Posted 2020-01-27

Last Updated 2021-05-13

Mothership Character Sheet

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The original Mothership character sheet is among the best pieces of layout design I’ve seen in RPGs, combining an excellent character-creation flowchart with a very usable gameplay aid. However! After running the first “season” of a campaign and using my players as playtesting subjects, our needs gradually deviated from what the original sheet accommodated, and I found a few tweaks I’d like to make. Plus I wanted to learn from the master by picking apart Sean’s original and see if I could find ways to improve on it!

Downloads:

• Mothership Playtesting Character Sheet v1.0 (PDF)
• Mothership Playtesting Character Sheet v1.0 (Form-Fillable PDF)

Calm Version Downloads for users of my Calm system:

• Character Sheet Calm Version v1.0 (PDF)
• Character Sheet Calm Version v1.0 (Form-Fillable PDF)

Translations:

• French Character Sheet Calm Version v1.0 (Form-Fillable PDF) French translation by Pyloric!

Redesign goals:

• Make a fitting homage to the original, maintaining its flowcharty quality, usability, and aesthetic
• Maintain character stats and necessary instructions for character creation
• Lay out the sheet to lean a little more towards usability in play while maintaining ease of character creation (use less space on character stats, make a bigger Notes field, etc.)
• Use the latest playtesting health rules, in which PCs have Hits in addition to HP, and each Hit has HP = Strength
• Use the latest playtesting encumbrance rules, without adding too much clutter
• Try to make the flow between Skills a touch more readable
• Add some more fields:
  • A “Player” field (for ease of organization — I hold onto the player sheets in my home game)
  • A “Next Level XP” field (so players can easily see what they’re working towards)
  • A “Conditions and Phobias” field (I want to lean more into these in the future)
  • A “Minimum Stress” field (this has come up a bunch for us)
  • An “Unused Skill Points” field (my players often bank skill points for later use)
  • A “Debt” field (we haven’t used this yet but there will be new debt rules, plus I like the message putting it on the character sheet sends)
• Add some spaces for new skills (we’ve been pretty well covered so far, but I like explicitly calling out that we can add new ones if we want)

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Edits:

• 2020-04-09: added a form-fillable version.
• 2020-09-03: added a version that uses my Calm system.
• 2020-10-23: added a form-fillable version of the Calm sheet.
• 2021-05-13: added a French translation of the form-fillable Calm sheet by Pyloric.