Pathfinder Second Edition Character Sheets

The color version hurts the eyes and is difficult to read due to color contrast. The printer-friendly version looks much better.

So I made my first character using these sheets. Specifically, I used the "printer-friendly" b/w ones. Two thumbs up on the layout. Two thumbs down on the stark contrast. What I write (in pencil) gets lost in the sea of black ink on the form. Writing it in blue ink doesn't help much. Green ink shows up a little better. I'm considering red or orange.. but honestly, I shouldn't have to.

I would recommend releasing a greyscale pdf with the black at 50% darkness to make it easier to pick out handwriting.

looking at the color one printed in greyscale, it looks better but could still use a whole bunch of improvement with respect to color.

Added: I toned down the black significantly via photoshop. Obviously, this is a matter of taste. Regardless, here's the alternative. . PM me if this breaks some sort of rule and I'll take it down.

Is there a plan to release a PDF character sheet that is usable by blind or visually impaired gamers using screen readers? These ones show up all out of order when I open them and I am unable to fill anything out.

Wow. Just wow. Not the good kind of wow.

I get it that visual art is subjective, but the colour version strikes me as visually unpleasant. I'm sorry... I know someone worked really hard on this and it's not fashionable to tell creative types "I don't like that", but without feedback, improvement can't happen.

Specifically: as has been mentioned, the colour choices are clashing, and not only slightly. The brown is the offender, and while I imagine the designer was trying to evoke fantasy-era leather, as used it just appears like the last - unwanted - crayon in the box was used. A (much) lighter shade of tan might have been viable. Perhaps as light as the rest of the parchment background behind the overlaid character sheet. Otherwise something else.

Also, there is insufficient contrast between the main brown and the darker brown/red area borders. That's mainly because the lighter brown isn't light enough.

As for layout, I won't form an opinion until I've read the system. At first glance it feels really, really busy, but that might be a benefit. So no comments there since I'm uneducated.

In conclusion, please... whoever designed this, don't take this personally, but this specific creation doesn't float my boat and feels like the first un-Paizo art asset I've ever seen.

Those are... very blue and beige. They're a bit of an eyesore.

You're not wrong, but that seems to be par for the course where colour CSs are concerned - just stick with the printer-friendly one.

Thank you! I love them! Any chance of getting a form-fillable version? There are form-fillable ones from the Playtest. Speaking of which, is there anything that prevents one from using the playtest character sheets with the 2E Core Rules?

I imagine there was simply no room to put a "Damage total" field for the Strikes sections? There's a total for attack (assumed: it's not labeled), but not damage. I suppose folks can just add Dice, Strength, Proficiency, Specialization, Other, and Traits individually, but lets be honest: that's an unnecessary PITA during combat.

On the strikes section, where it says "damage". In the box that says "dice". And next to it, in the box that says "strength" (for melee) or "special" (for ranged strikes).

To the right of that is a box for "other" and a box for "traits".

Are you sure you've looked at the sheet? :/

Edit: mixed up my left and right 😅

Looks awesome, can't wait to take 2E out for a spin! I'm having a bit of trouble convincing a couple of my players due to the present lack of Mythic stuff, but I told them we could house-rule things until there's an official supplement. 8-P

If you previously downloaded the color character sheet when it was without symbols, we've updated it to include them now. Thanks for your patience!

Would you guys maybe consider using Scantron-style bubbles for the TEML fields?

I know it wouldn't be much, but those sheets as they stand are crazy busy.

One bit of feedback, I noted a distinct lack of a 'range' box for the ranged attacks when I built a character. Other than that, the sheet worked quite well when I built a fighter when the power was out earlier!

Aratrok wrote:

Those are... very blue and beige. They're a bit of an eyesore.

You're not wrong, but that seems to be par for the course where colour CSs are concerned - just stick with the printer-friendly one.

Seconded; I much prefer the black-and-white version (though it does look a bit like a tax form).

If you previously downloaded the color character sheet when it was without symbols, we've updated it to include them now. Thanks for your patience!

