The DnD Character sheet is super important to the game but often gets little attention. If you’re anything like the average dungeon master, you players are likely all using different character sheets and a pile of player aids each session. You and you players can do better!
Different Character Sheets
First and foremost, the official DnD 5E character sheet can be found on Wizards’ website for free. While these sheets are great and useful, maybe they’re not right for you group. There are other options available believe it or not. If paper sheets are not your style, perhaps you want a digital character sheet.
Without going into all the features and benefits, D&D Beyond might be your best bet if you want to go digital. It offers character sheets to your players and the ability for you to have an easily stored and viewable copy for yourself as the DM.
The biggest downside here is cost. It’s a monthly subscription and you need to purchase digital copies of the books you’re using to get those rules added to the character sheets your players are using. It’s around $6 a month, plus another $200-$400 to get all the books you would likely use. It’s an amazing resource and super handy, but the price point makes it a bit hard to swallow for some people, especially if you already own copies of all the books.
Not willing to spend that much for digital character sheets? No problem! People have been making them since the internet was born. Our favorite fillable DnD character sheet is on MPMB Patreon.
More Purple More Better has made a fantastic character sheet that takes all the information and resources from the 5e SRD and rolls it into a simple, fast and easy to use character sheet will pre-filled drop downs and options. This is our favorite and most used sheet, and all it costs is $1.00. Only downside to it is you need Acrobat to open and read it, meaning it does not play well with Chrome books or web based PDF viewers.
Sample of the MPMB Character Sheet.
Keeping Character Sheets Consistent
We encourage you to make a push for your players to use the same sheets. This mostly helps you and is not a critical sticking point. But if you’re serious about your game, you’ll spend a good deal of time looking at your players’ character sheets to plan encounters and make decisions. If each player uses a different sheet layout, you can quickly end up with a small headache trying to sort out all the difference.
Keeping Copies
Beyond keeping your character sheets consistent for your sanity, it’s helpful to keep records of all of them. In our games we typically have our players give us a digital copy of their sheet. If you are not keeping your players’ character sheets on hand, you may end up being unprepared for what they can do.
At the very least you should be reading your players character sheets each time they level up. There is a lot that can change in a single level, and if you always have the sheets on hand it helps out a lot. It’s also useful if your players show up and they realize they forgot their sheet. You can keep playing without having to guess what a player’s stats are.
Character Generators and Character Sheets
If you or your players are using a character generator to create a character, you’ll likely want to copy it to a new character sheet. We’ve seen a ton of different sheets come out of a ton of different character generators and most of them look awful. Even the best generators tend to have terrible sheets. So take the 10 minutes or so to copy the information into a fresh sheet. You’ll appreciate the small time investment later.
The Best Dnd Character Sheet for Your Group
Regardless what your preferences are, the best character sheets for your group are the ones that help you run a better game. If a small change can make a decision a bit faster or an encounter run a little smoother, it’ll pay off in the long run. Whether you use traditional character sheets or the ones on DnD Beyond, your game benefits from you keeping tabs on them. Get those sheets in order and run your game!