To All,
I have finally conquered the beast known as Adobe Acrobat. This is good news, for this means that the first official-not-in-beta release of the Pathfinder Character Sheet (not to be confused with the official one released by Paizo).
I want to thank everyone who has helped out with this from Neceros to the people who tested out the previous versions and let me know what was wrong and gave me ideas to make it better. Without you, this project wouldn’t exist.
Now, for a few fun-filled facts:
Here it is for your perusal.
Pathfinder Character Sheet - Version 1.0.8
Sep 26, 2009Excellent work. The clear buttons do not function within any reader I tried other that Adobe’s, but that is to be expected. No worries at all on that.
You are dead right about Adobe Acrobat being an exercise in sadomasochism. Cracked me up. ^_^
This is now my default Pathfinder sheet. Love it.
Tobias, there are a number of PDF editors that let you enter data into fields and then save a copy as a new document, keeping the data you entered. Evince in Gnome (Linux) will do it. I hear KDE’s default PDF viewer will too. xPDF on Linux will not.
I just tested Mac OS X’s (v10.4) Preview app, and it will save a new doc and keep edited data.
If you use windows, try a PDF filler. A few of my friends use FoxReader. It’s free, doesn’t leave a watermark, and (I think) opens in your web browser (Firefox plugin).
PDFill is what I use at work. The free version will leave a watermark, but is free. I bought a license for $15 and use it for all sorts of forms when needed. Very handy.
Sep 26, 2009@Tobias: I’m not sure how far you’ll get with Acrobat Reader, but it the unfortunate truth for the moment: it’s a reader, and not so keen on allowing you to save your character. I agree with SeditiousBroom, it’s worth picking up a copy of another program that works with PDF files. Foxit PDF Reader is free, but it doesn’t “respect” the embedded fonts on the character sheet. I haven’t tried PDFill myself, but for $20.00 it may be a better option. YMMV though.
@SeditiousBroom: I really detest the way Javascript is handled in Acrobat. It would’ve made the “clear” buttons work a bit better and kept me from having to click on so many boxes in the end. I tried setting up a loop of getField().value=”" to go across a given set of fields, but this fails miserably.
To both: I definitely appreciate the feedback. The whole goal was something flexible enough to handle anything you threw at it, yet remaining useful and easy to use. Basically, to be able to spend more time on character creation than filling out all the blocks.
–JTB
Sep 26, 2009Nice work JtB. I just put in my diviner into this format and it went seamlessly. Thanks so much man.
Sep 27, 2009Great one! One more note: Perception doesn’t seem to be adding the +3 Class Skill bonus. My players and I thank you and Neceros for all the hard work.
Sep 27, 2009Zo: Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fixed and ready to be downloaded.
Sep 27, 2009I tried FoxIt Reader an was very pleasantly surprised. This character sheet works very, very well in FoxIt. The calculations come our right (far as I can tell), easy to save a copy when finished. Very nice.
Sep 27, 2009@Seditious Broom: I agree with that. Acrobat Reader is slow and bloated in ways that make me wonder if it’s on purpose. I used to rock Foxit on my computers, but the only small problem I have is the font issue where it tends to ignore embedded fonts when opening PDF files. Foxit, however, is amazingly fast compared to Reader in that regard. I actually thought about using Nitro PDF Editor to form out the character sheet. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the lack of guides when doing layout.
–JTB
Sep 27, 2009Another quick one: Adding the +1 Size modifier for small characters seems to be added to CMD and CMB rather than subtracted. Also, there isn’t enough room to input the page number in the spells/powers area, maybe an auto-resizing font similar to the weapon crit field would work. Work-arounds for both these issues are simple, so don’t kill yourself fixing them 
You’ve done so much as it is!
Oct 2, 2009Right now, I’m working on the updates to the character sheet. The problem is that my internet is down until Sunday (best case scenario). I will try to get everything finished up as soon as I possibly can so please bear with me.
Oh, and by the way, Comcast sucks.
Oct 18, 2009Question; my dex bonus is stuck at -5 for computing AC values. Any way to get this to update properly?
Oct 20, 2009At those who have commented since 1.0.1: an apology. The computer that held my versions of Windows and Acrobat decided that allowing me to continue on this project was no longer within the realm of reason.
My response was simple: save up a few dollars and get back to the character sheet. The hard drive is in and I have recovered the OS and such from a backup that I had.
What does this mean? I will start back on the Character Sheet and try to track down the problems that everyone has brought to my attention. It should be out before the end of the week.
I want to give a great “Thank You” to those of you who have left feedback letting me know what needs to be fixed.
