I was just curious how other people handle this.

In some games I've been in, everybody kept their own character sheets, while in others I'd keep them (as GM), so the players just had to show up, they didn't have to bring anything.

I'd love to have an entire group who all use OggDude's generator and share the folder with our character sheets on them, but unfortunately I've never had a group who was that 'together' digitally.

In the games I GM, I keep everything in OggDude's program and keep the sheets updated. The PCs just note down their changes on their sheet and I put them into the computer. I like having everything there, and it means I know the players will never forget their character sheet

How do y'all do it in your games?

we make them on oggdudes, but we have physical sheets we keep gms house.

We've done it both ways and in combination. Typically, we'll all have our character sheets with us, but sometimes the GM will keep them. The downside to the GM keeping them, at least for us, is that we don't do the "level up" stuff in between sessions, it tends to get done (more or less) at the beginning, delaying things by another half-hour as we BS and fight over the appropriate rulebooks.

For my campaign, I intend to make everyone a nice folio with their character sheet, any relevant talent trees, and a reference sheet. We'll add newly purchased specialization talent trees and such as they gain them. The character sheets will almost certainly be hand-written except for "unchanging" info like name, species, career and portrait.

I would like to keep a digital copy in Oggdude's as well, so that "math errors"* don't creep into people's sheets.

*We had one player in a D&D campaign that was mixing up his gold and xp. Despite missing half the sessions, he somehow out-leveled everyone else. He often gets ribbed for that still.

We have Folders for each PC, Paper copies for everything due to tech limitations of some players. GM keeps them all or they stay at the Playing Venue (A Retail Shop one of us owns!... its quiet and no kids around).

tend to do levelling at the beginning, usually quick due to people knowing where they want to progress. we share splat books around so Players will take them home if they want to study up.

we level ah the end of adventures. good place to take a short break. could.be mid session or the end of sessions, but I don't give XP at the end of a nightfor the session, rather for the adventure as a whole.

We usually do two copies. One the GM keeps and one the player keeps.. Then we announce any xp spending at the beginning of the session and the GM, who has a sheet listing how much xp each character has checks the costs verus the amount in the character's xp pool. The GM used to have the only copies but there was an incident where a housemate of the GM's threw out all the character sheets to a very high level party, most of us had been playing the party in question through two full campaigns and were late in a third. Anyway recreating the characters as best we could remember them took one session and most of a second so we decided to make dual copies from then on to avoid repeats.

I was just curious how other people handle this.

In some games I've been in, everybody kept their own character sheets, while in others I'd keep them (as GM), so the players just had to show up, they didn't have to bring anything.

In the games I’ve been in, I keep my own.

They used to be completely hand-written, using the standard forms. Then I found better record sheets on this forum, but I still kept them hand-written. Then I found even better sheets that could be filled in digitally, and I’ve been doing that for a while.

I'd love to have an entire group who all use OggDude's generator and share the folder with our character sheets on them, but unfortunately I've never had a group who was that 'together' digitally.

Quite recently, I made the decision to try out OggDude’s generator, and that has been another improvement for me. I just wish it was natively available on the Mac.

That said, I don’t think I’d ever trust anyone else to share my character folder, not unless there was some way I could guarantee that they couldn’t screw me up by accident. I’m fine making copies of my PDF files and even my data files available, but I don’t want to risk the original files that I depend on.

In the games I GM, I keep everything in OggDude's program and keep the sheets updated. The PCs just note down their changes on their sheet and I put them into the computer. I like having everything there, and it means I know the players will never forget their character sheet

How do y'all do it in your games?

Your method sounds nice, and if I my GM was more computer-literate than I am, then I’d probably be okay with having him keep everything.

Thing is, I’ve been mucking about with computers since 1981 or so, and I’ve been a professional Unix system administrator since 1989 — and moving back and forth across the employee/consultant barrier every few years since. The open source/cloud consulting company I have worked for over the last few years was recently bought by VMware, and we are a separate division of their Professional Services Organization. I think my GM is less than 25 years old, so I’ve been in this career for longer than he has been alive.

Now, if he was a real computer super-genius, I’d still be happy to let him do the hard work, regardless of his age. And I’ve known a few real computer super-geniuses in my time. But as much as I like my GM and I think he’s a pretty sharp guy, I think I’m still a ways ahead of him with regards to computer skills.

I obviously use my generator to keep track of everyone's character I have a shared folder on DropBox that I use for the data folder, so everyone can install and use the generator, and have access to everything. I think... three of my players update their characters online, while one does it before the game, and I update my wife's and mother-in-law's characters.

All players have 1/2" notebook binders for their printed character sheets. I keep these at my house to make sure they're always available, and nobody seems to have an issue with that. Here's an example, along with their character sheet, and their character stand:

I'll send out an email a day or two before the game to remind them to spend their XP. Right before the game, I ask everyone if they need a new sheet printed up. If they've made enough changes, I'll re-print their sheets, and they'll just replace them in the sheet protectors in their notebooks. After the game is over, I'll gather up all the notebooks, put all the pencils, erasers, and wet erase pens back into their zipper compartments, and stash the player notebooks away for another two weeks. If anyone wants to look at their character between games, they can just get on the generator.

