Advice for my project AKA What do you want from YOUR electronic character sheet?

[Snow-blind]

I am working on a google sheets based Pathfinder character sheet at the moment because I haven't seen one I really like and because I have some homebrewed stuff which needs an easily adjusted character sheet. Since I would like to share it outside my playgroup I thought that I would start a brainstorming thread for things people want in their character sheets (or what they want in a sheet that they would give to other players they know) so I can pick up good ideas and know what is/isn't worthwhile putting effort into. Also, I would like to know what people don't like or what they have problems with so I know what to avoid or fix.

These are some of the things I want in a sheet:
The character sheet should be easy to print. It should be laid out in a way amenable to printing, and there shouldn't be 20 pages of formulas, class tables and other garbage at the end of it that have to be filtered out every time it needs to be printed.
The sheet should be easily modifiable to support simple alternate rules/3pp stuff without having to screw around too much with formulas. Stuff like extra skills, classes or weapons.
The character sheet should be easily adjusted to alternate rules or 3pp stuff. Things like extra skills should be easy to slot into the sheet with little fuss by adding or copying lines.
In general, the sheet should be robust and difficult to break, and it shouldn't be that difficult to fix if it does break. I have had experience trying to modify a sheet using formulas so complex that they lock up google sheets when you try to view them, and it isn't fun.
There should be plenty of space for adding notes. There should also be enough room to comfortably write in things by hand.
There should be support for common character needs which are a departure from the general rules. Stuff like the extra +1 skill point per level for being human, or changing the ability scores for saves and skills*.
The sheet layout should be intuitive and designed with an eye towards common use cases (so things which get commonly used together should be together, and things which get used a lot should be very easy to find).
Various other little quality of life features. Class skill, BAB and base saving throw tables. Total item weight/cost calculators. Attack routine displays. Deadly Aim/Piranha Strike/Power Attack selectors. Armor and weapon statistic tables. That sort of thing.
*fun fact - as a result of how I am implementing this in my custom sheet, ability scores in the ability score table can be added, removed or altered willy-nilly and the rest of the sheet will work off the new ability score table.

Here is some stuff I not so keen on because of personal experience and practical concerns, but I am interested in hearing what others think:
A bonus/penalty tracker - in my experience much of the stuff you would use this for isn't amenable to automatic tracking due to conditional bonuses (e.g. rage with Superstition, or Lycanthropy) or doesn't fit nicely into the general rules framework (e.g. Bane weapons, Fate's Favored), and most of the rest is really easy to add into the relevant bonus sections manually (e.g. Big 6 items). From a design perspective, this feature would greatly increase complexity across the entire sheet, so personally I am not particularly keen on having it.
Automatic spell linker with spell text copy feature - its likely to be kind of buggy no matter what, and I am so-so on pulling out entire spell descriptions wholesale because they tend to be too long and bloated for a character sheet, where space is at a premium.

So, now that is out of the way, let the flow of (hopefully) great ideas...begin!

[khadgar567]

Some way to track power points, sphere points and manuvers( this one can be useable as toggle were on you have the manuver off means manuver is not aviable )

[exelsisxax]

First, what do you think you can put together that this one cannot? Almost everything you are planning, it can do. It even supports many 3pp classes. While it doesn't support maneuvers/spheres directly, tracking your spellpool is as easy as putting a formula in one of the convenient misc tracking boxes. The spellbook page has a write-in section that you can list maneuvers if you want as well. Equipment page has your char's capacity and weight of everything you've got, with support for bags of holding and portable holes. It can automate iterative attacks, crits, power attack, etc.

Regarding difficult to break: you're using google sheets. It will never be resilient if it is powerful. (but maybe some day google will actually have it provide useful error information so fixing it won't be a pain?)

But if you want charts, go to the pfsrd. they aren't useful on a character sheet.

well I can't post a link to it due to post restrictions. It's the pathfinder autosheet. Should be trivial to find in google sheets.

