Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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One of the most difficult monsters in D&D is not in the Monster Manual: it's the character sheet.
I've been a DM for several years now, and I love infecting other people with the bug of D&D. But for a newcomer, or even someone who plays only once a month, the character sheet can be a very intimidating couple of pages. Put it next to a few hundred pages of Player's Handbook and people get overwhelmed and lose interest. It's not only newcomers, either. My regular crew hunts for things on their sheets too.
Taking the D&D Beyond sheet as the example, here's what I think goes wrong:
Too much on the page, and the wrong things up front. A lot of space goes to personality traits, ideals, bonds, flaws and backstory, and I've played long campaigns where nobody touched any of it. Armour class, which you need almost every round, gets the same positioning as initiative, which you need once a fight. And for a spellcaster, the spells come last: you can turn five pages before you get to them.
Abilities sorted by their rules origin, not by what they do. Attacks, spells, species, class, feats and items all live in different places. In the middle of a fight nobody cares whether something came from a feat or a spell. They want to know: can I use this right now, and what does it do?
The math is left to you. On paper it's all on you, and doing arithmetic for basic things slows everything down. Watching new players track numbers, add them up and suffer through it is a barrier to entry. We're here to have fun.
The rules are in the book. If you don't remember what Spike Growth does, that means clicking and scrolling, or the Player's Handbook. Finding the right page in that tome, reading a wall of text and interpreting it mid-fight grinds the game to a halt while everyone else waits.
Resources are extremely hard to track. Spell slots are just the tip of the iceberg. The 2024 rules hand out free castings from your species, your subclass and your feats, then there are class resources and charges on magic items, each kept somewhere different. Without an eidetic memory, it's impossible.
Items are forgotten. I've had players looking baffled at the table with no way to heal, when they had potions to reach for. And a flask of oil or caltrops? Their combat use just isn't something regular players think about.
So I designed a sheet that works at the table. A level 1 Fighter fits on a single page.
And it scales up. The next pictures are from a level 7 Circle of the Stars druid with spell slots, Wild Shape, free castings from her species, her subclass and a feat, two potions, a wand with charges, oil and caltrops.
Everything is grouped by what it does: damage, healing, buffs, battlefield control, reactions. Her buffs come from a feat, her species, two cantrips and her subclass, and they sit in one table. The math is done, and every ability has a one-line summary of what it does.Every resource sits in one list, and each ability names what it costs.
And the items you might use in a fight are on the sheet, with what they do.
It's always a work in progress, so I'd love to hear what you think. How do you get new players through their first character sheet?
You can check out the sheets in their full glory here (you will be able to pull new ones and even import your own from Beyond):