What is your favorite Pathfinder character sheets to use? Most that I have found are either missing something, to cluttered or I like parts of it but find other parts cumbersome.
When I look around the web I see most of them don't have the highest ratings by other people, so I'm not the only one.
What character sheets do you have your players use or do you have links to your favorites.
I like the Pathfinder Character Excelerator, but I might be biased*
;^)
It has held a roughly 4 out of 5 stars over at the Pathfinder DB site for a while now, and there are several other well-rated sheets there of various flavors.
* You can find the latest link for this sheet in my profile, along with a link to my discussion thread. Note the current version is in beta. If you do see something you don't like, I'm always open to suggestions!
E,
I was going to plug you.....
I have been wondering how does your sheet respond to print.
Can you give any guidelines for printing the sheet!I have been very afraid to hit print!
Heh, one of my design goals, actually, is to ensure the sheet is friendly for both print and on-screen use. All tabs with a P (portrait) or L (landscape) should be formatted to print on a single page and I've found they look good even on a 300 dpi B&W printer. One fellow is having difficulty with a few tabs getting them to print on A4 paper in OpenOffice, but otherwise they should be good to go...Now, that said if you do find any problems with printing, be sure to let me know!
I have an excel based sheet I created. It's Pathfinder Core rules (I up-converted from Beta).
It supports up to 3 classes per character, and auto calculates damage, weight, range, attack progression, saving throws, racial abilities, and about a dozen other things. It's got the goodies from all of the Player's guides (except second darkness, which I didn't buy) and races from the Bestiary.
I'm currently adding all the stuff from Adventurer's Armory. I'll try and post it when I'm done.
Just as an FYI, I created this on Excel 2007. I opened it with Excel 2003 and the colors were all crazy, but otherwise the sheet still functioned. I may change the colors to a greyscale so that it will look good with older Excel versions, but I really like the color scheme now.
Erian:
I didn't even know that site existed. Thanks. I'm going to post my sheet there instead of my own website.
Yep, the Pathfinder DB is a great site for fan-created resources. For the color scheme, I switched to a set of 3 gray scales plus black and white to keep the older apps happy.
Thanks for all your suggestions. I never used an excel character sheet before but I'll check it out.
You can try My character sheet.
I don't know whether it will be to your liking, because I designed is with my own personal tastes in mind (though I will shamelessly rip off other people's ideas if I like them, like the landscape format)
Other than the ones mentioned above I quite like Mediakorento's sheet. You can find it here.
I like the Pathfinder Character Excelerator, but I might be biased*
;^)
It has held a roughly 4 out of 5 stars over at the Pathfinder DB site for a while now, and there are several other well-rated sheets there of various flavors.
I've been playing around with your sheet last night and this morning and I really like it. Now if only I can convince my players to use excel.
I've been playing around with your sheet last night and this morning and I really like it. Now if only I can convince my players to use excel.
Thanks! I'm always open to suggestions/comments! Also, note that they can us OpenOffice as well if they don't have Excel (whether for cost issues, as a resistance to the Microsoft Assimilation, or otherwise).
I've done two rounds of character sheet reviews for the 3.5 Private Sanctuary website.
Round 1 (warning: some format problems seemed to have cropped up when we gave the site a makeover)
Like Leonal, I highly recommend Mediakorento's character sheet.
i Ryan. If you get around to doing another review I'd definitely appreciate another look at mine. It looks like you had a version from before all the APG classes were complete, so you haven't seen the latest updates. This includes a redesign of the landscape layout so that it takes up less table space during game use. Of course, being in beta right now it will keep changing, and this current round is focused on the automation of equipment and spell effects you noted in the review. I'm looking into a way of generating a spell list in the sheet, then porting that into Perram's Spellbook so it will auto-generate spell cards from his site (no need for me to reinvent spell support when something that good already exists!). Also, one important aspect of this sheet is cross-compatibility to systems like Mac, Unix, etc. and apps other than Excel 2007. Thanks!
