D&D: What’s In A Sheet? The Evolution Of Character Sheets From AD&D To Now – Prime
From AD&D’s handful of wargame stats to the streamlined, elegant design of 2020, D&D’s character sheets have a lot to say about how the game has changed.
Character sheets tell us a lot about how a game works. The core rules of a game might be hundreds of pages long, but a character sheet condenses the most relevant information into a single, easy to use document that tells players everything they need to know. A well designed sheet tells you what the game designers think is important, and help add emphasis to the game’s rules. You can learn a lot about what folks were thinking by looking at what goes into a sheet.
Which is exactly what we’re going to do today. Going back to the very first character sheets in D&D’s history to the present day incarnations, we’re going to take a look at how character sheets have evolved–and how they’ve shaped the game across the editions. So get out your graph paper, your slide rule, and let’s step back in time to 1971, back before there was a first edition, before there was even a dungeon OR dragon. Because if we want to look at the protoplasm that would evolve into the first recognizable character sheet, you’ve got to understand where it all begins.
And for us, that’s back in the progenitor of D&D: Chainmail – Rules for Medieval Miniatures.
We all know that D&D began as an outgrowth of the booming wargames scene that took hold in America in the 50s and 60s. D&D hit at just the right time when fantasy was on the rise and experimental roleplaying wargames (called Braunsteins) created the exigency for a system of rules that could handle actions beyond just combat between two napoleonic regiments. Things like duels called for rules for fighting man to man, and watching all of this, Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren developed rules for medieval miniatures to fight each other and from that we get a look at a proto-character sheet, which for the wargame is a series of quick reference charts that tell you what you need to know about your particular person’s fighting chances.
Here’s a look at the overall combat table, which breaks down a few concepts–these rules care what your soldiers are armed and armored with, expanded in the Man-to-Man Melee Table.
And one final table tells us everything we need to know to understand our troops. There are definitely other tables–but these three focus on the individual units, which is important because Chainmail was a 1:1 wargame. Each model was representative of exactly one person, a concept that would evolve into following one specific character in the game to come after. But we’ll get there in a moment.
For now, looking at these three tables, we can see what the game thinks is important to know: what kind of creature/soldier are you, what armor are you wearing, and what weapon are you wielding. If you’re a magic user, what kind of spells you know ought to be on there somewhere. But by and large all it cares about is how well you fight, how far you move, and how tough you are to kill. As we mentioned, this focus on one model helped feed into the idea of ‘you are this specific adventurer’ that would fuel D&D. That and the experimental wargame scenario mentioned earlier, the Braunstein.
Braunsteins–so named for the fictional town that the original iteration of the game took place in–were multiplayer miniatures wargames that featured two commanders of opposing armies, but would also assign additional, non-military roles. Players might take on the role of the town mayor, or banker, or university chancellor. And it’s here that we really see the truest form of an RPG, even in the days before D&D, as outlined in the Evolution of Fantasy Roleplaying Games:
“When nearly twenty people showed up [originator of the Braunstein, David Wesley] made up roles for them too. It was telling that the players received their orders in a separate room where Wesley briefed them, and were not allowed to share the information with each other. What was supposed to be an orderly set of instructions fell apart when two of the players, one an officer in the Prussian army, and the other a pro-French radical student, told Wesley they had challenged each other to a duel. Wesley was once again forced to improvise; he rolled some dice and declared that one had shot the other, with the winner imprisoned. The game continued well into the night, at which point Wesley realized that the players had taken over the game–his carefully crafted rules that would ultimately help determine who won no longer applied.”
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If there’s a truer expression of what it’s like to try and run a roleplaying game, I haven’t heard it. Arneson’s experiments with Braunsteins led to the creation of a medieval fantasy scenario incorporating ideas from the Lord of the Rings which would then shift in focus to dungeon exploration and fantasy-style commando raids in Blackmoor. And in 1973, born out of Blackmoor and Chainmail, Arneson and Gygax created a game of cooperative exploration in a fantasy world that looked wildly different from the game we know today.
