Why are character sheets so often badly designed?

[Lanefan]

They also never leave enough space for equipment.

Equipment is what the back of the page is for.

Supplementary question: what do you keep on your scratch paper, as a player, during a session? For me, in D&D family games, it's hit points, my current initiative value, spells, and notes about what's going on: the watch list if we're having a multi-day march, names of NPCs, spells currently in effect, that kind of thing.

Hit points, spell points (in the game I play in we use a spell-point system), spells active on self. If I'm playing a caster I'll have another scrap of paper with that day's spell list on it.

The party watch list is usually clipped to the DM screen facing out. That way we can all see it but the DM knows where to find it if needed and can easily reach it.

For initiative I just leave the die (or dice) I rolled on the table in front of me, removing it once that die's init has gone by. (we re-roll every round and use a rather unique - but IMO very functional - initiative system based on d6)

 

[Ulfgeir]

Do you think the initial Pathfinder 2E sheet was well designed??

Haven't seen it, and not played Pathfinder 2e, so no idea.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

If you see something done badly, then you have found a great (and possibly lucrative!) opportunity to do something better yourself.

Often, when making the better version yourself, you realize why all the other ones are done badly, and that it is not that easy.

 

[Li Shenron]

They also never leave enough space for equipment.

This is also something worth noting...

There are typically two types of gaming groups: those who simply treat everything you own as available, and those who make a distinction between what you have equipped and what you own but don't carry around with you all the time.

How to separate the two is something I am still not done with my own character sheets design. Note that the primary reason why I designed them is our own use, not for general public use, even though I shared them here on ENWorld. This means that I don't expect my character sheets to suit everyone's gaming style. Among other things, I still haven't run a high-level game, this is why I don't even have a page for spells beyond level 4. We haven't run out of room yet for abilities, but a couple of players quickly ran out of room with equipment because one of them has a swiss-army knife mentality (i.e. buys every cheap but potentially useful piece of junk from the PHB equipment table) and another is hoarding monsters parts and interesting objects and substances (for roleplaying reasons).

For the time being I have left only a small area in the main sheet for equipped stuff i.e. anything that is with you all the time. This includes at least cash, magic items and common adventuring supplies (e.g. torches, healer's kits, healing potions).

This area tends to also include equipped armor and weapons, but I am thinking that there is no fundamental reason to include this information here: it could be moved directly to AC and weapon attacks, so that it leaves more room in the equipped section. [example: since each PC rarely uses more than 4-5 weapons barring long-term changes, I tell the players to write down their weapon attacks only for weapons they are actually equipped with, but then it means this section already tells what they are, no need to write them again under equipment]

On the other hand, I made a completely separate page for stuff that the PCs are not necessarily carry around all the time but rather leaving at home. Other players aren't even using this sheet at all, as they only care about 1-2 best possible weapons, and magic items (which aren't that many yet). But the hoarders can use this extra page to organize their less-important properties, and they can mark which ones they decide to equip and carry around anyway.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Design is harder than you think. Fan-made character sheets are not better than professional ones; it's not an easy thing

I would disagree with the second part here.

Fan-made character sheets, are, in my experience, often significantly better than professional ones (thought also sometimes worse, or flawed in exactly the same way).

The issue I frequently see with professional sheets is that basically they've decided to make attractive character sheet, that contains all the information they believe is needed to play the character, but they tend to be shockingly lacking in practical terms.

In particular I'd identify the following common faults:

1) Information that is referenced infrequently is given parity to information that is referenced infrequently, or is much more obvious, visually. This can get really bad - some piece of information that, in practice, comes up every session multiple times, is often in small text, sometimes not even on the first page.

2) Completely unrealistic and clearly untested amounts of space for things. This is a striking flaw. I can't even count the number of official character sheets where will have like, 3 lines for weapons, when the average PC will have like 4-6 (often including example characters), or take up 1/4 of the entire front page with room for some sort of write-in bit, where most PCs will only fill in maybe 1/4 of that space. Or vice-versa - you'll have a situation where a normal PC has a 1/2 a page of special abilities, even written small, and they've given you less than a 1/4 of a page.

3) Simply missing information. How does this even happen? I've seen countless official characters that just don't have a space for stuff you need to know to play the character or that the book strongly encourages you to write down. Derived stats can sometimes be particularly bad here, because they're particularly likely to be just be missing.

4) Visual design that's clearly antithetical to way the sheet is used. This is a bit different from 1, though I guess related, in that it's typically less about text or positioning, but more often about bad use of textures/pictures/boxes/lines that make it harder to use the character sheet.

You're right in that some fan-made sheets have all these flaws and more. But many fan-made sheets, in my experience, are the product of actual play, and actual play shows you what matters and what doesn't, and what can afford to be small and take a minute to reference, and what's actually pretty vital to have immediately.

And frankly, many official character sheets are so bad that it's impossible to believe that they're the product of playtesting. Rather it seems like they're the product of theoretical thinking and or just cramming information in (sometimes not even in an organised way).

There's also wild variance. Character sheets haven't really improved much, unlike most aspects of RPGs. Rules now are typically presented far more clearly and in a far more organised way than in, say, 1995. Mechanics make more sense and are more playtested, and mathed-out, instead of guesswork and "feels okay" numbers. Rules are typically carefully considered in terms of how they impact the game, what behaviours they encourage (despite the fact that people actively opposed this to some extent in 1995).

