The Character Sheet Blues

Why is it that every RPG ever seems to be saddled with bad character sheets?

Okay, that's a serious exaggeration, but it really does seem that most if not all games have official sheets that are almost but never quite what you really want.

The latest offender is the Firefly RPG, which actually has quite a good sheet. It's a single page in landscape format. Top and centre are the attributes and skills, which have rather neat visual representations (and which make replacing this sheet with another very unappealing). To the right are the character's three distinctions, complete with triggers. And on the left we have things like the character's name, background, and appearance, and then a box for Signature Assets.

Shiny! Except...

In the Firefly RPG, each Distinction and Signature Asset has a little block of descriptive text. This same text appears in all the pre-gen character write-ups. It's very nice. And it's missing in the Distinctions box. Likewise, the Signature Assets box omits the spaces for the Asset triggers entirely. It's really close to being ideal... and really painful that it just misses it.

The sheet also has two other flaws - one thing that should be there but isn't, and two things that shouldn't be there but are. Specifically, each character should have an "Episode Guide", being a list of episodes that they've been in previously. This works somewhat like XP in other games. These really should appear on the character sheet, as they'd be good to have.

Conversely, the sheet has spaces for the character's Plot Points, and five different types of Big Damn Hero dice. But because these change quite often, it's better to handle these using tokens handed out during play (just as you would Assets and Complications) - Plot Points are best done with poker chips, while for BDH dice you could either use literal dice (colour-coded for convenience, of course), or generate some cards to that effect. Or, all else failing, just use a post-it note.

(Firefly doesn't have any concept of hit points, or anything equivalent. But for systems that do use hit points, I've long been an advocate of not including a box for these on the character sheet. Again, just use a post-it note, and use the space freed up for something more worthwhile.)

To come so near, and yet not quite get things just right is frustrating. Especially since I can see what would need done to fix it, but just don't have the means. Sigh.