Requirements for the perfect character sheet

[jeffh]

"What's your favorite character sheet" discussions come up here fairly often - in fact, there's one going on right now. But one thing I haven't seen much of is specifics as to how a sheet could be better or what the ideal sheet would be like. Running a heavily house-ruled game as I am doing, I have had to think about this a fair bit lately.

To get started, here are a few of my likes and dislikes about the two dozen or so d20 System (mostly D&D) sheets I've seen.

• Use readable fonts. A bit of pseudo-medieval feel can be nice, but being able to tell - ideally at a distance or upside-down - what the flippin' text actually says trumps all such considerations.
• Don't assume every character will have exactly one class! This extremely common, totally boneheaded error shows up as tiny spaces for class & level, "hit die" spaces that only leave room for one type (and come to think of it, that's a pretty useless thing to include anyway), single checkboxes for a skill's class or cross-class status, and so on.
• Leave blanks. I use a lot of house-rules, and if I were designing a sheet I would thing "Y'know, with the advent of Unearthed Arcana and the proliferation of not-quite-D&D d20 games, it's safe to assume not every member of my audience plays by the same rules. So I'll at least give them some damn "notes" sections or something so they can fill in other stats besides the default D&D ones!"
• Skills section - this seems to be the easiest to screw up. Too many sheets suffer from one of two opposite problems - assuming you're using all and only the default D&D skills and thus giving NO space for additional ones, or leaving the skills entirely blank and making you fill in everything yourself. I completely disagree with ForceUser's comments in the other thread - at a minimum, the skills that can be used untrained should be pre-written. There should be several blank spaces for additional skills - at least three if all the skills are written in ahead of time, and at least ten if not, preferably lots more.
• Two other skill-related annoyances, besides the above checkbox problem. First, there should be space for more than one miscellaneous mod per skill. As early as second level, it is possible to have race, feats, masterwork tools and synergy all giving modifiers. Secondly, while listing all the Knowledge fields is nice (especially if you follow up with at least one additional blank line), it is NOT necessary to devote that much room to Craft, Profession or Perform. Space for two or three types of each is plenty; there is no need for the six to eight Profession lines some sheets give, and don't even get me started on the one I saw that attempted an exhaustive list of them!
• Give enough room for feats! Preferably with space left over for short descriptions of what at least some of them do. How even a mid-level fighter is supposed to get the names of all their feats, much less any additional information, into the 2" x 2" space some designers seem to think is adequate is beyond me.
• (But don't try to list every feat a character could have in a checklist format, as one inexplicably popular sheet does. Inevitrably, the selection you end up with will work for exactly one campaign - yours. Other DMs won't necessarily make the same choices.)
• It's nice if there are clear spaces for all the magic item slots.

I'll leave off there, though I could probably think of a few more. What are other people's likes and dislikes for character sheets?

 

[lgburton]

an idea that's been going through my head for a little while about skill sections in character sheets.

i do actually agree with most of what you said.

were i to have the time to design a new character sheet, i would actually have two skill sections:

one blank skill section on the front page, with slots for about 10 skills and skill modifiers ONLY - just the numbers that might need to be referenced often. then, a seperate skill page, listing off all of the untrained skills, with full breakdown for modifiers (such as you describe above), and a trained skill section with blank slots and full breakdown for modifiers.

sure, it would end up being completely useless for a cleric or a fighter, for the most part, but for the party rogue? priceless...

 

[ForceUser]

I completely disagree with ForceUser's comments in the other thread - at a minimum, the skills that can be used untrained should be pre-written.

Woot, I've been cited!

For me, after DMing 3E for five years, all I need are the basics--the rest I can do in my head on the fly as necessary. If my character has a 14 Wis I don't need to list every skill affected by the +2 modifier--I'm confident enough in my knowledge of the fundamentals to know to simply add +2 when I'm using Wis-based skills I have no ranks in. If I've got a synergy bonus from another skill to a skill in which I have no ranks, I will list that, however. But I'm a big boy now, and I don't need it all spelled out for me.

My way has a practical consideration, too. Ink costs money. Since I print all my sheets on my own printer at home, a minimalist approach also saves on ink.

