Sunday, January 8, 2012

Character Sheet 2.0

I love index cards.  They're cheap, common, and standard-- all great qualities for a DIY material.  But as I've gotten more play under my belt, keeping track of player stuff has become a problem.  Players have cards I give them for treasure (potions, scrolls, gems, etc), poker chips to track ammo, little notes they've found in dungeons, and hireling cards.
The party was finding torn out pages all over Animal Island
How do you keep track of all that junk?  Especially if you have a player base that rotates and changes a lot (like mine) and you don't have a stable place of your own to game (like me)?

I sat down to try and come up with a solution.  I wanted it to use a single sheet of paper, require only folding, and be simple.  And I wanted that sheet of paper to also function as the character sheet.  I think I've got it:
Here are pdfs for Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, and Thief.  These are probably too specific to my own game to be of use to anyone else, but print one out and try it to see if you might want to make your own (you can also import the pdfs as images into an editor to make sure you've got the dimensions right before making it your own).  They're pretty simple to fold but I'll walk you through it:
Fold in half lengthwise.
Then fold that in half so the heart shows.
Fold along the dotted line.
Unfold everything, turn graphics-down, and fold the corner up.
Fold over the flap at the same dotted line.
Fold it back lengthwise again.
And in half again.
Now you've got a little pocket:
It's not perfect, but doesn't require staples or anything.

I made the backs so I could store them opening-up (maybe in a coupon holder).  I think I'll use colored paper clips to help distinguish which sheet is which player's (yes, sorting this out takes us a lot of time) and also to make sure the stuff doesn't fall out:
I might make some revisions later but that took me all day and I'm happy that at least it's better than my groups' current situation.

7 comments:

  1. Damn! That is very cool. It also makes me wonder why I don't hand more stuff to my players as a DM. :)

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  2. That's a nice-looking character folder thingy!

    Flying Buffalo's "Mercenaries Spies and Private Eyes" had character folders that were meant to be envelopes for holding various bits.

    There's a PDF available at Modus Operandi:
    http://www.modus-operandi.co.uk/?p=143

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  3. ..but it requires staples, tape or paper glue to hold the edges together...

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  4. Thanks a bunch. I hope you all get some use out of it. And thanks, monk, for that link. I'd never seen that.

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  5. 5x7 index card Character sheets which fit in ziplock bags with all character's other bits.

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    1. Thanks, Norman. It's hard to see in that first pic, but that's pretty much the solution I was using and wasn't satisfied with. My problem was that the slick bags don't stack, they slide and slump all over the place and also they are nearly impossible to tell which character is inside without opening them all. That's why I went to the trouble of looking for a better solution.

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