I'm relatively new to the D&D world; I've been playing for a little over a year. I am even newer to being a DM; I have only ran three sessions for my first campaign (which has a lot of homebrew elements for the story, deities, and worldbuilding), but the statistical aspect of my campaign follows the standard rules.
I have struggled a lot with organizing all of the different NPCs, items, enemy stats, etc., so I recently decided to try organizing some stuff on Google Sheets, and it has been pretty cool.
Has anyone else here tried this? If so, do you have any formulas to share? I have mine set-up so that when I put in a strength/dex/con/etc. stat for an enemy, it automatically puts the modifier into the next cell correctly rounded and within the parentheses, for example. I would love more ideas like this, or less complicated methods to achieve similar results.
I've mostly done that with encounter building/tracking, money tracking, and other book keeping matters. Indexing functions in excel are a good place to start looking when you want to call data based on other parameters. Just keep in mind that Google Sheets and Excel function and codes work a little differently. I found that out when I took my old DM toolsheet out of Google Sheets and tried to throw it back in excel. It's very helpful to have a 'Dm' or 'Master' spreadsheet of info.
This is actually a really good idea. You could get pretty granular with tracking individual members of an army and outcomes of combat.
However, you run the risk of slowing down player combat to check npc combat. That can just slow the game for no apparent reason. I just stick to local descriptions and have the battle hinge on the players actions, because otherwise they’re just observing.
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Howdy,
I'm relatively new to the D&D world; I've been playing for a little over a year. I am even newer to being a DM; I have only ran three sessions for my first campaign (which has a lot of homebrew elements for the story, deities, and worldbuilding), but the statistical aspect of my campaign follows the standard rules.
I have struggled a lot with organizing all of the different NPCs, items, enemy stats, etc., so I recently decided to try organizing some stuff on Google Sheets, and it has been pretty cool.
Has anyone else here tried this? If so, do you have any formulas to share? I have mine set-up so that when I put in a strength/dex/con/etc. stat for an enemy, it automatically puts the modifier into the next cell correctly rounded and within the parentheses, for example. I would love more ideas like this, or less complicated methods to achieve similar results.
I've mostly done that with encounter building/tracking, money tracking, and other book keeping matters. Indexing functions in excel are a good place to start looking when you want to call data based on other parameters. Just keep in mind that Google Sheets and Excel function and codes work a little differently. I found that out when I took my old DM toolsheet out of Google Sheets and tried to throw it back in excel. It's very helpful to have a 'Dm' or 'Master' spreadsheet of info.
This is actually a really good idea. You could get pretty granular with tracking individual members of an army and outcomes of combat.
However, you run the risk of slowing down player combat to check npc combat. That can just slow the game for no apparent reason. I just stick to local descriptions and have the battle hinge on the players actions, because otherwise they’re just observing.