Abstract

要約

1. Introduction

[1.1] In most role-playing games, play begins with character creation. In fact, the creation of characters should itself be considered part of playing the respective game (Torner 2017). One could even argue that writing down persistent traits for a unique character in the game was the most crucial step that allowed role-playing to emerge from wargaming in the early 1970s. Therefore, it is not surprising that Peterson in Playing at the World describes role-playing games as being created out of a combination of a new understanding of setting, system, and character (2012, 81–457). Only rarely do players – at least in tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) – not have some form of a written record of their character in front of them during a gaming session.

[1.2] By looking at the development of character records, one can trace the development of (T)RPGs in general and the history of their precursors (Peterson 2012, 289–90, 359–71; 2013; 2014; DHBoggs 2017). As a sign of the “individuation” (Peterson 2012, 359) of player characters, such records are part of the slow ‘invention’ of role-playing games in the 1960s and 1970s, even though this invention does not directly coincide with the production of officially designed character sheets. The original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) (Gygax and Arneson 1974) did not include pre-printed sheets. However, such sheets were among the first content published in initial fanzines (Peterson 2013). As some of the earliest accessories produced for D&D, character sheets were also the topic of the first copyright debates regarding the game (Peterson 2012, 551–57).

[1.3] In this article, we want to explore in detail a contemporary version of the character record that has become a central part of online play culture in some parts of the indie TRPG community: the character keeper. As a shared and emphatically ‘digital’ character sheet, such character keepers are most often realized in the form of a Google Sheets spreadsheet.¹

2. What Is a Character Sheet?

[2.1] Various contributors to role-playing game studies (Morningstar [2014] 2016; Torner 2017) have noted the importance of the character sheet as one of the central pieces of physical “role playing materials” (Bienia 2016). Next to maybe only dice and maps, character sheets can be considered a crucial, if not the most essential, “player-facing” resource (Morningstar [2014] 2016, 127) in TRPGs. As the primary record of player investment, character sheets “constitute just as much of a role-playing game’s ‘text’ as the session itself” (Torner 2017). In addition to looking at the mostly transitory role-playing game session (Padol 2007; Jara 2013, 40) – at least until the recent rise of recorded actual plays (Jones 2021) and despite some longer traditions of detailed documentation of sessions like the Japanese “replay” (Kamm 2019, 628–30) –, analyzing character sheets helps us understand “role-playing games as media” (Torner 2017).

[2.2] With Konzack, one could say that character sheets are therefore much more than a “paratext” (Jara 2013) and arguably are “involved in the whole process and every aspect of TRPG[s]” as a crucial element that keeps the “textual machine” (Konzack 2013, 87) of the game session running. In the sense proposed by Hammer (2007, 70–71), they “function as primary, secondary and tertiary texts”² (Konzack 2013, 87) and represent “the central document from which the player relates to role-playing a character as regards to rules, setting, situation, and performance” (Konzack 2013, 87).

[2.3] Nevertheless, not much has been written academically about character sheets. Even the foundational Role-Playing Game Studies handbook (Zagal and Deterding 2018b) contains little in-depth reflection on the material aspects of dice, maps, and character sheets, despite their foundational importance for the practice of tabletop role-playing games (an exception is Bienia 2018). In both popular theorizing (see Torner 2018) and academic commentary, the most interest so far has been paid to the historical evolution of character sheets, in particular regarding the different editions of D&D (see, e.g., Peterson 2012, 365–71; Peterson 2013). Some notable exceptions to this lack of attention are Rients (2014) on intertextuality and margin notes, Morningstar ([2014] 2016) on visual design, as well as Bienia (2016), Banks, Bowman, and Wasserman (2018), and Webber (2019) on materiality.

[2.4] A character sheet is traditionally a piece of paper collecting information about a character in a role-playing game. It is often provided as a pre-made printed sheet, template to be photocopied, or downloadable PDF. It serves as a “record of static and dynamic character traits” (Bienia 2016, 143) and “defines the character to the participants” (Konzack 2013, 86), in particular to the character’s player and the game master. We will see how this second function is extended to all players simultaneously in the case of digital character keepers. Torner draws our attention to how character sheets, as “non-diegetic texts,” support the diegesis “by helping a player perform as a character within it” through making available both mechanical information and “deliberate emotional propositions” which “pull the player into the role” (Torner 2017). In this sense, they are “documents that seek instantiation and/or confirmation in the actual play” (Torner 2017; see also Konzack 2013, 93).

[2.5] Character sheets normally collect a large variety of information like a basic character description (name, physical features), skills, powers, and experience, combat skills, defensive mechanisms, equipment, companions, money, psychology and flaws, information on the character’s background, and possibly pictures and notes (Konzack 2013, 89). In addition, sheets often display “[n]on character material” like decorative art or the name of the game (Konzack 2013, 89). Morningstar ([2014] 2016, 129) has proposed to distinguish between “static”, “stable”, and “volatile” information recorded on a sheet. The first normally does not change (a character’s name, their appearance), the second is rarely adjusted, like once per game session (level, new skills, or moves), while the third is frequently updated (hit points, equipment, or stress indicators).

