What do you do with your character sheets between game sessions?

If you’re using an online service for your character sheets that everyone in the group can access, this will largely take care of itself. But if not, then this is one of those little technical flourishes that you probably never think about, but which can nevertheless have an impact on your game. (And particularly so with some RPGs.)

Broadly speaking, there are three competing interests when it comes to the disposition of your group’s character sheets.

First, and most importantly, the players need to have their sheets during the game. (Obviously.) So if they forget to bring them or, worse yet, lose them entirely, that can derail an entire session.

Second, between sessions, the GM may want to reference the PCs’ sheets while prepping adventures. (Is anyone proficient in a particular skill? What spells do they have prepared today? Who’s carrying the Eye of Miebalung? And so forth.)

Third, and this is where it gets tricky, the players may want to have access to their sheets between sessions. This will be particularly true if they need to advance their characters between sessions or if there’s any form of intersession play. (For example, some groups might run domain play or downtime actions on their Discord server.)

Laying out all of these competing interests like this, it’s easy to see the points of tension.  In fact, if we assume there’s just one copy of each sheet, it would seem impossible to satisfy everyone’s needs, although whether or not this will effect a particular group will depend on their personal tastes and predilections.

(For example, I mostly prep my scenarios while thinking about the “logic of the world,” so I rarely, if ever, design with the PCs’ characters sheets in mind. In other words, I set up problems and let the players worry about how their characters will solve them. Although there are exceptions, like how the GUMSHOE system spreads its Investigation Abilities between the PCs, and it can be useful to do some spot-checking to make sure everyone is getting access to the spotlight.)

MY SOLUTIONS

In my dedicated tables, my players usually keep their sheets, taking them home with them between sessions. (Many of my players are copious note-takers, and they’ll often have a fistful of handouts they’ve collected over the course of the campaign. So they’ll just keep all that stuff together, sometimes even reviewing it between sessions.)

However, I do make a point of periodically making a copy of their sheets. (This usually just means taking pictures of them with my phone, although if the players are using a digital sheet – e.g., form-fillable PDFs – I’ll just have them e-mail me copies.) I generally don’t do this after every session (too much hassle), but instead aim for the moments where the sheets have been significantly updated. In D&D, for example, I try to remember to do this each time the characters level up. In my Night’s Black Agents campaign, on the other hand, I’ll do it after each major operation (which is, again, when character advancement is happening).

This works well because my copy is generally up to date enough to be an effective reference for adventure prep when I need it. If a player forgets their sheet for a session, it’s also “good enough” (or, at least, close enough) that I can print temp copies for them.

For my open tables, on the other hand, I’ve defaulted to keeping all of the character sheets. I’ve discovered that the more casual nature of the game and/or the long breaks between sessions for some players meant that it was much more likely for character sheets to vanish into the ether if they left the table. For open tables I’m also usually running RPGs with streamlined character creation systems, so players also don’t need as much time to advance their characters and are unlikely to be doing it between sessions.

OTHER SOLUTIONS

This is a good example of how the specific needs of your group may shift from one campaign and game to the next. So what you want to do is keep the general principles in mind, while thinking about how they can be fulfilled and the tensions between them resolved in each specific case.

For example, if the game is being hosted at the apartment of one of the players, it may make sense for that specific player – rather than the GM – to keep all of the primary character sheets. (If they never leave the gaming room, they can never be forgotten.)

As another example, the GUMSHOE roleplaying games all include worksheets that GMs can use to specifically track the Investigative Abilities of the group. By capturing the essential information the GM is most likely to need while prepping adventures between sessions, a tool like this may reduce the GM’s need to make duplicates of the PCs’ sheets.

Similarly, the digital tools I mentioned earlier can almost automatically resolve these issues by making access to the character sheets ubiquitous and the number of copies functionally infinite. But this can create tradeoffs for players who would prefer to play with paper-and-pencil (how often are they required to update their digital sheets? how can printing off up-to-date copies for each session be facilitated?) and potentially raise other questions. (For example, what will you do if an online service goes offline? Do you want to archive older versions of the sheets? If so, how often should you do it?)

There are undoubtedly solutions and creative approaches to this stuff that haven’t even been discovered yet. So keep experimenting!