#221 – What's On Your Character Sheet

Breakfast puppies?

This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences.

Listener discretion is advised. Um, you're listening to the Glitter Boys.

Is that okay?

Okay, so now flip to page 3 and add the bonuses from the parry to the bonuses of the sword, and then flip to page 4 and you'll see a whole little note there about the special ability that your particular class has. Add that all together and then add that to the d20 roll. You got that?

Okay, but hold on, I got this other sheet here and it says hand-to-hand combat style. Um, are these numbers already calculated? Do I need to do that too? Or wait, but I'm shooting a gun. Oh, I'm shooting a gun. That applies, right?

Right. But only— oh, damn it. I hate that character sheet. So we're going to talk about character sheets. Do you need character sheets? I'm going to assume yes, you should have character sheets.

Excuse me, teacher. What's a character sheet?

So We are playing a role-playing game, and we go back to basics. You are taking on the personification of a character in a fictional world.

This is a game?

It's a game. Oh, who invited him?

What happens if you die in the game?

Well, then we take you out back and we Old Yeller you. No, wait, uh, hold on. So character sheets, they're pretty important to most role-playing games. There are very few games out there where you don't have at least something on paper telling you What your stats are, your attributes or aspects of the character, right? If you've been playing role-playing games for any length of time, you've probably run into bad character sheets and good character sheets.

Oh yeah.

There are lots of very bad character sheets out there, uh, so much so it's funny when you find the ones you like for whatever game, I try to make as many copies of those in multiple locations with the same name so that I'll never lose it. I can always go find that character sheet. It becomes so painful. So what are some basics that you should have on your character sheet? That can vary a little bit, but I like to think at the high level, because I'm an elementary school person in my mind, I want my name on it.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? So I know it's my character sheet. I want the character's name on it.

I would say, let's call that, Let's start by breaking these into sections.

Oh, absolutely.

So I would say that's the bio section.

Yeah, the bio section. Your bio section should be who you are as a person, who your character is, significant things like what race or species, what alignment, class, if there's a class in that system. Some games don't have class, you know, most—

Let's just talk about Palladium.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's keep it focused.

Um, I might throw alignment in there.

Absolutely.

Uh, level. Uh, and then at that point, I think you could debate. You might throw hit points and SDC, MDC, but you might not. It might, that might be in a different section. That might be your combined attribute section or your statistics section, depending on how you want to call it.

My thought would be though, let's keep the bio section specifically to text, like descriptive things that, you know, the high-level overview. We're not going into any combat mechanics or numbers or anything.

Okay.

So what I think should immediately follow the bio are your 8 attributes.

Yeah.

Like we need a set for them. And I think your 8 attributes should be written in a way that you have the column, but I think you should also have like a spot set next to each for potential temporary modifiers to those.

Absolutely. There are, there, while Palladium doesn't have a lot of modifications of attributes, there are a lot of things who could modify your attributes and Maybe a GM fiat, maybe a spell, maybe a curse, maybe some person stealing your tailbone. You never know. It will modify something that's going on there.

And also, if you are playing a character that will frequently engage in using things like power armor or cybernetics, bionics, but mainly I'm thinking power armor, I think it would be good to have a column of your power armor stats right there next to your main stats because your power armor might be increases to a robotic physical Strength of 36. Okay. Don't— I mean, definitely keep that with the vehicle stats, but that's important enough that I think you should have it right there on your, your main stats stat block.

Oh yeah.

Especially if it comes up a lot. If you're, if you occasionally run around in power armor, okay, maybe not. But if you're a Glitterboy pilot and you're mostly in your Glitterboy, or you're a former Coalition Samus pilot. You're going to be in your armor more often than not.

If that's your character class, then yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It should be there. One of the things, jumping back to bio again, um, things like age, uh, family history, height, weight, those basic statistics.

What about the portrait?

