Okay, in all seriousness can we get rid of the BS? Can we return to the days of making stuff up on the fly? Using our imagination? I mean, DnD is all about pen and paper and imagination. Almost interactive oral stories, if you will.

Screw all that wordy stuff. I wanna use this:

That’s right, I want to use a notecard. And that’s it. Nothing else. And this is why I was glad to meet Swords and Wizardry.

According to SnW, we can do a lot of different things but in order to keep it simple. But, really, I think it’s simple just to keep it 4e rules… with a few changes.

1. While some people find Powers nice, I only find them nice for those that use magic. I’m cutting these out.
2. Feats are nice additions, but are not necessary. Honestly, extra skills should be learned in-game, not randomly ‘discovered’.
3. Saving throws are nice, but I’d prefer having only to roll once for all of them.
4. For attack, we’ll just use the strength/dexterity modifier. Nothing else.

Quite honestly, you don’t HAVE to do anything that the book does. You don’t HAVE to use the rules. In fact, if you’re asking me, don’t. Dungeons and Dragons is created to be homebrew, for imagination and manipulation. Those that stick by the rules are often destroyed (or overwhelmed, confused, etc) by the rules.

In any case, this is more of a rant then any helpful comments. Perhaps you should check out Swords and Wizardry, download their free core guide and form your own opinion.

First, let me tell you why I’m hesitant to give players without experience a character generator: it takes away from a key portion of the game. Your character is someone that you connect with.

• Perhaps you’re playing that character as yourself but in a fantasy world.
• Perhaps you want to play as a hero (think Luke Skywalker, Aragorn, Frodo) and have all the skills/abilities you don’t have.
• Perhaps you want to play a badass, a villain.

Whatever the case, a character generator takes out a small portion of that creation.

However, crunching numbers is a pain-in-the-behind when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons, so I feel the pain of those who care nothing for crunching numbers. And finding a character generator that fits you is up to you.

This character generator I’m linking to for example is something I would use. It does not produce an exact character sheet and does not include descriptions of anything chosen (and doesn’t include supplemental material from newer books), but is useful. In fact:

“Please keep in mind that this program is intended only as an assistant to character creation, not as an all-encompassing solution.”

So there you go.

I’d also like to direct you to the Wizards of the Coast website. No, I have no idea what’s even there anymore… but from what I can tell from the past 3.5e, it should have quite a bit, like this character name generator.

These skills are used in every day life of a hero. For example, Religion checks are used when a hero is trying to figure out something to do with a certain deity or religion. A hero might use Streetwise if they were searching for information on a certain person or place. The list of descriptions of the skills is on page 180.

The ability modifier used for each skill is labeled next to the section Abil Mod + 1/2 lvl. For example, Thievery used Dexterity (Dex).

So grab the appropriate modifiers and fill them in (for 1/2 level, at 1st level, is +0).

Now, if we check out the Fighter class. The Fighter’s reads: “From the class skill list below, choose three trained skills at 1st level. Class Skills: Athletics (Str), Endurance (Con), Heal (Wis), Intimidate (Cha), Streetwise (Cha)”. So we want to pick out three skills from these. But wait! Since Narisa is a human, if we check out the race section, we see that she gets an extra skill. So we actually get to choose four skills. Each of these skills gets a +5.

However, we are getting a negative due to armor. If we check the armor section, we see that some checks get a -1 penalty. We fill the sheet out as so:

So for Narisa’s trained skills we chose Athletics, Endurance, Heal, and Streetwise. The negative is placed in the third column. We can now add across the rows.

Now that we have our skills, we actually have 2 more passive skills that we need to take care of. Passive Insight and Passive Perception are two skills that we have constantly. Things we notice without looking for them, things we realize without actively paying attention. These are known as Senses.

Basically, these skills are 10 plus the skill total from the Skills section. For insight, we have a bonus of 1 and for perception we have a bonus of 1. Then we add up the rows.

-Step 11: Hit Points: The concept between Hit Points is simple: how much you have determines how much damage you can take. If you drop to zero hit points, you are considered unconscious. If you drop to -10 hit points, you’re dead.

First, go grab your constitution score (not modifier) from your character sheet. Narisa’s happens to be 13. Then turn to your class in your player’s handbook. In the grey box under the ‘bonus to defense’ you will say something that says Hit Points at 1st Level. The fighter class starts out with 15 + Constitution score, in our case 15+13 = 28 Hit Points.

Now divide that in half. Place that number (14) into the second square. At this point, you are considered Bloodied. You’ve taken enough damage to be looking bad, but you aren’t quite knocked out yet. Being bloodied triggers certain effects for certain creatures, feats and powers.

