I’ve been working on an custom layout for playbooks. My goal was to move the character building info to a separate sheet and colocate all the moves for easier reference during play. I play tested this once with people who had never played DW before and it went so so. It wasn’t obvious to them that the “character builder” page was discardable once the relevant information was copied to the character sheet.
Left me a little discouraged and questioning my goal. I wanted to try and work the class intro text into the playbook so newer players could get a feel for the class. I also wanted to have a flexible and spacious character sheet though which I’m beginning to feel is more of a feature for experienced players.
The other unique feature of this is the pdf is that it is generated from HTML using print CSS. This let’s me do some things like have a button switch between races or backgrounds. I can also easily generate a playbook for a new or customized class. I’m pretty proud of the system but unsure of the product.
Anyway I sat on this for a few weeks and didn’t have any inspiration to change anything. Rather than letting it molder, I’m sharing it here. Thoughts? Does this look like a playbook layout you’d want to use?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_Cb-Ol14MbUSWNtUlQ1Qk1fb2s/view?usp=sharing
The other “innovation” here, is starting moves that have character building qualities to them (like Bardic Lore) are split. Options on the character sheet, the “move” portion on the moves sheet.
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I like the clean and spacious layout, it could work very well printed as a 4 pages booklet on a single sheet. Having a script to automate the generation of the playbook would be a great thing, allowing much easier preparation for custom classes.
One of the best things of the standard playbooks style is that you can create the character fast just by selecting checkboxes, while with this setup a player should be copying a lot of text from the first to the second page.
Moving some move on the first page (I am not sure of what would be qualifying as character building) could be confusing to new player if they are not clearly marked as moves.
I think that this concept would work best as a computer assisted creation of the character generating the second and third page to print.
I like it and would love to see more 🙂
These are great looking sheets and definitely usable. If I might suggest, I think part of the problem with the final sheets is that second page. You’ve taken up a whole page for something that could really only take up half or less of the page. This is especially true if you generate the sheets programmatically. I’d love to see you try to alter your sheet generator present the first page to the player, log their choices, then generate the second page with all they chose from the first. I’d love to develop this with you further, if you’re willing, as it would have a direct benefit to a hack I have in the works.
Ari Black , you’re talking about the page with the stats? If so, I’ve intentionally inflated the size of the elements to fill that page. I wanted extra room in things like the HP box and Level box, and I wanted all the moves on one page. The stats and such could be condensed, but to what end? What goes on the rest of the page? If it’s the intro/class building info, that defeats the point of separating it out and making it discardable (e.g. I don’t care about the looks I didn’t pick). Just more room for notes? Might be worth while.
I’ve definitely considered making this a computer aided tool, but that also runs somewhat counter to my goal of having a “sell-sheet” (the first page) that I can hand out to players to choose from. I ultimately intended for these sheets for tabletop play, i.e. they should be written on and erased from repeatedly, not annotated and reprinted repeatedly.
I’m willing to share the code and possibly engage in some co-development, but a warning, I’m an old XML developer, you might find my code a bit “esoteric”.
Also if you’re interested in a computer tool for generating playbooks you might want to check out https://github.com/RobRendell/DungeonWorldHTMLSheets, it’s a pretty complete system (AFAICT) for creating/customizing the original style Dungeon World Sheets.
Really clear & cool!