–JTB
Oct 24, 2009Okay, just posted the 1.0.2 version of the sheet. Figured out what was causing the problems with the Max Dexterity Bonus and AC. If there are any other problems, please let me know.
–JTB
Nov 3, 2009Hey I have a question…
Ability DCs. Are they suppose to not up properly to the stat you provide?
Save DC’s don’t show (Not sure if I’m doing something wrong)
I click Cha on the Ability Bonus drop down and nothing happens to the other slots (they stay 0).
I am using Foxit Reader if that needs to be known.
I had a few friends talking about pathfinder and wanting to possibly do a campaign so I decided to make some chars for it. Thanks for making
Nov 11, 2009I’ve only found a couple of problems…
CMB/CMD don’t calculate the size bonus/penalty properly. My halfling should get a -1 penalty for CMB. If you have a size modifer, it is positive/negative across the board in your sheet.
Secondly, when you choose your spell casting stat on page three, it doesn’t populate your bonus spells per day, and also doesn’t let you edit those areas.
other than that, everything looks great! Thanks for the great work!
Nov 19, 2009Hi,
great sheets! I found only two minor bugs:
1. The Formular for Perception as a trained skill is wrong; the 0 should be switched to “Yes”.
2. The Armor topic “Penalty” is written “Penlaty”.
Cheers, Info
Nov 22, 2009Found one other issue… when adding up equipment weight, your sheet concatenates rather than adds. Is there a donate link anywhere where we can support this sheet?
Nov 23, 2009How are multi-BABs computed? I have a ranger level 7 that has a BAB of +7/+2. I try to enter “7/2″ and variations thereof in the BAB field under the Class Recorder section but it comes up at 7.2 and other weirdness under the Melee & Ranged sections. I’m using the Foxit Reader to enter my stats if that helps at all.
Otherwise, the sheet itself is pretty darn nice.
Nov 30, 2009Well, it’s been interesting and I want to apologize, things have been a bit hectic. I will be releasing an update over the next few days to remedy the bugs that have been found.
Right now I’m working my new job (a good thing) along with getting a decent system up and running for roleplaying online. My friends are highly interested in a campaign and being seperated by around 300+ miles means that there is no ‘middle ground’ to meet at for a quick spot o’ RP.
I do appreciate all the feedback and will get my lazy ass in gear to get the sheet right.
–JTB
Dec 1, 2009@zapoqx: Ability Scores and Save Bonuses seem to work correctly in the readers that I’ve tried them on with respect to the latest versions of the character sheet (1.0.2 and 1.0.3). I can’t reproduce the problem without more information (which I would gladly accept). As far as FoxIt Reader is concerned, it has a very large issue with filling out the Spell Bonuses on page 3 of the sheet. I’m trying to track down the problem, but for right now the solution is to use Acrobat Reader.
@Marshall: The CMB/CMD problem with the Size Modifier is corrected in 1.0.3 (which should be out very, very soon after I’m done writing this comment). As I mentioned to zapoqx, FoxIt doesn’t like the JavaScript used to populate those fields. If you’re using Acrobat and it still isn’t working, please let me know. With respect to the concatenation issue with weight: could you give me more information about that? I can’t reproduce it here on my machine and I’d like to track that one down. Also, I appreciate the idea of a Donate button. This project started out for my ‘group’ and kinda spread out from there. It’s more of an “open source” type thing and I’ll continue to update it because it’s useful to me and, from what I’ve seen, to other people.
@Infocalypse: Perception has been corrected for a bit now. I think you’ve got your hands on an older version of the character sheet. As far as the “Penalty” misspelling, I’ll work with Neceros to get that corrected for 1.0.4.
@Tim: Basically, the character sheet only computes your highest BAB. The Weapons subsection is the place to expand your attacks out. There are many, many factors that will affect your attacks after the first so it made more sense to leave the computer out of that one. If you type in “+7/+2″ it gets pretty angry. It’s best to just put in “+7″.
I appreciate all the feedback for the character sheet and hope that it keeps coming in.
Dec 2, 2009Updated the sheet to 1.0.4 which should allow people to save the data on their computer.
Dec 2, 2009I’ll try the sheets on Acrobat instead of foxit…
But for the weight issue, instead of 10+2+3=15, in foxit it would show as 1023.
I’ll try the new sheet in Acrobat and see if that resolves all the issues.
Thanks!
Dec 2, 2009@Marshall: I tried normal data on the sheet and I couldn’t reproduce it. However, after fighting Acrobat to enable Acrobat Reader users the ability to save as well as attempting to get FoxIt to work correctly on the third page, I figured out how to update the formulas on that section of the form so that they are all forced to numbers instead of strings which should solve the issue for the next version of the character sheet.
