I know I have been a poor blogger. I have not kept up these past weeks as I should. There are some good reasons for it, but the main reason is not important at all. You see, I found twitter not long ago, and I have been updating very frequently through there. This leaves me with very little to actually blog about. Not much of an excuse, but there it is. Anyways, onto thing you really want to know.

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The DPnP Character Management System is another component of the Digital Pen n Paper ™ suite of Role-Playing tools developed for PCs. The character manager allows you to create, edit, and manage Player Characters, Non-Player Characters, and Archetypes for any campaign created with the DPnP Campaign Resource Manager (CRM).

Character Creation

CRM Campaign files contain all the resources, rules, and formats used in a campaign. Using these created elements, the Character Management System (CMS) you can create fully compatible characters within the rules specified by that campaign. This easy to use application takes you step by step through each aspect of the character creation process. It even makes suggestions for character creation by looking at your character’s selected attributes, skills, etc. to easily help you make the best choices.

Break the Rules

You are not restricted by your chosen campaign’s rules. You can break them. For instance, while a campaign may allow only a certain amount of starting money, you may spend as much as you like. A report created with your character sheet reveals the steps you took in the character creation, including where and how you cheated. This feature allows for you to build characters that may conform to your Game Master’s rules, but not a specific campaign’s.

Manage Your Character

Game Master’s, through the CRM, have tools that will update your character from game sessions (including offline play). These updates take the form of money, equipment, and EXP. You can take this update and apply it to your character. Then, through character management you can quickly update your character by spending skill points, money, sell equipment, and more.

Additional Features:

• Journal Management: Keep your character’s story up to date with threaded journals.
• Development Logs: The character manager logs your awarded and spent money, exp, and journals so you know how, when, and why you spent, changed, and modified the way you did.
• Focus Measurement: Easily track how focused your character build is with focus tracking bars that dynamically adjust during character creation. They measure your level of focus between Combat, Knowledge (which includes magic, psychic powers, and computer skills), and Social ability. The larger each bar, the more focused your character is in that particular aspect.
• XML and XHTML: export characters to XML format and use XHTML character sheets. This allows for easily created community character sheets that can take information directly from a character’s XML file. Familiar with XML and XHTML? Create your own character style sheets and share them with the community!
• Focus Tracker: as you create watch as each step will reflect the focus of your character. This shows you how much of your character’s potential is focused on groups such as Combat, Physical, Technical, and Social.
• Character Packs: Purchase character packs that are included with books such as Fantasy Sagas Paradigm, or printed adventures, or download community characters from the forum to build your own library of characters.
• Will come free with any Player’s Guidebook and will include the 5 character Archetypes from that guidebook.

Screenshots

(Background artwork and character artwork by Marco Morte for the upcoming adventure “Desecration”)

The main interface shows your basic character sheet on the right. Buttons on the left reveal as you advance through the character creation process.

Here we see the basic character information. Upload your own images, and create custom stat blocks called traits.

The attribute generation wizard allows for you to go from random dice, to point buy at the click of a button. Also notice that wherever your mouse points, the rules for that element appear in the lower text box.

The Item Purchasing wizard shows a Suggested Items tab, which pulls information from your created character (so far) and determines the most likely equipment your character will use. Also notice that we can overspend our money as evident in the red remaining money value in the top right.

This image shows the recently added focus bars (bottom left of the screenshot) that track your character's level of focus between Combat, Knowledge, and Social concentration.

I know, I have been quiet. I have been sick with migraines and back problems (one compounds the other which compounds the former). Anyways, I am back, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot of catching up this week. It is a busy week for myself and my daughters. So, with having almost two weeks of very little progress, it is time to catch up, right? Well, with limited time, I think I can take what little time I have and apply some little bells and whistles. I am also looking at reintroducing some features. They key feature, XML files, will allow for third party application development that I think may a good topic for discussion. Primarily because it has been on my mind for some time.

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