Back in the old days of gaming, you carefully wrote out your character on your character sheet and used that prized sheet over and over, despite the wear and tear of transporting it around, eraser marks, Cheetos residue, and spilled drinks. Once your sheet got sufficiently "cruddy", you would carefully transcribe the character to a fresh sheet to start all over.

Stop the madness.

Create a blank character sheet template in HTML or in a word processor and make it available to your players. You can either let them fill out the information, or you can collect it and fill it out for them. Make a page that links to all of the character sheets, and you can easily print them out before a game. Each player gets a fresh character sheet for each game, there is no need to redo character sheets, and you never have to worry about not having a player's sheet.

This does create more work for the DM or the group's appointed "Keeper of the Sheets." However, the payoff is worth it. You can make custom character sheets for each campaign, which is especially useful when you run multiple campaigns of the same game system. Some campaigns you don't want players to be able to see each others' sheets; when I do this, I create the character sheet pages with random numbers for names and then make a DM Only web page that links to them. This way, no player can see another player's sheet, but I have no trouble trying to remember what I named it, because it is just a link to me.

I have found keeping control of the character sheet drastically cuts down on "math errors" that result in too high (or low) Armor Class, attack rolls and other stats. It also allows you to keep all the sheets uniform so everything is in the same location for everyone, noted the same way, and all the other benefits of standardization. You can also use space on the sheet to create areas for Power-Ups and other effects; in other words, you can have a place on the sheet that shows the effects of the player's favorite spells and items in use. This saves a tremendous amount of time in game.

Below are some examples of character sheets (blank) that we use. These sheets use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so if you want to use these files, you will need to save the HTML document and the CSS file to your computer. You can find out the location of the corresponding CSS file for each HTML document by looking at the page source and examining the HEAD statements. Neither CSS nor HTML are very difficult to learn. I recommend using W3C.org as a reference.

• d20 Modern — from our one-shot Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, 2006
• Dungeons & Dragons — from Age of Worms campaign, 2006
• Vampire: The Masquerade — from Underworld campaign, 2006
• Shadowrun — from Black Ops: Bogota campaign, 2009
• Dead Reign — from Life Among the Dead campaign, 2010
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition — from Priscus Venatus campaign, 2012
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition — from Flight of the Phoenix campaign, 2012
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game — from Carrion Crown Adventure Path campaign, 2013