means you probably didn't celebrate T-Day, I hope your day was still great! :smallbiggrin:

[missmvicious]

Finished! :smallcool:

It's in the sig now, so anybody who wants to check my current stuff. I think I'll update it regularly every time I add new stuff.

I welcome any critiques anyone might have. If I built something that breaks RAW and I didn't state that I broke RAW in the disclaimer, please let me know.

[jiriku]

Wow! Really great things you've got here. Thanks for sharing them with us!

[Endarire]

Thanks!

(|=^)

[missmvicious]

Your welcome! :smallbiggrin:

I'm glad some many people like them!

[Venger]

hey thanks for all this stuff! it'll save a lot of time. what a pleasant surprise. happy thanksgiving to you too :)

[agentnone]

I'm gonna have to take a look at this stuff myself. In return I'll try to clean up my wild surge table and send it to you so you can host that on there as well. 1000 wild surges broken up between 10 tabs on an Excell spreadsheet. Each tab is named to appropriately describe what/who the effect with target (such as the caster, or a random area). It's not to be taken seriously (I have a Chuck Norris surge in there) but it's great to add a little random fun to an otherwise mostly serious campaign.

Also, I'm unfamiliar with the hosting site. How does it work? We click the link and submit your our email or what (I can't access the site right now, site's blocked at work).

[Caliphbubba]

This is very cool stuff. I'm not what I would consider a "low-level" DM or whatever, but I still can see how this stuff would be really useful to anyone crunched for time to prepare (or if you're like me and just a little lazy when it comes to that). Thanks for sharing your work!

[missmvicious]

Really? :smallredface:

...

Your WELCOME?! I'm glad you like the stuff! :smallbiggrin: I didn't think that they would come in handy to so many people. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed about it at first, like maybe it wasn't worthy of the Playground. It's accidentally flattering that I'm able to contribute this way.

Agentnone, I'd love to add your Wild Surge spreadsheet to the resources list. I'd never even heard of Wild Surge before (I don't have a lot of Psionic resources) and therefor would never have thought to put together a tool like that. In fact, the more the merrier with Psionic resources. My group and I don't play them because we don't understand them, but at least a few of us have expressed an interest in playing them.

Sometimes, I think that there should be classes or seminars on D&D... especially 3.5. I'd take that as an elective in college. :smallsmile:

About accessing the resources, I'm new to the hosting site myself. As far as I know, you just copy/paste the link to whichever document you want to look at into your browser. It will download the document for you from there. All my spreadsheets are made in NeoOffice, which I'm pretty sure is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux and can be opened with Excel if that's the program you use. OpenOffice will also open the documents. I don't know what else it will open in, but NeoOffice is an open source, Mac-friendly freeware clone of Excel, which is why I use it. It's not as powerful as the real thing, but it's compatible with everything and good enough for my needs.

[suhkkaet]

Hey,
I had a little time free, and decided to, well, remake your .rtf as a .html file instead (word can do this automatically, but gawd that's some messy code).
It might just be me, but I dislike having to open word/whatever to see the resources.
You can save this .html and put it in your public folder, and then link the public link in your signature instead of linking the .rtf - it might give you more traffic.

This time around it's just the first one (Rookie & Low milage): linky (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14380793/helpful.html) (right-click -> save)

I'll put up the other one in either a few hours or tomorrow.

I also added a link (in the top) to this post.

I should mention, however, that if you rename/move around/delete the files the links will break.

[missmvicious]

Wow! Thanks! I added it to my sig. :smallcool:

[agentnone]

Agentnone, I'd love to add your Wild Surge spreadsheet to the resources list. I'd never even heard of Wild Surge before (I don't have a lot of Psionic resources) and therefor would never have thought to put together a tool like that. In fact, the more the merrier with Psionic resources. My group and I don't play them because we don't understand them, but at least a few of us have expressed an interest in playing them.

Hmm...guess I should have specified. Mine aren't psionic related, though I don't see why they can't be used as such. They're a remake of the wild magic surges from the 2nd edition Wild Mage character class. In my campaigns, I have areas in the game world where magic can be uncontrolled and well, wild. Whatever rules you use to determine this is up to you (or the individual DM). I use that whenever the character casts a spell or spell-like ability they roll a d20 and a result of 1 to 3 causes a surge effect. As soon as I get the table re-edited I can email it to you. I have campaign specific stuff on there that I need to swap out for universal things. Do you want me to email it to you or how do you want me to get into your hands? It's an excel spreadsheet broken up into 10 different tabs with 100 effects per tab. I'll also include a little explanation to the shorthand notes I have with it for ease of reading/use.

On another note, as soon as I get a chance, I'll take a look at your stuff and see if I can download anything.

Edit: typos