I enjoy roleplaying. As a kid, my friends and I pretended we were heroes: fighting imaginary bad-guys, playing multiple good-guys, or switching back and forth between sides to add more interaction. Our imagination was the limit, which meant that we were swordsmen, robots, catmen, rubber wizards, and wielded candy cane swords. We campaigned across the playground at school, and called the game, aptly, “Adventure.” A couple times one of my friends and I played some roleplaying games with his dad, who owned a game store: once D&D, and once Star Wars. Both were a ton of fun.
Unfortunately, both my friends’ parents divorced, which meant both friends moved away. Going into middle school I had to start over, after five years of playing with the same two people. I tried to find people to play with – even made my mom play with me once – but I didn’t have a lot of luck finding friends in middle school.
Fast forward to today. I’ve finally found people to play with again – in fact, I usually have too many people wanting to play in my campaigns, and am looking to have two going  simultaneously, while I play a character in a Mutant Year Zero campaign that a friend is running. I like DMing as much as I like playing a character. DMing lets me have a lot of creativity with the setting and the story, which calls to my writer side; however, having tried out D&D 3.5, 4th, 5th, and looked at Pathfinder, I haven’t found a fantasy roleplaying system that I love. For my two new campaigns I’m trying a little homebrew, mixing elements of Pathfinder and 5th edition, while tweaking it with my own ideas. As part of that, I designed my own character sheets, which you can see below:
Each page has its own subject: provided character sheets always seemed jumbled to me, which what information went where. First page is practical game information, second page is character description and background, third page is equipment, and fourth page is magic and companions. I got to add in my own attributes and customize which skills were available, and I’m trying out a different style of weight system – we’ll see how it works. So far, character generation has gone well, and I’m enjoying the flexibility homebrewing is providing. Somehow, when I grew up, I started getting really bogged down by rules: I’m hoping this process lets my imagination once again roam free.
magicbreakfastcereal 