After seeing the topic on "Savage Tide-styled Character Sheets" I thought I'd ask.
What's everyone's favourite type of character sheet?
3-hole punch lined paper?
A photocopy from the PHB or pdf download from Wizards.com?
An Excel Sheet you made yourself?
I'm pretty fond of Green Ronin's Character Record Folio, myself.
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I used to use PCGen, but I had a really hard time keeping up with all the prestige classes, magic items, and feats to make it time effective without too much messing with it.
I looked online for a character sheet in an excel format and found one that I really liked (from someone who knows more about Excel than I do -- and that is really saying something). I have modified it and added to it so that it calculates all the base stats and abilities, skill points, synergy bonuses, etc. It is also open enough so that if there is a feat or special ability or magic item that is a little quirky, it is really easy to modify. It's not a perfect system, but making a "perfect" system would be a programming nightmare to try and keep up with everything that comes out. If I have access to my books, I can create a 16th level character, complete with magic items in around 20-30 minutes. I love the fact that 3.X is so mathematically based. It makes programming this kind of thing so much easier.
I like Campaign Blog (http://www.campaign-blog.com/view.php?id=75 ) for online character records. For pencil and paper, I like Necromancer Game's Ultimate Character Sheet (www.necromancergames.com/pdf/mi_ng_ucs.pdf )
Check out http://www.dguys.net/heroforge/. It's robust, excel-based, and updated often. We use this *almost* exclusively around my place. When you save a file within the program, it saves to a .hf file that can be easily sent to your DM. He can then open the character in his HeroForge and see what you're up to. Been using this for a while, and vouch for it completely. Enjoy!
Well unfortunately there aren't a lot of really good ones. The Exel ones are usually formatted nicely but UGLY. The official ones aren't much prettier (all the fat black space and bold boxes make me think modern or scifi, not fantasy), and I never photocopy character sheets now that they're on the web.
rpgsheets.com is about the best thing I've ever found as far as a resource to print sheets off. They have almost any published character sheet (including long out of date and really obscure games too) as well as a good quantity of homebrews--many of which are quite good.
I used to make character sheets myself for games, mostly in Word with imported graphics from Photoshop. It's some very usable softward with nice mechanics for creating boxes and columns and all that nice stuff you need for making a good character sheet. Also once you make one, you can then adapt it pretty easily to other games off the same system, deleting and adding skills or game mechanics as the need arises.
The Iron Kingdoms character sheet is an interesting attempt to take the classic D&D sheet and fantasy it up a bit. Not sure it's my favorite though. There's also a good homebrew Darksun Character sheet out there I quite like--if you're playing that sort of game. It's on rpgsheets somewhere.
I take my character sheets seriously I guess, since they're the only tangible part of a character so I think they should look nice. Also I'm spoiled by the early White Wolf custom sheets for Vampire, Werewolf and Mage. Those were stunning. Granted their new stuff looks awful.
I use the Madirshman's Scarred Lands sheet off of www.rpgsheets.com. I've used it for about 3 years now and it is a clean, easy to read sheet with lots of room for notes, character history/description and equipment.
I make my own character sheets with tables in Microsoft Word. I roughed up a basic template - one table for name/race/class/alignment entries, one for ability scores, one for saves/BAB/initiative/hit points, one for AC/touch AC/flatfooted AC, one for feats, one for skills, one for spells, et cetera ad nauseam.
I make mine in Excel.
I like it and I can make the print as large as I want for my tired old eyes - and add all the goofy detail I want.
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The Singing Sheet. I love but they went and made the update themed to Eberron so I need to find another auto calculating sheet. Anyone know of a good-free one?
FH
I have both of those as well. Unfortunately, those sheets don't seem to handle gestalt characters very well, which is what we are using in our AoW campaign.
And for our Iron Heroes campaign I have another fillabel PDF sheet that is really nice (although I had to make some minor adjustments).
I use the 4-page Deluxe Character Sheets from WotC. I absolutely love them. I scanned them into my computer and print 'em up for each of my players. I've also downloaded all of the non-standard classes from the WotC website.
I've even found a way to make a picture of my characters on HeroMachine and print it in the little box on the back.
The only thing I don't like about them is the relatively little space for items.
