Dungeons and Dragons can be a marvellously minimalist experience, a game that needs nothing more than pencils, paper, dice, friends, and a weighty tome of rules. But it doesn’t hurt to have the right tools for the job, and a new edition calls for new solutions – such as this handy form-fillable PDF version of the new character sheet.
The Player’s Handbook for the 2024 edition of DnD went on sale in friendly local game stores in most territories on Monday. To match the updated rules there’s a new style of DnD character sheet printed in the back of the volume. At the time of writing, while it’s possible to create characters in DnD Beyond using the new rules and then export their character sheet, you can’t easily download a blank version of the new sheet, nor is there a form-fillable PDF version.
DnD fan Hightech Hextress has filled the gap with their own fan creation, which they shared with the r/DnDnext subreddit on Tuesday. It’s available to download from their Google Drive. Their motivation was very simple: “I made this because I got the new PHB and really liked how the new character sheets looked… so I decided to make a fillable PDF for me and my DM!”
When we first saw the new version of the character sheet we noted a few big changes from the previous version. There are dedicated slots to record which DnD magic items you’re attuned to, very handy indeed. Record keeping for DnD spells takes up far less space, so the entire sheet is now two sides of printer paper. Your skills are now grouped beneath the relevant DnD stats.
Less space is given over to recording backstory and character quirks. In our experience, players either care so much about their character’s backstory that the space on the old sheet was never enough, or they pick their DnD class and DnD race to build towards a specific set of game abilities without thinking about their backstory twice. All told, the new sheet makes more efficient use of space, so it’s no surprise that some fans want to play with this version already.
This does have us wondering – when will an official, downloadable, form-fillable version of the new character sheet appear on the DnD release schedule? Hurry up, Wizards!
Source: Wargamer
