Creating Sheets

By AgentJ, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

I am trying to create a character sheet. I have no idea how to start. I looked online however, if you are not sure what you are looking for it makes it harder to find.

So all you creative types please point me in the direction I need to go. I think I need something that will allow me to do the following:

Tables (to put the skills in along with a way to mark which are your class skills)

Headings (bold, underline, etc)

Boxes (for check marks, number of ranks, etc)

Symbols (Really like the idea of being able to add the dice symbols.

Shapes (trapezoid, hexagon, triangle, etc)

Font (I find the font for star wars hard to read, so I want to use an easier to read font)

Shading ( for highlighting headings, maybe for class skills instead of check boxes)

Moving (not sure what to call this. looking for a way to move shapes, tables, boxes, etc

to figure out best look for the sheet)

As I said earlier, I have no idea what I am doing. I tried to use word and um ya .... that was super frustrating and just was not working. So if you recommend a program please supply a tutorial to help me understand how to use it. The biggest reason I want to do this is to because of the star wars "font". I have a hard time reading it but 2 of my players struggle with it worse than I do. Also I think the sheets available waste a lot of room for characteristics, soak, wounds, strain, and defense. These areas could be a lot smaller making more room on the first page.

This can be a pdf or whatever other type of file when its done.(don't even know what the other types would be called. I am totally clueless)

Thanks,

J

Edited by AgentJ

I really like BastionKain's form fillable sheets, though I don't know where you can get them from at the moment, because all the dropbox links are broken on his blog.

I use the ones that I made form-fillable from another user on this site (see signature). I keep meaning to improve the ship sheet with more silhouettes for freighters, but that greatly increases the size of the PDF. Tried making it import images, but that is hit or miss due to security issues for PDFs to access a hard drive.

they have a ton of these up on the "compiled resources" and any simple search on the boards, but if you haven't liked what you've seen and want to go your own way, you should just break up the assets that are available in the FFG sheets in Illustrator and make it from "scratch". you can see what fonts they used and other assets that are decorative and you can recycle what works and discard what doesn't. this is what me and a friend have been doing for ours. you'll also need a good pdf editor like Acrobat to be able to make it form fillable.

i would suggest using BastionKain's though until you got yours up and running. after seeing his work, i have to go back and tinker a bit more with my own...

they have a ton of these up on the "compiled resources" and any simple search on the boards, but if you haven't liked what you've seen and want to go your own way, you should just break up the assets that are available in the FFG sheets in Illustrator and make it from "scratch". you can see what fonts they used and other assets that are decorative and you can recycle what works and discard what doesn't. this is what me and a friend have been doing for ours. you'll also need a good pdf editor like Acrobat to be able to make it form fillable.

i would suggest using BastionKain's though until you got yours up and running. after seeing his work, i have to go back and tinker a bit more with my own...

Now we are getting somewhere. Exactly how do I use illustrator to break up the assets to make it from scratch? That sounds like something I would like to do but no idea how to do that. I would look up a video tutorial but not sure searching for "break up the assets" would find me any hits. Going to need a little more direction/help please.

Thanks,

J

Now we are getting somewhere. Exactly how do I use illustrator to break up the assets to make it from scratch? That sounds like something I would like to do but no idea how to do that. I would look up a video tutorial but not sure searching for "break up the assets" would find me any hits. Going to need a little more direction/help please.

Illustrator is a large, complex, professional-grade vector-based graphics illustration program. If you know how to use Illustrator, then you already know how to break up the assets.

However, if you need more direction in how to break up the assets, then Illustrator almost certainly is not the tool you want to try to use for that job. This is not something that you just learn overnight, or on a single thread on a forum. Illustrator is the kind of tool that you spend long hard months just getting to the point where you can do some relatively simple tasks, and then spend years or a decade or more, as you try to master the program.

You don't just waltz into Mordor, you don't just casually blow up the Death Star, and you don't just grab Illustrator and overnight learn enough about it that you can use it to break up assets and make your own character sheets.