“It featured four races, (humans, dwarves, elves, and hobbits) and just three classes (fighting-men, magic-users, and clerics). It also introduced individual statistics that had never existed before: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. This was a quantum leap from wargames of the past, as the statistics described an individual person, not a unit.”
And it’s here, in the 3-volume set of original D&D that we first get the raw DNA of what we’d consider a character sheet today. Now were there literal blank sheets waiting for you to fill them out/in (depending on which side of the pond you’re on)? No. But even so we still get a look at what a character looks like, numerically speaking, in Volume 1 of D&D: Men and Magic.
If you’re unfamiliar, this little booklet is the one that started it all. It’s the ur-PHB, if you will. Volume 1 focuses entirely on player-facing content, while Volume 2 handles the second most important part, Monsters & Treasure, and Volume 3 is the hapless DM’s Guide only here it’s the form of Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. But those latter two volumes, while interesting, aren’t really important here. What matters is what players need to know. And Volume 1 has that summarized on page 10:
Now this is just a bunch of nouns and numbers gathered together, which can be said of pretty much anything using text, but it also tells us what we need to know. Look at what comes first–before anything else you need to know your Name and your Class. This emphasizes the focus on character in D&D, even if the rest of the sheet doesn’t. This first line is meant to get you into the game–you’re not just moving around a random knight miniature or robed Merlin wanna-be, you’re playing as Xylarthen the Magic-User.
After that is the single core set of stats that’s been around in D&D since the dawn of its existence: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Dexterity, and Charisma. They’re all basically the same–these are your ratings, and they grow out of the matrices you saw in Chainmail. You’ll have to go through the rules to understand what each of these means, but you know your character’s concept and level of skill is represented by these stats.
The last line emphasizes the core gameplay loop of D&D. Kill monsters, get treasure. That loop, that experience, is so important that it’s one of the defining elements of the genre. You start off with gold pieces and nil Experience, and presumably want to increase both of these numbers by going out and having heroic adventures. That’s why the second volume of the rules is all about the monsters you turn into experience and treasure by way of fantasy violence.
Now this blurb gets us started, but it’s not really a complete character sheet. Even this doesn’t tell you everything you need to know to play the game. There are still plenty of tables needed to tell you the same basic things as Chainmail: how far can you move, how well can you fight, how tough are you to kill. That’s where the combat matrices come into play.
But as you can see, while the premise is simple, referencing it isn’t. You need to know what class you are, what your fighting capability is, and your to hit score. But you also need to know what your target is wearing, and so on–as well as how many hits you can take before you die.
If you’re a magic-user or cleric you need to know what kind of spells you can cast, and how many per day.
Also, if you needed a reminder of what kind of old boy’s club early D&D was (despite many women making the game the cultural phenomenon it is) you need only look at the male-only titles for the various classes here. But we’re not here to discuss the sexism inherent in early RPGs (or even modern ones), we’re looking at how character sheets evolved. Even from the get-go it’s clear that there was a need for a handy way to record all the useful information. And as with so much of early D&D, the answers came from the players. The first character sheet for D&D appeared one year after it’s initial release, in 1975.
This is from D&D fanzine Haven Herald #1 dated May 3, 1975, as archived by Jon Peterson of Playing at the World. As you can see here, there’s a lot more information now, including a section to keep track of your level, as well as an idea of what players were tracking. We can see they cared about basic bonuses that would increase as you level, as well as Hirelings, Loyalty, and Encumbrance.
