Jeff Carlsen
Adventurer
It just makes it feel like it was designed to make a point, rather than to be convenient and useful. It's like the lemon squeezer thing. You can make a page with boxes for "favorite color" and "mother's maiden name" and call it a character sheet, but what people actually want character sheets for is to write down their stats.
I've always played with people who will happily fill out any descriptive field I give them, so maybe it's a playstyle thing. You should see the sheets I built for that purpose. Again, I can expand or contract the number of entries based on available space. I'd rather focus on improving the other areas, and adapting the rest as needed. I certainly wouldn't want character bio to significantly impact the usability of the sheet.
How do you use it?
Usually, you mark off your total hit points and maximum negative hit points, then make marks going backwards as you take damage to track your current total. Some people fill in the bubbles. Other cross them off with a line. I prefer to use small ticks to reduce the amount of erasing I have to do later.
Some players prefer to count damage upward toward a hit point total. Either way works well.
I've been looking at the spell page for a few minutes trying to come up with how to make it better (as it's nearly perfect right now). The only thing I can think of is that it's weird for divine spells; it feels like you'd have to write and erase every time you want to prepare a different spell loadout.
This has long been a challenge with divine casters. The best sheet for them would list every spell on the Cleric Spell list. I'm not ready to do that with the game is such flux. My recommendation would be to fill out the spell sheet with the spells you prepare most often, perhaps with a couple blank spots per level. Then just check off the ones you've actually prepared.
Can you share how you created this in Calc (or upload the file)? I'm really interested in how to make stuff like this.
And give away trade secrets? NEVER!
Actually, I use a set of custom cell styles to do most of the heavy lifting for fonts, fills, and borders. For Checkboxes, I use special characters, which is unfortunate because every other part of the sheet is fillable in Calc, but I can't make the checkboxes functional.
I'll include the .ODS file with the next revision for people to look at.