Hey all,
For those interested, I’ve created an online Burning Wheel Gold character burner called Charred:
The salient features are:
[ol]
[li]Character files can be saved to the user’s local computer, and later loaded. Useful for showing a character to someone else.
[/li][li]Can generate a simple PDF character sheet.
[/li][li]Allows Gear selection from the gear lists.
[/li][li]Random name generation (albeit somewhat cheesy).
[/li][/ol]
Let me know what you think, and if you find any bugs.
Fantastic!
What are, however, the legalities of essentially publishing the lifepath system?
ken
That’s a good question. I’d emailed Luke about it but never got a response. If there are any copyright issues raised, I can take Charred offline and address them as needed.
I really like your layout. Its good, clean, and intuitive. Edit: I’m blind. Found it. [SUB] I’m sure you are already looking into improving it in the future, but the resource layout could really do to be expanded with affiliation, relationships, and fame. [/SUB] Likewise, being able to know the trait-point cost before selecting one would be a much appreciated feature.
On the topic of legality. There used to be an online character creation tool which was accessible only if you could answer questions from the BWR(revised) booklet.
ken
Showing the trait point costs is a good idea.
I remember that question-and-answer authentication. I’d brought it up to a few people and they figured it’s probably not necessary at this point. If problems do come up, though, I’m not against implementing that.
Excellent wok, this will make first sessions much smoother. Especially if we’ve been recruiting 
EDIT: If you need any grunt work help, please do ask 
My coding is 12 years outdated and bad to begin with though.
I second the notion of Gruntwork: Depending on the construction of your databases, if you need proof reading, I work nightshifts this weekend. I can easily pull a few hours looking through your Lifepaths. (alternatively, type up Trait descriptions) Knowing that OlavBB is working with me, I volunteer him as well. ducks
-k
I just did a cursory inspection and it looks fantastic!
Get permission from Luke and BWHQ, though
Good job!
Thanks guys!
As for the offer of help, I think writing out the skill and trait descriptions would be a great benefit. If people were interested in doing a few at a time I could compile them together.
I’ll come up with a simple format for them.
If you have a usable format in some 20 odd hours, you’ll have two goons churning out the text you need
Ahh, I knew this University education would get me going places.
A couple of them! This one and this one for Revised.
And not even “used to be” since a (partial) update to the former exists.
But this looks very nice. And it’s great to have an actually up-to-date Gold burner instead of the wonderful but (semi-)Revised versions.
A suggestion:
One thing I think might be nice, during character generation. If you could, when selecting your next lifepath, click “browse setting”, to see a list of your choices presented in the way the are on the character sheet.
As an example, my character is Born Noble, no other lifepaths. I want to see what my choices are, I would select Noble Setting, in the drop down list, then hit a “Browse Setting” button and get a pop up looking like this:
http://i.imgur.com/jI5D79e.jpg
This would help if you’re looking for specific leads, skills or traits. Instead of clicking each and removing them to try.
I just burned up a character today, roughly at the same time this was posted. Wish I’d known about it!
For the heck of it, I’m remaking him in this thing, just to see how it works. It seems pretty slick.
I’m noticing that there don’t seem to be any traits past S, though? I can’t find my Unlucky trait.
It would also be nice if there were a way to get custom traits in there. I figure I’m not the only person who makes up simple, 1 point character traits on the spot without reservation.
Finally, it doesn’t seem to agree with me about my starting Resources value. I have a small cottage (3), a rowboat (5) and a 1D reputation (7) for a total of 15 rps spent on applicable stuff. 15/15 is 1, but Charred still says B0. Is it not updating, or am I the one who’s calculating wrong?
Those are the issues I see. Everything else worked fine. It was quite intuitive and easy to use.
A couple of minor Elf problems. Prince/Princess isn’t set up with any prerequisites. (Do traits not work yet?) For the Protector Sword Singer lifepath Soldier-Protector isn’t accepted as a prerequisite, I think because you left out the hyphen (it’s looking for “Soldier Protector”)
Still awesome though!
That’s a good idea! I’ll add it to the TODO list.
Good catch! It seems like those are missing for some reason. I’ll take a look.
Yeah that seems like a good thing to have. I’ll add it to the list.
I’ll look into that.
Good catches. I’ll fix those up.
Ok so I’m thinking something like this. Plain text, with each entry separated by a blank line. An entry consists of a fieldname, colon, and field value. An example for a Skill that shows the field names:
name: Silent Fury
desc: With but a glare, the Captain can send shivers down the spine of those who cross him. This skill follows the same rules as intimidation.
obstacle: Victim's Will
forks: Paean of Deeds
type: Social
tools: No
Within each field, make sure not to have any newlines (i.e. in the desc field’s value, make it one long line). For traits:
name: Dramatic
desc: Whatever happens to this character, it is very entertaining and overwrought when he tells you about it later. This trait can be called on for Acting and Theatrics.
All the rest of the fields I already have, so that’ll save a lot of typing.
What about skills with a list of example Obs or other necessarily multi-line descriptions?
How do you intend to handle the rare cases where a trait/skill exists and is not quite the same depending on which stock it comes from?
Good point, forgot the obstacles field. However, obstacles can still be one line; this is really just a simple format for data-entry that I’ll be postprocessing with a tool later to make a final datafile. Here’s an example with sample obstacles:
name: Midwifery
desc: Midwives are an important fixture in any village. They help women give birth to children and survive.
obstacles: Keeping the mother and child healthy, Ob 2. Uncomplicated birth, Ob 3. Caesarean, Ob 4. Breach birth, Ob 5. Determining the child's sex before birth, Ob 6.
forks: Herbalism
type: Medicinal
tools: No
That’s an interesting point. I don’t know if I’ve come across any; do you have an example? I suppose that I’d just end up adding both descriptions. Realistically I don’t think Charred will end up handling all the weird corner-cases, but as long as it’s mostly correct it should be good enough. Any bizarre cases can be handled later on the character sheet with a pencil.