Peterson documents the fan evolution of the character sheets, which shows some truly remarkable progress. The first known usage of the phrase “character sheet” comes from another sheet, pictured above, from one of the first and longest running Amateur Press Association titles dedicated entirely to roleplaying games, Alarums and Excursions, featuring a classic two-sided sheet by its 5th issue:
And that’s just the tip of the fandom iceberg. But towards the latter half of 1975, TSR would start distributing an “official” version, produced by Wee Warriors who also produced what is regarded as the first D&D module, Palace of the Vampire Queen. Their record sheet, known as the Character Archaic, was a three-ring, red covered packet of twenty different record sheets:
Now we see examples of some of the later rules that had come out of other expansions, including scores for Comeliness, Psychic Ability, Saving Throws, and notably: NEXT OF KIN. An important stat to keep in mind, because after all, someone’s got to inherit all those items you’re keeping track of. They’d go on to print another version of these, and eventually TSR would go ahead and just start releasing their own a year later and through 1977:
All of which pretty much carries us through to the year 1978, when D&D blossoms into what we now call 1st Edition or AD&D. This is the earliest “Player’s Handbook” and even it didn’t come with a character sheet. Players would have to wait until 1980 to get their first look at a Character Sheet that’s recognizable as a “modern” ancestor of the sheet we know today. The skeletal structure is there along with several recognizable features:
It’s double sided, as you’ll see, and each side has a story to tell. By the time AD&D had come about, the game had moved away from being supplemented by the Chainmail rules. It had ceased being a growth out of a Wargame, and D&D had blossomed into its own game, and the record sheet shows it. Looking at the sheet, again, produced by TSR, you get a feel for what the designers and players considered important. Again the emphasis on character and their background is up top, given a fair amount of real estate, but nothing compared to the amount of this sheet that’s geared towards fighting prowess.
Each of the stats is broken down into its respective modifier. There’s so much more to juggle in 1st Edition, especially since these sheets came about in 1980, around the same time that articles in Dragon and elsewhere introduced the concept of things like bending bars and lifting gates.
For all its charm, though, the 1st Edition sheet is still a mess. There’s so much to keep track of, and not all of it’s necessarily going to come up every time you play. When’s the last time you needed to know whether you were better at pummeling or overbearing or grappling? Saving throws, Resistances, and the like lead into the actual combat portion, along with a dedicated space for attacks with specific weapons and all the modifiers, but all of it’s vaguely combat related and tricky. Still this sheet gets across the message that AD&D is not messing around. It wants you to be good at fighting monsters and keeping track of your loot.
This also gives you a great place to keep track of your character’s appearance and a pseudo chronicle. In the second half of the backsheet you can track what your character loves and desires, alongside their hated foes, compatriots, and of course the PC’s will. Which is distressing–but that’s what 1st Edition was all about.
The 2nd Edition Character sheets are incredible. Look at the artwork on the cover for this. It speaks volumes as to where TSR was when 2nd Edition was in its heyday. Here’s a scenario that would look good airbrushed on the side of any van. Heroes wearing armor and very little else, an actual dragon, some castles…this is D&D at its most D&D. And the sheets themselves have changed over the nine years or so since the 1st Edition sheet:
The biggest change looking at this first sheet is how much the real estate has shifted around. You can divide this sheet up into three distinct sections: who the character is, how do they fight, and what else do they do. This latter part is so important–the inclusion of proficiencies, skills, and languages tells you how much the game has shifted away from just combat after dungeon crawling combat. Recall that by the time of 2nd Edition D&D had branched out into multiple campaign settings, from the space-faring adventures of Spelljammer to the planar hopping antics of Planescape. Gaming had changed in the last decade and players wanted more depth from their game.
So did the designers. The real estate isn’t quite as combat-centric. Now you have the first third of the sheet dedicated to defining your character’s looks and facts. I love the fact that many of these don’t even necessarily have game mechanics tied to them–or if they do, they don’t come up very often. Your birth rank and number of siblings, as well as your social class and homeland are important to know, but they don’t often come up when you’re playing the game.
The middle third of the first page is dedicated to combat, with defense leading the way. Again, feeding back into how your character looks the game centers on your equipped armor/clothing as well as your hit points before we get to weapons. Weapons being in an uncolored box makes them stand out more–again you have to know how you’re killing the monsters (as well as why), in order to portray your fantasy hero. And if you’ve gone through all that trouble, then give yourself plenty of space to define what else your character does when they’re not battling orcs and dragons and demons.
As is tradition, the second page is all about your character’s stuff. And that’s an important signifier, because it shows you how highly the designers regard your character’s drive to get stuff. You have spaces to write down your stuff, how much gold you have so you can buy more stuff, and the effects granted by all of your stuff. It’s very stuff-centric.
