I’ve been working up a set of characters for Furnace. This is (one of) what I’ve got so far.
It’s a Word Doc designed to be printed 2 pages to a sheet making it an A5 booklet. You’ll see it as pages 2,3,4,1.
I’m going for ease of use at the table mostly. There’s still some tinkering to do, but overall I’m fairly happy. My IT skills are pretty basic, and I’m sure it could be a lot more colourful and professional. Still, first effort and all that.
EDIT: My USB flash drive containing this and many, many more Mb of gaming goodness has just died. All data lost. At least I still have this sheet.
The Smart Party 
Hi Baz
D&D N00b asks: doesn’t Wizards have a character creator that does this for you? I’ve only played the one game of 4e and the GM handed out a whack of stuff prior to play. The main character sheet was pretty busy. The handful of colour-coded wee cards with your at-will, encounter, and daily powers ‘n feats was nice though. Cards that you played and then tossed into your discard pile made for very tactile and easily learned play experience.
Your sheet looks very nice and all. Just wondering why you chose to go your own way; maybe the Wizard version blows? Is too expensive for what you get? Crams too much stuff on the sheet? Do share.
Cheers
Rick (Pete)
Hi,
The WotC character builder is worth every penny. It’s head and shoulders above the level of support you see in any other RPG, it’s brilliant. The character sheet it throws out? Not so much. Too busy by far. It makes the (common) mistake of being a worksheet rather than a playsheet. I’ll expand on that answer in a seperate post.
I wanted to make a sheet that only included what a one shot player needed. You won’t see the characters level for instance. It simply doesn’t matter to the player in one shot game. Nor will you see how the reflex defence score is arrived at, irrelevant again.
I’ve tried to do all the heavy lifting in advance so that the players can get on with the playing. If I’m honest, I’m also trying to make a point, 4e D&D is not as complicated and intimidating as it can appear.
I use the official sheet and the cards in my weekly home game, they suit me fine there. Con games are a different proposition entirely.
That help?
Looked through the sheet, am I right in thinking (I’ve played a little 4e but it was a few months ago and we used the printed cards for powers) that the list of things from Change Shape to Clever Riposte are the various encounter/session/whatever powers? If so, and I’ve assumed right that some of them have limited uses, then some kind of tick box that the player can check to show when they’ve used the power might be handy.
I’m not sure the positioning/style of the features is optimum. Apparently, I’ve dabbled in DTP work, the bottom right hand corner of a document is the least likely to gain the attention of someone reading it (of course, your doing this as a booklet and I might be confused as to where it will actually appear on the page) and with the lack of colour compared to other bits of the sheet I’d worry that players would forget the whole ‘combat advantage = extra damage’ bit. With the increased accuracy and damage options it might be worth adding ‘factored in’ or some such as I assume it has been.
Fully agree that custom sheets are the way to go if you want to keep players from losing focus on the game and/or just being overwhelmed by the information in front of them. Hope the comments have been of some help.