So I am not an artiste of any kind, but I do like some of the character sheets that have the little portrait block that you can You know, I'll have like a little stick figure maybe of what I'm doing and stuff like that. But yeah, I like that in the bio section.

My personal rule for a character sheet in a game as widget heavy as Palladium is that the spot, if there is a spot on the front page for a portrait, it should be no more than 1/16 of the page in size.

Yeah.

Now, if it's on a separate sheet, Go to fucking town. I don't care. But if you put it on the front, it needs to be small enough that I can still fit all of the other crucial relevant info.

So small side note, a lot of the original Heroes Unlimited character sheets have this big blank section in the upper left-hand corner. And for the life of me, for the longest time, I'm like, why are you wasting this space? Until I watched a player doodle their character in it. I'm like, oh, It's a portrait box, but it doesn't say portrait box. It doesn't have a box around it half the time. You're like, oh, that makes so much sense.

It's an assumption carried forward from the earlier days of gaming when those were there.

Yeah. You know, like, and there's not even a frame around some of them, which is really funny to me. That aside. So that's kind of all your bio section and then your base attributes section.

Now, if this were D&D or something, it's depending upon the version, you would also have like modifiers next to that. You shouldn't do that in Palladium really, because Those are going to factor in later and you're just going to repeat text.

Yeah, I, I would disagree. I like my attribute and like my, um, I would disagree. I like the extra attributes for one of my base attributes next to it. Like, I know, like IQ, I have a 19 IQ, I get a plus to skill just so I don't have to look it up later in the book ever again.

Well, hear me out. Okay, we'll get to those.

Okay.

Trust me.

Okay, I'll trust you.

So what I think should come very close to the 8 attributes in Palladium is a list of your saving throws. You're gonna roll saving throws more than any other roll in the game. Some may say you're gonna roll attacks. No, no, you're gonna roll those saving throws, and there are dozens of them.

There really are. And every character sheet I've seen with Palladium has a different block of saving throws. Some of them are the same, like usually it's like spell and ritual, psionics, drugs, but then it varies.

Drugs and toxins lethal, drugs and toxics non-lethal.

Right, like, and horror factor, and that's the other one for blading. But then after that, I've seen wildly different stat blocks for your saving throws.

Circles, wards, spell magic versus ritual magic, all different kind of things.

Pain, coma, death. blindness, like possession. Like, you're like, what is going on?

I've seen gases be their own separate saving throw from poisons and drugs.

Which I think that has a lot to do with how many different influences there are in Palladium as the, as a family. If you're just staying in Rifts, it's a little bit better. If you're just in like Dead Rain or System Failure or some of the games that have just 1 or 2 books, it's usually fairly static. But Palladium Fantasy, Rifts, even Heroes Unlimited, some of the ones that have a lot of supplemental material, you're going to get stuff all over the place. Um, Nightbane might be a little diverse too, but I'm not sure.

So here's where, um, what I said, I'm going to get back to you on this. This is the first spot where I would say that this is where you should start Automatically adding in the modifiers from things from your attributes, specifically mental endurance and physical endurance, because they give bonuses to saving throws. You don't need to write those next to the stats when you're also going to add them in here. And the reason you shouldn't do that is because of that very first conversation we had at the very beginning of this episode. Okay, it says my saving throw here versus poison is a +6, but it also says I have a +3 for my physical endurance. So does that mean it's a +9? It might. See, there's the confusion. If you start writing these things down in multiple places, people get confused. So is it already calculated or what did you choose to write there? So my, my, what I think is that you should add in the bonuses total and write them down and then you should keep them in one place.

And that should be your source of truth. And this leads into my concept of the difference between a character's sheet on a weekly game and a character sheet at a convention that it's a one-shot that you do as pre-gens for GMs. As a GM at a one-shot, I don't want my players to have to do all that type of math.

I don't either.