 

[jeffh]

My way has a practical consideration, too. Ink costs money. Since I print all my sheets on my own printer at home, a minimalist approach also saves on ink.

Two words - laser printer . It's much less of a concern for me.

 

[ForceUser]

Two words - laser printer . It's much less of a concern for me.

Three words--poor college student.

 

[smootrk]

I have one major consideration that seems to elude everyone who makes these sheets...

Produce the sheet in landscape format, not the standard page layout.
This allows for the sheet to be usable both in print...
And it allows for the sheet to be used on a laptop (or other computer) during game play, without the scrolling up & down the visable area of the screen to get to info.

Another consideration is to have the sheet tabbed somehow (like the firefox browser allows) to make switching to different pages easier.

That's my 2 cents.

 

[Saeviomagy]

For me, after DMing 3E for five years, all I need are the basics--the rest I can do in my head on the fly as necessary. If my character has a 14 Wis I don't need to list every skill affected by the +2 modifier--I'm confident enough in my knowledge of the fundamentals to know to simply add +2 when I'm using Wis-based skills I have no ranks in. If I've got a synergy bonus from another skill to a skill in which I have no ranks, I will list that, however. But I'm a big boy now, and I don't need it all spelled out for me.

I'd go so far to say that you don't need ALL the untrained skills on a sheet - some simply never come up, and we don't need clutter (disguise for instance). However it's helpful to include ones which should be coming up all the time - sense motive, spot, listen, move silently, hide, climb, jump, balance and the like. Especially when some of them (notably those physical ones) are going to have encumberance and armour modifiers.

 

[jeffh]

I have one major consideration that seems to elude everyone who makes these sheets...

Produce the sheet in landscape format, not the standard page layout.
This allows for the sheet to be usable both in print...
And it allows for the sheet to be used on a laptop (or other computer) during game play, without the scrolling up & down the visable area of the screen to get to info.

Another consideration is to have the sheet tabbed somehow (like the firefox browser allows) to make switching to different pages easier.

That's my 2 cents.

Claudio Pozas (same guy who illustrated some of the Counter Collections and various other d20 products) has a nice landscape sheet that also meets most of my requirements. My roommate Colin, who incidentally has done some graphic design work for Mongoose, has further modified Pozas' sheet to, for example, use a modified skill list customized for my game.

I don't bring a laptop to the gaming table (though some of my players are starting to) so the electronic-format considerations don't apply to me as much, but a few of my players nevertheless like the Pozas sheet; it's one of the two I provide the players in my Mystara game to choose from at the moment.

 

[Umbran]

For me, nost sheets spend up too much of their room with graphics and spacers that don't actually carry information. The end result being that the areas where I need to write by hand don't have enough space. I don't need a huge header saying "WEAPONS!", or big curlycue graphics at the top and around the sides of the page.

Character sheets are reference tools, and should contain only that material you need to reference. I am not convinced that every sheet needs to list every skill in existance. If you've no ranks in a skill, you probably use it infrequently, and can normally just work with the attribute modifier. The saved space means everything else can be slightly lager, meaning sheet you can read easily, at greter distance, at a glance. I'm tired of people having to pick up and inspect sheets as if they were nearsighted to read their skills...

Give me legibility, or give me death!

 

[Janx]

Back when I got free printing in college, and played 2E, my char sheets were huge.

I broke everything up into a modular system. I had 1 page per topic. There was 1 page per class, listing the XP table and class abilities. 1 page per race as well. It was all in 1 document file, you just deleted the pages that didn't apply.

Basically, we had:
1 general page (stats)
1 race page (from the selected races)
1 or more class pages (from the selected classes)
1 skills page (listing proficiencies you HAVE)
1 Combat page (the most used, listing #s for AC, saves, HP, and weapon stats and scratch space for during game notes)
1 Inventory page (which could spill over to multiple pages, as it was the last page in the series)

The result could be a hefty char sheet, but it had everything you needed during a game. This would almost resolve itself to the Tabbed format somebody was talking about.

I liked the Combat page the most, as it was the key page you used in every game, and keeping it seperate made it easy to find the info.