Character & Turn/Off-Turn Sheets AKA Easy Action Management w/ PDFs

[Crivens]

4th Edition combat and rules referencing can take a while. There are tools, like Power Cards, to simplify the process and speed it up for everyone.

The attached Character & Turn/Off-Turn Sheets are designed to work with Power Cards, organize information about encounters and characters in a way that make sense, and lay out the order of operations for turns and rounds, respectively.

I designed the sheets using LucidChart, and the templates are there for use, distribution and modification, but the "whitewashed" versions (attached) use form fields to make filling the sheets out even easier.

They are in black and white, except for At-Will Actions, which are Green, to match 4th Edition's At-Will/Encounter/Daily Power color code.

EDIT: Updated the Off-Turn Sheet

 

[Crivens]

10th level Rogue sample example: filled-out PDFs made w/ Lucidchart

Here's an example of how the Turn Sheet & Off-Turn Sheet came out when filled in with information specific to a 10th-level Brutal Scoundrel Rogue (named "Grimsby").

View attachment Grimsby's Turn Sheet.pdf
View attachment Grimsby's Off Turn Sheet.pdf

 

[Joshua Randall]

Nicely done, [MENTION=6871348]Crivens[/MENTION] -- I like the flowchart approach.

I made a similar organizational system for my characters, organizing powers by action type (standard, move, minor, immediate, free, ...) and by AED within each type. Once you get to mid- to high-level in 4e you need a way to keep yourself organized!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, you could kind of schematically organize around action types much like monster stat blocks from MM3 do.

 

[Cyvris]

Nicely done, [MENTION=6871348]Crivens[/MENTION]
I made a similar organizational system for my characters, organizing powers by action type (standard, move, minor, immediate, free, ...) and by AED within each type. Once you get to mid- to high-level in 4e you need a way to keep yourself organized!

That sounds interesting, mind sharing?

I'm about to start a 4e game with some of my veterans (started playing it together the day the edition launched) and a host of newbies, so any "helper" sheets like that would be very useful.

 

[Joshua Randall]

That sounds interesting, mind sharing?

Each sheet ends up being highly customized to each character, but the basic idea is a 'power grid' with action types on one axis and power frequency on the other axis. In each 'cell' you put an abbreviated version of the power in question.

(I submitted this idea to Dragon magazine back in the 4e days, but they eventually turned it down. I keep meaning to write a blog post or something about it... I guess this will have to do! Would appreciate being credited if anyone gets use out of this.)
(Oh, and here's the original pitch which explains things.)
[sblock=]I'm pitching an article for Dragon magazine, tentatively titled 'The Power Grid'. The Power Grid is a method that players can use to organize their characters' powers for the purposes of planning or playing that character.

The grid has two axes: Usage (At-Will, Encounter, Daily) and Action Type (Free, Immediate, Minor, Move, Standard, etc.).

Powers are listed in the "cells" created by the intersections of the axes.

The Power Grid has two purposes: planning and playing.

1. Planning -- by looking at the Power Grid for a given character, you can see how that character will spend most of his or her time in combat. For example, you might find that your character is overloaded on immediate actions, which can be problematic to use in multiples.

2. Playing -- shorthand descriptions of the powers themselves can fit in the Power Grid. This allows the player to use it at the table instead of the traditional power cards. The advantage of the Power Grid layout is similar to the advantage of the monster stat block in Monster Manual 3 / Monster Vault; namely, seeing your powers organized by action type is more intuitive than seeing them organized only by usage.

I estimate that I can explain the Power Grid concept in 1,200-1,500 words.

In addition, I believe this article will require fairly sizable graphic elements (the blank Power Grid itself, plus any examples) which will increase the "page count" if not the "word count".

Thank you for your consideration.[/sblock]
As noted in my pitch, one major benefit of the power grid (and its original impetus) is that you can see when a character is overloading a particular action type. For example if you have a lot of Immediate actions you may find it hard to use them all effectively in a single combat.

Attached are several examples:

• Helja, Dwarf Warpriest 1 (one of the sample CB characters) -- this shows a simple example for a character without a lot of options
• Anton, Dwarf Fighter 15 -- this shows a mid-level character with several options, including magic items
• Sseklah, Dragonborn Paladin 30 -- this shows a maxed out character with a huge number of options

Note that different characters may need different columns for action type. Most characters can combine Move/minor actions into a single column, but some may have enough minor actions to warrant splitting those out. Similar, beginning characters can often combine Immediate/Free/No action into a single column, but as you level up you may need to split those out (see Sseklah for an example -- he has something like 10 free actions and 5 no actions).

You also have to be ruthless about abbreviating power descriptions to get them to fit in the grid.

Hope this is helpful.

 

[MwaO]

Yeah, you could kind of schematically organize around action types much like monster stat blocks from MM3 do.

