How to make a digital character sheet?

[BookTenTiger]

Let's say I've made my own custom stripped-down version of 5e, which folks often do. For those of you who have done so, how do I go about making a digital character sheet? Not just a sheet that can be printed (I've already done that), but one that can be interacted with by a player. Maybe even one that calculates things like attack bonuses and skill bonuses?

I really don't know what software is used for making custom digital character sheets these days. Any experience or advice is welcome!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I did a HERO character sheet in Excel that did all of the number crunching.

 

[Morrus]

Depends how slick you want it. At the lower end you could have an interactive spreadsheet, but it won’t look fancy. Won’t cost you anything but a lot of time doing data entry and finagling formulas. At the higher end you have D&D Beyond, a platform which cost millions to develop and is still being developed to this day. We’ve been working on Level Up Gateway for about 18 months now and it’s still a long way from a basic complete version.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Let's say I've made my own custom stripped-down version of 5e, which folks often do. For those of you who have done so, how do I go about making a digital character sheet? Not just a sheet that can be printed (I've already done that), but one that can be interacted with by a player. Maybe even one that calculates things like attack bonuses and skill bonuses?

I really don't know what software is used for making custom digital character sheets these days. Any experience or advice is welcome!

Usually they're either fillable PDF sheets (you can bake some calculations into those) or spreadsheets. The problem with both is making sure your players will have the software to properly use them.

 

[Li Shenron]

Let's say I've made my own custom stripped-down version of 5e, which folks often do. For those of you who have done so, how do I go about making a digital character sheet? Not just a sheet that can be printed (I've already done that), but one that can be interacted with by a player. Maybe even one that calculates things like attack bonuses and skill bonuses?

I really don't know what software is used for making custom digital character sheets these days. Any experience or advice is welcome!

I am still too much of a fan of pen-and-paper so I print out my custom character sheets, but if I were to make a digital version of them nowadays, the first thing coming to mind would be a simple HTML page with autocalculations, which should work in every browser (so that it can be used on laptop, tablet or phone). Vibe-code it with the help of your favourite LLM AI if you don't have the skills yourself.

 

[neceros]

Either a PDF writer like Adobe or good ol HTML.