My own personal character sheet, I might make myself do the math to remember where things are coming from. I might not. That's kind of a personal preference. But as a GM doing pre-gens, if it says +3 to save versus psionics, that is the total number for that save versus psionics. All other data has been added into it. And I, I will personally state that to the players so they know ahead of time. If you see a +12 to strike with that sword specifically under the sword description, that is a combined +12. And I tend to do it that way. So I agree with you. I would just approach it slightly different.

I mean, every player is going to have their own preference on that.

Absolutely.

But if we're going to go with like a universal, a suggested universal standard, I think they should all, all those modifiers should be kept in the place they're most relevant. Yep.

Okay. I can totally agree with that. So we've now done our saving throws. The next big section for Palladium is skills in my mind.

What about hit points? So where do you put those? So my theory is to put them with what I call combat mods.

Okay.

What?

But we're not—

you could be right. Are skills more important than combat mods is the question.

Okay. So there should be a big block up there that says combat mods next to your saving throws in my mind, in my visually. But you're not going to start fill those in yet. You're now going to go to skills in my mind, because a lot of your physical skills are going to change your attributes, and your combat.

Oh, this is a good question. So we didn't really, we didn't really think about this. Is the purpose of the character sheet to create the character or to keep track of the character during play?

Ooh, that's an interesting question.

Now, many games in more recent era have tackled that in one of two ways, either by having a special dedicated creation sheet That you then use and copy all the final things over to your ultimate sheet, or the playbook system where you have not just a sheet, but you have like a little trifold or something that you use to create and play the character through a process. Mothership does this very well.

I personally almost always use scratchpad when I'm creating the character. And once I figured everything out, I transcribe it onto the character sheet as the start point of the game after session zero. That's how I approach it.

Same. Yeah.

Uh, I've, I've played a, uh, recently I've been doing a Star Trek game using the, uh, the 2d20 system. And it's been really interesting. Their character creation is very much what you're talking about. It's like this path that you kind of flow through and you pick your different things, but you really couldn't do that on the character sheet they provide. You, pretty much had to do that on the side. So I think it's very much like the Conan. I think Conan is that way too. Oh God.

Yeah.

The Conan 2d20 system, it gives you like a sheet or maybe 2 sheets, but you don't use that to create your character. Oh no, no, no. Because character creation is dense in that. And it does, it goes through the eras of your life.

And so, and when I'm envisioning this character sheet, we now have up at the top a bio section. We have the attributes section. We have saving throws and combat skills. And then we have this big area of skills, or not combat skills, combat stats. We have the bigger area of skills. And this, to me, when I'm looking at my sheet, as I was building it offline and transcribing it over and doing the math, the skills get set into place as I'm building them. And I will have special skills or OCC skills, right?

Mm-hmm.

Ones that are only part of that character class. And then I'll have OCC related, and then I'll have secondary skills. I'd like to have 4 columns, but most sheets don't. Most, most times they have 3 columns or they have one big column down the side or something like that.

Uh-huh.

Um, I think the original character sheet that Palladium offered, it was almost impossible to put all the skills. Like if you played a skilled heavy, like a rogue scientist or rogue scholar, you couldn't put all the skills on the sheet. And this is where it gets interesting to me because most of them have 3 sections in each, each of the columns, right?

I think they need at least 5.

And so you have like the name and then you have how much you get per level and then you have the current percentage and that works okay. And then you level. And it's like, yeah, it's scratching out and rewriting them and scratching out. And I think that's where a lot of people who play Palladium games, that's why there's so many versions of Excel spreadsheets of Rifts character sheets and Palladium game character sheets.

That's why I only run these games with Excel spreadsheets to handle everything. Because I play with a lot of people who like simpler games and they don't want to have to recalculate everything every level.

Yeah.

So my minimum would be 5, 5 spots for a skill. I think the skill, you need to have the name, you need to have, it's very important to me what level you acquired that skill at.

Oh yeah.

