Being in the middle of running Age of Worms, and preparing to run Savage Tide soon, I thought I would adapt my excel spreadsheet that I developed to manage the vast amount of stuff that happens in a adventure path (or any campaign). I am sharing this with anyone who wants it. Take a look, it's mostly self explanitory. Be sure to enter the players current level when entering data as it calculates exp on an individual level and not a party average.
http://www.zackfamily.com/excel/Savage%20Tide%20Campaign%20Tracking.xls
Edit: Oh, I only track GP in my games, so you might need to fidget it if you want to track all the coin types.
Nice work Festivus! Why do you only keep track of gp in your game ?
Nice work Festivus! Why do you only keep track of gp in your game ?
I could track it all but I have enough trouble tracking gold. In general I just convert it all to GP for tracking purposes because I have enough other stuff to keep track of.
Now if the group came upon 200,000 sp there would be weight concerns to deal with of course, but once they get to a major town I can assume they would visit a moneychanger and convert to gold or preferrably gems. For things like meals and whatnot I generally round it to the nearest gp and say they pay for the week (when in town rarely do they stay for just one night anyhow).
I can work on adding the other denominations if folks are interested in it. I set this up for myself and thought others might find it useful.
edit: Also, once I find out details on the affiliations I plan on adding a tracking system for that as well, probably in another tab.
I have updated the spreadsheet to include the rudiments of a Affiliation Tracking system. Once I get the players guide I will include what your rank in each affiliation will gain you.
I also added a new column to better describe the encounter if you desire for the experience tracking section.
If anyone wants to see anything else in this let me know.
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I have updated the spreadsheet to include the rudiments of a Affiliation Tracking system. Once I get the players guide I will include what your rank in each affiliation will gain you.
I also added a new column to better describe the encounter if you desire for the experience tracking section.
If anyone wants to see anything else in this let me know.
Unfortunately the player's guide does not describe what your affliations grant you. Or I'm blind as a bat.
Unfortunately the player's guide does not describe what your affliations grant you. Or I'm blind as a bat.I have updated the spreadsheet to include the rudiments of a Affiliation Tracking system. Once I get the players guide I will include what your rank in each affiliation will gain you.
I also added a new column to better describe the encounter if you desire for the experience tracking section.
If anyone wants to see anything else in this let me know.
Yes, I was saddened by this, but hopefully I will get that info soon and will update it.
I hate to say this, but I can't figure out how to use some of the spreadsheets. Considering you stated that the file is fairly self-explanatory, I'm feeling rather stupid that I can't figure it out.
Anyway you can just drop a few lines of instruction?
I hate to say this, but I can't figure out how to use some of the spreadsheets. Considering you stated that the file is fairly self-explanatory, I'm feeling rather stupid that I can't figure it out.
Anyway you can just drop a few lines of instruction?
Yep, you bet. No no, don't feel that way, it was much simpler when I started... it's grown a bit more complex. I will have to break this up into smaller posts for a) my sanity and b) in order to make it to my game that is starting right now :)
There are several tabs across the bottom of the spreadsheet, each dedicated to tracking some aspect of your Savage Tide campaign.
First, Campaign Experience Tracking. This sheet uses a row for each item you want to award experience for. Starting at row 8, you fill in the data (date, event #, adventure, encounter desc, critter count, and then the level of each character in the columns in the green section.
The blue section reflects the appropriate exp that player attains for each encounter, and there is a total at the top.
You can use the percentile modifier above each column in the green section to throttle back experience, which is useful for cohorts or any other instance where you want to limit the exp for an individual character. If one of the character was an npc (e.g. an absent player), you would enter a 0 for their level. This will still include that character in the experience division but award no experience to it. Lastly, since I happen to use action points, I included a place to track action points (the big red stuff). Don't forget to insert the entire row when adding a row or you might not get the formulas. To do this, right click the numbered column on the left for the row you want to copy, select copy, and then right click again and select insert copied cells.
Did I mention that if you replace the Character 1 through Character 8 with your players characters it fills it in whereever else in the spreadsheets those appear?
Tomorrow, Gold Tracking... including my reasons why I don't track copper and silver.
Gold Tracking tab-
This was setup to work very much like a bank account. Add the date the characters gained or lost gold, what they spent it on or earned it from, and the amount in the appropriate column for the appropriate character.