[2.6] Konzack’s concept of “characterology” describes how a character sheet’s design influences “how the character is played” (2013, 86). He argues that “character sheets are not neutral, but allow for a certain range of player behavior,” encouraging some and discouraging other activities (Konzack 2013, 86). In that sense, the information on the character sheet provides both “quantifiable measures of player-character qualities and player-character scripts for plausible actions and re-actions within the game world” (Konzack 2013, 88). One could say then that the design of a character sheet implements the characterology inherent in a particular game system (Konzack 2013, 86, 92). Since the 1970s, the design of character sheets also expressed a certain tension between universal sheets and specific sheets for particular character types or “classes” (Peterson 2013). In many indie TRPGs published in the 2010s, the “playbook,” as a particular style of sheet stemming from Apocalypse World (Baker 2010; Baker and Baker 2016), combines a specific sheet for each character type with the corresponding character options.

[2.7] The information codified on the character sheet also mediates between the agency implied in a particular character’s fictional role and their concrete ability to act in the game according to the rules. It can only ever partly represent their potentially relevant traits and “diegetic power” (Hammer et al. 2018, 453) irrespective of whether they are a queen or a peasant in the fiction. In fact, Rients (2014, 11) argues, on many sheets “there’s very little room for detailing the things that make a character really a character”, like their relationships to other player characters or NPCs (non-player characters) and additional information that players often make use of in play (see also Mackay 2001, 99).

[2.8] In sum, character sheets can be considered both a necessary and a defining feature of most TRPGs (Zagal and Deterding 2018a, 27). While a wide variety of “supporting props” (Zagal and Deterding 2018a, 31) are used in playing these games – like miniatures, battle maps, or 3D-terrain –, and most use dice, very few TRPGs, if any, can do without some form of character record (Bienia 2016, 128). As Torner writes, the “fluidity between written and performed character text is, in fact, specific to role-playing games as a medium” (Torner 2017). Filling out a character sheet (as a central stage of ‘character evolution,’ Bowman and Schrier 2018, 403), or being handed a pre-filled character sheet, can sometimes be the only prerequisite to play (Rients 2014, 9), as just-in-time explanations by other players can replace almost all knowledge of the rules.

[2.9] If the innovation of TRPGs was that they provided a “system for simulating a person” (Peterson 2013, 367), character sheets are what supports this “individuation” (Peterson 2013, 366) that forms the basis of play. Playing a single character representing the player in the fictional world still seems to be the most popular way TRPGs are designed and played (see also Montola 2009, 24). Thus, the character sheet can be understood as the primary interface (together with dice) between the players and the fictional world: it serves as both user interface and controller for the character of an individual player.

[2.10] One way of theorizing the character sheet, then, would be to understand it as both a “systemic” and a “compound element,” drawing on the theory of game elements proposed by Järvinen (2009). He understands the former as “the formal parts of a system” and the latter as “facilitators of the interaction between the systemic and behavioural elements” that also govern this interaction (Järvinen 2009, 29). Behavioral elements are the players themselves and the context in which a particular game is played. As a systemic element, the character sheet could be understood as a component, as an object that the player manipulates during the game. Contrastingly, as a compound element, the character sheet contains information and serves as an interface for the player to interact with the game system. It fulfills this role by creating connections between different game elements (Järvinen 2009, 87–88). “Information” as the “fuel of meaning” provides connections between game elements and can be distinguished regarding facts about events, agents, objects, and system (Järvinen 2009, 71). Concerning character sheets, the question of information management and the distinction between hidden and public information is relevant, as traditionally, character information was seen as somewhat private to the particular character’s player.³ “Interface” as a game element is often considered only regarding video games, where it points to both the physical controllers (keyboard, mouse, or gamepad) and the user interfaces on screen. But more generally, interface(s) can be thought of as the elements which provide “indirect access to the game system when direct access is impossible” (Järvinen 2009, 87). This applies not only to video game avatars but also to TRPGs, where such direct access to the characters in the individual and shared imagination is not possible. We argue that the character sheet is the most crucial game element that serves as such an interface and allows a player to ‘control’ their character. In this central role, it should be theorized in conjunction with other aspects of TRPG interfaces like miniatures and dice (see Torner 2016, 89).

[2.11] While the character sheet’s ‘connecting’ role has been recognized in role-playing game studies, these observations have not been integrated into a more extensive theory. For Rients (2014, 9), the character sheet is “the one tangible, persistent object that uniquely connects the player to the game activity” (see also Webber 2019). This statement highlights its particular role in contrast to other ‘props’ that might appear as compound elements in a TRPG session. Serving to focus the player’s imagination, most of these “role-playing materials” (Bienia 2016) – like miniatures, handouts, images, and maps – are shared. The character sheet, however, originally is not. This is also the case because of its concrete materiality. Typically, a paper sheet cannot be read and written on by all players simultaneously and together. This is different not necessarily for all digital character sheets but in particular for digital character keepers. In any case, the sheet of paper used for a particular character is linked to this fictional entity in a “material-ludic relation” (Bienia 2016, 144), with the adjusting of entries on the sheet directly translating into potential changes in the imagination (Bienia 2016, 145). A character sheet thus builds, maintains, and records “affective connections” (Webber 2019). It is also often described as taking on the quality of ‘being’ the character it represents, as in “can you hand me character name,” pointing to the sheet (Rients 2014, 9; Bienia 2016, 144). As a physical object, it defines the “personal area” of the player at the table (Bienia 2016, 144–46; Morningstar [2014] 2016, 130) and, over time, displays “material traces” of its use (Bienia 2016, 145). Serving as both a “representation and a storage medium,” it has an archival quality and implies the possibility (though never the certainty) of future play (Webber 2019). Some games even build on and play with these material connections; for example, when in the apocalyptic Ten Candles (Dewey 2015), the player is instructed to burn the index card representing one of their character’s traits after using it. Similarly, during a deadly introductory “funnel” adventure in Dungeon Crawl Classics (Goodman 2012) – where a player typically plays multiple level-0 characters – character sheets might be torn up by the game master in an act of finality after the character has died.

