D&D 5E (2014) What character sheet do you use?

[neogod22]

I use the 5e character sheet app. It fills in everything for me and is good at updating new stuff as books come out.

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[LordEntrails]

Fantasy Grounds

 

[Irda Ranger]

I use a plain text file with simple formatting (Bold, Underline, Italics, and CAPS) as markup. It's the only way to be able to easily share, view, and edit a sheet between Windows, Mac, and iOS. I also find that most PDF sheets are too busy and contain stuff I don't need, and lack features I do need. For instance, no sheet I've seen can handle multiclass spellcasters well.

 

[Blue]

I custom make my own, usually in Excel, for that specific character. I play few characters and usually do so for a long time, and I enjoy mucking around. Just exactly the information I need on the front, often landscape instead of portrait, and other information like equipment lists and other less-referred to information on the back. If a spellcaster the spells with cheat-sheet info goes either on the front (which will displace/shrink other stuff) or on a separate sheet. Occasionally if I have some tricksy spells I'll have the full text of the typed up on the back of the spells sheet so I don't need to refer to a reference book in play.

Oh, I also usually have a fold-out with my character portrait and name that I can put in front of me. Sometimes with some basic information for the DM in a large font size (AC, passive perception, etc.)

In 4e, where running someone else's paragon-level character if they didn't show was a pain because of all of the unique powers, I included a tactics section with common situations and powers to use to make it easy, especially pointing out fun combinations. For example, one character could use his Winged Dagger to change the source of a spell with some of my close burst spells.

I don't have anything against generic character sheets, and they often have a more pleasing aesthetic, but I go for ruthless practicality first. I don't look at a sheet for the vast majority of a session. If I'm looking at it that means I need a specific piece of information and I want it both handy and with enough detail I don't need to access a book. I've even had the text of some conditions I inflicted just so I had them ready if the DM asked.

EDIT: Here's a sheet I had for a 4e character. But it was a Word document and this machine has Libre Office installed and all of the formatting is bad. It would be one color-coded front page with all powered, skills, defenses, HPs and special modifiers, and then a wordy page back with tactics. But when I just opening it it wasn't nicely formatted (text boxes moved, spilled over onto second page, etc.) so I hope you get the idea.

View attachment Silith cheatsheet 10.docx

 

[Blue]

Oh that reminds me. I have a semiformalized format I use when typing up a character sheet in Notepad - yes, Notepad - that has lasted through several editions. The fixed width font and lack of formatting was a feature for me.

It's actually also the same format I use with blank paper and pencil.

You probably already know this, but if you wanted to do it in something like Word or Libre Office they also have monospaced fonts where each character is the same width. But this way you could do bold and underline or colors as you wanted as well, or do the character name in double the size of everything else.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

I create character in Microsoft Word, using a bunch of fields to do the maths.

View attachment Microsoft Word - Balasar, Dragonborn Barbarian 1.pdf

 

[Hjorimir]

I make my own (attached an example).

 

[Satyrn]

You probably already know this, but if you wanted to do it in something like Word or Libre Office they also have monospaced fonts where each character is the same width. But this way you could do bold and underline or colors as you wanted as well, or do the character name in double the size of everything else.

Aye. But: I'm sure lots of us have idled away hours just creating a bunch of characters. I think it was doing just that that led me to prefering Notepad's complete lack of formatting. I found the Word and the like just caused me to spend more time playing with the formatting than rolling up characters.

(Although I actually didn't use Notepad much, rather I used a code editor called Ultraedit. It had one feature I really liked: It could select and copy/paste columns of text instead of rows; so for example I could cut a list of skills from below the list of feats and paste them beside each other, etc.)

 

[The Old Crow]

Any chance you could post an example of your 2e sheet?

Well, it is somewhat worse for wear; I transferred to my laptop to post and it didn't like the change in Word versions. The lines got all crooked, though I straightened them as best I could. The attachment in Word was really wonky, so I ended up turning it into a PDF to post.

Well, it was never pretty and perfect anyway, because I wasn't kidding about throwing it together. But it does show the layout I like, which mimics where everyone I knew back in Ye Olden AD&D Days used to put things on college rule paper, with AC and HP on the left under the Ability Scores.

This sheet is for a heavily houseruled 2e. To update this for easier use in 5e I need to start from scratch, figure out what to change, what to add, and mostly what not to add so it won't get cluttered.

 

[Yaarel]

Aye. But: I'm sure lots of us have idled away hours just creating a bunch of characters. I think it was doing just that that led me to prefering Notepad's complete lack of formatting. I found the Word and the like just caused me to spend more time playing with the formatting than rolling up characters.

(Although I actually didn't use Notepad much, rather I used a code editor called Ultraedit. It had one feature I really liked: It could select and copy/paste columns of text instead of rows; so for example I could cut a list of skills from below the list of feats and paste them beside each other, etc.)

On paper, I always use gridded graph paper to write out a character sheet − because it organizes space both horizontally and vertically.

At the moment, I am using Word tables to try do something similar. I like the results.