Great, thanks!

Unfortunately that "Pathifnder" typo in the footer slipped through :/ .

Both the black & white and color versions of the character sheet have been updated. We even got that pesky spelling error. Thanks for the feedback!

-Jim

I kinda wish they'd gone landscape.

Portrait is okay and "traditional" but when you're playing at a table—which is almost a given since minis and a battlemap are expected—it takes up extra space.

If everyone's using landscape sheets, it's five more inches of interior table space to put out the maps or place minis.

If I wanted to make my own sheets (say I was planning on giving out more than 2 bonus feats) is there a way I can use the real action/reaction etc. symbols instead of having to do like [A],[AA],[R] etc.?

To start, I obviously want to say how grateful I am to all the devs at Paizo for all the hard work you've put into this system, and I'm already trying to recruit people to test drive the first couple encounters of the first AP book to get a feel for the system in motion, because that's how excited I am.

I also do not feel comfortable putting this sheet in front of a new player to the system. I'm sorry, it's just way too busy and intimidating. Someone got really excited with the flavorful frames. Way too excited.

The proficiency system I think will be fantastic for simplifying the various numbers and modifiers you're adding to rolls in favor of a unified system of proficiency. It's a fantastic change to Pathfinder. It also makes these character sheets crazy with the tiny T.E.M.L. boxes everywhere, contributing to how busy it looks, with what, at first glance, looks like crazy amounts of tiny boxes everywhere. I will admit, I don't know the solution to that.

In general, in my line of work I reference these fantastic dos and don'ts for design that I would love to pass on to as many people as possible, because I've found them really helpful:

Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility.

And here's the direct English version of the PDF from drilling down through the links in their GitHub.

I can also personally vouch for the accuracy of the poster that talks about designing for people on the spectrum. I'm on the spectrum, and the last principle mentioned on the poster is really hitting me bad when I look at these sheets: "Do build simple and consistent layouts. Don't build complex and cluttered layouts." The accompanying images illustrate that really well too. Not that I'm incapable of reading the sheet, of course, just that it's taking a noticeable extra few seconds to stop, and try to take it in and parse it.

Again, thanks for all the hard work you've all done so far, and I recognize that for something like a character sheet, this is a hard problem to solve. It just seems like between my own experience, the experience I've already seen with showing these sheets to a few 5E players around the office, and what other people have already said about the colors and accessibility problems, that this is feedback really worth giving. If you haven't already seen the resources I linked to, I hope they're just as helpful to you as they have been for me!

EDIT: Oh, and I want to add that most of my criticism is largely aimed at the first page. The other three pages I'm pretty ok with, and the spell page actually is a great example of even if you have different sections of different sizes, the alignment between the different columns alone helps so much. Hmmm....what else....I guess I also don't think my character's catchphrases needs such a large box? I don't know, my feedback is definitely much more minor the other three pages. I do really like the clear list of feats and features on the second page! Such an incredibly vast improvement on that tiny, half-page, single-column, blank text area where we apparently needed to put all our feats/traits/etc on the First Edition sheet.

I can confirm, my first impression of the sheet was "Oh goddess everything is boxes my eyes don't know where to focus".

My second impression was "This is going to be super intimidating for my players."

This is a really busy sheet. I don't really know how you simplify, though, without omitting information that a player legitimately needs at the table. What's extraneous? (I mean, yeah, you don't need a character sketch and catchphrases, but that's not the busiest part of the document.)

Could we get a color version without the parchment background so printing the color version doesn't take up more ink?

Thanks for those links VestOfHolding! Very interesting. And, I'm afraid, applicable to these sheets, especially the color one. Very busy, hard to follow, unflattering colors; it made my eyes very unhappy.

I gotta say that, while they weren't perfect, I kind of liked the playtest sheets better. Landscape should also be an option for those who like them as well.

Oh, and the B&W character sheet I just downloaded still has Pathfinder misspelled in the footers.

Not that I need it, but what about a professionally crafted electronic character sheet?

