Image by Laenulfean via Flickr

I noticed something recently when I was playing in Ethan’s D&D game last week (which is a separate issue I will probably blog about at some point).

Whenever I’m playing a roleplaying game, I have the same ritual when I first sit down to play — I pull out my character sheet and I study it. For games with a lot of information like D&D, this is useful to help me reacquaint myself with what my character can do, but I do this even with games that have very few mechanics, like when we were playing Three Sixteen at the office. Even when I go to a Vampire LARP with a character I’ve played for years, I pull out the character sheet and reread it before I go into character. While refreshing my memory is clearly part of the ritual (and let’s face it — I have a shitty memory), there must be something more.

In thinking about it, I was reminded of my interview with Rich Thomas as I was applying for my job at White Wolf. We talked about the utility of character sheets, and the balance of utility and attractiveness in them. Why should a character sheet be attractive at all? During the conversation, I came up with the idea that character sheets are like a portal for the player into the game system.

On the one hand, a character sheet is, in some way, a vote by the player for what they want to see in the game. Most character creation rules involve the allocation of a scarce resource amongst a variety of options, and where the player allocates those resources indicates what that player would like to see in the game. A character that has lots of dots in investigation stuff probably wants to see investigation in the game, while a character with a slew of points in combat statistics probably hopes to flex his mighty thews a lot. In this respect, the character sheet is the more fundamental control a player has over the course of the game they’re playing in.

On the other hand, it’s also the single most common touchstone the player has with the game. A roleplaying game may have lots or few dice, many rulebooks or nearly none, but just about every one has some sort of character reference sheet, and often that sheet is stared at over the course of several sessions (or months, or years). A character sheet that looks confusing will cause players to think the game is complicated, and a character sheet that looks simple will help the players to believe the game is easy — even if the game uses the exact same rules. At conventions, I’ve noticed that characters printed on attractive sheets that look like something appropriate to the game seem to help players get more in the mood than character sheets that are simple Word documents or a clump of hand-written statistics.

This extends to video games as well. How information about characters or system is expressed on the screen can impact the game experience. One of the barriers for me to play World of Warcraft was seeing high-level players with screens full of arcane buttons and strange floating numbers that just looked impossible to keep track of. Once I started playing, however, I realized that the game was revealed in bits over time, and things were slowly revealed before you were dealing with a half-dozen bars all over your screen.

Sometimes, game information is less important than how it’s presented to the player.