Meanwhile the last page in the records if for spells and spell-accessories. Let’s leave this aside and hop on over to third edition, where we really start getting modern. This is once TSR has finally given up the ghost and Wizards has stepped in, flush with all the money they’ve been printing from Magic: the Gathering, to save the game that we know and love. And to kick it off, in 2000 they launched 3rd Edition and the Open Gaming License and gave us this beauty.
This reflects the huge shift in design from 2nd to 3rd Edition. Now you’re given the steps needed to generate your formula–3rd edition was all about putting the power (and the work) in the hands of the people playing the game. No more matrices, no more charts to consult. It all comes down to the d20 engine, and math that anyone can do to figure out whatever relevant information they need. This is true of both monsters and players, which is why 3.x and Pathfinder are so much work for the GM. You can customize anything, but if you want to build your own custom monster it’s as much or more work than developing a character and generally it’s only going to last you a session of good fighting if not longer. There’s a lot of information here. This sheet is dense with spots for formulae, which is basically how 3rd Edition can be summed up. Your items your abilities, your skills–all of it comes down to how it adds up. The space for defining your character has shrunk.
Even the 2nd page doesn’t have room for extraneous information like how many siblings you have, or what your coat looks like. If you want to write that down you’ll have to grab a sheet all your own, 3rd Edition doesn’t care about what your character looks like, they care about how they fit into the engine. This is I suppose a development that comes about from coming up alongside many popular video games. You can kind of see the influence. All the ‘under the hood’ work is shown here, and that’s all they have room for.
But for all that, 3rd edition is the first edition to directly reference a character sheet. This is the first edition where it’s expected that you’ll use a uniform tool to record your character. Not only does the book include it, it directs you on the proper ways to fill the sheet out/in. It’s the basic programming of the game, if you will, and the designers want to make sure you understand.
Now we get to 4th Edition though. And if you thought 3rd was like a video game–wait until we get to this one.
Though it is a much more elegant example than the 3rd edition one. 4th Edition had some of the best tactical combat of any D&D game, and for all the faults that later bloat would bring to the edition, in those early days this was a usable sheet. These were the basics of what you needed to be a person in the world. Skills, defenses, classes, races, features–but this is just the start. You needed both sheets of paper because by the time we got to 4th edition you needed so much more than just your ability scores and to-hit modifiers. Even 3rd Edition was mostly only interested in those. But for 4th Edition, you needed powers.
Everything was based off of the powers system, and the fact that every sheet had effectively a spell book on it clued you in. 4th Edition was a game that wanted you to have an interesting choice in every combat, and preferably on every round–which is why its combat was so rewarding–so they emphasize that on the sheet. The powers are included on the section that defines your character’s other traits. Your powers are as important as your character’s appearance, mannerism, background, and more. They are as much who your character is as what they do, and this principle is highlighted best right here on the same sheet everyone used. It carries through to the 5th Edition sheet.
There’s a lot of subtle embellishments here. The design is a lot more modern–the faint backgrounds suggest a more artful kind of character. And you’re given space to center the things that are important. Skills are right alongside stats for easy access and math–which is good because most folks who play 5th Edition are new to D&D and that proximity is newbie-friendly. The whole sheet is. It’s not nearly as dense or imposing as the other editions. It’s got a lot of space to write and make your own notes. It offers you the blank canvas you need to start making the character yours, right down to their personality traits, bonds, ideals, and flaws. These are as important, real-estate-wise, as your stats and skills and attacks. It’s one of the big shifts towards narrative that 5th Edition manages to highlight with just some placement.
And the back of the sheet is all about personalization. If the other editions tell you how to represent your character, 5th Edition asks. It gives you space and asks you to fill it in. None of the information here, except for maybe treasure, matters to how your character interacts in the game. But it’s still important enough to be listed ahead of spells or magic items. If the front page is the skeleton, than the second page is the skin–this is where you finish making the character yours.
And I think that speaks to 5th Edition’s popularity. For the first time in quite a while, they make it easy to make a character and define them. Even if you prefer the customization of Pathfinder–it’s a lot of work to do that, and again it goes back to 3rd Edition’s choices. They wanted people to do the work. Now in 5th Edition they just want you to play. And it shows in the sheets.
Happy Adventuring!
