[DitV] Neat character sheet

[Jumanji83]

I stumbled upon this today, and had to share!

http://spaceanddeath.com/geekgrrl/chase.pdf

Recently we've been playing lots of Dogs and similar games where the character sheet changes so fast that either you end up printing a new sheet every game and/or your cover becomes such a mess of grease pen markings that its illegible. In order to deal with this Mo came up with an ingenious solution where we make a sheet with a cut out area. You print the nice looking part of the sheet then cut out the cut out (duh), and mount it on a piece of card stock by taping or gluing the edges. You then can put a sheet of paper in between the sheet and the stock, and note your character attributes in pencil there. That way when you update rapidly its easy to erase and change, or to just switch out sheets of blank paper, but you still get the pretty of the character sheet.

Full text, and other gorgeous sheet designs for other games here:
http://games.spaceanddeath.com/yudhishthirasdice/74

[David Artman]

VERY nice design.

Out of curiosity... have you ever used sheet protectors and dry-erase pens? It's pretty much my standard setup, for games with resource tracking (HP, mana, action pool, Artha spent, etc). It might also work for you for Dogs... though I am surprised that you find Traits and Relationships changing that often, not to mention Attributes. I've played a Dog in four serial games without shifting more than a die or two in a Trait, and never lost a Relationship.

Also (God, don't take this as all thread crapping--just food for thought), I kind of like leaving enough space to actually cross-out the old die value and write the new, when making up a character. That way, i have an at-a-glance record of all his or her trials and tribulations. I see the scratched out "2d8" and the following "2d6" and I recall what caused that Fallout. I see a Belonging completely struck out and recall when it was lost or destroyed and the circumstances surrounding it.

Anyhow, beautiful work... I'd use it as-is, no cutout (adding in fields for Attributes, Coat, and maybe some dividing lines) and just try to leave space to keep a history. Did you consider landscape layout--I find it's better for having some reference charts along the bottom, but still leaving WIDE areas for writing wordy Traits.

[Jumanji83]

You sound like you are under the impression that I designed that sheet or that I wrote the little paragraph above. Not so. I stumbled upon a blog while googling stuff, and thought I'd bring this to you guys' attention, thought it was neat. The quoted paragraph is from the blog itself.

I'm afraid I haven't played enough Dogs yet to be able to formulate an informed opinion about fallout management.

[Brand_Robins]

J,

Thanks for the nod!

David,

I'm the one who made the sheet. To answer questions:

1) Yes, as I said on the blog, we frequently use sheet protectors and dry erase markers. For many games they work quite well, but for Dogs they tend to end up a mess in short order. Plus, I like pencils. Thus the reason the Dogs sheet is different in design than, say, the Unknown Armies or Wushu sheets that I'd done.

2) I've played a lot of Dogs, and often traits get messed about with -- but the most common thing to change is dice numbers. But new stuff gets added all the time. The result of which is that if you're using a sheet protector it ends up a mess, you have to reprint the sheet often, and if you're doing a new color sheet every game it can get hungry on the color print cartridge. (Its interesting to note the degree of color and graphic intensiveness between character sheets I designed when I was using the color laser printer at work and when I was using my own desk jet at home....)

3) I did at one point think about shifting the sheet to landscape next time I did it, as towards the end of game things were getting a little cramped. But then we have a tendency towards longer trait names, so I'm not sure how universal that'd be.