Your freeform digital character sheet for D&D 5e
My first foray into digital character sheets was the 5th edition form-fillable PDF, the official ones from Wizards of the Coast. Those quickly became annoying as there just wasn’t enough space to write everything down, even though it was typed instead of handwritten. I wasn’t planning to print my character sheet, yet I was being bound to unnecessary physical constraints.
That’s when I began to explore the various other digital character sheets available. I don’t remember most of them now, but I did find D&D Beyond. It was a rather good character sheet even before they were fully integrated with Wizards of the Coast. But something about that character sheet and other digital ones rubbed me the wrong way—I had to go by their strict rules on what abilities and features my character could have. Yes, there was a mechanism to do homebrew. But I just didn’t feel like fiddling with all of the details. Those are all necessary if you are going to have a nice automated character sheet experience, so I get it—especially from a developer point of view. But I was looking for something different.
So in 2019, I built Minimal Character Sheet. It tries to be space efficient, yet give you space to write all of the information you want to record. It gives you fields for the common things that you would find on your character sheet. While it does do a little bit of automation, such as calculating modifiers, most everything is freeform and flexible.
I used it off and on for years, but recently started using it again and immediately realized it needed some quality of life updates. I also realized I never properly introduced it on my blog. So here we go!
Features
As I mentioned, this app is all about giving you a freeform character sheet in a digital format. It does mean that editing your character sheet is a more manual thing than with automated tools, but it also means you have much fewer limitations about what features and abilities your character has. There’s also flexibility in how you organize things since you can be as verbose or concise as you want to be.
-
Dense character information
Information about your character, including your class, species, and background, as well as your AC and hit points and related stats of that nature. These are packed together in a dense display that is always viewable. Input fields auto expand as needed and textareas grow in height as needed. -
Modifier calculations
Once you enter in your ability scores, the modifiers are automatically calculated. Skill modifiers will calculate themselves (including proficiency and expertise) but you can override these values if you have an ability that enhances one of your skills. -
Spell management
You can add a list of spells at each spell level. Each spell is a single rich text area, so you can write whatever you want and link out to other resources. You can reorder your list of spells and track which ones are prepared. You can also track the number of spell slots and how many are expended at each level. -
Weapon info and notes
You’ve got the fields you would expect—name, attack bonus, damage —plus a rich text notes field to write out anything else you’d like to know about your weapons. -
Collapsible sections
Most sections of the character sheet are collapsible so that you can focus on just the stuff you care about. I’ve got plans for spells in this area as well—the ability to collapse spell descriptions and open them up only when needed. That feature will hopefully be coming soon. -
D&D 5e 2024 updates
Thanks to the freeform nature of the app, it more or less already supported the 2024 rules. But I’ve made some improvements such as giving background its own field and renaming race to species. I renamed or altogether deleted a few other fields. Other than that, there’s not a material difference between the 2014 version—which is still supported—and the new 2024 version. -
Mobile updates
Because of my disability I don’t use phones very much and sometimes that shows in my side project work. As part of a recent round of updates I greatly improved the mobile experience—that is to say, there actually is one now. -
Public character sheet (optional)
Character sheets are private by default, but if you opt to make your character sheet public, anyone with the link can view a read-only version of it. This is useful for sharing it with your party or DM.
Those are the main features. There are a few goodies like appearance options and I have a road map of little useful things to add.
Free and open source
I run this service for free and anyone can sign up. In addition, the code is on GitHub under an MIT license, so anyone is free to use it however they see fit. Please don’t judge me too harshly as the codebase is somewhat old. I would do things differently if I were starting over, but that’s how it goes in the software development game.
I don’t regret the decision to use PHP and SQLite. Both of these are pretty boring, reliable technologies. If I get around to making any significant changes to the architecture, it would be removing the build step from the frontend. I’m currently using Vue.js, but I wouldn’t mind eliminating the build step and either use the browser version of Vue or its cousin, Alpine.js. Anywho, it is what it is.
I’m happy to be playing D&D again
Any D&D fan can tell you the worst part of the hobby is when you don’t have anyone to play with. This happens for various reasons. Sometimes you’re in a group and things fall apart because of conflicting schedules or the DM gets burnt out or what have you. I had several years of no D&D after a couple of years of failed attempts to either run games or play in games. Fortunately, D&D is back in my life. I’m currently DMing one game and playing in another game. Things seem relatively stable for the moment. So, I’m just enjoying it while it lasts.
If you know of other good character sheet apps, apps for DMs, cool generators, or any other D&D things that you love, please email me or at me on Mastodon because I would love to know about it. And if you happen to try minimal character sheet, let me know if you have any trouble or any feature requests.