That is crucial. And in fact, you can use that to plan out your character career either by just predestinating all of your skills and picking them before you get there, or at least having the spots there so that you know, okay, well, I've got 2 blank skills that say level 3. So when I get to level 3, I'm going to pick 2, 2 more. It could be handy to note whether they are secondary or OCC related also. Anyway, I think you need the name, the level you got it, the per level bonus, and the current, current level or the current total. And I think it's important to have a 5th one, which is temporary modifier notes.

Yeah.

Okay, I get a 10%, but only when fighting goblins or something. These are important to note, and I think it's important to have them next to the skill that they are relevant to.

I think the underlying goal that we're getting at, both of us through slightly different approaches, is that everything I need as a player needs to be on this sheet. I want to have to go to the books as infrequently as possible. I want all the information I really need on my character sheet. Because every time I have to go look something up in the book, I'm slowing down the game. If there's a situational modifier, I want it noted on my sheet, maybe in the margin, maybe the skill, something somewhere so I know it's there. So really all I need is my character sheet to play. I don't need any other books.

Yeah, I've typically, when I play, I rarely use official character sheets and I almost only use my own pencil and paper notepad because I've got a format that I have used that works for me that I've used for years. And in that format, I have all of my skills on a wholly separate page that is just skills because then I can just do college rule paper and I can just draw my lines and get everything set the way I want. I've never seen a character, an official character sheet from Palladium that I think has everything that I need. For my character skills.

So after the skill section— oh, and this is actually a good question— do you separate out the weapon proficiency skills from your main skills? Because a lot of the character sheets you get from Palladium do that, and I get very torn sometimes because where did you get that weapon proficiency skill?

Yeah, I keep it in the list just so I know when I got it and at what level.

Right. And so we're down into the weapon proficiencies and how and what bonuses they give and how do you handle that. Because what level you got— there's no percentages with weapon proficiencies. It's all around what level you got it and what level you are now, right? So that gives you different bonuses and you need to probably note that somewhere. That's why a lot of times they call it out in weapon proficiencies. So you might be writing it twice. you know, the current level of the skill and when you got it, and then somewhere else all the bonuses you get because you have it at that level.

Mm-hmm.

And that can go along with also, you know, your main weapons and maybe your armor, maybe not. It gets funky at that point. I tend to, on my first sheet, a lot of times will only have stats And proficiencies and things like that. It won't have gear. My gear will be on a second page.

So a format that I have used in the past for keeping track of weapon proficiency modifiers and attacks is to have a dedicated section for weapon proficiencies and attacks. And it's basically set in 2 sections. The first section has my WPs listed out. It's got a column for strike mod, column for parry mod. column for each and every little thing that it does. And then beneath that, I have all of the weapons that I have. And each weapon has a column for the name, column for how many attacks it takes to roll, column for how the strike mod, any stuff like that. And then I draw an arrow from the column in the first thing down over and point down. So like I draw a strike mod, arrow down to the strike mod on the second one, and that tells me at a glance that I haven't automatically calculated these. So I— yeah, that way I'm not messing myself up. I just— when I put down the weapon, I put down its mods and everything and just leave it as is. So then I have to very quickly eyeball, okay, I've got this at a level that gives me a +3, and this does this, so I've got a +4 to strike with this weapon.

I have gone to the item I'm using having the combined attack or parry or whatever bonus. I've basically, when I get a new item and I'm going to be using it for a particular attack, I'll say, okay, I basically can go, oh, I'm using a JA-12. My JA-12, the total plus to strike with that on a Aim shot is this, and I just have done all the math for that item. And if I lose the item, I remove the item and I remove that bonus because I don't want to do that math anymore.

Yeah, I— what I do with strike versus aim again is weapon proficiency strike bonus points down to the strike column on my weapon list, and immediately to the right of my strike column is any potential aim bonus.

Okay.

And for that, I do automatically add in the +2 for all of them simply because we'll probably talk, have an episode about aiming. But remember folks, the aim bonus of a weapon only applies if you use the aim option.

