I love character creation… well, I should say, I think most of us love character creation. Something about those moments/days/weeks of planning and imagining the future of a character… it’s inspiring.
I often find I’m best inspired (while creating my character) when I simply use a blank white sheet of paper. There are no lines to constrain me. I can make sketches and diagrams, and put the information wherever I please. It feels less rigid to me, and I tend to really think about who my character is while letting that drive the way I highlight what I feel is important. Later on, once the dust has settled, I tend to move the important bits over to a proper character sheet, but the blank canvas I started with helped me get to a good point first, focusing on the important things (who my character is) and getting that settled before focusing too heavily on the data.
Anyway, I was thinking about this today having made a new character last night which I thought I would post to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
I do something similar, although just with text documents on Google Docs.
I like it because it allows me to be very explicit in how things are calculated. e.g. here’s a line I just grabbed from one of my character sheets…
Intimidate: +11 = +1 (Ranks) +5 (Cha) +2 (Racial) + 3 (Class)
Yea, I like seeing the information that way – I guess my example would be the numbers under the Leather armor AC at the top (only, in this case, I point to where the bonuses came from, etc)
D00d…That character sheet is NICE.
Thanks!