It Slices! It Dices!

After having come up with the original idea, and some evocative phrasing, I like to work on the character sheets. Sometimes the design of the sheets themselves helps me create mood, which is of major importance to the play of the game.

I do a lot of shopping for designer paper in bargain bins of places at office and art supply stores, and the local "dollar" stores often have strange backgrounds I can design against... although not always stuff appropriate for the games I'm running. Seasonal designs usually work better than the wedding genre, but I have a collection for printing with which I'm pretty happy. My ghostbusting priest game got Halloween paper. My "All Cats are Kings" got a kind of outdoorsy theme. I also buy the occasional interesting "note card" paper for LARPs for the same reason.

I do most of my designing in MS Publisher these days, as PageMaker isn't available to me anymore. [sighs]

A lot of designing the character sheet is deciding what to have on it, and I usually do that in tandem with what challenges I feel comfortable giving as a GM, rather than adhering closely to the system. Do I want the statistics to be the most important item, or the qualities? What statistics are important? I can mess with the order if I want to emphasize one over another... and I can leave some out. Do I leave room for a description or is it something I don't care about having on the sheet?

Do you design character sheets? How?