Character creation

Originally written on Dec 11, 2016. Edited on Dec 18, 2022. Original blog available at: https://theexcelrpg.wordpress.com/

Now I’ve got the dice roll mechanic working, I can start doing character creation. Now I don’t really know what the setting for the game will be – epic fantasy like Skyrim, very gritty medieval fantasy like the Witcher, a sci-fi epic like Mass Effect, or some bizarre satire inspired by the Stick of Truth. However, I don’t need to know the setting to start character creation – although creating some Stick of Truth analogue does seem very tempting.

I’ve got a few ideas for the world and story, but I’ll set that aside for now. Right now, I want to focus on the most important thing in any RPG character:

Character Development.

Obviously by that I don’t mean the whole wishy-washy emotional arc rubbish, I mean attributes, classes, skills and levelling up.

I’ve mentioned D&D a lot in previous posts, however my tabletop experience actually comes from Pathfinder. Now, if I open up my Pathfinder GM guide I can find the character generation pages there, which generally involves choosing a race, a class and then your ability scores. I’m gonna scrap the race and class selection for now, and hop straight into abilities. Now each character has 6 main abilities: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma. These all determine various character traits.

Playing Classic Pathfinder, we’d role 3D6 and sum them. Repeat this process until we have 6 numbers, and then choose a number for each ability score. Sometimes you don’t have a choice – the first 3D6 goes to Strength, the second to Constitution, and so forth – but I want to keep the illusion of choice. However, to make things interesting, I’m going to add an element from Magic The Gathering (yes, I play a lot of nerdy things.) In MTG you can mulligan if you’ve drawn a crappy hand – taking 5 from the library (the deck for all you Yugioh players out there) – you can shuffle it back into your library, and then draw a new hand – but with only 4 cards. You can keep repeating this until you have no hand at all, but that’s a pretty bad play. So the Excelsior equivalent would be taking the 6 3D6, and then if the range is pretty poor ie 4, 3, 7, 9, 5, 12; then repeating the process, but with 2D6 and 1D5 instead. However coding all of that in is definitely going to be a challenge, and I may decide to scrap it in the end. Anyway, enough foreplay and on to the spreadsheet:

I started quite simply, just by creating the actual character sheet. Currently its very strongly inspired by Pathfinder, but the main benefit of keeping it in this format it that it’s genre independent – the abilities are relevant whether its set in the future, or in Middle Earth, or in Alabama.

The original ability scores are determined from the dice roll, then race modifiers are – surprisingly – race dependent. Then every 5 levels you can add 1 to an ability, so that will go in the level modifier score. The bonus is determined by subtracting 10 from the score and then dividing by 2.

Now the simple bits are out of the way, it’s time to create the score generator. Creating a fixed score generator with no mulligan and no choice is simple – the macro is very easy, and the ability scores are created instantly.

However, being a masochist, lets add some extra elements to it. We can use data validation to allow assigning each ability score, however this has an issue with duplicates. I found a great online guide for this – link as follows: http://www.contextures.com/xlDataVal03.html . This helped get the generated ability scores, and then choose them.

I then got round to adding the mulligan. This was done by further modifying the macro, and then adding message boxes. You have three tries to choose your ability scores, going from 6 3D6, 5 3D6 and 3D4, 4 3D6 2 3D4.

The message boxes are there to replace the DM’s voice – they’ll communicate all key information to the player.

After saying no:

And saying no once more:

I tested this for a while, and realised there were some issues with the data validation. If we rolled 8, 11, 16, 8, 11, 13, we would only be allowed 8, 11, 16 and 13. I’m gonna call it a day though, and try and sort that out another time.

Till next time.