RPGaDay 2023 # 26
This is my 26th post for RPGaDay 2023, if you’re not sure what that is you can find Autocratik’s blog post about it by clicking here.
Basically a list of prompts is provided to generate discussion around RPG topics, with creators making a blog post, video or podcast each day during the month of August, the list of prompts is included below:
Favourite CHARACTER SHEET
This will probably be a short post since I tend to run most of my games online nowadays and so don't really make a lot of use of printed character sheets, the ones you tend to get on the VTTs I use are pretty utilitarian and functional, and that's fine with me.
When it comes to what I look for in a character sheet I generally like one that is clear and allows me to find the information I want relatively quickly without being bogged down in unnecessary artistic flourishes that interfere with main purpose of a character sheet, that said, it is nice to have a little visual embellishment as long as it doesn't get in the way.
Off the top of my head I'd say my favourite is probably the character sheet for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, it is a nice no-nonsense character sheet that groups attributes, equipment, etc into relevant aea and is extremely ckear, using different shaped boxes to distinguish different scores, however it also has a couple of cool little visual flourishes that I like.
In LotFP every character has certain skills or "common activities" as they are referred to on the sheet, and these are:
Architecture
Bushcraft
Climbing
Languages
Open Doors
Search
Sleight of Hand
Sneak Attack
Stealth
Tinkering
Anyone who has played older versions of D&D will (rightly) recognise these as the old x-in-6 chance activities present in the system, most characters in LotFP have access to these rolls just usually at a low level, however the Expert (the game's Thief analogue) has points they can distribute to increase these abilities allowing them to specialise in a way that the Thief didn't really have the option to do in some older versions of D&D.
The way that the sheet represents this is by each activity having a diagram of a dice with 6 pips next to it and the player just colours in what their chance of success is out of 6, I think this is a neat way of representing this information, and making it more visually interesting without obfuscating the meaning.
There are also a couple of pentacle style drawings at the bottom of the sheet that have each point marked with a dot, one is for clerical magic and the other wizardly magic, the player colours in a dot for each level of spell they can cast. Again, very simple but it adds a bit of visual flair and interest to the sheet.