Right.

It's not just a universal bonus to strike. So that's how I know. So I know that I need to add the strike column. I have to go 1, 2, 3. So it's like a 1, 2, 3 to calculate the mods.

And so now we've gotten into gear and things like that. I always thought it was very interesting that the original— I think it was the original, uh, PDF or character sheet that so many people had— they listed out all the psionics.

Oh yeah.

It was always like, that's weird. But they didn't list out all the spells, right? It was just all the psionics. And I was like, okay, that's kind of odd.

Yeah, this will be like a checkbox thing.

Yeah, yeah, a checkbox. Um, now I know In core Palladium Butts Edition or Unlimited, every player who's a human theoretically can roll for psionics.

Many other races too.

Yeah.

And so, okay, that's cool, but I didn't necessarily need to spend the printer ink on everyone and all their values. So I probably wouldn't put that on my sheet.

Here's what I would do after the combat section, after— so after the skills, would be weapons and attacks. And then after that, I would put down powers.

Yep.

And that would be psionics. That would be spells. That'd be all of the things that specifically are powers of some kind. And in my, in my mind, they are powers that don't have a percentage chance of success. To me, those, and you know, those things like the dog boys, sense supernatural, whatever. That's a skill.

Yeah.

I keep those on the skill list.

I put those on the skill list as well.

And then finally, gear. Get like 4 pages.

Depending on your character, you might need like an extra spiral notebook. You know, it's, uh, there's a lot of gear if you're, if you especially go super heavy.

I've seen some sheets get really creative where they'll like draw out a little, you know, a little blocky dude representing your different hit locations and whatnot. Here's the problem with those. They're so generic, they apply to very few things. Like Palladium will have like, you know, you'll have armor that'll have, okay, this armor has, you know, X MDC on the arms and X MDC on the legs, but this one also has X MDC on the shoulders and then X MDC on the elbow joints.

Yeah.

And there's those that don't work for those nice little graphics that you guys have helpfully drawn.

And that's where your character sheet design can just completely break down.

Yeah.

Is if you're trying to detail everything, and you may want to, but you're not going to find a pre-gen integrated character sheet that's going to fit those needs. And that's where, you know, regular paper— I use engineering graph paper for almost everything I do, and I'll have my character sheet, you know, detailed out that way, uh, or I'll have a normal printed pre-gen first character sheet. There's just one page and then the supplemental notes behind it. Right. Yeah.

Oh yeah.

So character sheets, in essence, how you lay out your character sheet, be you the player or the GM, will help you flow through the game more easily and help you move through some of those, those parts that aren't as fun. It's like breaking down the game flow and going through, it's like, oh yeah, I gotta do this math and this math and this math. That's, I mean, it can be fun. But it's not really conducive to the story moving along quickly. And all of this goes with the underlying note and assumption that you are playing your own character and actually invested in playing your character. Not to get too pet peevish, but one of my biggest pet peeves as a player or a game master is when the player doesn't know their own character sheet and they're the ones that wrote it up and they aren't even paying attention to their own stuff. And that doesn't really have as much to do with character sheets, but it can. Sometimes you think the layout is helping you when in reality it's not, and you need to reevaluate how you want to lay out your character sheet so that when you look at an attribute or a skill or a piece of equipment, it's just right there and real easy. It's like, oh, okay. And you're only looking things up that you can't read your own writing or something like that. Yeah.

And some might say that a character sheet should have a notes section. I'm kind of iffy on this. Oftentimes the notes section isn't big enough for me to write the notes that I want to write. So for me personally, I just say write your notes either on a separate sheet of paper or on the back of your character sheet if it's a one-sider.

If it's a one-sider. There's a character sheet out there somewhere. I can't remember. I don't know who made it. Maybe Palladium. And it's like 9 pages or 10 pages and it has everything in it, but you don't normally need all of the sheets for the character. So.

