Attached is my PDF char­ac­ter sheet pro­to­type.

The graphic design work is not done, just the bare­bones are present.

I’m try­ing to strike a bal­ance between a sheet that is func­tional dig­i­tally and in print (the dig­i­tal sheet will do and sim­plify many of the cal­cu­la­tions for you, but noth­ing is lost in print form), while keep­ing to the spirit of the sys­tem. As a PDF, the auto cal­cu­la­tions can sim­ply be over­writ­ten, unlike an excel sheet.

The sec­ond page is meant to solve a prob­lem I had regard­ing wounds and armor — specif­i­cally mak­ing it intu­itive to new play­ers. So yes, you are meant to draw lines from the wound and armor bul­lets to the applic­a­ble parts of the body out­line. The sec­ond page is essen­tially meant to reflect all things that are not intrin­sic to your char­ac­ter (and is thus dis­pos­able, assum­ing you sur­vive 10+ wounds…)

All feed­back is welcome.

Some encod­ing issues pop up when open­ing the PDF in-​browser vs down­load­ing and open­ing in Acro­bat reader. Try­ing to fig­ure it out.

Also, the aes­thetic I wanted to go for is what I’d call “junior high note­book,” e.g. set against a ruled back­ground, and the let­ter­ing and art meant to look like a 12 year-​old in the late ’70’s-early-80’s who reads Heavy Metal mag­a­zine had drawn it out. I’ve already cre­ated a vec­tor ver­sion of the Blade logo as if said 12 year-​old had lov­ingly drawn it whilst ignor­ing teacher.

I ulti­mately want to get a Blade pod­cast or Twitch series going, but orga­niz­ing is dif­fi­cult at the moment (I might have men­tioned, my aorta fuck­ing exploded and set me back a bit). A friend and I are grow­ing a slowly-​burgeoning gam­ing media ven­ture (“Boardgames & Bour­bon”) and when I can get the pieces together I’d like to get a Blade game on that plat­form. BTW, hit me up if inter­ested in any involvement.

This is awe­some man, great to see peo­ple still use this forum.

I just started play­ing blade, my group just made its char­ac­ters today and we will begin play­ing next week. Going to use your sheets!

Look­ing good Herr, for me the sim­pler the bet­ter.

On to feed­back:

1) I think it would be best to make two dis­tinct sheets for reg­u­lar char­ac­ters and another for sor­cerer char­ac­ters. There’s such a large chunk of space ded­i­cated to sor­cer­ous maneu­vers and mys­ter­ies that it would be a waste of space for non-​sorcerers. Maybe the non-​magic sheet has more space ded­i­cated to skills?

2) Not sure you need the maneu­vers on the sheet, at least not the box for what I think are the acti­va­tion costs, due to the fact that AC vary from pro­fi­ciency to pro­fi­ciency (which is why maneu­ver cards are so impor­tant). I mean, if there’s plenty of space I guess it doesn’t hurt putting it for ref­er­ence, and maybe you meant for the player to use the AC for its most used prof?

Alter­na­tively, maybe you could fit in some­where (in con­densed form ofc) tables 3.1 and 3.2 of the off and def maneu­ver costs, mak­ing it a ref­er­ence sheet as much as its a character’s. Its more work, but it cuts down sig­nif­i­cant time even if you do have a set of maneu­ver cards, and facil­i­tates fol­low­ing the rules closely instead of hand-​waving it to keep the pace.

3) Real­is­ti­cally I never fill Inven­tory in my (main) sheet, I’ll usu­ally use a blank paper for all sorts of notes and what­not because the con­stant scrib­bling and eras­ing dras­ti­cally low­ers the life expectancy of the sheet and I want it to last as long as pos­si­ble. Maybe cram it into the sec­ond page?

Any updates?

Won’t have an update for a day or two.

Still work­ing on it, but wanted to run some of my deci­sions with you guys:

Anarak, I designed the sheet around the idea that it’s rarely fea­si­ble to choose mul­ti­ple melee pro­fi­cien­cies at cre­ation or to even spend points towards another one. That allowed me to list avail­able Maneu­vers and costs in a way that’s easy to ref­er­ence — a new player can scan the avail­able options in com­bat with­out shuf­fling and re-​reading maneu­ver cards/​sheets on their turn. I only included the Pro­fi­ciency defaults because it fit in that spot, but will likely move it. The ques­tion is, how often do mul­ti­ple melee pro­fi­cien­cies really come into play? If it’s a fre­quent thing, I’ll have to recon­sider my design.

On that note, what is the max­i­mum peo­ple tend to see for skills known? Doing the math, it seemed like 10 would be a rea­son­able max — skill-​heavy char­ac­ters I’ve seen max out around 6. Is 10 spaces too few to pro­vide?

Like­wise, the inven­tory was more of a place-​holder. Will move it to sec­ond sheet.

I think I’ll make a magic-​only sheet like you sug­gested — I put it on the first sheet because I intended the sheet to have a sor­cery box by default — so that even non-​sorcerers have a role­play­ing ref­er­ence and reminder about any resis­tance penal­ties — and the rest fit nicely around it.

And an addi­tional point of using the body out­line is to encour­age new play­ers to describe their com­bat more organ­i­cally. I find it works eas­ier for them when they aren’t think­ing in terms of zones in their por­tion of the narrative.

Not very i’d say. Although I’ve had one or two play­ers who lev­eled a few sec­ondary pro­fi­cien­cies after get­ting some xp.

Two main pro­fi­ciency slots –one for melee and another for ranged is given, but i’d per­son­ally leave space for sep­a­rate pro­fi­ciency pro­gres­sion else­where, together maybe with all defaults, at least the melee defaults.

My point on the list­ing of maneu­ver costs was that maneu­ver acti­va­tion costs vary from what pro­fi­ciency you’re using. For exam­ple, bind & strike costs 2AC for greatsword prof. but 0 for cut & thrust. I’m aware you can use one pro­fi­ciency for non-​proper weapons (such using a mace as a sword/​cut & thrust with a mace). So I guess i’ll throw another ques­tion here, how often do you guys switch pro­fi­cien­cies or use the same pro­fi­ciency across var­i­ous weapons?