I decided to start working on the Excel Character sheet for Black Crusade today. I am starting with the Advancements/Alignment page because think it will be the most troublesome. I want to make sure I understand how the alignments work so I don't make any mistakes in creating the this section. Hence turn to you all to confirm my understanding.

Rules of Aligntment (As I understand them)

1. You become aligned with a god when you have 5 or more advances than with any other path.

2. If the chaos god alignment you have the highest points in is within 4 points of any other chaos god's point total you count as unaligned.

3. Only those talents and skills purchased with experience (i.e. not starting skills or talents) count towards alignment.

4. Skill advances (+10, +20, +30) also add a point of alignment for the respective god.

5. Multiple advances of a Talent with specialties also add a point of alignment for the respective god.

6. Unaligned is ignored when comparing which god you are aligned to. (Not sure about this one)

How accurate is my understanding of the rules?

Edit: Clarified Rule #2

Gunslinger_Gaius said:

As far as I can tell you're spot on.

Well, point number 2 only counts if point number 1 doesnt. So if you have 7 tzeentch advances, 2 khorne and 2 nurgle you count as being aligned to tzeentch.

That seems to be everything except for one problem, if i remember right you don't count as aligned to a new god unless you meet the 5+ in one category when you hit a multiple of 10 corruption. That might be pretty hard to get working in excel and will probably end up being clunky, so you should just let them type in/choose from list their alignment.

merashin said:

Very true, forgot about the corruption bit.

So if you want to make a character that can quickly be aligned to a certain god you have to pick the "wrong" skills/talents when picking your free skills/talents at character creation.

I'm not sure how you're doing this in Excel code, but #2 is completely wrong. #1 is correct, but counting only really matters for the alignment you have the most points in. For example, if you have Slaanesh 2, Khorne 3, and Tzeench 9, you're aligned to Tzeench, even though two of your alignments are within 5 of each other.

I was just going over the corruption impact on how this will work. For the sake of convenience I want to let have the sheet tell people where they stand at any given time, but I can't use that to drive the stat/talent/skill costs.

As far as current skill/talent/stat costs go a simple drop down will work, but we need a mechanism for tracking where you have been so we don't screw up the historical costs. If we add a corruption tier column (i.e. 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc) and a historical alignment chart for where you have been through the tiers, it should be possible to accurately provide current costs without trashing the historical costs. Hopefully that makes sense.

Good point Doomaflatchi. That was what I meant, but I worded it poorly. I'll fix it. As far as how I did it, I just created a table comparing all their values, and then used IF statements to find which one fit the criteria or if none did set it to unaligned.

Gunslinger, you might like to take a look at this: javascript:void(0);/*1316211653936*/ . It's not as automated as the sheet you're making, but I think it works decently well.