Ghost Characters Sheets: Simple JavaScript is Magick

I’ve written before about writing a character sheet manager for Geist characters, but there have been some upheavals within the Camarilla (now the Midnight Dance, a non-profit separate from White Wolf) that have the project on hold.

For one, their developers may be doing it themselves, and they’re competent.

For another, even if they don’t, they may be exposing a handy API that I can tie into.

Lastly, I’m busy finishing a novel at the moment.

That said, Greg offers Midnight Dance/Camarilla prestige (like, um, club brownie points; with enough of them, you can get more XP for your characters) if we submit ghost non-player characters to him. It’s not terribly onerous to do, but if you don’t have the book and don’t make them often, it can be annoying to remember the calculations for stats like Willpower.

So I made a JavaScript-based ghost character sheet. Plug in the basics of the ghost’s stats and background, and the calculated values will spit out for you.

Other features:

• Its print version is clean and single-page.
• A (lengthy!) link on the page will update as you update values. Visiting that link again will reload the ghost.
• A shortened (bit.ly) link can be generated for you if you don’t want to cart around the long one.

It’s not perfect and it’s not pretty. (Mmm, yellow and black on brown on more brown. Tasty!) (Click the screenshot image to see Pinko’s character sheet. A pizza slice is a lousy anchor.)

There’s no text-only export, so you’d need to either hand your ST a set of URLs (preferably the short ones!) or print to PDF and copy out of that.

I’ll get around to that. Novel.

I got to learn the (surface-level) joys of JSONP to get the bit.ly integration working. (Remote calls are what back-end languages are for, dammit.) “Shorten long URLs with jQuery & bit.ly service” was a good (albeit slightly outdated) reference for the bit.ly-specific call.