So there was a fellow on the Rifts Reddit whose screen name was ShonicBurn, and he was doing these series of updated, all-encompassing character sheet packages for Rifts, but with like 5e styling to it. Oh, it could give them some kind of like visual flair and make, make the different areas pop out instead of just the old classic sheets, which are just line, line, line, line, line, line, you know, 12-point, whatever. They're really good. Go look on the Rifts Reddit, folks, and you can just search for character sheet and you'll eventually find them.

And there's also the Excel spreadsheet that I think they still sell on Palladium's website. It's like $4 or $5 or something like that. It's a fairly intensive calculated pre-tabulated Excel sheet to help you build characters. Uh, and I, I used some a while ago. I haven't used it in a while, but it was really interesting just how much work went into the backend of that particular Excel sheet.

Yeah, folks, if you're going to do Excel or Google Sheets, totally valid. Excel has a lot more function to it, but Google Sheets works just as well in most cases. Think about whether Think about that question we asked a little bit towards the beginning. Are you wanting this to keep track of your character? Are you wanting this to serve as a creation tool? If you're only looking for a character sheet that will keep track of a character and just handle all the basic calculations, that's actually pretty easy to do. You just need to think about how— think about what we kept talking about. Where are you putting your modifiers? And how often are you typing them? Are you setting a central location for everything to go? Every— is everything getting calculated in a certain way? Because if you're just going to write everything by hand, you can just have a section where you write all your combat mods, and these are your total mods. And then you can have a section of your weapons that just automatically adds in those mods. And that's as complex as you need to get it. You don't have to be like, well, if it's this skill, it needs to do this. And This skill needs to do this. Oh, and I'm this level, whatever. If the assumption is that you're going to handle all the base calculations yourself because you trust your own math, that's the way to do it. Just have a very simple set of 1-2 calculations and it will make playing crunchy games in 2026 that much easier.

Absolutely. And if you're in a game and you don't like the character sheets that whoever's provided, the GM may have a stack and okay, use these. Just ask the GM and go, hey, I don't really like this one. Can I use a different character sheet? I don't know of any GM that would say no, unless there's some really weird specific reason, especially if it's in your weekly game. Um, pre-gens are a little bit different, but I— sometimes a character sheet, a generic character sheet just does not fit the way you think. And so redo it to make it flow better for you. It's your character. Do what you want to it. You know, don't cheat, but do what you want to it layout-wise, right?

Drive it like you stole it.

Yeah.

If you have a character sheet that you are particularly fond of, or if you have a way of doing things that you think is pretty cool and you want others to know, drop by our Discord and tell us, or leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify and let us know your thoughts. We appreciate them.

Absolutely. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go over and check out our swag on our page, and you can go over to the Redbubble page and Download some merch. It really helps support us, or drop over to Ko-fi and give us a little donation. We also greatly appreciate any reviews you give us on YouTube or Spotify or the various places that you can give us reviews, because it just gets the word out more and gets us pumped up in some of those fun algorithms.

We appreciate anything you can send our way, even if it's just your appreciation of our show. You know, drop us a comment, drop us a review, just drop it and say hello. We'd love to hear from you. And if you throw us some monies, sincerely, thank you. Keeps the lights going.

Well, that's it. Thank you, everyone.

Starships, magic, mystic martial arts, romance. All of these can be found in A Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher. You might have heard my name before. I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies. And I've recently released my first novel. It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback. And you can get it for free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies. And it's been a pleasure talking with you today. Have a good one!

You've been listening to the Glitter Boys, a Palladium Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse, and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furbyguy from freesound.org. This closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross, available at freemusicarchive.org. All sound effects used are self-made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as The Glitter Boys. That's B-O-I-S. And check us out online at breakfastpuppies.com/glitterboys. And also join us on the Breakfast Puppies Network Discord at breakfastpuppies.com/discord. And if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time.