Dungeons and Dragons is well known for its campaigns. The award for longest session recorded goes to Robert Wardhaug, whose campaign has lasted over 40 years. It stands to reason that you need a way of tracking everything that goes on during a campaign, especially if you are playing multiple simultaneously and so voila, the DnD character sheet was born. A one stop shop for all you character needs.
Table of Contents
- How Does a Character Sheet Work?
- Breaking Down the Different Parts of a DnD Character Sheet
- DnD Character Sheet Examples
- What Have We Learnt About the DnD Character Sheet?
How Does a Character Sheet Work?
A Character Sheet in D&D keeps record and tells you everything you need to know about your character. While there are many different kinds of character sheets it might be best discussing the official character sheet by Wizards of the Coast first – Dungeons and Dragon’s publisher. In D&D 5e Key things to look out for include:
- Character information – Class & Level, Race, Background, Alignment etc.
- Abilities – Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom etc.
- Combat information – Hit points, Initiative, Speed, and more.
- Proficiencies and Languages
- Feats and Traits
Additionally, on the second page of the official D&D character sheet you might see background information. Typically its slightly less important than the above because its contents are more subjective, but it is always a great joy to have compelling backstory.
Some more modern character sheets have found it helpful to add a spells section, but its worth mentioning first, not all characters use spells, so it can be redundant for some people; and second, in a lot of cases the spell second comes as a completely different sheet, so if you are missing it, do not worry.
Breaking Down the Different Parts of a DnD Character Sheet
Character Information
Class and Race
Class and race both impact your stats as they can give you innate features specific to the race or class you have chosen. Humans, for example, are known for their adaptability even in the harshest of conditions, they get +1 to all ability scores making them more of an all-rounder. On the other hand, Tiefling are more biased to Charisma, getting +2, and also have a handy fire resistance on the side. It really depends on what you want your character to be doing and how you want them to influence the campaign you are on.
In the same vein, is your Class more focused towards swooning and talking their way out of trouble, like the charismatic bard? Or you can just cut down anyone in front of you like the strength focused Barbarian. The beauty of DnD is that it is entirely up to the player, but these preliminary stages will go on to define the rest of your game.
Typically, it is best to use a Class and Race that complement each other, for example, a Half-Orc has +2 strength as a racial trait. Pair that with the Barbarian class and you will be grinding your enemies to dust in no time.
Your Character’s Name
Lastly, your name is critical. It is how you will be known, how your deeds will be recorded and how you will go down in history in the D&D world you and your friends have created. Names are typically tied to race, of course you could call your character something like “Jeff”, but it does not have the same feel as a Dragonborn called Lamphiath Tohazar – Lamphi to his friends. If you can’t come up with a good name yourself we would recommend the D&D fantasy name generator, it’s a really helpful tool and, without exposing myself too much here, is how I came up with Lamphi.
Abilities on the Character Sheet
How to Allocate Abilities
There are a few tried and tested methods for determining how many ability points you can allocate:
- Point buy – This is a method where the DM gives players a certain number of total points, for example, 70, and they must distribute it amongst their abilities how they see fit.
- Roll three D6 6 times and take the total result – the minimum would be 18 and max 108 which can make for either a very lousy campaign or one for the annals of history.
- Manual Array – Players are given predetermined numbers
- Maverick Method – Players roll 7 D20s and remove the lowest dice and use that as their points to distribute.
Point buy is typically the fairest, but the second option of rolling multiple D6 can often give the most random and interesting results.
A Brief Description of Ability Scores
- Strength: A measure of one’s physical power – Can they lift a battle axe, for example.
- Dexterity: how agile your character is, among other things, this will make you harder to hit in battle.
- Constitution: Your character’s endurance, this can be things like disease resistance, but also physical resistance. This stat directly influences the HP of your character.
- Intelligence: reasoning and memory
- Wisdom: perception and insight, basically, how easily they can intuit information.
- Charisma: a measure of the strength of a character’s personality.
