Blades in the Dark Character Sheet template

This is a template for creating a derivative of the character sheet for Blades in the Dark for use on Roll20. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on Discord @deceptive.duality#6358.

This is the main version of this template, still containing all the Blades-specific data such as items, playbooks, crews, and factions. If you want to start from a clean sheet for a fresh hack, it is probably best to start from the clean version instead, and use this branch only for insight in how to structure your data. If you want to see an example of a complete sheet created from this template, have a look at the A Nocturne branch of this repository.

Changelog

July 3, 2018

Switched from command line sass to node-sass. This makes installing the required dependencies a bit more intuitive.

June 2, 2018

Apart from bugfixes, some changes made to the Blades sheet were backported to the templated version. Moreover, this template vas reset to internal version number 1.0, since a new sheet really should not start at 2.7. The following innovations of the Blades sheet were backported:

• Friend/contact notes
• Automatically filling ability description upon entering names
• Character picture on chat rolls
• Pre-calculated number of dice
• Restyled repeating section controls to use symbols instead of text

Installing dependencies

To work with this sheet template, you need to first install Node.js.

To install all of the Node packages required to compile and work with the sheets, open a command-prompt and run

npm install

This will install all the dependencies defined in package.json. If you would prefer to install dependencies manually, you can:

npm install pug node-sass jstransformer jstransformer-babel babel-preset-minify

Compiling the sheet

The sheet uses pug as a HTML preprocessor and sass as a CSS preprocessor. This means that you need to compile the two main source code files (Source/blades.pug and Source/blades.scss) into the actual blades.html and blades.css files. It also uses Babel (via JSTransformer) to minify the Javascript code, though this is optional (read below on how to disable it if it produces problems). Once the command line interfaces for pug and sass are installed, the sheet is compiled via

node build.js

executed in the root directory of this code.

If you want to change the look of the sheet or the roll template, you should already know how CSS works: in this case, just go ahead and change the sheet.scss and rolltemplate.scss to your heart's content. Sass is an extension of CSS, so if you don't know sass, just adding CSS code will work just fine.

For changing the content of the sheet, you will have to make changes to the pug files (for the HTML), the translation.json file (for changing the actual text on the sheet), or to the data.json and sheetworkers.js files.

If you do not feel comfortable working with pug or sass, the Source/uncompressed folder contains compiled, but human-readable versions of blades.html and blades.css. Editing them is more work, however (for example for changing action names). It is highly recommended that you at least start by making changes to the .pug files instead.

If you have made some changes in pug, e.g. action names, and want to transition to doing the rest of the editing in HTML, you can change the pretty option to true in the build.js file. This will produce human-readable HTML/CSS for you to edit further.

Babel problems

Sometimes the babel filter does not seem to work and produces errors. You can change enableBabel to false in the build.js file to disable it. It will have no impact on the functionality of the sheet, and it will get rid of this error.

File structure

translation.json

The translation.json file contains all the text in the sheet and the roll template (set up for translation, hence the name). As indicated by the file name, the content is in JSON format, so it follows a "key": "value" pattern. For almost all text changes, you will have to add or change keys/values here (and you might want to remove superfluous lines, though this is optional).

pug

The base file for the pug code that generates the HTML is Source/blades.pug. You will find some variables at the top of the file to change what the resulting HTML looks like. When building the sheet, this file pulls in information from the individual parts of the sheet in the Source/pug/ folder (the names should be self-explanatory), as well the data.json and sheetworkers.js files. If you want to change a specific part of the sheet, try searching around the indivual .pug files to find the part you want to change (and if you cannot find it, feel free to ask me).

Any attribute that starts with "data-i18n" references a key in the translation.json variable — look it up there to find out what the specific text is (though it will often be obvious).

Source/data.json

This file supplies the database used by the sheet worker scripts. It may look intimidatingly large at first, but most of this file is just the data for the various crews, playbooks, and factions. You will probably only have to change the data at the top of the script, not the code that comes after. Here's a short explanation of the data keys (more details in the "Common changes" section).

• crew is an object containing the information about the crew information that is filled in automatically when you enter a crew's name.
• playbook is the same as the previous one, but for playbooks instead of crews.
• factions is an object containing the faction information that is put into the factions sheet when "Generate Factions" is pressed.
• actions contains the attributes and actions.
• traumas contains traumas (by type).
• items contains the default items a character starts with.
• translatedDefaults contains the defaults for input fields that should be translated. This is a rather cumbersome way to make sure that you can have an input field whose value you can change, but whose default depends on your chosen translation. Unless you add more translated fields, you do not need to change this.
• defaultValues provides some defaults to reset attributes when you switch playbooks. It should not be necessary to edit this object, though you may do so when you change e.g. action names. Resetting should work either way.
• alchemicals contains the list of alchemicals that a Leech gets automatically.
• maxFriendsPerPlaybook and maxContactsPerCrew control the number of friends and contacts each playbook gets.
• friendlessPlaybooks should be self-explanatory.
• translatedCrewAttributes and translatedPlaybookAttributes contain those attributes of crews/playbooks that the script should look for translations for.

