1 post tagged “rpg design”

Character sheets I think are important in terms of game design. Sure, it's nor your priority when designing the system from scratch, but it's something you'll need to tackle eventually. What's vital is to treat it as a legitimate concern and not simply a half-hearted endeavor which you need to finish. It can spell the difference between gathering new players or intimidating them to try something else.

The problem with the current (or default) character sheet in most mainstream RPGs is that they're not optimized for comprehension efficiency. Rather, they're designed to be filled out, for boxes to be ticked off by the player and for blanks to be filled out. It's a great design to help players learn the rules. In actual play, however, it's not necessarily the best method. Take the D&D character sheet for example: in terms of character creation, it's great design. When I'm actually playing D&D, however, it can be confusing when looking for my bonuses to attack, to AC, and the like. It simply doesn't occur as seamlessly as I'd like it to be. Worse, I need to turn the character sheet around to know certain details, such as what my items are, what spells I've prepared, etc.

This problem, I think, is more visible when you're the GM. A GM for example doesn't use character sheets to create his NPCs. Usually he uses the NPC stat block. In 3.0, the stat block was horrible. Sure, it occupies a small chunk of space but finding which is which can be confusing. But it was still a step ahead of the PHB character sheets in the sense that all the relevant information was on one page. The new NPC stat block (which can be viewed here, at the end of the entry) post DMG 2, is clearly much more efficient. Sure, it took up more space than the old stat block but it was far more easy to use and better organized.

Of course I'm not proposing the new NPC stat block to players--at least not initially. Veteran players will have no problems converting their character sheets to the stat block format; it's more prep-work but the rewards in actual game play is worth it. No, the problem is getting new players to use the new NPC stat block. To a new player, filling out those blanks won't be simple: they won't know the answer. That's the advantage of the clunky PHB character sheet; it helps them get off their feet.

The design dilemma I think is reconciling the two or at the very least if there's a way to better streamline the existing character sheet.

Of course that's not to say that actual game design is independent from designing the character sheet. For example Ability Scores having two values (you know, having an 18 really means you have a +4 modifier) seems like a redundant value (when you could simply state it as a +4) and could actually make designing the character sheet easier. (Of course I understand why Ability Scores have two values, everything from it being a hold-over from the previous edition to it aiding in the generation of random stats.)

At the end of the day, the fact that there are several variants of character sheets, both by independent gamers and third party companies, just goes to show that there's room for improvement in this arena.