How big will my character sheet be?!

[Shado]

This isn't just for spells but for everything from Cleave to Backstabbing! OK at 1st level you have a handful of unique abilities but how many do you have at level 20? or 30?!

At 20?

11 more powers than you had at first level. (Discounting the number of powers Wizards would have access to in their spellbook.)

At 30?

2 more powers than you had at 20. (Though several you had at 20 will have been swapped out.)

I've been working on my own custom character sheets for the past couple of months as information is confirmed. It's really very possible to keep all relevant information on two sheets for a 30th level character. One a traditional type sheet. The other a "spell" sheet converted to powers. Neceros' sheet is a decent example of how well you should be able to keep things down to one sheet.

My personal plan is to use a second sheet as a record sheet of a character's powers. In game, I intend to make use of my own custom power cards. There's some fantastic community work being done on them here.

 

[invokethehojo]

Keep in mind that they have to print the entire power for these pregens since we don't have the books yet. It would be like printing out the entire feat block for a 3rd edition sheet rather than writing 'Power Attack'. I'm sure that for an actual character sheet, you could write down the name of the power and a real quick blurb about what it does.

I transcribed the pregens from Shadowfell on my computer and I must say IMHO I think your wrong, maybe after lots of play you will have certain things memorized, but these new powers are so detailed (and all those details are important) and there are so many of them that anything less than typing out the whole thing is only going to result in having you face in a book most of the gaming session.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I made a charactersheet that should work fine at low levels and it only uses one page.

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=225971

 

[Piratecat]

PS: There's no way I'm copying the same info over and over and over again onto blank cards, or asking my players to. I'm making cards that I can print and hand out whenever a character gains a new power.

Check out the 4e sub-forum for fan created material. There's a GREAT thread there on how to make your own power cards. Good stuff.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

A character sheet with a section similar to the Talents section on an Earthdawn character sheet could work.

 

[Ander00]

I like having all pertinent information available at a glance, and I've found the card system to work rather well for Tome of Battle maneuvers, so I'll probably make my own one-sided character sheet again, with powers being relegated to cards (with full descriptions printed on them and just damage figures and the like left to fill in).


cheers

 

[quindia]

I plan to make my own character sheet and use power cards in conjunction. The actual sheet will only list the names of the powers while the card will contain the game mechanics.

 

[Mercule]

Wizards IMC have always gotten along just fine with a one-line description for each spell.

Yes, some of the new powers have details to which we're unaccustomed as of yet. But, people will get used to them. Martial characters, especially, haven't traditionally had to keep track of such things, but even 3.5 clerics (who ended up with the whole spell list on their sheet if you used PCGen or HeroForge) didn't have unwieldy character sheets. How many people still look up the cap on the +level for healing spells? Or the cost of psionic powers? Or the modifier for ability scores?

I expect that a significant amount of info in the powers will become second nature after a couple months of playing. That doesn't mean that people won't decide that it's just nicer to have the whole description right there. Just that it probably won't be needed. You could build a huge character sheet in any edition. I had a 2e wizard/druid with a 25 page character sheet.

 

[drjones]

As has already been said, Power cards.