Dec 3, 2009Version 1.04, combined with using Acrobat, seems to have fixed nearly all of my problems!
CMB/CMD seem to be a little off… my halfling now has the size showing in the box as a -1, but the calculation still uses a +1 instead.
The only other tiny quibble is that when I put in page numbers for spells, the 3-digit number doesn’t *quite* fit, so it gets a ‘+’ sign superimposed on it.
Obviously, neither of these really affect the usability of the sheet, since they are both very easily worked around.
Thank you so much for this sheet, it’s a huge help!
Dec 3, 2009@Marshall: I went ahead and made the changes to the equipment weights as a precaution and finally fixed the CMB/CMD problem. Also, I adjusted the font sizes on the Page Number columns for the spells on page 3.
Dec 21, 2009Leveled up to level 3, and picked up a +1 Breasplate for my Ranger. it was at this point that I noticed the +1 enhancement bonus for the Breastplate did not auto-add into my AC. Easily solved by changing the AC mod for the gear from 6 to 7, but I’m not sure if this is how you’d expect it to work… when listing the AC of a piece of magic gear, should it be ‘breastplate is AC6, +1′ or ‘breastplate +1 is AC7′.
Not really worth a new version either way… but it’s something that came up.
Thanks again!
Jan 2, 2010@Marshall: It’s working the way it is supposed to. Even though I cannot think of a situation where the magical bonus would deviate from the bonuses conferred by it, there might be a GM who could do something with it. If presented two options, I try to keep the more flexible of the two.
I appreciate the feedback and welcome anything else you can find.
Jan 3, 2010Dexterity penalty should apply to flat-footed AC.
Jan 4, 2010Is there any way that a version of this form could be obtained without the calculations? I’m fairly sure that’d be an obscene amount of work, if I know anything about Acrobat – you’d likely have to get rid of the form entirely, so please don’t go to that trouble, but I was curious.
The reason I ask is that I just don’t like the auto-calculations in all circumstances.
Thanks in advance, and I await your reply.
Jan 5, 2010Yes, the base of this character sheet was created by Neceros and can be found at his website.
Jan 6, 2010This coming from all the small characters in the Pathfinder World the Size mods for CMD and CMB still come out +1 infact i belive its because all the size mods are the same line or what ever it would be called but you cange on size mod and they all change please fix as soon as posable it makes the sheet useless to all small and large characters.
Jan 6, 2010Ah i see its not you who has the issues its the version of the sheet on Necros Site that has the issues with the cmd cmb still
Jan 7, 2010Ah, I think you misunderstand…the only ones I see posted on Neceros are your calculating one, and one that does not have forms, unless I’m mistaken. What I was looking for is one that allows you to type values in, but does not calculate other fields upon entry.
Sorry if I was unclear.
Jan 8, 2010Okay, we’re on the same page now. No, the only version I have is the sheet with the calculations on it. The thought of re-tweaking the ~1,500 fields makes me cry on the inside.
Jan 8, 2010@Ridoran Pernell: If I have any quick corrections or a new version of the forms comes out, this will be the first place to see it (mostly since I can fix it and post it to my website) 
Jan 9, 2010I think I’ve discovered an issue, or something that may become one with higher-level characters (and this is the reason I was requesting a non-auto); when a character has multiple attacks, such as “+18/+13/+8/+3″, the sheet cannot deal with it. Is there another notation I should be using, or is this simply impossible? Thanks for your quick responses so far.
Jan 9, 2010The proper place for your attack progression would be in the Weapons section. The character sheet can calculate your best attack, but everything after that is up to you to fill out. There are simply too many things that can affect the attack progression.
Jan 11, 2010Okay, sounds good. Thanks for your time, and love the sheet. Keep up the good work!
Jan 11, 2010Appreciate it, and I hope the sheet works out for you. If you find anything else, please let me know.
Jan 26, 2010great sheet James, this is the best I have found so far. a small request, can you create a copy or an extra page for multi-class casters to have a second spell sheet (page #3).
Jan 28, 2010@xyrophobic: Thanks, I appreciate it. As far as a second page for multiclass characters, I’ll see what I can do about that. I’m working on getting a new version of the sheet up but the only thing holding it back is a single piece of software.
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4:23 am
I’m wondering, is it possible to have this sheet saved with what you edit?
It seems kinda futile, to have this sheet, having to fill it in every single time you level up?
Otherwise it’s damn awesome, and it could be used for making the base of the character.