Filling out paperwork and monitoring the rules along the way by hand is only slightly better than scraping on stone.

. . . but what about a professionally crafted electronic character sheet?

How about HeroLab Online?

Not that I need it, but what about a professionally crafted electronic character sheet?

Filling out paperwork and monitoring the rules along the way by hand is only slightly better than scraping on stone.

Especially since the game expects you to recalculate every single number every time you level up. That's a dealbreaker for me as far as physical character sheets go.

Barring workarounds, anyway - for example, it would be much cleaner to just write proficiency as "L+2" or "L+6", calculate your total without your level, and then remember to add your level to your rolls. That way you only need to rewrite anything when your proficiency or attributes change.

DropBearHunter wrote:

. . . but what about a professionally crafted electronic character sheet?

How about HeroLab Online?

mandatory subscription payments and online access might be a downsell for people.

If I wanted to make my own sheets (say I was planning on giving out more than 2 bonus feats) is there a way I can use the real action/reaction etc. symbols instead of having to do like [A],[AA],[R] etc.?

I believe they've said the icons will be added to the Community Use package, for that reason. Eventually anyway...

(Although that won't help 3rd Parties; expect a LOT of homebrew variants in the next few months.)

That said, Paizo was nice enough not to lock these sheets and prevent editing. So you can pull them up in Acrobat or Photoshop and cut-and-paste those icons.

I'm actually really glad the sheets aren't landscape; it was my biggest gripe with the playtest ones. Landscape might leave more interior table space, but if you play in a small space on a small table (like me), you don't have much table-edge space to set them on.

The color one does seem a bit busy, but I expect I'll be using the black-and-white one anyway (that's a lot of printer ink to use up). The feat spaces don't provide much space for writing down what the feats actually do, but then, neither did 1E's sheet.

For people looking to cut down on page count to make the sheets less intimidating, I feel like you could probably skip the third page (just need to write the action/reaction stuff on the back of one of the others) if you wanted. For me, most of the top boxes are flavor stuff I already know in my head anyway, so I don't need them written down (and I can write gender/pronouns/ethnicity/other short details on the top of page 1). As for character sketch...well, I can draw stick figures and that's about it. :-) And the fourth page is only going to come into play if you're a caster, so it's not quite as intimidating as it looks on first glance.

One thing I find confusing about the black-and-white version: In the "Melee Strikes" and "Ranged Strikes" sections of page 1, there is no visible separator between each strike. But there IS a visible separator WITHIN each strike. So the grouping reads wrong; it looks as though each "Damage" secion is associated with the "Weapon" section below it, rather than the one above it.

This is something I've seen on the web as well, and it always bugs me: sections separated by nothing but whitespace, but visible separators within a section, so it's easy to mis-read which subsections are grouped together. I've most often seen this in web forums, where one could mistakenly associate the wrong user info line with the wrong post.

...Hey, come to think of it, this web forum does that very thing! And not too long ago, it caused me to "flag" the wrong post, because I mistook the "FLAG | LIST | REPLY" controls as being attached to the post above them, rather than the one below, thanks to the separator line.

In summary, sections should have MORE prominent separators between them than the sub-section separators within them.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

If I wanted to make my own sheets (say I was planning on giving out more than 2 bonus feats) is there a way I can use the real action/reaction etc. symbols instead of having to do like [A],[AA],[R] etc.?

I believe they've said the icons will be added to the Community Use package, for that reason. Eventually anyway..

You may be thinking of this post from Paizo's Licensing Manager. It does not say anything specific about icons & warns that any update to the Community Use package might take a while after release. (I couldn't find anything else relevant.)

The Community Use Policy is specifically designed to be edition agnostic, so it will not need to change when Second Edition is released. Instead, you'll just see the new assets for Second Edition added to the Community Use Package when they become available just like you do for other Paizo products. I don't have a specific ETA for that, other than it will be after launch and might take a little bit longer than normal due to the volume of new products.

