Character Sheet 2nd Prototype

Posted by on Jul 25, 2010 in newsies and bootblacks | 7 comments

Well, here it is, not yet the final thing, but pretty close. As you can see under these lines, I have chosen an informal, hand drawn frame. I wanted something simple that could be have made by a dedicated newsboy of the early XX century. As for the software used, I emplyed Scribus, which is the best free desktop publishing software around for this kind of non standard documents. For ordinary books, I still favor LyX, though.

You’ll notice we begin with the character’s name in a box, then his age and pace — that’s a game stats that tells how fast your character is –. Immediately below we have the Damage Scale — that goes from Bruised then Hurt, Grave and Dead –, the Attributes: Strength, Agility, Heatlth, Eyes & Ears (aka Perception), Education and Charisma1. Then, to the right, you have a tiny box for a character’s portrait. The skills follow, arranged alphabetically in three columns. A space for the equipment and a box for the chits end the the first page.

This sheet is supposed to be printed on dual mode. The front page contains the character stats, while the back page is reserved for a summary of the rules2 and players notes. This back page is not essential and those wishing to save ink might prefer not to print it.

I’ll be polishing this sheet soon — so any ideas are warmly appreciated –, but the final version will not be quite different to what you are seeing now.

  1. The player should provide the intelligence. ↩

  2. The version you are seeing is the one intended for the Primer, which uses a simplified version of the rules. I’ll probably be forced to make some changes for the regular game. ↩

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  • Crimsoncompass

    Miguel, this looks fantastic! :) I love it.

  • http://sabiavida.com Miguel de Luis

    Thanks, it took — and it will take — a bit of work :)

  • http://elcaravasar.wordpress.com Tonisancho

    I like very much its hand-made look.

  • Ze_Mighty_Vegetable

    Hey! Ze Mighty Vegetable from RPG.net here. Hope you don't mind me stalking your blog as well as your page. I like your ideas so far.

    1): It's about kids. Why not a few scratched misspelled words, doodles and stuff? Maybe a half-finished hangman game, or something.

    2): I like the color of your sheet. It evoke the depression-era. Wich is why I must reluctantly tell you it is a bad idea. First, it's a PDF. You have to think that some people will want to print character sheets. Printing a non-white page is murder on cartridges.

    Secondly… people want white sheets of paper. At my job, I tried to interest people in replacing our recycled bleached (ie, white) paper with recycled, unbleached (ie, brownish) paper for the office work. Nobody liked it (not even me!). People were ashamed of saying they prefered white sheets, but it was quite obvious. And it was in a… youth house? not sure of the right translation, we took care of kids and parents and had a lot of dealing with schools. You'd think they'd have been sensible to the environement, but not in this particular case :(

    3): E&E? HLT? STR? Write every word. It's great to add the abbreviations in parenthesis, but on your official sheet, write the whole word. We, the players, can afford to be lazy when making a makeshift sheet. You, the designer, cannot.



    4): Player's note? It seems to be a convention to add those. I always used the back of the sheet, but not having it listed would be a faux-pas. The same is true of a description. You should add lines for weight, height, hair and eye color, race, favorite toy or other personnalising touches. and also add DRAWING or PICTURE over the cute little square at the right of the stats. Yes, it's obvious why it's there. But you should always identify stuff on your sheet. The absence of something obvious is too often interpreted as lazyness. Same with the damage scale.

    5): I like that you do not have “equipment”, you have “stuff”.

    Again, I don't want to rain in your parade. I'm merely offering my non-scientific advice. I know compliments are easy to get from your entourage, but cricticism are hard to get until you launch the final version. and by then, it's often too late to change anything.

    Anyway, wish you luck!

  • http://sabiavida.com Miguel de Luis

    A lot of the thanks for the suggestions, Ze Mighty. I'm not trying in the least to be lazy; perhaps I'm still stuck with my first role-playing game RQ (in Spanish) and how they did things back then. I'm definitively going to use many of your suggestions and test the others.

  • Ze_Mighty_Vegetable

    Never said you were lazy. Only that it could be interpreted that way. As an example, I received a resumé from a guy who had been a technician in leisure… uh, leisure coordonator? (in my native french: Technicien en loisirs). He wrote Tech. Loisir, and Qc instead of Québec. Small mistakes on his part? Nitpickery on mine? Possible. But for the time it takes to write the full word, why cut corners?

    By the way, have you thought about approaching museums about the depression era, New-York or even children's museums as possible points-of-sales of hardcopies of your book? Or even as promotional give-away on their website? Most museums have gift shops… Even if they do not want to sell it, maybe you can interest them in a kind of joint promotion.

  • http://sabiavida.com Miguel de Luis

    Oh, yes, I knew you weren't calling me lazy… well it's about font size and
    white space, but anyway, I will be doing some tests and check the results.

    I am not intending to sell hard copies, just e-books. I am a Spaniard living
    in a island off the NW Coast of Morocco :)