After writing the article ‘The Game of You‘ as part of Ludogogy’s ‘Quantified Self’ theme, I got to thinking about creating some simple completely customisable gameplay materials for people who don’t necessarily what to go to the effort of creating their own RPG style tracking sheets.
The result, I hope, will not only be a whole load more fun than traditional goal planning, but will also be just as, or possibly even more effective, encouraging reflection on what really matters, in terms of skills, allies and resources, to achieve a medium to long term development aspiration, and providing an accurate (although subject to player biases about their own capabilities and effort), measurement of progress towards a valued goal.
More gameplay on the way
This is also just a starting point. This character sheet can be used on its own to track progress, but the logical next step is to link it with other sheets which will evaluate ‘Quests’ (think projects, training or other forms of experience) and allow them to update the characters vital stats and progress.
And because its an RPG style experience it also makes sense to include a ‘Spellbook’. This will contain all those pieces of ‘magic’ that work for you, focusing on aspects such as self-care, life (and work) hacks and learning from books/videos etc.
Finally, (for the moment), I think it will also be possible to create another template which will take information from all the above to create a ‘cv’ type character sheet which will allow you to display your experience and achievements in an easy-to-read format.
So for the moment, here is the Character Sheet, and only in a print format, for filling in with a good old-fashioned pen or pencil. It should be enough for you to do your initial character creation and calculate your current level and experience with regard to that all-important purpose. I’ll be honest, it’ll probably be tough to keep doing the calculations manually, on an ongoing basis, so you’ll probably want the spreadsheet pretty soonish, if the initial try out makes you think you might want to use this long-term.
Game of You Character Sheet (279 downloads )
The fully functioning spreadsheet version will follow in due time, and will be available on itch.io
Formulas for the pen and paper version
You might have noticed that the thing works slightly differently from an RPG character sheet – instead of adding to your stats when you level up, you update your stats, and your level and experience update accordingly. Think of your level as being a progress bar (going from 0 to 20) which shows how close you are to achieving what you want. With the character sheet alone that won’t reflect how close you are to achieving a task or project (you’d need ‘Quests’ for that), but it will show how prepared your character (ie You) is with all they need (skills, allies, equipment) for the tasks and projects you have in mind
With a spreadsheet, you will obviously be able to get much more complex calculations, not to mention fancier outputs, but for the pen and paper exercise, the following calculations will give you a good approximation to see your character’s current level.
Here is a typical D&D levels/experience table.
| Level | XP | Level | XP |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 11 | 85,000 |
| 2 | 300 | 12 | 100,000 |
| 3 | 900 | 13 | 120,000 |
| 4 | 2,700 | 14 | 140,000 |
| 5 | 6,500 | 15 | 165,000 |
| 6 | 14,000 | 16 | 195,000 |
| 7 | 23,000 | 17 | 225,000 |
| 8 | 34,000 | 18 | 265,000 |
| 9 | 48,000 | 19 | 305,000 |
| 10 | 64,000 | 20 | 355,000 |
To discover your current level, simply take an average of all the populated yellow boxes. If you want to see your current XP, use the following formula.
xp of current level + (xp of next level - xp of current level) * (average - current level)
So for example, if the average you calculated was 6.75, you would be Level 6, but you would have achieved 75% (0.75) of the XP needed to get to the next level. This formula would calculate 75% of the difference in XP between Level 6 and 7 and add it to the XP for Level 6.
The spreadsheet will be a deal more complex than this but these simple calculations will give you a good enough idea to test out the concept of this character sheet.
The Quest sheet will follow in quick order, and the Spell sheet should be up and running by end July, early August – also on itch.
Happy Role(Real)playing.
A real board games nerd, she is considering having her floors reinforced to support the ever increasing weight of the boxes. When she is not designing or facilitating learning games she is the editor of Ludogogy Magazine. Sarah lives in Oxfordshire with her husband, younger daughter, and a beautiful (but very loud) Bengal cat.
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