by Michael G. Barford, Keeper of the Eternal Chime
When playing RPGs online, there are some obvious downsides. Anyone who has come from a background of playing face-to-face knows this. But there are also some considerable upsides that technology can provide to gaming! With online games, we can play with people halfway across the world. We can find people who like the games we like, even if the games are less well known. We can attend conventions without exposing ourselves (or others) to germs and other hazards of large meeting places. If you want to improve your online gaming experience, you should try to maximize the strengths of using online platforms while minimizing its weaknesses. One unique advantage of gaming online is access to online character sheets. Many popular games like Dungeons and Dragons have extensive, advanced character sheets capable of handling the large amounts of information that a player needs to track; often these sheets can be accessed from a service like Roll20 or Tabletop Simulator. Here at the Gauntlet, we tend to avoid those platforms when possible for a few reasons:
With these points in mind, the most practical and accessible solution we’ve found for character sheets is Google Sheets, which are Google’s online, collaborative version of a spreadsheet very similar to Microsoft Excel. Noble Gauntleteers have already created a number of character sheets for various games. We prefer to call them character keepers because they keep all of the characters for any given campaign in one place! You can find the tons of our character keepers in our Player Aids folder on the Community Resources page. The benefits in using Google Sheets character keepers include:
Some people have found Google Sheets so easy to use that they use it to design the rough drafts of their games (looking at you, Hearts of Wulin!). But not everyone has had experience with using Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or other spreadsheets, and at first it can seem overwhelming. In this series of blog posts I will walk you through how to create your own online character keepers.
1 Comment
7/6/2022 07:53:31 am
Nice article! Thanks for sharing this informative post. Keep posting!
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