Back in The Day!

[darjr]

My Dad had one of the first Macintoshes and a dot matrix printer. I have a ton of those sheets. None of the digital copies.

 

[Scribble]

My Dad had one of the first Macintoshes and a dot matrix printer. I have a ton of those sheets. None of the digital copies.

I had a ton of Tales From The Floating Vagabond sheets that I printed out on a dot matrix... brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnt brrrrrrrrrnnnnnnt

 

[darjr]

I had a ton of Tales From The Floating Vagabond sheets that I printed out on a dot matrix... brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnt brrrrrrrrrnnnnnnt

I new another kid that, for some reason, had access to the mimeo graph machine at school. Loved watching those print.

 

[grodog]

Back in the day (82 or so) I didn't know where pre-made character sheets came from; probably I saw some that older kids at the library group had, but the idea that you could buy them (e.g. the goldenrod AD&D ones) either never occurred to me or seemed too expensive. So I sat down with a typewriter and laid out my own, by the expedient of going across each row, typing in the things I wanted on that row, and then putting in a : where I wanted a vertical line between sections to appear, then doing it again on the next row with the : hopefully lining up with the one above. How much time and White-Out I spent on this cannot be imagined. (I did then have my dad copy it at his office, though - I didn't do it every time I wanted to make a new character).

Good to know I wasn't the only one who created his own PC sheets on a typewriter Our sheets were ~6 single-sided pages, with room for languages, Comeliness, Proficiencies, and the usual stats, magic items, memorized spells, fortress locations, etc. We had optional sheets for Psionics (using the new "Grand Arts" from Dragon 78), and for spell books for wizards. (We did use official sheets, too, though). I should dig them back out to see if they would still be useful in our current 1e game....

 

[Pbartender]

If you go to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, you can still find the character sheets that me and Grog carved into the wall with stones for our games. That's how far back in the day I go.

If you have a really good radio telescope, you can just about make out my big brother's first character sheet in the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe.

 

[pawsplay]

I don't think my dad understood why I needed so many photocopies, but he would get them just the same. I spent many an idle afternoon rolling up a few characters. On the other hand, graph paper was expensive, and simple black-lined grids were hard to use for mapping, so I sometimes bought graph pads with my allowance. I hoarded them greedily, but nonetheless, I always seemed to be running out for important projects.

 

[Dice4Hire]

If you go to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, you can still find the character sheets that me and Grog carved into the wall with stones for our games. That's how far back in the day I go.

Get out of prison yet?

 

[Mark]

Back in the day, I had a character sheet translated into genetic code and divvied up among the various races of the Federation of Planets and their enemies in hopes that one day it would be discovered and bring them together in peace.

 

[darjr]

Oh yea, graph paper. I remember finding some kind of cooking paper meant to be used in the oven that had a grid on it. After going through a whole role my mother was steaming mad.

 

[Dykstrav]

Up until 3E, I was fond of using a simple piece of unlined paper, folded in half (and I even did it in 3E sometimes). My handwriting is very small, and it always seemed like a waste for me to make all those photocopies (that used vast amounts of real estate on the page that I might never need) when I could tweak my "character sheet" to fit my needs precisely with each character I made.

I never enjoyed the feeling of having to fill in all the blank spots on a character sheet--it was too much like schoolwork. I rather enjoy the idea of statting out an entire character in the area of an index card or so.