Since we're swapping character sheet resources, would anyone be interested in my six page monstrosity? I'd be more than happy to share space on my website for anyone that wants to share their character sheets for mass consumption. :D
Scrap paper; the original character sheet. Everyone always seems so surprised when I show up to game and just start scribbling in a notebook...hey if the DM has a problem with it he/she can print me out a character sheet and I'll be happy to use it but until then the only person that needs to understand my character sheet is me! (and believe me, there is a method to my madness and I understand it better than most understand their own character sheets)
Since we're swapping character sheet resources, would anyone be interested in my six page monstrosity? I'd be more than happy to share space on my website for anyone that wants to share their character sheets for mass consumption. :D
I'd love to see another "comprehensive" style character sheet. Mine usually weigh in at two to three plus fluff (anywhere from one to five extra pages), and are basically the same format that Thanis uses -- purely text based, heavily adapted versions of the new statblock. Ideas for new fields to add are always welcome, so far as I'm concerned. Heck, I've been contemplating adding an "On Religion" field to the default sheet, to make it simpler figuring out where to explain why (for example) my Sirine Marshal pays homage in equal parts to the elven goddesses of Love and War.
my favorite 3.5 character sheet is the simple 3.5 character sheet that appeared in the 3.5 update pdf from WotC, for my 1e game I have the characters generaly use a sheet downloaded from Dragonsfoot.
Anyone else use EMA's character sheet PDFs? They're great?
Anyone else use EMA's character sheet PDFs? They're great?
No, never heard of them, but i'm interested...is there a website?
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Scrap paper; the original character sheet. Everyone always seems so surprised when I show up to game and just start scribbling in a notebook...hey if the DM has a problem with it he/she can print me out a character sheet and I'll be happy to use it but until then the only person that needs to understand my character sheet is me! (and believe me, there is a method to my madness and I understand it better than most understand their own character sheets)
Oh man, in my original group we used to do the same thing. We'd have notebooks with pages of stats and background info.
(sings aloud to self)
Memories, light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolored memories
Of the way we were...
I could go on, but people are starting to look at me funny.
Anyone else use EMA's character sheet PDFs? They're great?No, never heard of them, but i'm interested...is there a website?
I use them all the time too.
Try Googling "Ema's Charsheets"
Scrap paper; the original character sheet. Everyone always seems so surprised when I show up to game and just start scribbling in a notebook...hey if the DM has a problem with it he/she can print me out a character sheet and I'll be happy to use it but until then the only person that needs to understand my character sheet is me! (and believe me, there is a method to my madness and I understand it better than most understand their own character sheets)
This is what the majority of character sheets that my previous edition characters have been, but once 3.0 came out I found it just too much work... even in my current 1e game all the NPC's that I use and such are written in notebooks, but my players having grown used to 3.x prefer character sheets of some sort, so I suggested the DF ones to them.
HeroForge. Google it.
It's an Excel-based sheet that allows creation of up to 20th level characters in five minutes, with no errors (well, very few errors). Almost all the official splatbooks are supported, and the formulas can be changed to support house rules.
I play off a laptop, so I keep it open and modify as needed.
Print to PDF, and it's a 300K sheet that anyone can see. Print and slip into a clear cover, and wet-erase your modifiers.
Telas
My favorite character sheet is a corner-stapled two-page double-sided sheet heavily modified from what I'm guessing was an early 2nd ed one (its origins are lost to my memory as I've been using it so long). The front page has all the nuts & bolts - name, class, level,abilities, combat information, etc. The back of the front page details all skills & feats, xps, and has generous space for character background & experience notes. The front of the second page is entirely equipment and treasure. The back of the second page is for spells, detailed descriptions of magical items, and all things arcane/divine. Perhaps my favorite part of my homebrew sheet is the section on the back of the front page that is almost a carry-over from 1st ed D&D - the section titled "Monsters Encountered". Within said box is the space to list each creature encountered throughout the (hopefully) long life of the character. This list is useful in preventing meta-gaming - "Have you ever actually *seen* a formarian giant? Then how do you know this *is* one?" and also serves as a sort of truncated diary - "remember the time we encountered that terrible night hag?".
Anyway, I like it and page flipping is limited (only 2 pages) and I never have trouble immediately putting my finger on the information I want/need at any given moment.