This beyond all else is what I wish Character Builder could do as output...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This beyond all else is what I wish Character Builder could do as output...

agreed!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Each sheet ends up being highly customized to each character, but the basic idea is a 'power grid' with action types on one axis and power frequency on the other axis. In each 'cell' you put an abbreviated version of the power in question.

(I submitted this idea to Dragon magazine back in the 4e days, but they eventually turned it down. I keep meaning to write a blog post or something about it... I guess this will have to do! Would appreciate being credited if anyone gets use out of this.)
(Oh, and here's the original pitch which explains things.)
[sblock=]I'm pitching an article for Dragon magazine, tentatively titled 'The Power Grid'. The Power Grid is a method that players can use to organize their characters' powers for the purposes of planning or playing that character.

The grid has two axes: Usage (At-Will, Encounter, Daily) and Action Type (Free, Immediate, Minor, Move, Standard, etc.).

Powers are listed in the "cells" created by the intersections of the axes.

The Power Grid has two purposes: planning and playing.

1. Planning -- by looking at the Power Grid for a given character, you can see how that character will spend most of his or her time in combat. For example, you might find that your character is overloaded on immediate actions, which can be problematic to use in multiples.

2. Playing -- shorthand descriptions of the powers themselves can fit in the Power Grid. This allows the player to use it at the table instead of the traditional power cards. The advantage of the Power Grid layout is similar to the advantage of the monster stat block in Monster Manual 3 / Monster Vault; namely, seeing your powers organized by action type is more intuitive than seeing them organized only by usage.

I estimate that I can explain the Power Grid concept in 1,200-1,500 words.

In addition, I believe this article will require fairly sizable graphic elements (the blank Power Grid itself, plus any examples) which will increase the "page count" if not the "word count".

Thank you for your consideration.[/sblock]
As noted in my pitch, one major benefit of the power grid (and its original impetus) is that you can see when a character is overloading a particular action type. For example if you have a lot of Immediate actions you may find it hard to use them all effectively in a single combat.

Attached are several examples:

• Helja, Dwarf Warpriest 1 (one of the sample CB characters) -- this shows a simple example for a character without a lot of options
• Anton, Dwarf Fighter 15 -- this shows a mid-level character with several options, including magic items
• Sseklah, Dragonborn Paladin 30 -- this shows a maxed out character with a huge number of options

Note that different characters may need different columns for action type. Most characters can combine Move/minor actions into a single column, but some may have enough minor actions to warrant splitting those out. Similar, beginning characters can often combine Immediate/Free/No action into a single column, but as you level up you may need to split those out (see Sseklah for an example -- he has something like 10 free actions and 5 no actions).

You also have to be ruthless about abbreviating power descriptions to get them to fit in the grid.

Hope this is helpful.

Its an interesting idea. I tend to think that it would be best to simply put the names of the powers and maybe an indicator of whether it is an attack power or utility power. Then print out the power cards from CB and use those when you need a reference (or you could even make better ones, though that takes some work).

I think an online tool that presented this stuff, something like an enhanced iplay4e (which sadly doesn't exist anymore I guess?) would be nice.

 

[Joshua Randall]

This [powers organized by action type / frequency] beyond all else is what I wish Character Builder could do as output...

Old offline CB could output files into XML. At that point it was possible to modify the XML to build your own output. I played around with back in the day but never got very far due to my limited XML/XSL/coding skills.

New online CB doesn't have the XML output, which really limits what you can do. You might be able to take the 'Character Summary' output and do some kind of lookup on the power names, grab the power's action type / frequency, then build a grid to put them into... of course this implies you have a way to get data out of the Compendium (or some other source) which is well beyond my abilities.

Its an interesting idea. I tend to think that it would be best to simply put the names of the powers and maybe an indicator of whether it is an attack power or utility power.

That's how it originally started, simply as a way for me to tell at a glance if my characters were overloaded on a certain type of action.

When I started using the power grid in play it rapidly became annoying to swap between the power grid and the actual power cards for the rules text. At that point I tried to copy/paste the rules text (from DDI Compendium) onto the power grid itself. However, *that* led to an immensely large power grid. So I finally went with the power shorthand that you see in my examples.

I think an online tool that presented this stuff [...] would be nice.

Oh yes, there's a lot of cool work that could be done in 4e to manage information presentation and make things more useful at the table.

Side Note / Rant: D&D character sheets and monster stat blocks have historically been a dysfunctional blend between "build or level up a character / monster, showing enough math that I can audit your work" and "manage information at the table" -- they try to do both and end up accomplishing neither. Late 3e and 4e took a large step towards making monster stat blocks more useful at the table, and 4e power cards got us some of way towards that on the character side. However 4e's default character sheets are still quite bad for at-the-table use.