Setting up your character on DiceCloud is going to take you a little longer than just filling it in on a paper character sheet would have. The goal of using an online sheet is to make actually playing the game more streamlined, and ultimately more fun. So putting a little extra effort into setting up your character now will pay off over and over again once you're playing.
The idea is to track where each number comes from, and allow you to easily make changes on the fly.
-Lets look at a hypothetical example.
-You need to swim through a sunken section of dungeon to fetch the quest's Thing.
You'll need to take off your magical Plate Armor of +1 Constitution to swim without sinking, of course. Taking it off will change your armor class, your speed and your constitution, which in turn changes your hitpoints and your constitution saving throw. Working out all those changes in the middle of a game will drag the game to a hault.
Fortunately you have a digital character sheet, so it's a matter of dragging your Plate Armor +1 Con from your "equipment" box to your "backpack" box and you're done. Your hitpoints change correctly, your saving throws are up to date, your armor class goes back to reflecting the fact that you have natural armor from being a dragonborn. Your character sheet keeps up and you ultimately get more time to play the game. Huzzah!
Let's look at a hypothetical example.
+You need to swim through a sunken section of dungeon to fetch the quest's Thing.
You'll need to take off your magical Plate Armor of +1 Constitution to swim without sinking, of course. Taking it off will change your armor class, your speed and your constitution, which in turn changes your hit points and your constitution saving throw. Working out all those changes in the middle of a game will drag the game to a halt.
Fortunately you have a digital character sheet, so it's a matter of dragging your Plate Armor +1 Con from your "equipment" box to your "backpack" box and you're done. Your hitpoints change correctly, your saving throws are up to date, your armor class goes back to reflecting the fact that you have natural armor from being a dragonborn. Your character sheet keeps up and you ultimately get more time to play the game. Huzzah!
You have already given your character a race, but you haven't yet specified what that race does for your character, so lets do that.
+You have already given your character a race, but you haven't yet specified what that race does for your character, so let's do that.
In the edit mode of the racial dialog you can change your race's name and add effects and proficiencies your race gives you. We will only be adding the base traits our race gives us, specific features can go in the features tab so we can more easily reference them later.
-Lets add some of the effects all races will give.
+Let's add some of the effects all races will give.
You can now also add any other stat changes given yo you by your race, for example a human's +1 to each ability score, or an elf's +2 Dexterity.
Your character currently doesn't have any ability scores, so lets fix that. Whether you roll your abilities or point-buy them, lets add a feature to represent where they came from
+Your character's ability scores are currently all 10 by default - which means that they're no better than your average commoner! Whether you roll your abilities, point-buy them, or just use the standard set of values, you'll need to update them.
You can now check that your ability scores appear on your Stats page and that your skills that use them have their values calculated accordingly.
We didn't include your character's racial ability modifiers in the feature, so you should go back to your character's racial dialog and add them in there as effects. Remember to use the add operation, rather than base value, since your race adds to your ability scores.
@@ -63,35 +60,39 @@Currently your character is at level 0, because they don't have any class levels. Let's fix that.
We now have a class, lets add the saving throw proficiencies it gives us.
+We now have a class, let's add the saving throw proficiencies it gives us.
If you navigate back to the stat page, you will see that you now have a proficiency bonus, based on your class level, and the saving throw you are proficienct in will take your proficiency bonus into account.
-One of the most important things your class gives you is your hitpoints, so lets go add those now.
+One of the most important things your class gives you is your hit points, so let's go add those now.
Now we need to decide how many hitpoints our class gives us. We will assume that we take the constant hitpoints per level, since it's both the rule used for league play and it's statistically advantageous over rolling for hitpoints every level.
-We could work out our hit points every level and change the effect each time, but we can do one better, we can input the calculation directly into the value field and have the character sheet figure it out for us
-Let's assume we are rolling a fighter, so in the class name you typed in "Fighter" (with the capital F, but without the quote marks). A fighter gets 10 hp at first level and 6 hitpoints every level after that.
-Lets rather split that into 4 bonus hitpoints at first level, and 6 hitpoints for every fighter level your character has. We can the write this as 4 + 6*FighterLevel where the * represents multiplication.
-Note, we don't add the constitution modifier here, that's already taken care of by default, since all characters add their constitution modifier to their hit points
+Now we need to decide how many hit points our class gives us. We will assume that we take the constant hit points per level, since it's both the rule used for league play and it's statistically advantageous over rolling for hit points every level.
+We could work out our hit points every level and change the effect each time, but we can do one better: we can input the calculation directly into the value field and have the character sheet figure it out for us.
+Let's assume we are creating a fighter, so in the class name you typed in "Fighter" (with the capital F, but without the quote marks). A fighter gets 10 hp at first level and 6 hitpoints every level after that.
+Let's rather split that into 4 bonus hit points at first level, and 6 hit points for every fighter level your character has. We can the write this as 4 + 6*FighterLevel where the * represents multiplication.
+Note that we don't add the constitution modifier here; that's already taken care of by default, since all characters add their constitution modifier to their hit points automatically.
You can try all sorts of calculations in your effects and in certain other places too. For example if you had some feature that is used a number of times equal to your wisdom modifier or 1, whichever is lower, you could limit its uses to min(1, wisdomMod) and the character sheet will figure it out for you, and update itself if you wisdom modifier happens to change later.
+This method of including calculations in other stats allows you to take full advantage of having a digital character sheet, as it means that you can change any one thing in your character sheet and everthing else will update automatically.
+Any input field with a
Any input field with a
The full list of functions and variables can be found on the GitHub wiki, here.