Speaking of confused, it took me a moment to realize that wasn't my post. XD

Speaking of confused, it took me a moment to realize that wasn't my post. XD

You post a lot more than I do, so I've had plenty of time to get used to it. :-)

Barbaric Gug Swarm wrote:

DropBearHunter wrote:

. . . but what about a professionally crafted electronic character sheet?

How about HeroLab Online?

mandatory subscription payments and online access might be a downsell for people.

Fully agreed! I could be slowly convinced to do the monthly subscription if there was trust built up that month-to-month there really are very cool new features and bug fixes very consistently. But even with that, it's still a big loss for people who don't have reliable or fast enough internet, and that's a non-starter.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

If I wanted to make my own sheets (say I was planning on giving out more than 2 bonus feats) is there a way I can use the real action/reaction etc. symbols instead of having to do like [A],[AA],[R] etc.?

I believe they've said the icons will be added to the Community Use package, for that reason. Eventually anyway...

(Although that won't help 3rd Parties; expect a LOT of homebrew variants in the next few months.)

We have released a font that includes the action symbols as part of the Pathfinder Second Edition Compatibility License (not part of the Community Use packages).

Jester David wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

If I wanted to make my own sheets (say I was planning on giving out more than 2 bonus feats) is there a way I can use the real action/reaction etc. symbols instead of having to do like [A],[AA],[R] etc.?

I believe they've said the icons will be added to the Community Use package, for that reason. Eventually anyway...

(Although that won't help 3rd Parties; expect a LOT of homebrew variants in the next few months.)

We have released a font that includes the action symbols as part of the Pathfinder Second Edition Compatibility License (not part of the Community Use packages).

That is very awesome. Appreciated deeply.

Addendum: assuming "I intend to make Word document character sheets and statblocks for myself and my players" is acceptable as the list of products intended to be made. <Grin>

Jester David wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

If I wanted to make my own sheets (say I was planning on giving out more than 2 bonus feats) is there a way I can use the real action/reaction etc. symbols instead of having to do like [A],[AA],[R] etc.?

I believe they've said the icons will be added to the Community Use package, for that reason. Eventually anyway...

(Although that won't help 3rd Parties; expect a LOT of homebrew variants in the next few months.)

We have released a font that includes the action symbols as part of the Pathfinder Second Edition Compatibility License (not part of the Community Use packages).

That's great for 3PP.

Less so for.... pretty much anyone who wants to make power cards or homebrew feats for personal use. You shouldn't have to resort to pirating a font or registering as an official publisher to homebrew.
And it's not idea for Paizo to have to "approve" endless waves of GMs registering as compatible publishers just so they can make NPCs and monsters that look right.

Given every single character will have four or five feats that unlock different actions, being able to make cards or cheat sheets will be a must. And typing [A] and [A][A] looks lame...

I kinda wish they'd gone landscape.

Portrait is okay and "traditional" but when you're playing at a table—which is almost a given since minis and a battlemap are expected—it takes up extra space.

If everyone's using landscape sheets, it's five more inches of interior table space to put out the maps or place minis.

I, for one, REALLY liked the landscape character sheet from the playtest.

Jester David wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

If I wanted to make my own sheets (say I was planning on giving out more than 2 bonus feats) is there a way I can use the real action/reaction etc. symbols instead of having to do like [A],[AA],[R] etc.?

I believe they've said the icons will be added to the Community Use package, for that reason. Eventually anyway...

(Although that won't help 3rd Parties; expect a LOT of homebrew variants in the next few months.)

We have released a font that includes the action symbols as part of the Pathfinder Second Edition Compatibility License (not part of the Community Use packages).

Hmm. That license really doesn't look like a good fit for the main use I had in mind—using the icons in statblocks for my characters, in pregens for my players, and maybe in the shared statblock template I put together today.

So I guess I'll have to make my own icons or wait for others to make some. Ah well. Thanks for the quick answer, Vic!

Vic Wertz wrote:

We have released a font that includes the action symbols as part of the Pathfinder Second Edition Compatibility License (not part of the Community Use packages).

