Emberwind and Spirit Island

[Blicero]

The only times I've seen purely digital character sheets used have been in online roll20 games. Even then, everyone just had a communal google sheets file that didn't have any macros built into it or anything. As a player and mister cavern, I find that incentives for players to be looking at their phones/tablets/etc while gaming are almost always bad for collective enjoyment. (The caveat is that I haven't played or run in a D&D(like) game that's gone past level six or seven in almost a decade, so required complexity thresholds have been lower than they could have been.)

[MGuy]

I typically like to discourage use of phones at the table if I'm running irl. Certain routine players of mine shun electronic sheets altogether for one reason or another. I don't know how prevalent electronic sheet use is outside of my personal experiences of course.

[jt]

You could print character sheets on a score pad. They're cheap ($4 for 40 sheets at The Game Crafter, and they're never the cheapest), and something you could actually sell. Hell, design a different one for every class, with custom places to track their special mechanics or options, and now you have a way to monetize class bloat. And something actually useful.

[Chamomile]

The majority of my experience is online, but despite digital character sheets existing and being perfectly usable, the Adventurer's League still brings huge stacks of blank paper character sheets to every event. Wanting to have a physical piece of paper in front of you is common. I do wonder if this would be considerably less so if carrying a tablet around were as commonplace as carrying a phone. I think a lot of the resistance to using digital character sheets comes down to phone screens being smaller than an 8x11.5" piece of paper.

But regardless, a lot of people want to use physical character sheets. The "different character sheet for each class" option did occur to me, but that does mean you have to pretty much ban multiclassing. This is reasonable from a game design standpoint, but deeply unpopular.

[jt]

The other solution to "people want physical character sheets but have to go on an IRL quest to find a printer" is to make character sheets append-only after level 1. For example, you can replace an increasing number with a line of checkboxes. This is space-inefficient though.

[Username17]

A significant issue is that RPGs aren't limited by official content. That is, in a fantasy RPG your character might get "The Golden Fleece" or "The Boon of Ayra," and there's no reason to have precise rules for all such things in the book - let alone have every possible variation coded into pull down menus.

An advantage of lined paper and a pencil with an eraser on it is that you can write down anything. You aren't limited to things that other people have thought of, let alone being limited to things other people have literally coded into software.

I don't think I've seen an electronic character sheet for any game that I've been particularly happy with. Between house rules and unique adventure rewards even the most "advanced" versions seem pretty much obsolete immediately upon hitting the pavement.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Things like Myth-Weavers and Roll20 work by translating the printed character sheets as literally as possible into digital format. Even when there are dropdown menus or auto-calculation, you can always add arbitrary variables in, including replacing a drop down selection with whatever string of characters you care to write in. In order to be functional, a digital character sheet does need to be able to have an editable text field in the equipment section where you can just write in "the Golden Fleece" or "the Boon of Ayra," but it's not like editable text fields are advanced technologies that modern developers struggle to implement.