urbwar wrote:I have Excel on my desktop (after I had to get it fixed from a nasty virus, they put Excel on for me), but my laptops have Open office. I'll have to give it a try on the laptop, and see if it works
btw, neither link worked for me. I had to go to the group's file section directly to download it. Might want to check them
Bummer... I grabbed a new copy last night from the second link, but today neither are working for me either. If you want a copy immediately (before Simpson sees this to fix it) you can email me and I'll try to respond quickly with a copy - kevperrine @yahoo.com
I am SUPER curious to know what folks think of using the Excel builder! Simpson created a sheet similar to this one for M&M 1 & 2 back in the day. It became quite popular and was the only thing I used to make characters for M&M.
Neat history of
"The AMZ BASH! BOOK"
I started a project to make a BASH! Excel sheet about 6-7 months ago... Then (after not having gamed regularly with Simpson in 7-8 YEARS) he *found* BASH! and started making a sheet on his own... We hooked up again here on the forums (hey look - BASH! is not only a great supers RPG, but it rekindles old friendships!! hehe) and I offered him all the "data tab" info I'd collected. He grabbed it from there and worked his awesome excel-mojo and after several versions of trial and error and suggestions and fixes with rule issues, etc... This is the result. I am still toying with imagery and such to help give the sheet even more of a fantastic "comic book look", but Simpson's done an amazing job.
The sheet is built (as he mentioned) for ultimate flexibility. You can't really make a character without a core BASH! sourcebook or a strong understanding of the rules and character build process. But, once you have either/both of those... making characters is just a joy with the sheet.
Watch the sheet's tabs and go through all the various input areas and tabs to understand *what* each thing does, because there are alot of "little things" that really make the sheet neat. It won't auto-calculate your Armor or Deflect or anything in from your Power tab selection - but you can run back to the "Stats" tab and have a place to enter all that (including Priority, Stat changes, Soaks, Defense, etc...) and it'll auto-calculate all the final numbers for you on the character sheet.
Also... one of MY favorite things is that there is NO "choose a Character Point total" at the beginning... My meaning - many point based systems have the GM tell the players "you have THIS many points to build a character with... GO!" ... with BASH!, one of my favorite (implied) rules is that you have NO direct Character Point total to build from. The Narrator suggests a range (as the Campaign Scale) and players can go hog-wild... making a PC-Hero that is within those limits, or one that's lower/below limits, or even one that's high/beyond the limits. The "difference" is then equaled out with HERO PTS/DICE or PERSONAL SETBACKS. So that no player/hero needs to have exactly the SAME total but still "balances" well for the game part of the game.
"The AMZ BASH! BOOK" does that well, only noting what you have spent, not giving you a total to choose then subtract from.
Then awesome of AWESOME, the final total of your Character Point build is tallied up and auto-posted on the character sheet to look like the "$ cost" of the "comic book" (Simpson had it there in that spot, I am proud to have suggested it be the price! hehe)
Anyway...
I love the sheet. I love the sections (Gear, Vehicles and HQ need tested more I think) and we have some more ideas to build onto the sheet later.
What's needed is heavy playtesting to make sure all the rules and auto-calculating and populating that the sheet DOES is solid.
So all help is appreciated!
Still lovin'
"The AMZ BASH! BOOK" Simpson!!
Thanks for working your excel-mojo so well!!
-kev-
It's also Macro-less.
I'm a Windows nerd, so I can't really help all that much there. XML is really only handy when the sheet goes through a lot of revisions and you want to move your existing characters to the new version.