For my stuff, I'll print out a group sheet maybe once every few sessions, unless obligation or duty changes dramatically. I also prepare adventures ahead of time, printing out the encounters and putting them in my own notebook, along with my patented plastic stand pictures of everything and any adversary tokens that I made. I'm a very organized GM.

When I GM I always keep physical character sheets with me (it helps since we game at my house). But if there's an online character generator for the game we are currently playing (we use OggDude's generator) then they can tweak their characters between sessions. Every other session or so I'll print of new character sheets.

OggDude, I want to be like you when I grow up

I've been thinking about getting a folder to keep the character sheet and other notes in, I'd like to be a little more organized with the sheets.

I've learned the hard way to keep the player's character sheets. Sometimes it's due to math inabilities of my players (very true in games in 7th Sea), sometimes due to players trying to fudge things (D&D, and recently in EotE; a player tried to state he had 20k in credits between games), and mostly because players have a VERY bad habit of forgetting their sheets and then having to recreate their character on the spot and hope it's accurate.

I really should get around to setting up and using OggDude's sheets, but time hasn't been on my side lately.

I'm really fond of keeping the sheets in a folder with all of the player's other notes as it allows me to make better opposition for them...or showcase the abilities of one of the players :-D

OggDude, I want to be like you when I grow up

Seconded. You've inspired me. I was going to put together a folio and now I'm going to expand it a bit to use a notebook and sheet protectors. That eliminates the issue of binding, and having too much near the "inside" of the page, and update issues of not ripping the old sheets when adding new sheets, etc. The only downside is some extra bulk, but that's minor.

The character stand is neat but I don't know what it's for. I can see using it to remind people of in-character names, that is sometimes an issue, especially at the beginning of a campaign.

I keep them with all of my other RPG materials, as GM. That way we're all in the same place, and either everyone has their sheets available and we play, or noone does and we don't. Before I instituted this rule, a couple of players went through three or four versions of the same character as they kept losing sheets, and it was a pain to try to recreate the character every other session. I'm the only one with the rulebooks anyway, although I have talent tree handouts for the players so they don't need the rulebooks to spend XP on anything other than new specs.

Half of my group kept theirs, half took them with. We had no issues with people forgetting them, but that has happened in other groups. I like to keep mine - it's really the only thing I don't do with a paperless mentality. They're a contract between me an the character (how I justify the paper) so I treat my sheets well and keep them safe in my Star Wars gaming go bag (not as cool as it sounds.)

OggDude, I want to be like you when I grow up

The character stand is neat but I don't know what it's for. I can see using it to remind people of in-character names, that is sometimes an issue, especially at the beginning of a campaign.

Yeah, you'd think. I thought so, too. We'd been using the portrait stands since we started the campaign. We play on my dining room table, which is like four feet across. Since room tends to become an issue (especially in the middle of the table), I thought I'd just forego the stands one session. I figured that they already know what their characters look like, so this far into the campaign, the pictures weren't needed.

Boy, was I wrong

The very first thing EVERYONE said when they got to the house was "Where'd the portrait stands go??" They love those things. They're proud of them And apparently, they don't want to play without them.

Needless to say, that was the last time I tried making room on the table by eliminating the portrait stands

The very first thing EVERYONE said when they got to the house was "Where'd the portrait stands go??" They love those things. They're proud of them And apparently, they don't want to play without them.

Needless to say, that was the last time I tried making room on the table by eliminating the portrait stands

Funny. Ok. I would like to use something like that, we'll see how well it goes over. Worst case I blow a few bucks on printing.

I remember a site where there were a bazillion character pog pictures. Those seem like they'd be a good place to start for such portraits. Anyone recall what that site was? I couldn't find it searching the forum or the resources thread.

I'm the GM. I usually end up keeping the players' sheets no matter what game it is. I usually ask if the players want to hang onto their sheets, and they often don't. One player I have, if he hangs onto his sheet, he'll be making a new character the following week because he's lost it.

OggDude's pic up yonder makes me want to buy personal binders for each PC and fill it full of useful stuff for that particular character...

But for now, they're all just in a simple folder along with the ship sheet, stats for their co-pilot droid, and their notes.

We tend to keep our own sheets. Mine, for example, only exists as a excel spreadsheet (sorry Oggy - I understand why you want to avoid the Disney cease and desist, but typing in all that data - man, I barely have time for other game maintenance) - so there's no physical copy to keep.

The upsides is that handing off a copy to the GM is super easy that way!

In our group for any and all systems GM keeps sheets unless the player wants to. A few of us keep folders of all our PCs (i especially as I tend to prefer printed over hand written). The GMs were worried at first of a convenient addition error but I also tend to xp log my chars too.