Saturday, January 24, 2009

"Old School" character sheet download

As I mentioned in my last post, I am finding I enjoy the simplicity of the character sheets used in older editions of D&D and the retro clones. There are already a few character sheets available for download from various individuals..and each has its merits, but over the past two months I've gotten a better feel for which elements are most important, which statistics need to be located where in order to be found easily, and how much room is needed to fill in the various types of information on a character sheet for a typical player in a typical game (though "typical" might be a strong word for what goes on here at Chateau-Garish)

And since the traditional roleplaying community has given me so much in the past few months, I'm giving a little bit back. I've created a character log sheet PDF that can be downloaded HERE from my ftp space.

Among the features this one has..

Places at the top for character name, player name, and campaign -- This is important around here because we have three seperate campaigns going on, and it's not entirely impossible that a character might be participating in more than one campaign at the same time.

A spot for character portrait -- I know not everybody can draw, but then again, who's the one that wants to tell Rich Burlew that stick drawings are not viable, huh?

PLENTY of room to list loot -- though most folks end up cashing in their loot as soon as they hit the next town and therefore track their looting on a piece of scratch-paper, I like the convenience of having all my data on one page...because I lose stuff or might get my loot pages from different campaigns mixed up.

A place for tracking quantity of arrows/darts/bullets -- Most sheets just don't have room for that sort of thing, but it is, at least in my opinion, one of the more important game stats for characters that use ranged weapons.

Ascending and Descending "to hit' table -- I keep wanting to call it THACO, but you other retro gamers know the sort of chart I'm talking about.

A small block for character notes -- Good spot for keeping up wtih current nemesis, favourite tavern, or character's shoe size...whatever you feel is important.


Anyway, feel free to make use of this in your own retro games. I promise soon to produce a similar sheet for tracking spells for mages and clerics. I'm also not beyond taking requests for elements you'd like to see included in such a document.

2 comments:

Chad Thorson said...

I really dig the new character sheets! I think that's what I'll used for S&W!

Hey, I added you to my blog list and to my Flickr account also. You probably know me on S&W as SonofThor.

christian said...

Great character sheet. I ordered S&W through Lulu and will keep your sheet on hand if I ever get a campaign going. :)

Peace,
Christian
http://www.iridiazine.net