DrunkonDuty
he/him
Character sheets are a thing.
Their purpose is to act as a memory aid for the player. But what is the best way of doing that?
There's a real tension between making information easy to find and understand, and including all the info one needs. More mechanically complex games increase this tension, he says in Hero System.
Grouping, colour coding, these have their advantages. But as others here have said - what gets grouped with what? And one person's clear, concise colour code is another person's clashing nightmare of weirdness.
I'm convinced there's no one answer. Obviously different systems are going to have different character sheets. But even within the one game system there's so many ways to go about doing it.
When designing a sheet I guess the first thing you need to do is decide what's in most need of memory aid. This will depend on the system of course. Probably doesn't need saying but, in most systems, combat has the most buttons to push and thus needs the most help with the rememberising.
As an example of the tension between presentation and information here's a part of a character sheet I did for an introductory Champions adventure. This page is all combat numbers. (These were printed on white paper, so some of the writing will be lost on a black background. Soz to those in dark mode.)
This page is intended for use at the table to track the important variables. The idea is is that the player can use glass beads (or jelly beans, I provided both) on the various tracks.
The rest of the character sheet (not pictured) was 3 pages. 2 pages dedicated to stats, 1 page on background & personality.
My play testers liked the tracking sheet. They were less enamoured of the pages of stats. Didn't hate them, but thought they're very busy. I admit they are. I should have used more white space. Made the headings and bodies of sections more distinct. Maybe even colour coded the sections. But I wanted to keep the CS to 4 pages because I worried that handing over a whole dossier to new players would be too intimidating.
I don't know if any of this answers the OP. Soz again.
Actually there is one point I will make - get a good graphic designer. They're trained in this stuff.
Their purpose is to act as a memory aid for the player. But what is the best way of doing that?
There's a real tension between making information easy to find and understand, and including all the info one needs. More mechanically complex games increase this tension, he says in Hero System.
Grouping, colour coding, these have their advantages. But as others here have said - what gets grouped with what? And one person's clear, concise colour code is another person's clashing nightmare of weirdness.
I'm convinced there's no one answer. Obviously different systems are going to have different character sheets. But even within the one game system there's so many ways to go about doing it.
When designing a sheet I guess the first thing you need to do is decide what's in most need of memory aid. This will depend on the system of course. Probably doesn't need saying but, in most systems, combat has the most buttons to push and thus needs the most help with the rememberising.
As an example of the tension between presentation and information here's a part of a character sheet I did for an introductory Champions adventure. This page is all combat numbers. (These were printed on white paper, so some of the writing will be lost on a black background. Soz to those in dark mode.)
This page is intended for use at the table to track the important variables. The idea is is that the player can use glass beads (or jelly beans, I provided both) on the various tracks.
The rest of the character sheet (not pictured) was 3 pages. 2 pages dedicated to stats, 1 page on background & personality.
My play testers liked the tracking sheet. They were less enamoured of the pages of stats. Didn't hate them, but thought they're very busy. I admit they are. I should have used more white space. Made the headings and bodies of sections more distinct. Maybe even colour coded the sections. But I wanted to keep the CS to 4 pages because I worried that handing over a whole dossier to new players would be too intimidating.
I don't know if any of this answers the OP. Soz again.
Actually there is one point I will make - get a good graphic designer. They're trained in this stuff.
