Revision as of 12:01, 4 April 2020

Main Article: Building Character Sheets

This is a general guide to different approaches/methods you can use to create the general layout of your custom character sheets.

Layout Types

Roll20 columns/rows

Good for basic layouts, but if you aim for a more complex layout/design, CSS Grid and CSS Flexbox is recommended.

Roll20 provides a few basic classes you can use to organize things into a simple column-based layout. To use them, just create a div with a class of '3colrow', '2colrow', or 'row'. Then inside of that div, create a div for each column with a class of 'col'. For example, to create a 3-column layout, you would could:

<div class='3colrow'>
  <div class='col'>
    <!-- Put the content for the first column here -->
  </div>

  <div class='col'>
    <!-- Second column -->
  </div>

  <div class='col'>
    <!-- Third column -->
  </div>
</div>

CSS Grid

CSS Grid guide Many newer character sheet use CSS Grid for their layout, and is recommended as a

CSS Flexbox

CSS Flexbox guide

HTML Table

HTML table guide Many older sheet use HTML tables for layout, but it's harder to customize and adjust to looks of it compared to other methods, so it's generally not seen as a good idea for sheet layout. Roll20 don't accept new sheet submissions that rely on HTML tables for design, so this option shouldn't be used if you want your sheet published. Old sheet using tables do exist int the Roll20 character sheet repository, but they shouldn't be used as templates for your own designs.

Article: Why you shouldn't use HTML tabels for layout

Pages

Example: Tabs

When trying to mimic the paper-version of the sheet, or the sheet starts to become too long, it's a good idea to split up content into separate tabs/pages, see Tabs.

The section above also show how you can hide areas with checkboxes, useful for temporally hiding/expanding some section for displaying more info.

Images

Main Article: Image use in character sheets

You'll likely want to use images to improve the looks of a sheet, and there are a few example of how to do so, like displaying a logo or having a nice background.

Sheet Templates

There exist a couple of character sheet templates that are intended as a starting point for character sheet creations.

• Roll20's character sheet template
• Cassie's sheet template - A character sheet skeleton, not recommended for beginners as it uses PUG & SCSS
• Anduh's sheet template - Simple character sheet skeleton, using CSS Grid for layout
• Sheet template based on Blades in the Dark by Jakob

See Also

• CSS Wizardry - List of Tips & Tricks on how to create a variety of effects on your character sheet
• Image use in character sheets - How to include images on your character sheets
• Roll Template Creation
• Roll20 GitHub repository
• Sheet Design Best Practices