What If the Character Sheet Were a Board

I’m reading the excellent Prismatic Wisdom published by Games Omnivorous. It’s a collection of blog posts by

Prismatic Wasteland

. They’ve been beautifully edited and organized thematically. It feels so much better to read than the never-ending rabbit hole of blog posts linking to other blog posts linking to other blogposts posts… And so much easier to reference.

Anyway… the author talks about procedures in RPGs, and he gives Monopoly as an example. Thinking about it, I started wondering what it would be like to have a board-game-like board for the character sheet in an RPG. It comes from my ingrained hatred for erasing things from the character sheet and rewriting stuff, which leads to ugly and worn-out sheets after a while.

It’s a raw idea for now but I’d like to list some ways this could be used:

• Spacial equipment (this already exists, e.g., in Mausritter).

• Resource tracks (this also exists, e.g., in Ironsworn).

• Action resolution by moving a pawn on a track similar to Monopoly. I’m not aware of anything like that in RPGs.

For that last idea, you could have fields that give you particularly lucky or unlucky results, others that let you shape the fiction in some forms, others yet that activate character strengths from profession or race or whatever. Character advancement could mean fields changing to something better. It could also accommodate states and wounds (if you land on a wound, it affected your performance negatively). It would probably require cards for those temporary states. For permanent things (like abilities), they could be written directly onto the board.

I don’t know if this idea will go anywhere but it was a good excuse to return to this blog after a long hiatus. I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.