But character sheets? Pfffft. Your odds of any given game having a good or even decent character sheet now are about the same as they were in 1995. The only real place that has improved here is PtbA games and the like, where your whole class/character is one sheet, because those do mostly seem like the product of playtesting of a serious nature.

If you see something done badly, then you have found a great (and possibly lucrative!) opportunity to do something better yourself.

Often, when making the better version yourself, you realize why all the other ones are done badly, and that it is not that easy.

This is true. But there's also a significant portion of the time when you're left going "What, why? Why did they do such a terrible job?". Of all the character sheets I've designed for games (most lost to the ages and old HDDs sadly now), the only one that made go "Damn this is hard" is 2E AD&D. But I was able to design a sheet that worked better than the ones we had, and as a bonus made people think about their character a bit more and numbers a bit less.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

This is true. But there's also a significant portion of the time when you're left going "What, why? Why did they do such a terrible job?". Of all the character sheets I've designed for games (most lost to the ages and old HDDs sadly now), the only one that made go "Damn this is hard" is 2E AD&D. But I was able to design a sheet that worked better than the ones we had, and as a bonus made people think about their character a bit more and numbers a bit less.

The last time I used a character sheet was those sweet, sweet orange/yellow ones printed in 1981. Those will always be my platonic idea of a mix between usefulness and insanity. Debts owed/obligations FTW!

Which brings to mind the following three observations:

1. All character sheets should have wills.

2. Any time I see that strange color, I get nostalgic. You just don't really see it on anything else.

3. I've just never found a character sheet for any system that is as good as a piece of paper, or multiple pieces of paper.

 

[Ulfgeir]

This is also something worth noting...

There are typically two types of gaming groups: those who simply treat everything you own as available, and those who make a distinction between what you have equipped and what you own but don't carry around with you all the time.

Exactly this. I mean if you are weeks/months out in the wilderness exploring dungeons, it is to say the least usually very important to know if you actually HAVE a rope, with which you can climb down into that gaping cavern or not, whereas if if you are at your home base, then you can simply assume that you have access to such mundane things (and maybe also some not so mundane stuff).

It does lead to rather different types of play.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Fan-made character sheets, are, in my experience, often significantly better than professional ones

I realize that this is really just a question of personal preference, and I think my preference is a little more weighted towards aesthetics than your is; I'm happy to have a bit less functionality if I can have something nicer to look at! But for interest's sake, I'm going to list the games I have current or much-played characters for and categorize what sheet I use. I'd be very interested to see what others regard as better fan-made sheets!

Professional / Publisher-distributed character sheet :

• D&D 5E (Druid)
• Call of Cthulhu 7E (1920's)
• Numenéra (various)
• DWAITAS
• PF2 (HeroLab online)
• 13th Age (Druid)
• Various GUMSHOE (NBA, TOC)
• Savage Worlds (Flash Gordon)
• Classic Deadlands
• Ghostbusters
• Big Eyes Small Mouth

Ones designed by friends / me:

• Fate
• ICONS
• D&D 4E (used to use online, no longer available. now I have the ugliest spreadsheet in the world ...)

All fan-based replacement suggestions welcome! My only criteria is that they have to look as good as the publisher-created ones and allow me to make a PDF I can put on my iPad (e.g. for most I just print them to PDF). Interested to see the results ...

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Exactly this. I mean if you are weeks/months out in the wilderness exploring dungeons, it is to say the least usually very important to know if you actually HAVE a rope, with which you can climb down into that gaping cavern or not, whereas if if you are at your home base, then you can simply assume that you have access to such mundane things (and maybe also some not so mundane stuff).

It does lead to rather different types of play.

My favorite skill in GUMSHOE system: Preparedness. Basically it boils down to a roll to determine "would your character have remembered to pack that". For rope in a wilderness, probably a DC 5 (in D&D terms). I found it so useful, I might just steal it for any other system I run ...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

1. All character sheets should have wills.

This is an extremely good point I had never previously considered. Whilst I haven't made a sheet for a couple of years, because the internet has provided (or we used Beyond, if it's D&D), I will take that into account in future.

I realize that this is really just a question of personal preference, and I think my preference is a little more weighted towards aesthetics than your is; I'm happy to have a bit less functionality if I can have something nicer to look at!

For me, I guess it's like a balance of practicality, laziness on my part (which is abundant), and aesthetics, but to me, you have to get above a certain bar before I even consider the aesthetics, and most characters, including every official D&D character sheet I can think of (every edition), have fallen distinctly below that minimum bar of "Oh that's kinda sexy/stylish/evocative" that I have before aesthetics kicks in.

So then it's just a war between my laziness and how practical the official sheets are. The internet obviously complicated the situation in two ways:

1) In the early days of the internets, particularly before about 1997-ish, there often wasn't an official character sheet you could print out. So you either had booklets of character sheets, photocopies (flashbacks man), or you had an unofficial sheet someone had whipped up on a website. Often these were godawful (all three) and part of why I started creating sheets.

2) In more recent years (certainly the last decade), every time I've been dissatisfied with a character sheet for a game I've just Googled for one and found one that is "good enough for government work" - and sometimes they're actually excellent.

Our most recent non-D&D game we didn't even need character sheets. We just had a Google Sheet filled in with the stats of the characters and referenced it as needed. But that was a real one-page RPG (Sepulchre - it was excellent).

I actually think we'd see a lot more better-designed character-sheets if it wasn't for the fact that once the game is started, even if you realize a sheet sucks, it's a pain to transfer the character details.