Now take 1/4 of your HP (or half of your bloodied amount: 7) and place it into the next square. This is how much HP you gain when you Heal Surge. This literally means that by sure power of being a hero, you are able to heal yourself a little bit, perhaps by adrenaline or some other source.

While we’re on the topic, go over to your player’s handbook and see what it says under Healing Surges per Day. The fighter’s says 9 + Constitution modifier. So we take 9 and add 1 to it to get 10. Place this in the last square.

-Step 12: Movement and Initiative: Something important in battle is who goes first. Since Dungeons and Dragons is a turn based game, there has to be a way to determine who goes in which order.

Initiative ends up being d20 + Initiative modifier. The Initiative modifier is 1/2 your character’s level plus their dexterity modifier.

From here, we can add across the row.

Now that we have initiative, we have the final number crunching for the moment, and that’s for Movement. In battle, you will have miniatures (or likewise) that you use across a board. Your character can only move so many squares on the board, and that’s determined by their Movement.

Your character’s base movement score can be found under their race. Humans have a base movement score of 6. Then, if you check under armor you’ll see how much their movement is decreased due to their armor. Scale armor gives a negative of 1. Then add across the row.

Lastly, we have Feats and Powers.

- Step 13: Feats and Powers: At first level, each character has one feat, which you can see on page 29. However, since Narisa is human, she gets an additional feat and that allows her to take two total feats.

The feats are listed starting on page 195, with the descriptions on the pages before and after.

The first feat I choose is Improved Initiative. This gives +4 to initiative checks, so I get to update my initiative.

This allows me to go sooner in battle, and as a Fighter allows me to do a lot of damage before the enemy begins to go.

Lastly, I take Human Perseverance to give +1 bonuses to all saving throws.

We place our list of feats under Feats:

Now we want to pick our character’s powers. At first level, we get 2 at-will powers, 1 encounter power and 1 daily power. At-will powers can be used whenever the character wills, the encounter powers can be used once per encounter (battle) or once every 5 minutes and daily powers can only be used once per day.

One other thing, however, since Narisa is a human she gets an additional at-will power, bringing her total up to three at-will powers.

Go to page 77 to start looking for powers. For at will powers, we get a choice of Cleave, Reaping Strike, Sure Strike, or Tide of Iron.

Let’s take an up close look at cleave:

Cleave is a Standard Action. During a turn in battle, you can perform only one standard action. It uses a Melee weapon, which means you can’t use your crossbow, longbow or any other ranged weapon (but we can use our greatsword). The attack targets one creature. It’s attack is strength versus the enemies AC. When the attack hits, you take 1 of your weapon die (for the greatsword, that’s 1d10) and add the strength modifier. Then an adjacent enemy takes damage equal to your strength modifier.

Then, at higher levels, you use 2d10 + strength modifier.

For this walkthrough, I choose Cleave, Reaping Strike and Sure Strike. For the encounter power, I choose Steel Serpent Strike. For the daily power, I choose Comeback Strike.

Powers are sort of an experience thing, to know which powers really work for you and against what your DM throws at you, you have to experiment with them.

- Step 14: The Rest: At this point in time, we check back over to make sure we didn’t miss anything so far. And I did, I totally forgot about the Human Defenses that up our Reflex, Will and Fortitude. I immediately go back and add the appropriate numbers:

Crisis diverted. We can now continue onto the rest of the sheet.

There are quite a few languages in dungeons and dragons. Each race has it’s own language, relatively. Dwarves speak Dwarven. Humans speak Common. Elves speak Elven. And then there are a lot more than that.

Check your race, under Languages. Humans speak Common and one other language. For Narisa, I pick Dwarven.

Narisa is now fluent in both and can read/write both (she knows the script).

Let’s look at the back page of the sheet, or page two. There are a list of things: Personality Traits, Mannerisms, etc. I’m leaving these up to you. What’s your character like? Do they have quirks? How do they react to people? Fill these in, if you want.

Finally, let’s relook at that top bar.

There are two final things you want to take care of: your character’s alignment and their deity.

Your character’s Alignment is generally how they react to things. An Evil character would likely kill someone who crossed them, while a Good character would seek a less violent solution. An Unaligned or neutral character could fall either way, but it’s difficult to stay in that alignment (most people do a majority of good or evil deeds, not equal amounts of both).

In this case Narisa is neutral because her deity, Kord, is a a neutral deity. In gameplay, she tried to talk her way out of things but would not hesitate to react harshly and go through a few people – and walls.

For more information on these, check out pages 19 to 23.

You’re done! For now. Your character is now available for use. Here, I offer this Character Sheet in PDF form so that you can view it in full.