Web Only PDF Sheets?
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A sad reality of my work schedule means that I'm limited to RPing almost exclusively on Ares games thanks to the web portal and being able to pose every few hours instead of every few minutes. Unfortunately, there are not many Ares games out there. Beyond that, I think most people are spoiled by the FS3 system which comes fully integrated with the mush and web portal. Sure, there are several plugins for RPGs but they are mush side only with no web portal integration.
Obsidian Reverie did something I found rather interesting(even if they don't seem to do it consistently). They have no coded systems that I'm aware of, aside from the standard +roll, instead they store sheets as links on the character bios. I thought this was interesting but did not like the google drive approach so I coded up a snippet of code that supports inline PDFs on the web portal.
My question is..would a lack of integrated systems and reliance on a web-only character sheet keep you from playing on a game? You'd have a +roll system to support whatever RPG you're using(both in-game and on the web portal) but no +sheet, no +attack, no +<whatever>.
During the quarantine, I've used it so my TT group(and some others) can still play Pathfinder online and it's worked out really well. I'm just curious about what a broader base of people may think. Also, I'm hoping that it may prove to be a viable option for people who are looking to get new games started up.
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Er, I hit the wrong button. No, web-only sheets is fine.
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I have played games where web only sheets were the way things were done.
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I think it is fine. While I agree that having integrated stuff is really nice, I also think with an interesting concept and fun and active people to play with, people will forgo the bells and whistles too.
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Web sheets are totally viable. You don't even need to take the step of doing them with a PDF; you can set up wiki forms and the likes to handle this.
Depending on the system, this may be more or less issue-laden. WoD is a nightmare, something like HorrorMU's system was pretty easy.
As to worries that someone would change something inappropriately -- which a lot of people have reasonable concerns about if players can manage their sheets on their own -- mediawiki takes care of this for you: it marks all the changes made, who made them, and when automatically as part of its default. If someone's engaging in funny business, it's easily spotted, and that people know these changes are marked/etc. is a good deterrent to those who might try to get away with such shenanigans if the changes were not so visible.
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A "game-only" sheet is much more likely to keep me from playing than a web-only one. At this point... if I can't play exclusively on the web... I can't(/won't) play at all.
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I'm kind of surprised people are using PDFs or Google sheets, instead of something more automated/targeted-to-RP like myth-weavers.com ... did something happen to blacklist that option, or do people just not know it exists somehow?
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For me, I have no idea what myth-weavers is. I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the info.
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@ZombieGenesis Wow, that site's been around for decades. I've used it for TT and VTT games for a long time, so I'm really surprised. I guess I just assumed everyone knew about it by now.
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My work has the site blocked but I'll check it out when I get home. I like the PDF option as it lets me secure the sheets. People submit a form fillable, once approved I print it as a non-form fillable and upload to the site.
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Tangential to the question at hand, but I just figured I'd toss out there that doing a full-blown chargen system in Ares is a big undertaking, but just adding something to record stats in the web portal is trivial. You could adapt the web goals tutorial pretty easily for that and just make it a staff-only command to edit the list of stats.
To the original point - it depends on the game, and how much friction is caused by having to figure out die pools and such manually. On some games it works fine. On others it would be a dealbreaker.
