Stat Tracking Fishbones for Player Characters and NPCs
This is Keith in the studio here for a podcast extra from Episode 2: Fishbones. I wanted to talk a little bit about the report sheets that I built to go along with our most recent episode, episode two fish bones. I built two report sheets here, one for player characters and one for non-player characters to help the dungeon master stay organized.
The sheet is divided into four for each of four player characters at the top of each set:
One is for your stats. My initial thought was that this would be for your players, save modifiers. So strength, intelligence, Dex, wisdom, constitution in charisma save so that you could roll your own, save through your players. If you wanted to get a little more complex with it, you could write in their scores and you could notate for yourself, which saves they are proficient in.
And that way, if you wanted to say, rolla Dex check for them, you could do that. This allows you to create a little more flavor in the game without necessarily alerting your players to what's going on.
On the end of that fishbone is a spot for passive perception, something which I don't use enough. But is very useful for your people just walking around. You've got some orcs talking in next door, they're making a certain amount of noise and you just want to know. How, what the baseline, you know, perception is for your players to hear that. Proficiency bonus in the middle. This is more, more helpful on the NPC sheet, but I kept it on the player character sheet as well.
And then the second fishbone on there is sort of your vital signs, fishbone. So you've got armor class, you've got current HP, total HP, and then also temporary hit points. This can allow you to track your players hit points, some dungeon masters like to do this. It's especially useful if you have newer players that are maybe having trouble organizing their own player sheets, and you want to make sure that everything is getting tracked appropriately.
Then there are four boxes there just for you to notate relationships. Your player characters are having with the environment around them. Friends they've made, enemies they've made. Notable items. I was thinking that that would be magical items, potions, things like that, that you have given them, but maybe they haven't yet identified. Sometimes those can be tricky to track. This gives you one place to, to keep all those notes handy. And then of course, a general notes section for your use as needed.
The second sheet I made up here is for non-player characters. When I build my NPCs, I usually will roll out a whole stat sheet. Sometimes I will use fastcharacter.com, which is a great resource for creating a character —getting nuts and bolts put together — and then you can layer your story on top of that. Sometimes I use it for player characters as well, though. If I have an idea for a flavor of a character that I want to build, I know the race, the class and all that stuff, and I just want to roll out a character really fast so I can play the game rather than having to spend three hours building, I will use Fast Character. But this is a really handy sort of step block replacement for fast reference.
The problem with having a whole character sheet for your NPCs is that it's a lot harder to track everything that they've got going on. So this gives you again, all of their physical and mental state. The same fish bones at the top as the player characters.
Once you've learned it, the shorthand just comes easily. So if you keep it consistent than, you know, everything that's in there, and then a couple more spots there for speed, since as resistances, which could include, you know, immunities and weaknesses as well, languages, proficiencies, and then any actions combat or otherwise that you want to have noted for your non-player characters.
Take a look at these, use them. We're going to be play-testing them this week. So we'll let you know how they're working for us. You let us know how they're working for you. And we look forward to your feedback. I could easily see adapting this non-player character sheet to a larger format so that you can have your whole NPC on one sheet or half of a sheet, maybe. Let me know if that's something that you'd be interested in. We can get that posted as well.
We also have posted a copy of my report sheet that I use at work. You can look at it, compare it. It's sort of, again, a fast reference for a person given me all the information that I need in order to give a quick report, if I need to hand that person off or I need to talk to a doctor who's not familiar with that patient yet or something like that.
So take a look. Compare contrast and leave comments in the section below. Thanks for listening. We'll be back at you soon with another episode. And we'll see you in the forgotten realms
