NeoGrognard

So a little bit ago, a document sharing site called Scribd had quite a few D&D books up on it. I found out about this while teaching a class on Level Design. The black and white photocopy handouts I gave to the students—pages from the T1 The Village of Hommlet and H1 Keep on the Shadowfell —were soon replaced by full color (or at least fully digital) versions on their computer screens. Naively, I was at first impressed by the student’s dedication dedicated. I thought they went and bought the PDFs, which were available at a couple of sites back then. I had just started teaching. I should have known better. They got them from Scribd. 

This is the front side of the magic-user / illusionist character sheet. It’s just a riot of activity. I was always surprised at how much space they gave you for magic components (bottom left corner). No one used those.

Eventually, a legal department would act, settlements would occur, and now you have to find your pirated copy of PDF books on a site that makes you wait a minute before letting you download. And you can’t buy digital copies at all.   

But this ham-handed approach to piracy has been a tradition long before Wizards acquired the D&D brand. Before there was the internet, there was the dread copy machine—bane of intellectual property rights. That’s why maps were printed in powder blue. And that’s why character sheets came in neon green and orange. The splotchy black and white reproductions of these sheets were splotch gray, and annoying to write on. 

Its loud fashion sense aside (it was the 80s…I remember neon leg warmers ::shudder::), I always like the 1e character sheet. It’s corny, but evocative. With the release of 2e, character sheets began to look like tax forms, or the first page of your S.A.T.. The 1e form looks like some strange sort of gobbledygook you’d find in a wizard’s spellbook, or the pages from some 14th Century alchemist, all ciphered and esoteric…well, bred with a tax form, or the first page of the S.A.T..  I like that there was different character sheets for different class groupings, and that each sheet had information pertaining to that grouping or some aspect of that grouping alone. 

I’ll fully admit that I may be suffering from nostalgia. I’m sure Logan Bonner or Chris Sims or some other friend will pop up and tell me how they never liked the 1e character sheet. And there were plenty of people who I played with “back in the day” who either didn’t like it either. They preferred their own home-made character sheets (or the massive Armory character sheets), or just used notebook paper. 

This is one of the enduring qualities of Dungeons & Dragons and RPGs. Everyone has a better way. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe everyone is always searching for a better way, but usually only by examining the contents of their own head. 

Usually characters sheets are created just by someone with a smidgen (or more) of layout skills who needs to cram everything on the sheet. That’s why they look like tax forms. They suffer the same problem…information overload. They are also typically created at the start of an edition cycle, when very little is known (but much is assumed) on how players will actually interact with the various pieces of the new rules set. Typically this means that we get saddled with a character sheet that is clunky, scattered, and not very useful. It usually has all the information you may think you want, but it rarely organizes that information that you need in actual play. For instance, every D&D character sheet features ability scores prominently, but ability scores are rarely used in game. They modify a bunch of other things used in actual play. I’m sure the convention wisdom is that they are the main building blocks for the entire character, so they should be featured prominently, but that’s a principle of system architecture, not actual play. 

Now, for us diehards, that’s not a problem. We have become used to this and roll with the punches, but a crappy interface can be the thing that kills the experience for a new player. 

I think my favorite part of the 1e character sheet was the will. Given how much space they give you for equipment, it only really gives you space to grant all your possessions to the party.

Even those who put up with it, feel a tad uncomfortable in the skin of character sheets, because no one really has gone out and seen what people need in a character sheet. Few if any have taken the time to ask crucial questions about this interface, and we just keep on iterating and updating the loud pieces of paper from the 80s. Even D&D Character Builder, which has revolutionized the character creation and upkeep of D&D characters, still replicates what might be an antiquated way of doing things. 

Hell, just about everyone uses cards now, at least in 4e, and digital character trackers are on the rise. I think the time is right to start building a better mouse trap than staying in love with this old tramp.