This week on the podcast I’ve got Emanoel Melo talking to me about character sheets. It’s such a visual subject, and there were so many more sheets I wanted to talk about than we had time for, that I thought I’d put together a companion blogpost here with some bonus thoughts and content.
character sheets
Google Slides: The Easiest Virtual Tabletop Around
CommentThe thing about Google Slides that makes it my favorite virtual tabletop is that everyone knows how to use it. No setting up accounts, no learning a new service, you just get right to playing. It’s easy to navigate and remember where things are. And if all you’re doing is dropping in jpgs of character sheets and putting text on top of them, maybe with a few extra slides for session recaps and notes, Slides is fully functional. You’re killing it even.
Here’s a tour of how I use it.
Design Your Character Sheet First
CommentThere’s a (potentially apocryphal) story about the design of Apocalypse World that says that the first thing Vincent Baker designed for the game was the Angel playbook. (Or possibly Brainer? I’ve heard both.) Before what dice you were rolling, before the basic moves, before any kind of MC-facing mechanics, Vincent started with some evocative stats and abilities. Before he knew what “open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom” meant, those words existed on a page. From there, he and Meguey built the game around what that playbook would need to function instead of starting big picture and gradually filling in.
Now, I’m sure that first playbook was iterated on later. Maybe it was completely revised. I’m sure a lot of that game existed before the fifth playbook was written. Maybe all of this is a lie! But I think there’s something very useful about the idea of starting a game’s design with its character sheet and/or playbooks and building out…