Checkin 7: One For the Dungeon Masters

I've been doing final testing to release "Scheming Vizier", the data management update to Paperize. This release is all about linking up your Google Sheets and making all of their data accessible for transformation, templating, and, ultimately, printing!

I came across something interesting when I sat down to do this to our characters for the weekly old-school D&D game I play in. (Ok, it's actually the free-to-download, D&D-red-box-inspired game, Labyrinth Lord. Get ready to lose some player characters like the 80s!)

RPGs, Meet Spreadsheets

We keep our characters in a spreadsheet, as is the fashion these days. This made it very easy for me to import into Paperize and start toying with, except for one thing: the spreadsheet is inverted!

Easy to read (and edit) for a Dungeon Master, especially during live play. But Paperize expects the columns to be attributes and the rows be characters, so I wasn't going to be able to import things in this state. I also didn't want to change the source spreadsheet because it would hinder my DM from doing his thing.

Behold: the "transpose" function:

Turns out you can flip the axis on a range of cells very easily like this: =transpose(RANGE), where the RANGE parameter points to a range that could even be in another sheet.

So, leveraging that, I made a second sheet and named them both appropriately:

...and slapped the transpose function into the new sheet, referencing the first sheet and its entire range of cells, like this:

=TRANSPOSE(Characters!A1:E24)

Now it imports nicely, and (the upcoming release of) Paperize loads the data source correctly, check it out:

What will be really cool will be when printing is working again and we can actually generate character sheet PDFs via Paperize. The flow might go something like this:

• DM prints up character sheets before a session
• DM edits the source spreadsheet live during play
• (the transposed sheet automatically updates)
• after play, the DM makes sure all updates are captured (transcribing notes from character sheets made during play, etc)
• before next session, DM refreshes the spreadsheet in Paperize (one click), and reprints character sheets
• BOOM: fresh, clean, up-to-date character sheets, every session, with no added work!

An ambitious DM could run wild with this once they were comfortable with the basics. Imagine:

• trading card-form character sheets with front and back
• adding graphics so we know what our characters look like
• printing enemy stat blocks for quick reference
• prominent NPCs and Big Bads getting full character sheets
• making cards for items and equipment
• making sheets for towns and locations, and tracking party reputation or store inventories there over time

I'm sure the possibilities are endless, I can't wait to be surprised!