One of the great things about being a fan of D&D is that it’s players tend to be geeks. This is good because it means that they are good with technology and that  they aren’t afraid to mod things to their hearts content. To this end there are already a number of customized character sheets for 4^th Edition. They tend to be PDFs or excel sheets. Some are just blank forms for us to fill in with pen and pencil and some are auto calculating with lots of info in them. Why am I wasting time telling you about them when I should be giving you a bunch of links so you can start playing with them. Well, a lot of them were on ENworld, and that they have taken all those threads down. It’s a good thing I checked the links I copied earlier in the week cause they all return “404 not found” now.  Here is a link to their forums anyway. Poke around there and you may find something worth while. There is thread that has a decent char sheet going and that is Shado’s. His sheet is real sharp. My only gripe with it is that I like to fill them in on my computer before printing them out. I understand that someone was going to post a form version of his work but I haven’t checked into that yet. Here is one at the RPGnet forums. Here is one Here is one by someone called Kisnit (page 1) (page 2.) He also did a great Combat Crib Sheet which should prove to be very useful as we all learn the rules. Here is one that is real nice in that it fills in a lot of info automatically. It is a good worksheet if you think an idea might be worth doing and want to see how it looks.

And now for the bad news. The coolest of the resources I found were all at ENworld. The threads they were in are now lost to us. However due to my mighty Google Fu I have acquired the links to the cool character sheets created by Halivar. (Excel format here.) (Open Office here.) (Blank PDF here) The excel one is the one I used. It does some of the calculating for me but I had to fill in most on the fields. The coolness that I still can’t find is the mod for the Magic Set Editor (an awesome Magic the Gartering Card creator with which I am slowly building a “Larry Elmore Expansion set.”(see aside)) This mod not only allowed it to create Power Cards for Class powers but it had the entire PHB and some of the MM already made for us. Here is an example:

I’m guessing this thread was killed and all evidence wiped from existence because WotC wants to sell similar cards, or at least release them as an insider perk. I was thinking about scanning my PHB for the powers of my fledgling Ranger so I am glad to have this come my way and save me the effort (not to mention the ware and tear on my book.) There are some other power card makers that some people have made for the MSE but I like the ones that look like the rules at least while I am learning the system.

If you want to see an example of the Halivar sheet I mentioned above when it’s all filled out check out my Dwarf Ranger:File Attachment: Dwarf sheet.xls (155 KB) I don’t expect that any of you are intertested but I’ve been reading RPG forums all week and you can only read so many ‘check out my character’ threads without getting infected.