Back in The Day!

[megamania]

I still have a bunch of grainy photocopied character sheets for 2e. Depending on the quality of the copier the green color would appear as grey to dotted black. Oh what a mess!

I remember trying to create my first homemade character sheet using a Brother Word Processor that weighed a ton and when it printed it sounded like a gattling gun being fired. I used to place a pillow over it to dull the noise so as not to wake the wife when we were first married.

 

[Lord Xtheth]

My first character sheet was one of my first DMs old characters, erased with smudges and his old stats still indented in the paper.

That sheet went on to house 3 more characters after as well. They were good times!

 

[wotmaniac]

Back in the day (probably 1980 or so), all of our character sheets were each made from scratch, starting with a blank sheet of lined paper and a pencil. We had no idea that there were such things as preprinted character sheets. We followed the format of the only character sheets we'd ever seen: the handmade ones that my cousins, who introduced us to the game, had made for their PCs.

Johnathan

I still do this to some degree (since '94)

 

[Ssadral]

From 1979 till about 1986 we pretty much exclusively used either graph paper or just regular binder paper, for not only D&D but other games like Universe, Faserip, Traveller, Top Secret, Gangbusters... etc. etc. We new that character sheets existed but saw no real reason to use them.

Oh and we had to walk ten miles to school, uphill, both ways.

 

[wotmaniac]

From 1979 till about 1986 we pretty much exclusively used either graph paper or just regular binder paper, for not only D&D but other games like Universe, Faserip, Traveller, Top Secret, Gangbusters... etc. etc. We new that character sheets existed but saw no real reason to use them.

Oh and we had to walk ten miles to school, uphill, both ways.

Ah, but did you do it bare-footed; and did you have 10 feet of snow to deal with, 370 days a year?

 

[grodog]

More imporantly: did you have to roll your dice up-hill too?

 

[JoeNotCharles]

I was lucky though, my parents were teachers, so every so often they'd take the book with the sheet I needed to work, and copy me like 100 character sheets. (Double sided too cause my parents were awesome like that!)

My Dad used to do that too. Every once in a while I'd ask him to make a couple of copies of something, and he'd come back with a stack of hundreds. The worst was when I started playing Rolemaster.

 

[darjr]

I just had a player at the RPGA event today show me a first level 4e character. All written out by hand on one sheet of college rule paper, back and front. He had the latest errata and everything. Little doodles in corners and to highlight certain things. Brought back good ole memories it did.

 

[Stormonu]

I started with lined sheets of paper and a ruler; got to where I was "photocopying" up to 30 sheets a minute for the D&D game (I used to write up tons of NPCs or replacement characters for the game in batches). That was back about 81-83.

My next step up was getting an electric (brother) typewriter and making sheets on onion paper. That didn't last long because I luckily found a place that sold Armory "Revised" (i.e., 2E) character sheets. It was cheaper and easier to buy the packs of character sheets than to photocopy them at that time.

Later, I got my first non TRS-80 computer in '90 and started making my own character sheets, until PDFs eventually replaced making sheets.

On a side note, I'd been in drafting since about '86 and had long ago made a 1" hex map template that I would draw my campaign maps on - 3 feet by 5 feet monsters on vellum paper, inked in by hand and then colored in with colored pencil and/or water colors. They'd take several 8-hour days of work, something I can now spit out in campaign cartorapher with a couple hours (or less) of play.

 

[Ssadral]

Ah, but did you do it bare-footed; and did you have 10 feet of snow to deal with, 370 days a year?

Of course! I live in Canada!

More imporantly: did you have to roll your dice up-hill too?

We had to make our own dice out of whale bone using crude flint knives!