Combat Information
There are many different aspects of combat, weapons and spells that you gather through your quest will give you various improvement to the core aspects, but we will briefly discuss them below:
Armour Class
Armour Class (AC) is determined by the armour you are currently wearing and sometimes your dexterity. It is a measure of how difficult your character is to hit. Some armour types, such as chainmail directly adds AC to a character; Leather Armour on the other hand, which is more flexible, allows you to take the AC from the armour and add a dexterity modifier to it.
Initiative
Initiative determines the order of combat, a character with high initiative is more likely to attack first. It is also affected by your dexterity.
Speed
Speed is how far a Character can move in a single action
Hit Points
If your characters Hit Points fall to 0 they will fall unconscious. In addition, there is a section called temporary hit points, but we will not go into too much detail here – this is affected by spells and magic.
Hit Dice
Hit Dice is the method with which you can regain heath while resting. The amount of health you regain depends on the number rolled, your class and your current level.
Death Saves
When a character reaches 0 HP these are used to determine if the character is dead, or just unconscious. Rolling equal to or greater than 10 normally makes a death save, anything under 10 and you fail one. Succeed 3 times and you become stable, fail three times and you permanently die.
There are some examples of powerful magic and homebrew classes that can help you come back from the dead, but that is a whole other kettle of fish!
Proficiencies and Languages
A short, but sweet, section. Proficiencies are non-skill related bonuses – for example, your character is skilled with a bow, or is a skilled carpenter. Languages on the other hand is what your character is able to speak, similar to the real world communication happens best when both parties speak the same language.
Feats and Traits
Feats and Traits in 5E are any additional skills and passive benefit your character might have.
Feats
Feats are other aspects of your character. For example, they might be Naturally Stealthy, where they are better at hiding. Homebrew especially uses featsextensively to give flexibility and originality to the new races and classes they create.
Traits
Traits are aspects of personality, they might be ideals, like what your character believes in; or they could be flaws, such as Greed. The traits are key for the role-playing aspect of Dungeons and Dragons.
Character Background
The character background section of the DnD character sheet is an example of something that is simultaneously important and unimportant at the same time. Realistically, if you wanted to, you could choose to play with a character with no history – maybe they are suffering a heavy bout of amnesia – the flexibility of D&D makes this possible. However, Dungeons and Dragons is all about projecting oneself into this fantasy world, so it’s a case of who do you want to be in this world?
Our experiences and history moulds us into the people that we are today, we make decisions based on what we know, from examples of our past. The character background therefore determines how your character might act in any situation. Are they a noble Paladin and therefore unlikely to lie and likely to protect the weak? Maybe your character is a trickster and a rouge and can’t wait to get into that bar fight. The character background helps you understand the decisions your character might make.
Does it help with combat and the general campaign – not really. Is it fun, intuitive and enjoyable – 100%.
DnD Character Sheet Examples
The 5e DnD character sheets described here are available both in a pdf format and are printable.
Free
The most straightforward and easy to read character sheets are ones provided by Wizards of the Coast, you can find them at their website here. Its probably best when first starting to use the official character sheet when playing as it forms the best possible basis for D&D play.
However, there are also plenty of free online character sheets made by D&D’s loyal fanbase. We will hyperlink all the websites in the caption section.
First, there is a great futuristic Character sheet on legendarypants.net – we didn’t pick the domain name!
Darkelfdice do some great illustrated character sheets that are downloadable as pdf and printable,
There are also kid friendly versions, for example at sageadvice
And Lastly quite a fun cyberpunk inspired one by SkullSplitterDice
Honestly, there are plenty of places to find free character sheet examples, it just takes a bit of searching!
Paid
Of course, unsurprisingly, the best Character Sheets are ones that you can pay for, the best places we found while looking were Etsy and people linking their products through Pinterest. Here are three of our favourites.
As you can see, overall these are better quality, all of these examples cost between $3-5 for the PDF download.
What Have We Learnt About the DnD Character Sheet?
The DnD Character Sheet is essential for D&D play. We tried to provide some examples at the end of character sheets that were slightly different to those officially licensed by Wizard of the Coasts . Dungeons and Dragons has been from its outset a game about creativity of its players and character sheets are no exception. Its amazing to see what some people can come up with and they are really intuitive.
