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Help with a character generator

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    Smile Help with a character generator

    Hi everyone,

    I have been looking around on the internet for a while to get this question sorted, but I couldn't come up with something really useful, which might well be due to having difficulties phrasing the question adequately (I'm not a native speaker).

    I'm currently in the process of creating a character generator in Excel. What I essentially want it to do is the following:

    I have a list of traits, such as "strong", which a character might gain across several stages of his or her life (such as "childhood" or "birth").
    I need to spit out many characters in short succession, so I want Excel to select a random trait from each stage of life and output them somewhere else in the spreadsheet, or even more ideally, in a text file.
    As an additional problem, all of these traits have values associated to them, ranging from -5 to +5, and I would like Excel to select three traits that will even out to zero when combined.

    Right now my data is contained in a giant table, with a column for the traits, one for their values and one for the different stages of life. I tried to experiment with VLOOKUP and RAND, but I couldn't seem to get a working formula at all. Is it maybe not the best way of organizing the data, and it would be better to have several tables? Or can this all even not be done without diving into VBA? I'm kinda new to Excel, so any hint on best practice would be very much appreciated.

    Thanks in advance,

    Florian

  2. #2
    Forum Expert dilipandey's Avatar
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    Re: Help with a character generator

    HI Florian and welcome to the forum.

    Right now my data is contained in a giant table, with a column for the traits, one for their values and one for the different stages of life. I tried to experiment with VLOOKUP and RAND, but I couldn't seem to get a working formula at all.
    Post a small sample alongwith your expected output..thanks.

    Regards,
    DILIPandey
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    DILIPandey, Excel rMVP
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    Re: Help with a character generator

    Hey Dili,

    thanks for answering. Here's a (small representative) sample of what my data currently looks like and how the output should be. So for example, it would pick "Stunning" worth 4 value points at random from the "physical" traits and then look for one or two "social" traits with combined values of -4 to even it out, for example "Insane", and then post the respective chosen traits down into the little character information table below.

    Character_Sample.xlsx

    Thanks for helping,

    Florian

  4. #4
    Forum Expert dilipandey's Avatar
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    Re: Help with a character generator

    So for example, it would pick "Stunning" worth 4 value points at random from the "physical" traits
    Also, fill out the results manually and I'll try obtaining that using formulas. thanks.

    Regards,
    DILIPandey
    <click on below * if this helps>

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