My reviews have really slowed down lately. But yours isn't the only character sheet that's improved since my last look at it. Maybe it's time for a review update soon.
Thanks! Of course, I know that anytime you're working with a beta, some folks will only see a snap shot and not like what they see. However, given the amount of automation the sheet does for feats and traits (pretty much every OGC item from Paizo for these two, plus material from 3PP) I think it serves as a useful tool even in this state. But of course, I know I'm biased!
The Only Sheet+ is one of the best choices for serious players. Here are a few reasons why:
* it is extremely powerful and automates practically everything
* it has a full implementation of the Stacking Rules
* it is very customizable
* it supports both D&D3.5 and Pathfinder RPG
* it has a large community where people share stuff (Classes/Races etc..) and it hosts Play-by-Post games
* it allows for Dynamic Play (with a Laptop) (video example)
* it helps you SAVE TIME so you can focus on PLAYING
* it is not costly and is updated often
Click here to read what users have to say about TOS+!
You can get much more information here: http://TheOnlySheet.com
The Paizo Forum entry for TOS+ is located here (note that this link can become invalidated when topics are moved to the Archives section).
Happy Gaming!
RiTz21
http://TheOnlySheet.com
P.S. Work on TOS+ started back in 2003 with D&D3.5. Hence why this is a very mature and powerful product!
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Anyone got a fillable one without all the autocomputations that can be saved? I had to makeup some NPC character sheets incase the player with the out-of-commission character wanted to run one of them. I'd like to be able to enter all the info in and save it so I only have to update things as the campaign progresses.
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What is your favorite Pathfinder character sheets to use? Most that I have found are either missing something, to cluttered or I like parts of it but find other parts cumbersome.
When I look around the web I see most of them don't have the highest ratings by other people, so I'm not the only one.
What character sheets do you have your players use or do you have links to your favorites.
Herolab is awsome.
I know this is kind of obvious but nobody's brought it up so I figured I would.
I've given up on character sheets as they traditionally exist. I use a standard monster statblock for all my PCs. I've added a few very minor adjustments to the format for quicker play, but essentially what you see in a printed adventure is what I use.
Anyone got a fillable one without all the autocomputations that can be saved? I had to makeup some NPC character sheets incase the player with the out-of-commission character wanted to run one of them. I'd like to be able to enter all the info in and save it so I only have to update things as the campaign progresses.
The Mediakorento one is like that, at least using Foxit rather than Acrobat Reader. I don't know how well it saves with Adobe's, but really...Foxit's a lot better anyway.
I'd like to see a full CMD section on a sheet, no idea why all the modifiers aren't listed out on the core sheet, if it's not going to have a spot for the dodge and deflection etc then why have a spot for the str and bab etc? Also, CMD should be up with the other ACs.
Similarly, I think each weapon entry should have a spot to enter your CMB for whatever maneuvers are possible with it.
I'd also like a spot near the weapons, ac & cmd, saves, to enter temporary modifiers, instead of having to use the margins or re-write everything on scrap paper.
My absolute favorite fillable sheet is here:
http://www.jamesthebard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9
direct link to the download page: http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?page_id=249
I'll also say that the Wicked K Games Advanced Character Portfolio is amazing, but I only use 5-6 pages of it, normally... I love it for Animal Companions and campaign journals, though.
Hmmm, I have to try some of these other sheets. What I can add is that I think Hero Lab is not NEARLY as good as it could be. Here are my issues:
- No GM/DM style stat block generation
- User interface is very borning, these are games of imagination after all
- User interface, even though it is boring, is not very intuitive, for example to many links as opposed to visible buttons. Background interferes with highlighted, non-highlighted features, to many pop ups verse trees, drop downs, or list boxes, no multiple deletes or clear features.
- Character sheet output has same issue as interface, in my opinion you should always have the option for a sheet that looks simular to the publishers version and a DM/GM stat block option.
