The Best DnD Character Sheets In 2023

If you’re new to Table Top RPGs, the character sheet for DnD 5th edition is… a lot. Even for experienced gamers, there’s loads of detailed info crammed on there. 5e is very unlike Pokéthulhu or InSpectres, two games where your entire character sheet can comfortably fit on a post-it note.

Today we’re gonna run through six different kinds of sheet, looking at the strengths and weaknesses of each. There’s no perfect sheet that is the best at everything – 5E is simply too expansive a system for there to be an objectively ideal sheet.

The default sheet

We begin, as we must, with the main 5E character sheet that we can find in the back of Player’s Handbook on pages 317-9.

This sheet wants to put all the maths in tiny boxes, broadly going from left to right: Abilities, then saves and skills, then other things. Compared to many other RPGs, D&D is a very crunchy (a word describing TTRPG systems with lots of maths and mechanical abstraction. The opposite is ‘fluffy’, used to describe lore and thematics) and combat heavy system. Stuff like your backstory and connections to the wider world get shunted off onto a second sheet. Sure there are no maths to these parts, but it’d be nice if they weren’t treated like optional extras. It’s also where you’ll have to put lists of what you own. Spells are also relegated to their own sheet, and even on that page there’s not enough room to write in what each spells does, nor are there enough tick-boxes to cover both preparation, casting and slots. (If you do use a sheet with this format, I highly recommend Spell Cards)

The main draw of this sheet is the very fact that it is the common, normal sheet. Familiarity is helpful – your sheet will make sense to most players and DMs when they see it. It also matches the pre-made character sheets that come with the essentials kit. And because this is the sheet that WotC have made, you can download a form fillable pdf version.

Class Specific Sheets

Emmet Byrne‘s class specific Character Sheets are quite possibly the best 5e sheets I’ve come across.

In a single pay-what-you-want bundle comes a wide range of form-fillable sheets covering not just the 13 official classes, but other classes such as Matt Mercer’s Blood Hunter. These are helpful as you level up, as each sheet comes preloaded with the info regarding what features you get at each level. What’s particularly good about this is that not every class needs the same amount of space for each part of their sheet.

By way of example, the Monk has no spells, but loads of hard to remember rules about Ki and Martial Arts.

Whereas the wizard has far fewer strange rules, but needs loads of space for the many different spells that the class will inevitably pick up.

Alas, while the extra space for spells is nice, it still isn’t likely to be detailed enough to remove the need for a separate dedicated way to catalogue your spells. The other problem is the inevitable flipside of pre-written character rules: it’s much harder to do homebrew or multiclass options when so much of the sheet is already set for you. Still, a great set overall.

Mobile Friendly

It’s hard for me to recommend a smart-phone based sheet, simply because I am very much a pencil and paper type player (I feel the same about apps versus physical dice). Still, I would be remiss not to include some information about what is available.

There is of course D&D Beyond, the official electronic app/website/repository for 5e. This is quite powerful because it can cover all of official 5e and link lots of it together BUT it does get very expensive to try and collect together all the different bits and pieces. To use the app effectively, you’d need to have digital access to everything you’re using (unlike a paper sheet, where you could borrow a DMG and just write down the stats of a magic item yourself).

Away from official Wizard’s products, Walter Kammerer’s character sheet app is well regarded. I don’t find it aesthetically pleasing, but it is at least clear to read.

Spreadsheet…. Sheet.

MorePurpleMoreBetter leans towards the high tech end of things. The form fillable sheet provided by MPMB has two noteworthy features. One, they include dropdown menus that contains some of things you will need to fill in: when you pick a background feature, it automatically provides the mechanics of it (plus, no more struggling to remember how to spell shillelagh). The second feature is that once you punch in your ability scores, it updates other parts of the sheet to reflect the inputted value.

The problem however is that the maths is not applied across all of the sheet (or at least it didn’t work on my Windows PC, and that’s before mentioning that Android and Mac aren’t supported) Sadly this means that you’ll still be doing most of the maths yourself, so the effort saved in overall is pretty minimal.

Accessible and Dyslexic friendly sheets

There’s a few of these about, but by far the most noteworthy accessible sheet is the one by Inuyasharuls and Axelle123. Given how information dense a character sheet can be, sheets that help dyslexic players make sense of things are a real boon. Even for these of us without accessibility needs, these sheets can be handy as it makes the info on them easier to find, reference and remember.

This sheet does a few things. Most obviously, it adds shapes and symbols as a reminder of what each ability does (although not all of these are perfect – Dexterity looks like “stop” to me). Secondly, it adds faint rules to help people with keeping their sheet neat, and third it provides more room for the fiddly maths of weapons and damage. Fourth, there’s not just a form-fillable version, but a colour coded one too.

The fifth and final feature is the one that puts some people off. The sheet uses the comic sans font. Yes, comic sans is both uninspired and ugly, yes it is overused everywhere. BUT, comic sans is easy to read. That’s WHY it turns up everywhere. Unless you’re knowledgeable enough to form opinions on the kerning of a font, then I think it’s safe to say that you’ll find the readability of this sheet more important than its aesthetics.

If there’s a flaw to the sheet, it’s that the choice of colours for certain words is going to clash with dyslexic-friendly paper or lenses, which tend to be a shade of yellow in which the brown and orange of this sheet are going to vanish.

Dave Bowlin’s Super Simple Beginner Sheets

This sheet seeks to strip out as much as possible, and get the 5E character sheet down to just the basic mechanical essentials. I really like these. I wanted to say that up front because a lot of what I say next is discussing the limitations of this sheet. The reason I like Dave’s sheet is that the decision to put very little on the page makes everything that is left really clear. There’s more space, so you aren’t cramped in filling in the numbers. There’s also room for small print explaining certain mechanics.

The result removes all possible distractions to working out how to perform tasks. It walks you through how to work out your attacks and damage, explaining what is and isn’t included in resulting numbers.

The flip side of this is that it assumes that you’ll only have one kind of weapon attack and one spell attack. This is fine for absolute beginners (and certain character builds) but a lot of characters very quickly end up using many different weapon types (often in the same fight if they make very specific preparations).

Another notable feature is that instead of skills being listed together, they are divided up among the different Abilities that they are tied to.

This seems like a really smart move at first, because when initially filling out the sheet you get an immediate idea of what your character is good at. But after this, I think it might be harder for beginners because suddenly the different abilities are no longer in alphabetical order.

Certain things that just aren’t on the sheet, such as languages and other proficiencies. For some characters this won’t really matter, but if you’re character is a polyglot or you’re in a game where tool proficiencies really matter, then this info being absent is more annoying. The default version on DM’s Guild also isn’t form fillable, so this is very much one for pencil and paper players.

I’m ending with this sheet for another reason. All the blank space on the sheet gives you room to express yourself. Remember, this is the whole point in TTRPGs, and personally I often find myself doodling things, such as how you’d make a suit of armour fit onto a Locathah). So with the simple sheet, you can go to down! Doodle, scribble, make IC notes, practise your character’s signature for when they get married to a dragon!

Make your character sheet yours.