How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet

<em>Arena.Xlsm</em> puts macros to work for leveling, battling, and collecting items.

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[koolraap]

Hrmmm[/url]":3o3fldbe]Darn I knew there was a reason I still needed MS Office.

Needs a Google Docs port

Google Doc's spreadsheet is shadow of an imitation of Excel. It doesn't have a scripting language amongst other missing features. Never say never, I guess, but it won't be for years.

 

[koolraap]

zelannii[/url]":vw0wrh3s]

koolraap[/url]":vw0wrh3s]He's using Excel as a display device more than anything. VBA is a proper language -- if he'd done it using cell functions only, that would have been truly impressive.

Yes it's cool, somewhat insane even, but... why all the fuss? You could do the same thing in Power Point, Word and Access and the others, too.

I assisted building a full DnD 4e character generator, tracker, die roller, and full-on real-time character management system using exclusively cell functions. it was massive. some cells had over 10K precedents. took us almost 2 years total to get it done.

This, I admire. He's basically taken a simplified character manager (lets just say, less than 10 books of DnD content, probably still damned complex) and merged it with a zork-like story progression system and a few tables of item drops, and positional tracking, so basically a mini version of maptool meets our old spreadsheet. very cool. I totally respect the level of efort.

I admire your effort far more. My group tried 4E, got fed up very quickly with the ludicrously complex character generations (and let's not talk about combat) and moved onto Pathfinder and now DCC.

I know what the guy's done is lots of work, I'm just bemused by the amount of media attention. As an earlier commenter mentions Pacman was done in Excel years ago.