3. What Is a Digital Character Keeper?

[3.1] It is, of course, possible to use paper character sheets while playing TRPGs online using audio or video chat (which people did, especially in the early years of online play, and still do). Still, it is not surprising that many players had wanted to (also) store their character information digitally when they started playing online.⁴ Although we cannot explore the more extended general history of digital character sheets here, we want to contribute to research on this topic. We focus on one popular and important aspect of contemporary online play culture, especially in the indie TRPG community: digital character keepers,⁵ most often created using Google Sheets. The primary purpose of a character keeper is to gather all data about all of a particular game’s characters in one place.⁶ It becomes the original source of information for online play, i.e., there usually are no additional private sheets, digital or paper. In discussing character keepers in this article, we begin by outlining their characteristics and the pragmatics of their use, followed by elements of a short history of the format, a description of some historical and contemporary examples, and a systematic exploration of contemporary player and designer theorizing on this topic.

[3.2] Google Sheets is an online spreadsheet program (like Microsoft Excel) that allows users to create and edit complex spreadsheets collaboratively and in real-time, mainly through its web application. Each spreadsheet can contain many individual sheets, each represented by a tab at the bottom of the browser window. Cell functions allow for coding complex applications within these documents. Spreadsheets thus combine the simplicity and visual appeal of a table structure with the possibility of backend coding and data management.

[3.3] When used for a character keeper, the Google Sheets spreadsheet file (what in Excel would be called a workbook) regularly contains several individual spreadsheets, either one sheet per character or a single sheet for all characters of a session or campaign (cf. fig. 1). In addition, there often are a variety of other sheets for additional information and the backend data used on the other tab(s). During the game session, players update values and information in real-time. All players and the facilitator have editing access to the keeper.

Fig. 1: Screenshots of a relatively simple 2013 character keeper (empty) for Dungeon World (LaTorra and Koebel 2012) and a highly complex 2021 keeper (in use) for Brindlewood Bay (Cordova 2020) (character images from Pexels.com, free to use).⁷

[3.4] A character keeper, then, is like a shared binder of character sheets. Additional tabs contain setting information, rules excerpts, a list of non-player characters, relationship maps, and safety tools. Since all information is usually accessible to all participants in a session (with the possible exception of GM notes), players can look up details that would be mostly inaccessible to them on the other players’ character records when using paper sheets. Depending on the play style, this can contribute to smooth gameplay and, even more so, create opportunities for collaborative narration in which players pro-actively address each other’s characters’ traits and backgrounds. The highly structured spreadsheet format also allows players to easily cross-compare entries (e.g., skill values) or plan an effective strategy in a fight. Many newer keepers also include ways of easily incorporating character portraits (most often using an image the player found online), providing a shared visual reference for the group. Using a character keeper thus can reduce all players’ mental load.

[3.5] While they at first glance simply function as digital equivalents of character sheets, character keepers therefore go beyond them in at least the following regards: 1) they serve as shared sheets, allowing all players to refer to the information on all player characters simultaneously – with many keepers not presenting each player character separately but displaying all of them on a single tab; 2) many sophisticated keepers take advantage of the programming interface of Google Sheets to provide functions like drop-down selections for character options (or even step-by-step guided character creation), real time calculation of stats and other information, or representations of relationships between the player characters; 3) keepers often include tabs for tracking shared session and campaign notes between players and facilitators (lists of NPCs, ongoing mysteries, etc.); 4) scenario and game state information for the facilitator is often also tracked on tabs in the keeper; 5) some (especially newer) keepers include a lot of the reference information needed to play the game (basic rules, skill lists, moves etc.), often making additional reference materials unnecessary; 6) supplementary tools that facilitate play like safety tools are often integrated in a separate tab and also make use of the programming possibilities of Google Sheets; 7) the keeper might also collect links to other accessories used during online play like a digital dice roller or additional visualization tools (Google Drawings or Virtual Table Tops [VTTs] like Roll20).

[3.6] These (and other additional) characteristics of digital character keepers are not simply technical differences that differentiate them from analog character sheets. As we already touched upon above, they directly affect the play culture that has developed around them. Also, in many respects, these features distinguish character keepers from other forms of digital character sheets, both simple character records and sophisticated sheets available within VTTs like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. While, for example, automatic calculations are a feature of most character sheets on VTTs, in the end, these are most often still designed as digital ‘translations’ of paper sheets. In contrast to these ‘skeuomorphic’ designs that mimic the characteristics of paper sheets in a digital environment,⁸ many character keepers help envision what a character record can look like that is designed as digital from the ground up.

