D&D 5th edition Character Cards

Ever since we pried open the 'Holmes' D&D box back in the day, and jotted down our very first RPG characters, DIY was the name of the game. I'm not sure if that edition even had any pre-printed character sheets, and if it did, photocopying them would not have been a walk in the park it is today. But we had pencils, and paper, and later whole notebooks to fill up with all the character details. So maybe it's a remnant from those days, or maybe it's just the way my brain functions, but even today if I need to really grasp how a RPG system - well, at least the character generation aspect of it - works, I do it best by designing a character sheet. For me, that is the way to see what is essential, and how the different parts mesh up with each other.

So, as my interest towards the 5th edition of D&D increased end eventually led me to purchase the rulebooks - first full core rules of any version of D&D I've had, by the way - the first thing I needed was some character sheets. At first I toyed with the idea of using some pre-made sheets, but then I remembered an idea I had had for Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, character cards for the NPCs where at the front side would be the name, picture, and similar information that the players could see, and at the other side there would be all the relevant game statistics for the GM. Of course, in WFRP the game mechanics are much more easily condensed than in D&D, but that just added one extra bit of challenge to the project. Of course I could not hope to cram everything in a space that would be slightly smaller than a regular postcard, but I figured that I could fit enough shorthand notes of the relevant information, and to find the rest of the stuff from the rules during the game.

The watercolour splash background for the character illustrations is a visual cue from the rulebooks which I liked; it also frees me from trying to come up with backgrounds for each image. In fact I made a couple of such shapes, and saved them as a mask layer in a PhotoShop document, so that I can easily give each splash a colour scheme that fits whatever character they are used for.

On the game mechanics side, I tried to keep the information simple and modular, so that a character would have only those weapons they are likely to use, spellcasting stats are of course class-dependant, and so on. I would of course need to have a separate sheet to keep track of current Hit Points, used HD, and spells and Spell Slots for casters, but other that that, I think most things are being covered.

One way to take this even further would be have the same style for the 'Name' side of cards, but have a different reverse side for detailed NPCs (antagonists or those likely to tag along), background NPCs (with motivations and RP cues), and monsters (mostly combat stats and tactics).