Source/sheetworkers.js

This is the source code for the part of the sheet workers that actually executes code. There's a good chance that no changes will be necessary here.

SASS

The sheet's CSS is generated from Source/blades.scss, which is a short file that mostly combines Source/scss/sheet.scss and Source/scss/rolltemplate.scss, whose different functions should be self-explanatory.

Common changes

All of the text visible on the sheet and in roll templates is translated text. Most of the text on the sheet can simply be changed by changing the corresponding value in the translation.json file. In general, whenever you add new text to the sheet or change existing text, you will have to make changes to the translation.json.

Action/attribute names

To effectively change action and/or attribute names, you need to make changes in two places. Everything except the value in the translation file should be strictly lowercase.

1. In the data.json object, change the actions property.
2. In the translation.json file, add keys for your changed actions, attributes, and their descriptions. E.g., if you want to add a "Hack" action, add the following lines:

"hack": "Hack",
"hack_description": "Interface with machines. Manipulate computer systems, extract data, etc. (whatever your description for Hack is)",

Note that there is no need to have 3 attributes with 4 actions each, even though that is probably the case for most hacks. The code will adapt to whatever info you feed into actionData.

Default items

In order to change the non-playbook-specific gear that every character gets, you will need to edit the items property in the data.json file. The names of items (such as "a_blade_or_two") and their descriptions (such as "a_blade_or_two_description") are translated, so make sure to also edit the translation.json file as well. The items are in the same order that they will appear on the sheet. The "numboxes" property controls the number of boxes, and "short": "1" creates an item that only takes up half a line.

Factions

To change the factions, modify the factions property in the data.json. The faction names (such as "The Circle of Flame") as well the headers (such as "Underworld") are translated, so be sure to change and/or add the corresponding keys in the translation.json file, e.g. "faction_the_circle_of_flame": "The Circle of Flame", and "factions1": "Underworld",. You can play around with the number of faction "categories" in the faction.pug and the factions property - the numbers 1-5 in the faction.pug correspond to factions1-factions5 in the data.json.

Logo

The game logo is on line 635 of sheet.scss.

Playbooks/crews

You will have to edit both the data.json and the translation.json in order to modify playbooks/crews.

1. Modify the "crew", respectively "playbook" properties in the data.json object. You can use one of the standard playbooks as a template.
2. Change the translation.json to reflect any newly-added translation keys, such as for playbook contacts, items, et cetera. In particular, add the name of your new playbook, e.g. "hacker": "Hacker",.

Some remarks on Step 2:

• A playbook's friends (or a crew's contacts) are generated automatically from the translation.json file — hence, when you add your "Hacker" playbook, you also have to add their five hacker friends (as below). Changing the number of contacts or friends can be done by changing the maxFriendsPerPlaybook and max ContactsPerCrew properties in data.json.

"playbook_hacker_friend_0": "Jack",
"playbook_hacker_friend_1": "Sue",
...
"playbook_hacker_friend_4": "AZ-215, a sentient AI",

• The names of playbook items and their descriptions are pulled from the translation.json, so make sure to make the necessary changes there. Same for crew upgrades.

• If you (which is very likely) have new special abilities for your playbook or crew, just enter the name into the corresponding array; to add the actual data of the ability, add them to the translation.json, as detailed under "Special abilities".

• Everything about a character/crew that's not abilities, friends/contacts, or items/upgrades, is detailed in the "base" property. Here, you change default action dots, xp triggers, gather information questions, the names of claims, et cetera. Take a look at the existing playbooks and crews for details.

Special abilities

In order to add or change special abilities, you need to change the translation.json file (note that adding special abilities will do nothing unless you also add or modify a playbook or crew so that it uses them). In order to do this, you need two new lines in the translation.json file for every new special ability, with keys playbook_ability_NAME and playbook_ability_NAME_description (for characters) or crew_ability_NAME and crew_ability_NAME_description (for crews). E.g:

"playbook_ability_hedonist": "Hedonist",
"playbook_ability_hedonist_description": "When you indulge your vice, you may adjust the dice outcome by +/-2. An ally who joins you may do the same.",

Traumas

To modify traumas, change the traumaData property in the data.json, and add any translations for new traumas to the translation.json.

Upgrades

The crew upgrades are on line 249+ of the crew.pug. However, their default names and descriptions are actually translated values. To change them:

1. Change/add/delete the +makeupgrade commands in the crew.pug. The first argument (e.g. 6) is the number of the upgrade, make sure those are unique. The second argument is the number of upgrade boxes (1 or 2), after that come the translation keys for the default value and description.
2. Change the translatedDefaultValues property of data.json so that it reflects the upgrade numbers that exist now.
3. Add the necessary new translation keys to the translation.json.

In order, you might make these changes:

+makeupgrade(6, 1, 'racing_car', 'upgrade_racing_car_description')
...
"racing_car": "Racing Car",
"upgrade_racing_car_description": "This is a very fast car.",

Specialty sections

The sheet still contains some of the more esoteric parts of the sheet, such as the strictures for vampires. While I do not expect anyone to use them as-is, they remain as a template for how to create custom special sections on the sheet. Some of them are toggled off via global variables in blades.pug by default.