[3.7] How are character keepers actually used in online play? Sometimes they are available in the form of a link to a Google Sheets spreadsheet on the website of the designer or publisher of a particular TRPG. But most often, character keepers are ‘unofficial’ creations provided by GMs and players as links to a ‘master’ spreadsheet template available from online forums or other community spaces. The online TRPG community “The Gauntlet” curates the most extensive collection.⁹ When a group decides to play a game online, the facilitator opens the master template and makes a copy of the keeper, saving it in their own Google Drive, Google’s online file storage platform. After changing permissions to allow all people who have the link to edit the spreadsheet, the GM shares this link with players. They then generate and enter their character information either before or during the (first) session. While playing, players keep a browser tab with the character keeper open (often in a prominent and always visible section of their desktop), constantly refer to it for information, update the character record, and use it to keep track of the progression of play.

[3.8] It is important to note that while character keepers have become an important aspect of play culture in a particular section of the indie TRPG community, they only represent one aspect of online play practices. If we transfer Bienia’s perspective on the material practice of paper character sheets – which, for example, includes paying attention to “the position of character sheets on the table” (2016, 153) – to digital character keepers, in studying the online play they help facilitate we would also have to take into account how people organize their digital play spaces more generally. How do players position the browser window with the character keeper in relation to a possible use of audio or video chat software? How many (if any) other browser tabs and additional resources, like PDFs etc., do they use for reference? What difference does a multiple monitor setup make? In addition, one would have to pay attention to how players combine digital tools with analog instruments like, e.g., notebooks, pencils, and physical dice.¹⁰

4. Elements of a Short History of the Character Keeper

[4.1] Tracing the history of the tools used for online TRPG play in 2021 is not a straightforward endeavor. In the 2010s, the rise of Google Plus (a social network operated by Google from 2011 to 2019) as a significant communication platform for (indie) TRPG players and designers accelerated an international exchange of tools and ideas. In the same year that Google Plus was launched, Google Hangouts became the first video call service that allowed free conference calls for more than two parties, leading to widespread adoption of the service for online TRPG play. Together, the existence of Google Plus as a common communication platform (later supplemented by other chat tools like Slack) and Google Hangouts as a free play arena suggested (at least to some groups) to also use Google Docs, a collaborative online word processor, for keeping shared text documents. These first documents were often just notes on a play session or ongoing campaign. The exchange of players between gaming groups (facilitated by the new possibilities of online play) and discussions on Google Plus on how to keep such notes led to the emergence and diffusion of early forms of ‘best practices.’

[4.2] While it seemed logical to share common information on setting and play history among the group, in the beginning, there was some hesitation in transferring character details to a shared document, as the paper character sheet was somehow considered ‘sacred.’ As the master record of a particular character, it firmly remained under the control of the respective player. For example, it seemed that any volatile information like hit points needed to be closely tracked on one original source that only one player could edit. But character information slowly crept into the collaborative session notes, as it was very convenient to use this shared document as a central player-facing resource during gameplay.

[4.3] Early attempts at creating what later became established as the format of the character keeper soon tried to replace paper character sheets fully. The availability of Google Sheets as free software accelerated this development. Since many players already had a Google account to play online via Google Hangouts, additional Google apps were often an obvious choice. They became the standard for sharing TRPG notes and finally for creating character keepers.

[4.4] Some of the oldest Google Sheets templates that could be called ‘character keepers’ in the sense that we discuss here probably were the ones designed by Shawn McCarthy back in 2013. McCarthy seems to have created the first keeper on June 11, 2013 for a very popular TRPG at the time, Dungeon World – an indie take on D&D. In addition to a simple tab with the information for all characters, this keeper provides a “GM Summary,” where the most important volatile information (Armor, Hit Points, Conditions) is collected.¹¹ Another one is a simple single-tab spreadsheet that includes all necessary character information for Fate Core (Donoghue, Hicks, and Balsera 2013). McCarthy also added keepers for Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts (Alder 2012), as well as Mouse Guard (Crane and Petersen 2008) and The Quiet Year (Alder 2013) – which also used other Google apps like Drawings and Slides. Reflecting on designing these early character keepers, he said in February 2021:

[4.6] The concept quickly spread through the part of the indie TRPG community, which played online.¹² At the same time, other local scenes experimented with using Google’s apps for playing online. The German TRPG community on Google Plus, for example, started exploring possibilities to track and store character information in collaborative online docs, as we will see in the next section.

[4.7] In December 2015, Jason Cordova created a folder on Google Drive to collect character keepers and other templates (“Play Aids”) that were used by the online TRPG community “The Gauntlet.” The Gauntlet Play Aids Folder, as it now is referred to, has since grown into the largest free online play resource for indie TRPGs, collecting character keepers for over 400 games as of June 2021.¹³

[4.8] Over the next few years, character keepers became a staple for online play in various indie TRPG communities.¹⁴ The Gauntlet published several blog posts providing an introduction to the format and various design tips (Barford 2019a; Barford 2019b; Barford 2019c), attempting to initiate a larger conversation about the advantages of the form and common challenges in creating keepers. Keepers also showed up as part of games released through the indie marketplace itch.io. In 2019, they started to be used for online LARPs (or LAOGs, Live-Action Online Games) as well.

