LotR Character Generator (Excel spreadsheet)

Attached is my very own LotR character generator. It's in Excel, and fairly primitive by the standards of commercial chargen apps, but more advanced than any Excel solution I've seen yet. I've been working on it off and on for the past year, and I think it's about as good as my paltry Excel skills will allow.

The Good News
Lots of stuff auto-calculates (ATT mods, Skill totals, Age effects, Reactions, et al). The sheet can be easily customized by anyone with a smattering of Excel know-how. I am by no mean an advanced Excel user, perhaps just shy of "intermediate", but you can add skills, packages, and abilities to your heart's content if you know the basics of spreadsheet operation and calculations.
If any among you are an Excel wiz and would like to help me improve the sheet with the advent of lookup tables and arrays, just lemme know. Those concepts are beyond me just now, but I think the program could be streamlined with the use of them.

The sheet contains all of the vital information on a single side of paper, which can be printed to 8.5 x 11 quite nicely. Everything's here but spells and equipment.

The Bad News
There is scant documentation. I've included some comments (displayed as red flags) to help you along, but I don't have the time, energy or wherewithal to spell out every feature. But as long as you don't monkey with the layout (adding or deleting cells, rows, or columns can break the internal formulas if you don't know what you're doing) this baby should hum along for quite a long time.

No support for spells. I don't see much value in this, since a separate list can be maintained on paper.

I had to break up the four major races because Excel's scripting only accommodates up to seven nested formulae, so I couldn't get all the if/then statements necessary to accommodate all the races on one sheet.

Getting Started
Simply choose your sub-race, background package (if applicable) and Order from the drop-down menus. The program supports two Orders and two Elite orders at a time, but is not smart enough to prohibit you from having more than two Orders at a time, so you'll have to monitor yourself on this one.

Then use dice or the Pick method to roll up your character to determine the base ATT values and enter them in the first column of the Attributes section. Age and racial modifiers will be automatically applied based on your drop-down menu choices. There's also room to enter any other absolute modifiers (that is, constant mods that are always applied as opposed to situational mods which are only applied under certian conditions) to the Att matrix, including Picks and Misc, which can be used for magic enhancement or other absolute modifiers.

You should then indicate Favored ATT and Reactions by a simple asterisk.

Next, visit each of the successive worksheets in the file and drag and drop (or cut and paste) the appropriate bonuses and descriptors to the corresponding Racial Abilities, Order Abilities , Edges, Flaws and Skills columns. These worksheets roughly correspond to the character creation method. Do not drag from Appendix II, for it is the reference that stores the plain-English labels that the various formulae use to calculate values. In fact, you should never touch Appendix II unless you have sufficient skills to modify the program.

Once everything is in place you can modify the bonuses in the Misc column of the Skills section to correctly auto-calculate the skill rank total for every skill. Absolute modifiers are indicated as >n<. These should be included in the Misc column formula and can be entered in plain English using the actual Trait or Ability name--as long as you use an underscore to separate words in a label. Hyphens must also be replaced with underscores in formula. The Misc formula should also include the final ATT mod, as appropriate. you can even enter "Untrained" in the Misc formula (only if you have no "training, ie, values in the Ranks or Picks column) to get the -2 value.

So a typical Misc formula might look like this:

=SUM(BRGmod+Musical_Gifts+Untrained)

This is what the Misc formula would like like for a Elf that has no Picks or Ranks devoted to the Perform: Sing skill.

This will call the character's BRG modifier as well as the Musical Gift bonus of +2. The spreadsheet then uses this number, along with any values in the Specialty (Special), Starting Ranks (Rank), and Picks columns to calculate the total skill rank! Other factors could be included in the Misc formula, such as magic, etc. Note that, although absolute modifiers should be included in the calculation, situational modifiers still need to be added to the final rank total when determining success during game play.

It is recommended that you include the standard +2 bonus for specialties in the Special column, since most skill use will almost always call on the specialty skill. Where this is not true, simply subtract the value in the Special column from the skill rank total and you'll have the actual rank total for that situation. The Special formula should also include absolute bonuses from certain Abilities and Traits that apply to the specialty only.

The nether regions of the 1.Worksheet contains a table of all the weapons stats, too. Simply select the entire row of the weapons you want and drag and drop it to a blank slot on the Weapons array.

I'm sure you'll all have questions on using this tool and I'll try to answer them here.

I've also included a sample character so you can see how the formula are calculated. Simply select the cell in question, open the formula toolbar in Excel and check it out. Again, App II holds only the plain-English label reference for the absolute mods. You can also see a complete list of these in the pull-down menu on the extreme left of the formula bar.

Now here's hoping the zip file's size doesn't exceed the admin's limit. If not, we'll have to work something else out!


Good luck and enjoy!

T.