For anybody just looking for the d/l link: http://enklave-23.de/OnlyWar/OnlyWar-AdvancementHelper.pdf
A friend of mine is new to RPGs, and we just had our first Only War session last Saturday, where she had her first real play-session. She enjoyed it well enough but was overwhelmed when it came to spending XP. And, well, I can sympathize. While I really love the open nature of the Aptitude mechanics, it's a bit much to cross-reference at the table each time you want to look at what to get.
So I told her to just look through the skills and talents and write down what she'd think she'd like her character (a Weapon Specialist) to develop/gain during the course of the campaign.
Then I started up Photoshop and went to work. After all was said and done, the following is the result of this dabbling.
It has her first choices of skills and talents with advance-costs and per-requisites, as well as the advancement cost of all attributes (and a small, quadratic, space to jot down current attribute values). Then I left some space for her to later "taq" other skills and talents on her own. I also put down the Comrade advances on the bottom, because… Why not?
So you could give this to your players, make them calculate all the attribute advance-values, pick a few skills and talents and quickly jot down those costs, too. Then see them being ready to just check a tick-box, deduct the XP from their total and move on with the game when it's time to spend XP. It can also make planning a bit easier, as people don't need to share the book around the table all the time to take another look at prerequisites and such.
I then continued working on it and made it a fully "blank" version for use by others, which is what you will find here. The small white rectangles besides the attribute names are to scribble in the current attribute values to make buying talents even easier (reducing the need to reference the character sheet).
So I combined a full-colour and a greyscale version into one PDF for easier sharing. Point of warning: It's formatted for A4. But I /think/ that I left enough space in the margins so that printing it out in Letter shouldn't cripple it in any way. It's also not perfectly alligned, as I'm still struggling with CS4 and really didn't have the time to go over it again after it was finished. Maybe next week, but I won't promise anything.
Hopefully this will be helpful to somebody here.
Here are two preview pictures. One is the empty version you get, the other one is the filled-in version for my friend so that you can get an idea of how it's intended to work. Enjoy! (Hopefully…)
All the best,
Have fun playing,
-Matt