Here is my creation [.xlsx]. It can be customized for each class.
What I can add is that I think Hero Lab is not NEARLY as good as it could be. Here are my issues:
I'm glad I stumbled across this here. If you have further recommendations for how we can improve Hero Lab, please also post them in Hero Lab product thread here on the Paizo forums so we can make sure to see them and add them to our feature request list. :-)
Allow me to take a minute to reply to the issues you identified....
- No GM/DM style stat block generation
It seems that you missed this feature within the product, as Hero Lab generates statblock output using the same format as the official Pathfinder statblocks from Paizo. Simply go to the File menu and use the "Output Active Hero Summary" option. Statblock output is available as plain text, HTML (for website posting), BBCode (for forum posting), and Wikitext (for GMs using wikis to track their campaigns).
- User interface is very borning, these are games of imagination after all
This may be a philosophical difference. We're not trying to produce a video game. We view Hero Lab as a *tool*, with Pathfinder (and other RPGs) being the actual game. Consequently, we don't want Hero Lab to visually compete with the games. From our perspective, the games should be the focus and the tool (Hero Lab) should be subordinate to the game being played. We could easily make Hero Lab more visually sexy, just like video games, but we feel that would foster a visual distraction from the game being played. So we've kept the interface clean and simple.
- User interface, even though it is boring, is not very intuitive, for example to many links as opposed to visible buttons. Background interferes with highlighted, non-highlighted features, to many pop ups verse trees, drop downs, or list boxes, no multiple deletes or clear features.
I find this surprising, since we're constantly being told how easy and intuitive the interface is to navigate. Heck, Hero Lab was nominated for an ENnie this year, so we must be doing something right. :-)
Based on your first assertion about statblock output not being present, I'm not sure how much time you spent using the product before rendering your opinions. This may just be a personal preference for how you think a product like Hero Lab should behave, but I'd like to understand this better.
Since your comments are very general, I'd appreciate you taking the time to explain what you mean with more concrete details. That will help me better understand how we can potentially revise the interface to improve how the product works. This is not the ideal thread for that, so would you please post those details in the Hero Lab product thread linked above? Thanks in advance for doing this.
- Character sheet output has same issue as interface, in my opinion you should always have the option for a sheet that looks simular to the publishers version and a DM/GM stat block option.
Everyone has their own preferences for character sheet output. When we polled hundreds of players, the overwhelming opinion was that the "official" character sheet format was not important. What *was* important was the ability to include a character portrait, keeping the output clear and easy to use, and minimizing ink usage. So those were our design goals with the character sheet output. Pazio seems to concur with that approach, since they had no problems with our character sheet output when granting Hero Lab the official license last month.
For those who want custom character sheet output, that's a high priority for us in the next big feature release for Hero Lab. At that point, players who want to design their own custom sheet will be able to do so.
The best news for players is that there are LOTS of options, as demonstrated by this thread. There are Excel-based tools, fan-created programs, and commercial products. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. All of them can be tried for free, including the commercial tools like Hero Lab, so players can experiment with all of them and choose the tool that best matches their requirements.
I like Neceros. He has one you can write on, and auto fill ones. The only error which to my knowledge has not been fixed, is that the +3 is not applied to perception when you indicate it as a class skill. The sheet is on Pathfinder DB. It used to be on his website which seems to be down now. He did declare it open content so I can pass a sample along if anyone want to try it.
I believe the automated version is here
Edit: Darn I was ninja'd
I know this is kind of obvious but nobody's brought it up so I figured I would.
I've given up on character sheets as they traditionally exist. I use a standard monster statblock for all my PCs. I've added a few very minor adjustments to the format for quicker play, but essentially what you see in a printed adventure is what I use.
I've added a Statblock view in my sheet. I'd be interested in the tweaks you made to see if they improve the use.
Oh, and for the Mac folks, my sheet is (to my knowledge) fully compatible between Windows and Mac (and Linux).