[4.9] In 2020, online TRPG play became much more prevalent, primarily because of the COVID-19 pandemic. More and more games, particularly in various indie TRPG communities, are now run using character keepers.¹⁵ In mid-2020, the character keepers for Trophy Dark (Ross 2018) and Trophy Gold (Ross 2019) that Drew Doucet created probably were the first keepers built ‘professionally’ as paid design work. Currently, new keepers seem to appear almost every day, both around the indie TRPG spaces somehow connected to The Gauntlet, which popularized the format, and in adjacent, unconnected spaces.¹⁶

[4.10] In parallel to this history of the development of the character keeper format since the early 2010s, which we can only roughly sketch here, equipment for audio and video conferences was becoming more widespread among TRPG players, and online play in itself became more popular. With the rise of Actual Plays (the recording or live streaming of TRPG sessions for public consumption), playing TRPGs online and the resulting aesthetics of such sessions were normalized for a new generation of role-players as well as for long-standing members of the community who moved some or much of their play online. Recording a session was simple, for example, due to Google’s Hangouts On Air service, which allowed easy recording of a Hangouts call to a YouTube channel. All of this contributed to the success of the digital character keeper as a decisively digital TRPG play aid.

5. Glimpses of Exemplary Historical and Contemporary Character Keepers

[5.1] Analyzing historical and contemporary character keepers as prototypical examples can demonstrate their evolution and current role in the indie TRPG community. It highlights keepers’ tangible impact on play culture and the performative ‘role-playing text’ (Stenros 2004) that emerges during the session.

[5.2] One of the oldest proto-keepers was used in a campaign one of the authors of this article (G. Reininghaus) played in (see fig. 2). Created in 2012, it is in German and started as a session diary for a long-running online campaign (over twenty sessions) set in Aventurien, the fantasy world of the classical German TRPG Das Schwarze Auge (‘The Black Eye,’ Kiesow 1984). However, the gaming group actually used the rules of Savage Worlds (Hensley 2003), a semi-traditional universal TRPG system in the style of 1990s point-based-character-creation games.

[5.3] This Google Docs document, a precursor in spirit to the later Google Sheets character keepers, contains only a small portion of the actual character sheets that were still mostly kept in paper form next to the computer. The document lists so-called “hindrances” (“Handicaps” in the German translation of Savage Worlds), character flaws that all players can ‘play against’ to bring them into the narrative. The player whose character’s hindrances become relevant in the fiction can earn a game resource called “benny.” For that reason, the group considered it essential to have at least this information at everybody’s disposal.

Fig. 2: “Notes on ‘By their own grace’,” Screenshot from the 2012 Google Doc listing the “Handicaps” for the characters of a Savage Worlds campaign.

[5.4] A model for a whole generation of keepers was the 2013 template for Dungeon World already mentioned in section 3. This keeper uses a one-column-per-character structure that produces a very spreadsheet-like look which many later keepers also adopted (see fig. 3). The top row (using colors to distinguish the characters) is fixed to keep the character’s name visible when scrolling. The “Notes” function is used to provide rules information like how to calculate the maximum hit points for a character.¹⁷ This keeper is still very basic but already uses some automation like calculating modifiers from the character’s stats (entered manually) and summing up experience points. It also contains a second tab for the GM with basic stable and volatile character information. In mid-2016, Rich Rogers created an updated version of this keeper, which included auto-populating fields for the basic playbook moves.¹⁸

Fig. 3: Screenshot of a detail of McCarthy’s 2013 keeper for Dungeon World.

[5.5] In a 2015 keeper for Monsterhearts,¹⁹ another Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game²⁰ about teenage monsters and paranormal romance, the Dungeon World keeper’s structure and design are still visible. This document, created by Jason Cordova, is clearly based on McCarthy’s original 2013 template for Monsterhearts (a fork of the Dungeon World keeper) but has been updated with additional functionality. The character tab is still very basic but now uses drop-down menus to choose the values of the four stats and track harm and experience (see fig. 4). The possible values for the stats are drawn from a separate “DATA” tab (a typical structure for spreadsheet applications). Such pre-populated menus help players in following the rules or provide inspiration during character creation. Later keepers, like the updated Dungeon World one mentioned above, then use programmed formulas to pull in more complex information (like the rules text for specific character abilities) or automatically calculate some values depending on the entries in other fields. A second tab in the Monsterhearts keeper (already present in the 2013 version) visualizes an American high school classroom that represents the starting situation of the game. During play, it is used to track player characters, information on non-player characters, and relationships. A third tab (“Misc”) invites players to add additional notes (for example, on what they want to see and don’t see in the game, an early informal safety tool).

Fig. 4: Screenshot of the drop-down menu in a 2015 keeper for Monsterhearts.

[5.6] Many (especially newer) keepers contain a separate tab for safety tools. The Gauntlet Play Aids folder offers a standard, accessibly designed template for the tool “Lines & Veils,” which allows players to select topics they want to avoid completely (“Line”) or wish not to be played out in detail (“Veil”).²¹ The template can be used as a standalone sheet or can be copied into an existing keeper (see fig. 5). Checkboxes allow players to indicate their preferences on how to treat particular topics, which are then highlighted in the color of the most restrictive column selected. Other keepers include additional safety tools like the X-Card or Script Change.²²

Fig. 5: Screenshot of The Gauntlet’s 2020 “Lines & Veils” template, optimized for legibility for vision-impaired people.

[5.7] Some keepers offer separate tabs to store additional information about the collaboratively created game world. Often, players and GM jointly enter these details, i.e., it is expected that everybody adds images, expands on details, and updates the information, etc. In the keeper for BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home (Nedjadi 2019), for example, each player creates two NPCs connected to their PC with an image, name, pronouns, and a short descriptive text (see fig. 6).

