Character Sheets

One issue I hear time and again when reading about A Time of War is the character sheets. For a character built by the Life Path system, there often simply aren't enough lines for everything they need. For example, let's look at Skills. Our characters have the following skills:

Clark: 34

Simon: 37

Shin: 41

Alex: 36

David: 67

There are only 30 skill lines, so not even the smallest skill list on our roster could fit on the standard character sheet. This required a bit of exploring on my part. Fortunately, I was able to find a new character sheet on the forums, designed by dieffenbachj. I'd like to take a moment to point out the strengths of this sheet, and its weaknesses, to relate why I decide that I wanted to go with this sheet over the in-book sheet Catalyst produced.

First, and to stay on-topic, this sheet has no less than 78 skill lines. That's more than enough to handle even Henry's jack-of-all-trades character. More over, the sheet has pre-printed every skill in the game, with their linked attributes and TN's right there on the sheet. While skills that get instantiated multiple times like Interest and Technician are forced to be written down long-hand for the secondary skill, for the majority of skills, the information you need to fill them in is right there -- only the Skill Points table in the book is missing to let you know the XP-to-Level conversion for your set of traits.

The price, of course, is that the skills are on the back. This requires a player to flip their sheet over to check their skills listing. Personally, I find the skills section to be the most commonly referenced element of the character sheet, so I find this a bit of a let-down, let us move on.

The Traits, Weapons, and Armor sections have all been expanded as well, and the former skills section has been replaced with a quite exhaustive combat modifiers table. This was obviously a sheet written for characters who expected to see a lot of battle. Attributes haven't been expanded, obviously, and personal data has been rearranged but is largely the same.

Also on the back, biography and vehicle data have been removed entirely, and replaced with the more generic "Notes" section although Inventory has been retained. Conversion of the earlier two into a more general and free-style section may well have been advisable.

One relevant fact that this character sheet demonstrated for me was that different campaigns, different players, even different missions look for differently optimized character sheets. For instance, were I designing my own sheets, I would have the condition monitor and expanded skills list on the front. Everything else -- Attributes, Traits, Inventory, the works, can go on the back, except for one.

Edge. Edge is special, and something my players have always kept in their minds. The get-out-of-jail-free card of MechWarrior is one of the most often changed values on a character's sheet, I find, and deserves a place right on the front page.

I've learned that my players shun combat unless they have an overwhelming advantage (they hate rerolling characters), and spend the vast majority of their time running around using skills. I understand the layout of dieffenbachj's sheet -- it is much more combat-oriented, and has everything you need to run character-level combat right on the front.

Unfortunately, this post doesn't have a strict this-is-the-way-to-do-it theme. The point is that the character sheet provided in A Time of War is a great starter that lets you know the kind of information you'll need on a character sheet, but if you're serious about running this game, you'll likely want something a bit more customized to your campaign style to avoid sheet-flipping and number-hunting from bogging down your game. If you come up with a specialized sheet, be sure to post a link here so we can peruse and consider what features your creation offers and how they might be useful.