Our Custom Live Show Character Sheet

Hello! This is Chris AKA Frederick de Bonesby. 

We just had a thrilling live show with a wonderful crowd in Brooklyn last night, and I thought I'd share a bit of the preparation that went into the show. As we were getting ready, producer Taylor laid down the edict that there was to be NO PAUSING THE GAME TO LOOK UP INFO, NO DEAD AIR WHILE WE FIGURED OUT HOW A SPELL WORKED, ROLL YOUR ATTACK AND YOUR DAMAGE AT THE SAME TIME, DO MATH FAST, etc. Since we did not have the luxury of our usual editing, we had to be nimble, and we needed to either memorize our character sheets, or make the info we needed more accessible than the standard. 

So here is what I designed! A one sided character sheet with ONLY the info we need for the live show, laid out in a way that is quick and easy to reference, and slightly customized to each character.

You can see that I stripped out player name, class, level, background, race, alignment, XP, ability scores, inspo points, the proficiency bonus, personality, ideals, bonds, flaws, temporary hit points, death saves, hit dice, allies and organizations, character backstory, and treasure. 

Several of these things we all had memorized (like our ACTUAL names, classes, levels, and backstory). Others were just math equations that could just be incorporated into their final numbers (proficiency bonus, ability scores (just the modifiers please)). Other things were condensed (weapons, armor, money, supplies). And other things we simply don't bother with anyway (experience points, alignment, ritual casting).

There are also some design choices to help us quickly find info, like how the skills are grouped with their corresponding ability modifiers, the little symbols around the spell casting numbers, health and AC.

I really liked playing with just this one sheet of paper (that also actually had room to write out the info for spells so I don't have to look it up in the book)! I think I will tinker with it further to use in our usual sessions (probably gonna have to sneak some info back in, and as we get more spells and abilities, this might become unusable), but ultimately, this was very helpful for us to keep the show going fairly seamlessly. I hope you enjoyed this look at it!

PS: Sorry but de Bonesby hasn't unveiled his Level 2 spells yet, so... spoilers!