Character Sheet w/ "Skill Buckets"

[Jump Dave]

Curious if anyone else will find this useful - I modified the character sheet's skills sections as follows:

1. Since "Jack of All Trades" affects the blanket modifier for untrained skills, I made a special box for it in the header of the Skills section.
2. I divided the skills into a set of "buckets" (People Skills, Mind Skills, Gear Skills, Body Skills, and Fight Skills) to make them easier to find when you're playing. Not in love with the names of my buckets, and open to feedback on what fits in each bucket.
3. Instead of combining the names of general skills with their specialties on the same line, I added a number of blank lines below each skill that has specialities. The number of blank lines varies by skill, since some skills have more specialties than others. Doing this allowed me to increase the number of columns in the skills area from four to six, to most skills with specialties on my sheet have more slots for specialties than the standard sheet does (plus it provided room to add the "bucket" names. I think it could be useful to organize the skills descriptions section this way too, to make it easier for the referee to find related skills (assuming I've done a reasonably good job grouping them).

Thoughts?

 

[Jump Dave]

Ugh, it says "the board attachment quota limit has been reached".

Anyone know how this can be fixed?

 

[Jump Dave]

strangely, at the bottom of the main Traveller forum, it tells me:

You can post attachments in this forum

:/

 

[steve98052]

I have designed my own formats for character sheets for just about every game where there's time for that. In this case, most characters have few enough skills that it's easy to keep track of them all -- just list only the ones that the character actually has.

I think a three column layout would work out pretty well:
1. Picture, characteristics, skills, allies-contacts-rivals-enemies
2. Equipment
3. Service history, then in-play history

 

[Infojunky]

Heck I still use just a Index card....

 

[EldritchFire]

Curious if anyone else will find this useful - I modified the character sheet's skills sections as follows:

1. Since "Jack of All Trades" affects the blanket modifier for untrained skills, I made a special box for it in the header of the Skills section.
2. I divided the skills into a set of "buckets" (People Skills, Mind Skills, Gear Skills, Body Skills, and Fight Skills) to make them easier to find when you're playing. Not in love with the names of my buckets, and open to feedback on what fits in each bucket.
3. Instead of combining the names of general skills with their specialties on the same line, I added a number of blank lines below each skill that has specialities. The number of blank lines varies by skill, since some skills have more specialties than others. Doing this allowed me to increase the number of columns in the skills area from four to six, to most skills with specialties on my sheet have more slots for specialties than the standard sheet does (plus it provided room to add the "bucket" names. I think it could be useful to organize the skills descriptions section this way too, to make it easier for the referee to find related skills (assuming I've done a reasonably good job grouping them).

Thoughts?

FFG's Star Wars RPG has three buckets for their skills: general, combat, knowledge. If you wanted to go a bit more specific, you could have personal combat, starship, knowledge, and general.

Do you have a Dropbox or Google Drive link for your character sheet so we can see what you have?

 

[Condottiere]

I think I prefer to default to an associated skill or attribute.

 

[egoaz2ca]

The groups I play with have mixed preferences for digital vs paper, so I made a character sheet and a builder that can be printed out if desired. I thought about doing different sectioning of skills, but choose the default as alphabetical matched the rest of the documentation. The one issue I find with any organization is that someone will invariably be looking for "history" instead of "science - history" which causes a tiny bit of frustration. As a hedge against that, I suggest that the players bold skills they have or fade those they don't (or both) on the digital form, which helps a bit.

 

[Jump Dave]

Hi folks, thanks for your interest! Apologies for the late reply - I've fixed my notifications so I'll be aware of any replies going forward.

Here's a Box link to my latest version of the sheet - it's not form-fillable or anything:
https://app.box.com/s/z6rmvytg7kwxinh843vbme7spl5yecnf

Definitely open to feedback; I know there's no perfect way to divide the skills, but this seemed to be a logical grouping to me.

Enjoy!

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I give out Jack of all Trades 0 to my new players, that don't have that skill, so they'll see it on their character sheets and be reminded if they have to use the DM -3 or not for their unskilled checks.

 

[paltrysum]

Great idea, Dave. Here's my feedback:

• Get rid of the word "Skills" in each section you've created. They're already all under a higher level section titled "SKILLS," so it's redundant. Getting rid of the word will also enable you to use longer words for each bucket. To wit...
• I would change "Mind" to "Intellectual" or "Academic," perhaps the latter so there's no confusion with the "Intellect" trait.
• Change "Gear" to "Vehicular" or something along those lines. Vacc Suit is the only one that would be a little off under that heading, but it's intuitive enough to fit anyway.
• Change "Physical" to "Environmental."

 

[Jump Dave]

Thanks for that feedback - that's fantastic!

I changed the headings to: Social, Academic, Technical, Environmental, and Combat.

Here's the latest version: https://app.box.com/s/pvgrgkmwo4shom6n1284au1ucymv4ow7