You will notice that if you entered the character names on the Campaign Experience Tracking green section, those same names are reflected here.
At the top of each column is each characters current gold balance. To the right is the group total. This is useful for figuring out total party wealth as well as splits of treasure.
I settled on a GP standard for my games, I convert all copper, silver, and platinum to gold for tracking purposes. Unless we are talking about 400,000 copper pieces, in which case I track that on the treasure tracking column (for weight purposes) until they can make it to a city (where they will use a moneychanger). In town, if you wanted to buy a torch, it's generally no charge (trivial), but if you wanted to buy 100 torches there would be a fee. It just simplifies the game a bit at the expense of a bit of realism.
Treasure Tracking Tab -
Here is where you get to track all those wonderful items the characters find in the adventure path. I usually also include bought or created objects that are of any value (e.g. magic weapons and potions) Feel free to track what you feel is important.
There are two halves to this sheet, the left half, with the black header, is intended to be available for players to peruse. the right half, with the grey header, is intended for the DM only. I have set the print range to only print the left half, which makes it nice to have a report to present to the players.
Here is the rundown on the columns.
ID - Use this column to assign a unique ID to the item. I usually use something like a letter combination, with the first letter being unique to each adventure. So the first item might be [AAA] the second [AAB] etc.
Unidentified Description - Put in a physical description of the item. For example, a potion of cure light wounds might be "A bottle containing a swirling green liquid"
Who - Which character possesses the item.
Weight - Optional, but useful to know if you are tracking encumberance in your games.
Identified Description - You should not enter anything in this column, it is calculated automatically
Magic Detected - If the players cast detect magic and viewed the object, enter a YES here. If they have not, enter a NO or leave blank.
Radiates - If they did cast detect magic, enter the school of magic they detected here.
CL - Caster Level used to create the item. I use a variant rule for identify that uses Spellcraft against DC20+CL to create item to identify items, so this was a useful column to me.
Identified - Enter a Yes in this column if the characters have identified this item, otherwise No for unidentified or leave blank for non-magical items.
Charges - Once identified, you can use this to track charge expenditures on charged items (e.g. wands, magic arrows, etc).
Appraised - What the players *think* the item is worth
GP Value - What the item is really worth
Date Acquired - When they picked it up
Date Sold/Used - When they sold or used item (or last charge)
Adventure - Which adventure they found the item
Encounter # - I usually put the room code for where the item was in the adventure. This makes it easy to go back and double check things later
DMs Description - This is where you put the identified description. When Magic Detected and Identified columns are both YES, this is copied to the Identified Description column
Notes - Any special notes. You would put comments about a cursed item in this column.
As with the Campaign Experience Tracking sheet, you should use the copy, insert method to add lines so that you get the formula.
Affiliations -
This is not totally finished yet as I don't have the ranks and benefits, but you can still use it to track their ranks in the various affiliations.
Each affiliation has a row. You simply enter a numerical value for each affiliation under the appropriate character to track that rank.
Later, I plan to add below a chart that will tell you what players have what benefit. At the moment it only displays Basic Member, since I really have nothing else to go on :)
More to come on this no doubt.
NPC Roster -
This is where you can track all the Non Player Characters the group comes in contact with. Here is a breakdown of the columns:
NPC Code - A unique identifier for each non-player character. This is useful for taking notes as you can just use the code rather than writing out a long name. You say "Jessie spoke with [SA2] about hiring him to captain a ship.", it takes getting used to but if you make index cards with the NPC names on it you can use those too and use this as your content manager.
Name - NPC name as it appears in the adventure
Phonetic - My lame attempt at standardizing the pronounciations so that I don't forget how I said it the last time.
Race - What the race of the NPC is. This can sometimes be a factor in how I portray the NPC
Gender - As with race
Notes - I usually put mannerisms here, so that I can have SA2 Captain Shadwik gag frequently on the wad of tobacco he chews, while squinting, speaking in a deep gravelly voice.
Campaign Notes -
This is a pretty free form sheet, just a date and comment column. I like to transcribe my notes from the various slips of paper at the game table after the session so that I don't lose the information. Just two columns, date and comment. Should be easy to figure out what goes in those two columns. :)
XP Awards Table - Only one thing should be changed on this sheet, and that is the universal XP modifier. If you want to slow down the overall XP table, you can use the Experience Chart Tuning to change the amount of exp awarded for all characters across all levels.
