u/victorhurtado

I found some interesting leftovers from the cut Gizmotech class.

Its gear still exists in the files: a Gizmotech jacket, pants, helmet, shoulderpad, and banderole. From what I can tell, the jacket, pants, and helmet seem to have later become the Ark Suit pieces. There was also a ranged weapon entry called the Flamethrower, which looks like it may have been intended as part of the class identity.

I tried restoring Gizmotech as a playable class, but ran into several issues:

• The current class menu only supports the existing class slots.
• Adding Gizmotech as a separate class caused crashes.
• Replacing Mercenary with Gizmotech worked partially, but the UI still had hardcoded Mercenary references.
• The Gizmotech clothing exists, but some of it behaves oddly in the gear menu.
• The Flamethrower model exists, but its actual firing behavior does not seem fully connected anymore.
• Making it shoot by borrowing another weapon's behavior made it act like a gun instead of a flamethrower.
• Trying other fire or missile-style paths either broke the weapon or did nothing.

It is a shame that most of these things are baked in, and modding beyond changing a few values within the datatables is not really possible unless we properly rebuild or inject cooked Unreal assets, which I do not feel comfortable doing.

About a year ago I posted this proof of concept for a TTRPG rulebook that was just one offline HTML file:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1hp4ou6/proof_of_concept_a_fully_offline_ttrpg_in_a/

Since then I kept messing with the idea and ended up building the character sheet side of it too.

Visual demo here:

https://youtu.be/__bd3jfCA3c

This is not polished yet. Some parts are still ugly, some parts need cleanup. But it works.

The sheet runs locally as an HTML file with all its code inlined (mainly bootstrap and javascript), and it can pull stuff from the offline rulebook file I had made before. So instead of copying every class, ancestry, move, spell, item, etc. into the sheet by hand, the sheet can read that stuff from it.

So why am I sharing all of this?

Mostly because form-fillable PDFs do not really cut it for me anymore, and I wanted to see how much of the useful stuff from tools like Demiplane and D&D Beyond I could recreate without needing a server and complex databases that ultimately lead to needing subscriptions.

So this is mostly me sharing the experiment in case it gives other designers ideas. You do not necessarily need a platform to make an interactive character sheet for your game. Not every game needs that, obviously. Plenty of games are better as a simple PDF or paper sheet. But if you have ever wanted something a little more interactive for your own games, this is one way to do it.

I've been messing around with the idea of Biomutant as a tabletop RPG, and put together a quick mockup of what a possible digital character sheet could look like.

There are no finalized mechanics yet, though I'm leaning toward something dice-pool based. This is mostly a layout/design pass to see how the game's character-building pieces could translate to a tabletop format.

You might notice that Luck is no longer a core stat. Instead, Luck would become a pool of points you can spend to shift the outcome of rolls, including things like loot results. In its place, I added Acuity, which represents your ability to notice things, read danger, track details, and aim accurately.

I'm also playing with the idea of showing things like Perks, Mutations, Wung-Fu moves, Psi powers, gear effects, and class features as cards on the sheet. The goal would be to make character options easy to scan at the table without burying everything in long text blocks.

Still very early, but I wanted to see if the concept feels right visually before digging too deep into mechanics. What do you guys think?