Fig. 6: Screenshot of the NPC tab of a 2019 keeper used for a session of BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home (images replaced with free to use alternatives from Pixabay.com).

[5.8] While Google Sheets has become the de-facto standard application for character keeper development and many newer examples continue to iterate on existing designs, there is a parallel history of using other tools for similar purposes in the second half of the 2010s.

[5.9] An example from early 2015 that uses Google Drawings is the keeper for the Fate Core setting Save Game (Wieland 2014). It is probably one of the first that includes the rules text for core mechanics, allowing play without (constantly) referencing the rulebook (see fig. 7). It is also an early example of a visual design that tries to reflect the setting’s atmosphere. As the game is about old-school video games, mechanics are represented by coins, diamonds, hearts, and stars – evoking resources from platformers like Super Mario Bros. (Miyamoto 1985).

Fig. 7: Screenshot of the 2015 keeper for a German-language session of Save Game.

[5.10] Other keepers around 2015, especially for rules-light systems like Cthulhu Dark (Walmsley 2010), also included much of the mechanical information necessary to play the game, with later and especially some of the most recent keepers featuring multiple tabs with reference information on mechanics, even for more complex indie TRPGs like the recently released The Between (Cordova 2021a; fig. 8).²³

Fig. 8: Screenshot of the 2021 keeper for The Between.

[5.11] Despite many advances, in the keeper for Trophy Gold from 2021²⁴ the structure of the 2013 Dungeon World template can still be identified. Including decorations like the game’s logo on a dedicated front page and adopting some of the color schemes of the published text, this professionally designed keeper – its creation was a paid effort by the publisher to make online play easier – features a formula-controlled tutorial which provides a step-by-step guide through the character creation process. There are tabs for additional character information, a bestiary (a particular mechanical aspect of Trophy Gold), and a data tab with a long list of names, inspiration for character backgrounds, and starting equipment (fig. 9). Incidentally, the official PDF character sheet for the sister game Trophy Dark (fig. 10), a column-based layout, was partly based on the aesthetic of character keepers, taking a future conversion to Google Sheets into account during the sheet’s design (Jesse Ross 2021, personal correspondence).

Fig. 9: Screenshot of the official 2021 keeper for Trophy Gold.

Fig. 10: The column-based
layout of the official
Trophy Dark character sheet.

[5.12] Character keepers also can take on a much more central role in game design. The keeper for World of Aventurien: Liska Hack (a 2019 hack of World of Dungeons [Harper 2012] created by Reininghaus, 2019b) was built to run one specific Das Schwarze Auge module, In Liskas Fängen (Hlawatsch 1995).²⁵ The game was developed entirely in the keeper and does not exist outside of it. Moreover, the players contributed to its final shape as the game rules were adapted during the playtests. Some games even use character keepers to implement mechanics that would require complex technological solutions to reproduce them offline. The keeper for the Live Action Online Game (LAOG) Outscored (Reininghaus 2019a, fig. 11)²⁶ uses conditional formatting to color each player’s screen depending on their character’s “social score” – which changes depending on their actions in the game. As there is a rule that the only light illuminating the players’ faces in the video call should be the light emitted by the monitor, this creates a direct link between the features of the keeper and the atmosphere of the game.

Fig. 11: Screenshot of the 2019 keeper for Outscored.

6. What Makes Character Keepers Popular? – Player and Designer Theorizing in the Contemporary Indie TRPG Scene

[6.1] Debates about character keepers among designers, GMs, and players are taking place at the (virtual) table during and around game sessions, but also in blog posts and online forums, on podcasts, and in actual play videos. Analyzing this material demonstrates how users reflect on the development of character keepers, the practices of using them for playing online, and their various roles in gameplay.

[6.2] Player theorizing is an important aspect of the culture of role-playing games. As Torner (2018) highlighted, players’ and designers’ “para-academic” theories have contributed significantly to TRPG discourse. Historically, the line between players, designers, and what Torner (2018, 192, drawing on Hills [2002]) calls “aca-fans” – academics who are both fans and scholars of TRPGs – has been blurry, and much of what once started as player theorizing found its way into academic theory. In a certain sense, then, the reflections we present here are at times little more than a systematization of these discussions within the contemporary indie TRPG scene.

[6.3] Most player and designer theorizing on character keepers – as a “killer app in online play” (Beakley 2021) – focuses on aspects that appear as directly beneficial to either the gameplay or the design of TRPGs. The following quote from Rich Rogers represents the gameplay aspect well. He describes his fondness for character keepers on the podcast Diceology in these words:

[6.5] He highlights the support keepers provide for collaboration at the table and how they facilitate aspects of gameplay that go beyond what is easily possible with analog tools. Jamila Nedjadi emphasizes the role of keepers in game design and playtesting:

[6.7] Moe Poplar discusses his use of character keepers in game design on the podcast +1 Forward:

[6.9] Both Nedjadi and Poplar focus on the advantages keepers provide for playtesting, their easy availability, and their versatility as a tool for game design.

[6.10] Starting from these more general reflections, the discussion about character keepers can be systematized according to the different ‘frames’ of TRPG play. Frame analysis in the tradition of sociologist Erving Goffman (1974) has been a prominent analytical perspective in role-playing game studies, building on Fine’s (1983) and Mackay’s (2001) pioneering work. We follow Grouling Cover (Grouling Cover 2010, 89) in distinguishing between the social frame of player interaction, the game frame of play, and the narrative frame of the fictional world (see also Hedge 2021, 62–66; Friedman 2021, 190–91). Slightly adapting a typology proposed by Mackay (2001, 56), the people at the table are addressed as persons in the social frame, as players in the game frame, and as their characters in the fictional world in the narrative frame.

