Community Creation โข 2020
When the world’s roleplaying groups went online in 2020, my group’s virtual tabletop of choice was Astral (sadly now defunct).
While I had bounced off other VTTs before, I found Astral to have a breezy learning curve with an intuitive UI. So it was my first choice when I wanted to run some 13th Age for Gen Con Online.
While Astral didn’t yet have support for 13th Age, it was easy to upload a PDF character sheet and add fields and checkboxes over the top.
From there I set to translating 13th Age‘s mechanics to Astral’s stat and dice syntax in order to automate the sheet and rolls.
Just with my experience using spreadsheet formulae, I built a character sheet with documentation that could:
- Calculate Ability Modifiers, Defenses and Hit Points.
- Calculate bonuses for, and roll Skill Checks, Saves, Basic Attacks and damage.
- Roll Icon Relationship points with helpful formatting.
- Add Background and Magic Item bonuses to skill checks using checkboxes.
- Automatically adjust HP and Skill Checks when taking Incremental Advances.
- Support easily adding actions and attacks with the explained stats.
Once completed, I submitted the template on the Astral forums where it was approved to become the official 13th Age character sheet.
I put it to work later that year when I started producing livestreams of my own.
