Okay, here's my situation.

Back when I started my campaign, I had my players (it's being played here on Dumpshock) post their char sheets, backgrounds, etc as spoiler-coded posts to the OOC thread.

This is fortunate, as I lost my campaign data files, including the non-posted character sheets (which weren't any different from the posted versions, yay).

Of course, now that they've completed a mission and are going to get karma soon, I run into the problem that all of the karma logging automation I've ever seen are attached to character builders - which is good, but difficult when you'd have to plug in those character sheets from scratch.

So here's a thought I just had, wish I knew how to do it.

I want to set up a Word file for each character in the campaign to log karma awards in.

I want to store char name, player name, date, reason, karma awarded. All in neat columns.

A sample entry would look like this:

Date CharName PlayerName Reason Karma
03/02/2010 Bob Bob Survival 2

The above I could probably do with a simple Table. But here's where my head hurts:

Then, at the bottom I want to store a running log of Career Karma Earned, Karma Available to spend, and have both values calculated automatically.

I don't know excel well enough to do this, at all.
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Of course, once that was done I could already see other features to add. Well, one feature, since I still figure this should be a simple program to use.

The ability to divide awards up by run/mission/adventure (whatever term you use), giving each run/mission/adventure a neme, and produce a log of how much karma got dealt out to the player per run.
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Here's where I mark myself as desperate: Would anybody else be interested in this? Maybe in coding it?

That's actually much simpler to do in Excel than in Word.

The first part simply requires you to have separate worksheets for each player, with columns just like you name, and then a cell where you do a sum of the karma column. it can obviously get much more complicated if you want it to do more (like the karma tracker I have for my character), where you can track both karma awards and karma expenditures, with a running total of Karma Received, Karma Spent, and Karma Remaining.

Now, the easiest way to do the second part (if you're going to award multiple lines of karma for one session, with each describing a specific reason for the karma award) is to then take the data tables and create a pivot table out of it. That's a bit more complicated if you're a novice to excel, but it's 5 minutes of work if you have any excel expertise with pivot tables.

You could even get more complex and have a data entry sheet for each player, and then a group sheet, where the data entered into the player sheets is automatically translated to the group sheet, so you can see a group total by player in the same table. You could even break that table down using a pivot table so that you can see each player's awards by whatever metric you want, as a group.

That coding is pretty simple, actually, but I'd need a better description of what it is you want the final product to look like, and how much of the above you really want.

Brooks

Well, since you asked:

It would not need to look pretty.

How I'd want ti to look like, now that I think about it some more:

Each player gets a sheet - at the top of each sheet would be Player Name [For their Dumpshock handle] and Character Name [Obvious]

Each sheet has columns labeled as follows, with comments in brackets for our use here on Dumpshock:

Date [OOC date, MM/DD/YYYY format]

Reason [Obvious]

Karma Awarded [Obvious]

Ideally it should be able to handle karma expenditure, somehow, without breaking the running total of Karma Earned.

At the bottom of each sheet, I'd want two listings:

Total Karma Earned [A running total of karma earned regardless of whether it's been spent or not]

Karma Available [Karma available to spend]

Then, yeah, your group sheet sounds exactly like what I'd want for karma tracking on the group level. A way to see where people stand in comparison with each other, and a way to track how much karma each person is getting per adventure. (Because I GM on dumpshock, I only award karma at the end of each adventure/mission, with them spending it during the "time off" between adventures. This is because, obviously, you can't really break up a PbP game into "sessions".)

So lets see...

No formatting, no formatting, date formated, no formatting, no formatting...

SUM! The sum function is what you want. Just at the top type =sum( and then drag your mouse over the column below it. Type ) and hit enter.

Karma left: well, sum up the column for total karma, then sum the column for spent karma, and subtract!

Took me 30 seconds.

...Why is today "Penta is an idiot" day?

Thanks for the sheet.

I'm going to go off to the dunce corner now.

There's a learning curve with every application. Don't worry about it.