That's great for 3PP. Less so for.... pretty much anyone who wants to make power cards or homebrew feats for personal use. You shouldn't have to resort to [...] registering as an official publisher to homebrew.

The solution here will be someone drawing up a set of "generic" icons and making them freely available for community use.

Valantrix1 wrote:

While these sheets are the bomb and all, for future reference it might be helpful for us blind folk if you tagged them for a proper reading order. Right now, I can barely make heads or tails of them.

This is on my radar and very important to me. It may take a bit for us to figure it out, but we will make it happen.

Thanks Jason! That's why you all are awesome!

I'm so glad the character sheets aren't horizontal like the playtest!

I'm so glad the character sheets aren't horizontal like the playtest!

I don't care about vertical vs horizontal, I just need a Form-fillable sheet since I can't read my own handwriting very well after my stroke last year, so until they release a form-fillable sheet, I'll need to keep using the one from the playtest.

Hmm perhaps it might be advisable to just have new players write their stats down on a sheet of ruled notebook paper?

It would be less 'intimidating' looking and would probably have sufficient space for a starting character to write down most of the pertinent information...

Hmm perhaps it might be advisable to just have new players write their stats down on a sheet of ruled notebook paper?

It would be less 'intimidating' looking and would probably have sufficient space for a starting character to write down most of the pertinent information...

The character sheet actually makes a lot of sense for the most part. I think after a couple minutes new players will really appreciate it.

It's not perfect (placement of reactions is the main thing I don't love), but it structures a lot of the underlying math/info in a way to help players organize it in their heads.

*Much* better than scratch paper.

I would have preferred landscape. I like the black and white one but there is too much contrast. There should be some use of greys too.

The color one is not for me.

Jason Bulmahn wrote:

Valantrix1 wrote:

While these sheets are the bomb and all, for future reference it might be helpful for us blind folk if you tagged them for a proper reading order. Right now, I can barely make heads or tails of them.

This is on my radar and very important to me. It may take a bit for us to figure it out, but we will make it happen.

Thanks Jason! That's why you all are awesome!

Oh hey I asked a repeat question. Sorry about that. I appreciate that it's on your radar Jason. I mostly game with roll20 but I am looking for an in person group to game with so I look forward to the screen reader-friendly sheet when it comes out.

Barbaric Gug Swarm wrote:

DropBearHunter wrote:

. . . but what about a professionally crafted electronic character sheet?

How about HeroLab Online?

mandatory subscription payments and online access might be a downsell for people.

Online only can be tough at cons.

I don't care about vertical vs horizontal, I just need a Form-fillable sheet since I can't read my own handwriting very well after my stroke last year, so until they release a form-fillable sheet, I'll need to keep using the one from the playtest.

If you have a look over on the 2nd Edition subreddit, I believe someone has already done the color version and is now working on the B&W version.

I went through and removed every "PROF" box. I don't quite see what I would need with that box anyways. It made the sheet a bit less busy.

So I made my first character using these sheets. Specifically, I used the "printer-friendly" b/w ones. Two thumbs up on the layout. Two thumbs down on the stark contrast. What I write (in pencil) gets lost in the sea of black ink on the form. Writing it in blue ink doesn't help much. Green ink shows up a little better. I'm considering red or orange.. but honestly, I shouldn't have to.

I would recommend releasing a greyscale pdf with the black at 50% darkness to make it easier to pick out handwriting.

looking at the color one printed in greyscale, it looks better but could still use a whole bunch of improvement with respect to color.

Added: I toned down the black significantly via photoshop. Obviously, this is a matter of taste. Regardless, here's the alternative. . PM me if this breaks some sort of rule and I'll take it down.

That actually looks too light. Can you up that from 50% to 65 or even 75%? The grey is so light it kind of hurts the eyes.

And for anyone who can answer this, what is the design behind the AC? Is that a suit of armor? A shield? I can't tell.

The B/W one looks very useful for sure. Looking forward to giving it a shot. I especially like how the Feats are broken down. Makes it easy to know where they should go.

Here is my edit of the black and white one:

LINK