[Snow-blind]

First, what do you think you can put together that this one cannot? Almost everything you are planning, it can do. It even supports many 3pp classes. While it doesn't support maneuvers/spheres directly, tracking your spellpool is as easy as putting a formula in one of the convenient misc tracking boxes. The spellbook page has a write-in section that you can list maneuvers if you want as well. Equipment page has your char's capacity and weight of everything you've got, with support for bags of holding and portable holes. It can automate iterative attacks, crits, power attack, etc.

Regarding difficult to break: you're using google sheets. It will never be resilient if it is powerful. (but maybe some day google will actually have it provide useful error information so fixing it won't be a pain?)

But if you want charts, go to the pfsrd. they aren't useful on a character sheet.

well I can't post a link to it due to post restrictions. It's the pathfinder autosheet. Should be trivial to find in google sheets.
Funnily enough, I have actually used that sheet before. While there are quite a few good things about it, it...has its problems.

Here is a quick whirlwind tour of the most pressing issues:
The sheet is so bloated with features that my Firefox browser/Google Sheets struggles to load it. I have to reload it several times before I can actually use it. Seriously, I just tried to look at the latest version and then gave up after the third time Sheets crapped out.
Many cells are filled with formulas so long that even trying to look at them locks up firefox until it gives me an opportunity to kill the script causing the lockup. This makes some problems completely uncorrectable without stripping out parts of the sheet and starting over, or reverting whatever I changed, which isn't good when I just want to tweak things.
Because of how many features it has, parts of the sheet are incredibly complex, making adjusting things very difficult.
Making basic changes like adding new skills, changing class skills and swapping ability scores is totally unsupported by the presented "interface" of the sheet. The only way to do it is to manually hack in changes. This is especially annoying when I have to fix someone else's sheet and I need to look through code in order to figure out what has changed instead of simply reading visible information. If I wanted to state it more formally, the sheet has a nasty habit of mixing "business rules" and "implementation details".
The layout makes it very, very difficult to add new things without making everything look wonky (if not outright breaking things). For example, more rows for weapons or skills can't be done without cutting up other sections of the sheet.
There are pages upon pages of garbage that I don't want to print, some of which is mixed in with important information. The layout isn't exactly printer friendly either (or particularly friendly at all).

In short, that sheet is designed in a very rigid manner. It works reasonably well so long as you are happy with it as is, but if you aren't then you will often have to fight it in order to get what you want.

I would hope that you could see why "just use *this* sheet" isn't particularly acceptable to me, when it has so many issues that writing my own sheet is easier than trying to fix it (plus I can hopefully get *exactly* what I want). It might work fine for some people, but a lot of the complexity in it has caused me grief, and many of the things that the complexity made possible aren't things I particularly want.

[DarkSoul]

I think the bloat on most spreadsheet-based character generators is what turns me off to them. I think my ideal sheet would have rows for class features that let you tell the sheet exactly how to calculate the benefit. For example, entering the monk's wisdom to AC would have the name, then a column listing what the ability modifies with a dropdown containing things like AC, Fort, Ref, Will, All Saves, Attack Bonus, Spell Penetration, etc. There would probably need to be several columns like this. The next column is where you put the value of the modifier. The dropdown would have 1-10, then Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha, then anything else you can think of. The fourth column would have a list of bonus types (dodge, insight, inherent, untyped, etc.). For the monk you'd type in whatever name, then set the "Stat modified" columns to AC and CMD, the Value column to Wis and the Type column to untyped. Have the formula for AC look for an "AC" entry in all the ability fields and read the value "wis", then retrieve the modifier itself.

The sheet wouldn't validate feat prerequisites, wouldn't do level checks, none of that stuff. It would be more a sheet for record keeping than something that checks to make sure you did everything right.

[exelsisxax]

Funnily enough, I have actually used that sheet before. While there are quite a few good things about it, it...has its problems.