[6.11] Regarding the social frame, an often-mentioned advantage of using a character keeper is organizational. Due to being on Google Sheets, keepers are described as easy to access without installing additional software or creating accounts (players do not even need a Google account to use a keeper) (Barford 2019a; Gurantz and Astadan 2021, 05:15-05:27). In addition to being simple repositories of character information, more complex keepers can be considered full “campaign managers, with tabs for every kind of data you could imagine: NPCs, locations, timelines, whatever” (Beakley 2020). Collecting all important play information and organizing it neatly, they serve as a shared source of truth about the characters and the fictional world.

[6.12] Keepers also help manage expectations and relationships between players, an additional aspect of the social frame, in particular by making it easy to use safety tools in online play. Especially in the indie TRPG scene, their use has become popular (see the TTRPG Safety Toolkit, Shaw and Bryant-Monk 2019). Many character keepers include separate tabs for this, as Poplar highlights:

[6.14] Using programming functions can also make safety tools easy to use by automatically highlighting selected options (Gurantz and Astadan 2021, 48:05–48:39). Similarly, using a keeper might make it easier to remember everyone’s names and preferred pronouns (Barford 2019a), an advantage, especially when playing online with strangers.

[6.15] If we look at the game frame, a large variety of different aspects are discussed when expressing how keepers support play. Probably the most often mentioned “unique advantage of online character keepers” (Barford 2019b) is that having shared access to the information for all players’ characters (possibly even on the same spreadsheet tab) facilitates collaborative play (Barford 2019b; Beakley 2021) – as stressed by Rogers in the first quote at the beginning of this section. Being aware of all characters’ backgrounds, ‘drives,’ or ‘bonds’ makes it easier to incorporate these elements into the narrative. This awareness, however, could also lead to problematic forms of optimization, as one GM reports about his first experience of using a character keeper: “since everyone can see everyone’s sheet, we have a tendency to drop into ‘who would be best at this thing?’” (Durrell 2020).

[6.16] A second advantage often mentioned that relates to the game frame is the possibilities afforded by automation, something common to digital character sheets and an important feature of keepers compared to paper sheets. Rogers, for example, highlights automation’s various possibilities:

[6.18] At the same time, he cautions that too much automation might make things too complicated for players (Brown and Rogers 2020, 05:20–05:27; see also Shelkey, Rogers, and Poplar 2021, 09:59–10:09). He points out that designing a keeper (like designing a paper sheet; see Morningstar [2014] 2016) is always a question of accounting for the concrete user experience. Still, according to Poplar, keepers can make complex systems easy to handle:

[6.20] Helping players deal with some of the mechanical crunch of playing a TRPG is something digital character sheets on VTTs can also provide. Nevertheless, designers often mention the ease with which Google Sheets makes such forms of automation possible even for complex mechanical aspects of a system. For example, in the official keeper for the recently released The Between, the mechanical aspects of certain moves and some game elements like the switching between phases of play are programmed into the keeper so that players don’t need to track them separately or consult the rule book (Cordova 2021b; Cordova 2021c).

[6.21] A third advantage often mentioned is how character keepers help “streamline and simplify” (Barford 2019a) the creation of characters. According to Tomer Gurantz, a well-organized keeper allows you to “easily go through this thing from top to bottom […] and just create your character” (Gurantz and Astadan 2021, 04:29–04:34). One recent trend is to combine this with automation and support, walking players through character creation step-by-step (see Cordova 2021d). Keepers are thus described as helping to “reduce manual input of character info to increase the ease-of-use […] and decrease the length of character creation” (Barford 2019c).²⁷ In addition, this reduction of the need to refer to the rulebook does not only make character creation easier but also extends to the rest of the session, as some keepers incorporate all rules needed for play (at least on the players’ side), as in the case of the keeper for The Between (Cordova 2021e).

[6.22] Such advantages regarding gameplay (e.g., drop-downs for the selection of character options, Donogh McCarthy 2021, personal correspondence) are also often discussed as helping people learn the game in the first place, as keepers highlight the elements that players need to focus on (Gurantz and Astadan 2021, 04:34–04:53). In addition, their creation and design are also described as a good way of learning how to run a game:

[6.24] In the same vein, creating a keeper might help a GM better understand what parts of a system players have to know about during a session (Barford 2019b). This is described as very useful, especially in the indie TRPG community, where it is customary to play many different games over a short period of time. Similarly, keepers are seen as helping GMs prepare for a game session:

[6.26] How a well-built and organized keeper allows an excellent overview over all important aspects of an ongoing series of sessions, GMs argue, makes it an ideal tool for preparation.

[6.27] An interesting additional aspect related to the game frame is the question of dice rolling. While a variety of methods for including random number generation and dice rolling into character keepers have been proposed and tried out, most of these methods either do not work, only work some of the time, or are cumbersome to use (Brown and Rogers 2020, 5:30–6:45; Harvey et al. 2021, 19:54–21:57). Here, the needs of the TRPG community and the needs for the majority of Google Sheets users are not aligned – the software is not made for TRPGs but is primarily oriented towards other use cases.