At the bottom of this sheet is also a handy summary sheet showing the XP, gold and action points each character has. This is the defined print area so you just need to print this sheet to get the report.
Version Info Sheet - This just has what I changed in what version of the sheet. Hopefully I won't be changing this much once the APs start going as I don't want to have to write out instructions on how to update the sheets :)
Festivus, this is a great piece of work, as a spreadsheet DM, myself, I appreciate both your gift and the amount of work you have put in.
MANY MANY Thanks
Coreans Disciple
Thanks for sharing, Festivus. I've never tried anything like this before, but I can see how it would be very helpful--especially for a large group, and for keeping consistency about portrayals, what PCs know about their items, etc.
This is truly impressive. Good work!
FWIW, Google Mail seems to have a Spreadsheet capability as well. I've got 14 invites left...:P
FWIW, Google Mail seems to have a Spreadsheet capability as well. I've got 14 invites left...:P
I do have a google compatable version of portions of this, though a bit more generic. The file is located on my FTP server in the same directory. Once things cool down with my updating it I will convert the STAP sheet too.
Egads, I just thought of a rather glaring bug in the experience spreadsheet, and I need to think about how I am going to fix it... probably more columns... sigh.
Anyhow, the spreadsheet does not take into account multiclassing penalties. You can override each characters individual encounter experience calculation (since it should only apply when the penalty applies) by editing the cell that contains the calculation to manually enter the exp for that event.
Adjusting the throttle adjusts their entire experience history and is not the correct way to handle this.
I will have a solution to this little oversight soon.
Version 1.14 is up on my website. I have included a way to adjust an individuals experience for an individual encounter by a percentile. So if they are to get a 20% exp penalty for a period of time, you enter 20%. I didn't spend time to make it validate the input, but if left blank it assumes they get 100% exp, and anything up to that point is the penalty (e.g. 20%).
Entering more than 100% will result in negative numbers, so don't do it :) It isn't the cleanest implementation but it was the only was it was going to make sense to me.
I have also included a summary of the character's gold on the experience page, so you now can just print that one page and have all the important (to the players) stuff. Gold, Exp and Action points. I suggest PDF or Legal/Landscape format as it is a touch wide.
Festivus, I started doing prep work for the first session of my campaign tonight and found a problem with the spreadsheet. Now, the problem I'm running across could very well be user error, but I figured you should be able to help me figure out how to fix it.
I have version 1.14, and I started inputing the encounters that are listed in TiNH. for easier tracking purposes, I changed "Adventure" to "Encounter Name" and "Encounter Description" to "Encounter Participants" I think it'll be easier for me to find the encounters based off of that rather than have an entire column repeating "There is No Honor".
Uhm, I guess I got a little side tracked. anyway, the problem that I'm running into . . . I have listed four PC's. Now, when I list what level the character would be for a particular encounter the amount of xp gained pops up as it should. except that under "Character 4", half the time only a partial amount of xp is listed.
For example, for the first encounter about the blue nixie, i have two lines for xp. The first line is for the crew, providing 263 xp per pc for the 7 CR .5 NPC's. The second line is for soller vark, where the first three pc's are listed to gain 150 xp, but PC 4 only lists 75?
If I move the level entries over one column to PC 5, then the same numbers pop up as the first three PC's.
Any idea's on this?
Not to resurrect something that shouldn't be -
Is this still being worked on?
Has this project turned into something else?I downloaded this the other day, and spent some time converting it to my Shackled City campaign, changing names around. I also ran into the problem William had, but I fixed it. I'd be happy to share an explanation.
Regardless, this is still a really handy way to keep track of everything, so . . .
Hell,
I'm just about to start a SC campaign too and I'd like to try this too!-Darren
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Not to resurrect something that shouldn't be -
Is this still being worked on?
Has this project turned into something else?I downloaded this the other day, and spent some time converting it to my Shackled City campaign, changing names around. I also ran into the problem William had, but I fixed it. I'd be happy to share an explanation.
Regardless, this is still a really handy way to keep track of everything, so . . .
Any chance of getting a copy of this tool? It sounds pretty cool.
Check the dates of this topic. It has been dead for nearly *six* years, so I doubt you'll get anything out of it.
Check the dates of this topic. It has been dead for nearly *six* years, so I doubt you'll get anything out of it.
Hey, hope springs eternal. Maybe Fest will meander back this way.