Here is a quick whirlwind tour of the most pressing issues:
The sheet is so bloated with features that my Firefox browser/Google Sheets struggles to load it. I have to reload it several times before I can actually use it. Seriously, I just tried to look at the latest version and then gave up after the third time Sheets crapped out.
Many cells are filled with formulas so long that even trying to look at them locks up firefox until it gives me an opportunity to kill the script causing the lockup. This makes some problems completely uncorrectable without stripping out parts of the sheet and starting over, or reverting whatever I changed, which isn't good when I just want to tweak things.
Because of how many features it has, parts of the sheet are incredibly complex, making adjusting things very difficult.
Making basic changes like adding new skills, changing class skills and swapping ability scores is totally unsupported by the presented "interface" of the sheet. The only way to do it is to manually hack in changes. This is especially annoying when I have to fix someone else's sheet and I need to look through code in order to figure out what has changed instead of simply reading visible information. If I wanted to state it more formally, the sheet has a nasty habit of mixing "business rules" and "implementation details".
The layout makes it very, very difficult to add new things without making everything look wonky (if not outright breaking things). For example, more rows for weapons or skills can't be done without cutting up other sections of the sheet.
There are pages upon pages of garbage that I don't want to print, some of which is mixed in with important information. The layout isn't exactly printer friendly either (or particularly friendly at all).

In short, that sheet is designed in a very rigid manner. It works reasonably well so long as you are happy with it as is, but if you aren't then you will often have to fight it in order to get what you want.

I would hope that you could see why "just use *this* sheet" isn't particularly acceptable to me, when it has so many issues that writing my own sheet is easier than trying to fix it (plus I can hopefully get *exactly* what I want). It might work fine for some people, but a lot of the complexity in it has caused me grief, and many of the things that the complexity made possible aren't things I particularly want.
The bloat is there for a reason. If it tracks spells, give up trying to make something sleek. It'll be an absolute labyrinth on the backend. Not trying to track spells saves you that, but the first reply has the guy asking for maneuver tracking. People want the bloat.
Similarly, all those formulae are complex houses of cards because people WANT that. Theoretically, weapon attack and damage is easy. If other people are going to use this, be prepared for complains unending or to end up with something equally esoteric(though quite possibly more elegant than that sheet's omnipresent lookup tables). Finesse, deadly agility, guided hand, thrown weapons, composite bows, weapon sizes are all going to be yelled at you. If you don't take this into account, you're better off leaving blanks, but then why bother?
Adjusting things for what, in particular? I've made tons of edits to it for my personal use, and generally speaking it's easy to do and works. But what I'm doing are small and numerical, like adding in a wierd scaling bonus from a 3pp class or tracking PP and similar resources. If you're making this to support enormous changes to fundamental rules, autosheet is definitely not going to work.
What do you mean "things like swapping ability scores"? That seems to me on one hand trivial, but on the other pointless. The sheet has every normal ability-score replacement worked into the sheet. If you mean completely swapping ability scores... switch the numbers, switch the names. Done. Is this even for pathfinder?
Yep, if you want to add more rows to the first sheet, it gets real ugly. Not a ton of weapon rows, but should be more than enough for anyone not a dedicated martial. There's 2 empty skill slots too. Again, is this really for, strictly speaking, PATHFINDER? You mention your homebrew, might want to take PF out of the title, or boldtext that. It's pretty important that this might not be useful for most PF users.
The pages of garbage are an easily avoided issue that has everything to do with google sheets, and absolutely nothing to do with that particular sheet. Print a selection area, specifiy the pages you want to print. Take 30 seconds, save a tree. If you make your own sheet, you'll find the same issue. The print area could certainly be better, though. I get the feeling the creator's goal is more for an electronic sheet, rather than an electronic manager for your printed sheets.

Yes, it's great if you like it. I like it. I get that you don't, but that's not what your OP asked. I WANT you to make something better, but some of your goals are essentially impossible or at odds with your issues with the autosheet. Basically everything about organization I wholeheartedly agree with, but everything about formulae and bloat make no sense. This thread could easily be called "bloat my spreadsheet", and google sheets is always going to be a finicky and error-prone platform. Give yourself a precise goal to the former, and give up with the latter.


This other guy just seems to want a piece of paper.

[Barstro]

Lots of formulas so I have to type in numbers only when my character levels.

Extra things on extra sheets. I like having separate sheets for spells, equipment, abilities.

The ability to add rows to things. I need to be able to add several Feats/Traits/etc. without screwing up the rest of the sheet.

Best of luck with this huge project.