One Page Character Sheets

[Crazy Jerome]

I've always found that character sheet construction to be a highly personal thing, so when people start making claims like "if the character sheet is over one or two pages then the system is bloated/broken" it comes across to be insulting and vaguely edition warring-y.

You'll note that I did suggest another reason for long character sheets, and even stated outright that I thought it was the more common reason: Bad character sheet design. As it happens, I prefer 4E of the versions available so far. I just prefer it despite the official character sheets, not because of them.

I'm also someone that has had to wade through a lot of long resumes over the last couple of years, written by people with the same mindset as the people that like to show every minor detail on a character sheet. So yeah, it's a personal preference thing. But it's a personal preference thing with a strong reason behind it.

 

[Rhenny]

And could you still read print that small, I wonder

Hey, back then when I was younger, my eyes were stronger, so I could easily read it.

We would write our own cards so we'd put stats (abilities, saves, ac, etc.) on and weapons, etc. If we played a rogue, we'd write down all our ability percentages. If we played a spell caster, we'd write down our spells. With OD&D, there was a lot less to write down.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Some of the guys I went to college with had AD&D characters written on a wallet photo size card (which they carried in their wallets instead of pictures of friends and family). These were emergency backup characters if they had one die in a game, or if they were out somewhere and suddenly got the opportunity to drop in on a game, unexpectedly. One guy had a 5th level ranger that he swore had only been played in such games, and had earned every XP.

 

[MortalPlague]

What frustrates me most of all with the 4th Edition sheet is that despite it's 6-8 page length, it still omits critical information! This is a mortal sin for a character sheet the length of a novel chapter.

Have you ever looked at the feat write-ups on a 4th Edition sheet? They're awful! My buddy's warlord has a feat where the description says "Target of inspiring word gains a defensive bonus", yet it neglects to say anything about what the bonus is or how long it lasts. I can't count the number of times I've seen "Gain damage when doing x" and had to look up the feat in the compendium to find out how much damage, how many attacks it applies to, and how to implement it.

I got so frustrated with the length of sheets that for my rogue in my buddy's game, I wrote up a sheet by hand on a single page. And it's worked out beautifully.

 

[Keldryn]

I love the idea of getting back to one-page character sheets. This could mean single-sided or double-sided, with the provision that a double-sided sheet doesn't mean two sides of densely-packed lists and numbers.

I came across this one-sided character sheet for a Labyrinth Lord game (B/X D&D retro-clone) a few days ago:

Full-size images at: Cincinnati Illustrators Blog: character sheet

In looking for similar character sheets, I found these AD&D character sheets done by Tony DiTerlizzi:

Full size images at: Tony DiTerlizzi, Never Abandon Imagination – Download some DiTerlizzi!

Some will dislike these sheets because they have too much "wasted" white space and because there are too many "useless" visual touches.

I love these sheets (especially the DiTerlizzi ones). They're clean and uncluttered but are nice to look at and it's easy to find information on them.

I don't like the mass of boxes, lines, checkboxes, and lists of things on the official 3e and 4e character sheets. They end up looking like income tax forms, not my "user interface" to a fantasy RPG.

The in-play character sheet doesn't need all of the "workspace" fields provided on most of the 3e and 4e character sheets. You could have nicely presented sheets that have all of the calculated values, and then additional worksheets that can be put aside until characters level up. Even better, make the core game streamlined enough that you don't need these kind of calculations. 3e really went out of its way to ensure that you couldn't just track your total skill modifier (skill ranks as pre-requisites, cross-class skills meaning that the order in which you took class levels made a difference, synergies, etc).

I'm going to make a custom sheet for my wife's 3.5 ranger, inspired by the DiTerlizzi ones. Unfortunately, I can't draw, so I'll be borrowing a lot of images. She'll definitely appreciate this approach over the typical 3.5/4e character sheet design.