[6.28] Concerning the narrative frame and the collaborative creation of the fictional world through the conversation at the table, character keepers are seen as helping create a story in which each of the player characters’ special abilities and other narrative elements are regularly incorporated. From the GM’s side, Rogers describes this as follows when reflecting on how a return to playing around a physical table after the COVID-19 pandemic might mean abandoning the use of keepers:

[6.30] As he describes it, keepers play a role in connecting the game frame and the narrative frame, providing inspiration and prompts for GMs and players on where to take the narrative next. For Greg Gelder, this relates to a general function of character sheets, reinforced by the shared nature of the character keeper:

[6.32] In this way, the information in a keeper can directly lead to a player or GM framing a particular scene or taking the narrative into a direction that resonates with one or more of the characters’ backgrounds or abilities, which helps to “make the ecosystem of the game immediate and present during play” (Donogh McCarthy 2021, personal correspondence). While in many traditional TRPGs, narrative speech is “most often spoken by the DM” (Grouling Cover 2010, 103), many indie TRPGs offer plenty of opportunities for players to take on the role of a narrator of events, proposing and setting up scenes for their own and other characters, which, as is argued by Rogers and Gelder above, is facilitated by the use of a character keeper.

[6.33] The role of (the creation of) keepers in learning how to play and run a particular game points to an additional important aspect of the contemporary debate that goes beyond play at the table: the design of character keepers and their role in game design more generally (Barford 2019b).²⁸

[6.34] Designing a keeper, Donogh McCarthy notes (2021, personal correspondence), involves at minimum figuring out “what the player should have to play their character,” “what might be useful to have during character generation,” and finally, “what might be key for the other players to see about them.” As we have already seen, in most cases, one of the fundamental design decisions is putting all characters in columns on a single tab or having a separate tab for each one. Lowell Francis proposes the former:

[6.36] In contrast, Nedjadi describes how for them, the choice for a single or multi-tab layout depends on the concrete mechanical nature of the particular system:

[6.38] The design approach can also vary depending on whether a keeper is designed primarily for one-shot play or for running longer campaigns – which, for example, influences whether options for character advancement have to be included (Francis 2021, personal correspondence). Another important question is the visual design of the keeper, like the use of particular fonts to “communicate the feel of the game” (Nedjadi 2021, personal correspondence).

[6.39] It is important to note that the practice of character keeper design often involves copying an existing keeper and working off of this template by revising and reworking it according to the needs of a particular game. In this sense, today’s character keepers, in particular many of the most popular ones, are the result of a very complex process of borrowing and cross-pollination between a sizeable number of players, GMs, and game designers (see Shelkey, Rogers, and Poplar 2021, 08:21–09:49). Sometimes certain innovations or concerns (e.g., ‘freezing’ in place the top rows with basic information like character names to be always visible, separate fields for player and character pronouns, or a tab for safety tools) are picked up quickly by other designers and spread among different keepers. In contrast, at other times, new or experimental additions stay limited to only a few keepers (e.g., complex solutions for random number generation or, at least until now, most attempts at accessible design).

[6.40] Most keepers are still the product of players and GMs who create them ad-hoc, according to their specific needs. Still, the role of the keeper creator might become more professionalized in the next few years, as recently several professionally developed keepers have been designed, particularly for games released by Gauntlet Publishing. In any case, the character keeper designer is now a new role (and new skillset) that designers and producers of indie TRPGs could take on themselves or consider budgeting for, as a game is more likely to be picked up by online TRPG players when a keeper is readily available.

[6.41] The second design-related issue regarding character keepers is, as described at the beginning of this section by Nedjadi and Poplar, the use of character keepers and keeper design as a tool for designing the game itself. As a potentially complete repository of all the important elements of a game, playtesting and revising a game during the design phase can be significantly facilitated by ‘designing in the keeper.’ Francis (2021, personal correspondence) describes this process during the design of Hearts of Wulin (Francis 2021) as follows: “I sketched things out, built a keeper, and then used that to figure out what else I needed and to see all the elements in parallel.” Another often-mentioned aspect is that quickly designing a hack of a particular game and having it ready for a playtest is made easier by using a character keeper. Over the last years, Rich Rogers (2021, personal correspondence), for example, created a variety of hacks for existing TRPGs, reworking them for the Star Wars universe. Many of these games only exist within their particular character keeper.²⁹

7. Conclusion

[7.1] This article has attempted to provide an overview of the emergence and contemporary use of character keepers as digital play aids in the indie TRPG community. At the same time, analyzing their actual effects on play culture is hardly possible by studying keepers in isolation outside of actual play. In this sense, while we hopefully were able to provide a detailed overview of the characteristics of character keepers, many of the concrete ways that their affordances affect play culture can only really be studied by observing gaming as an activity (Stenros and Waern 2011). Therefore, we suggest that future research should be concerned with the wide variety of ways in which character keepers are used during concrete gaming sessions. The rise in online TRPG play, which their emergence is a part of, contributes to the realization that these games have always been a multimodal and transmedial phenomenon (Hedge and Grouling 2021a, 8–10). At the same time, the broad success of recording actual play TRPG sessions both as professional entertainment productions and amateur endeavors provides a much broader empirical basis for studying their play cultures than has ever been available before.³⁰ Research into digital play aids and TRPG online play more generally is really just beginning.