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Self-hosted DnD 5e Charsheets
I’ve been looking for a good system for my friends and I to share TTRPG character sheets (primarily DnD) with one another.
We’re not interested in a full-digital VTT, but the ecosystem is pretty fragmented for charsheet-only apps (many immature and abandoned projects). Self-hosted webapp makes the most sense for our needs, but I’m open to suggestions for some other sync method that’s not PDF-based.
This seems like a viable candidate:
https://github.com/Orcpub/orcpub
…but I’d love to hear better options if anyone’s found em.
The reason the D&D 5e character sheet market is so bad (fragmented, immature projects as you mentioned) is because once a good website hits critical mass of being good, WotC sends them a takedown request. Orcpub is an example of this, they used to host their own builder that was fantastic.
In general any frameworks that you can find have to be very careful not to tread over the line of only using SRD content, because using anything that's even part of the PHB or other very basic documentation is copyright of WotC.
I'm not really here to start a fight over what is copyright infringement and what isn't, just hopefully shedding a bit of light on why the market for it is so bad as you've found.
For my own 5e sheets, I either export them from a Foundry character I make (full VTT and not what you're looking for) or usually the person running the campaign owns content on D&D Beyond which also does not meet the self host requirement.
Best of luck in your search. Would love to see if you are able to come up with something that hasn't already been hit by the copyright bat.
Edit: if you are playing Pathfinder 2e, that doesn't have the same issues since all of their content is freely available on Archives of Nethys. There is an excellent character builder that can be found at https://pathbuilder2e.com/
Now that 5E is on another license after all the WOTC things that happened last year, has that changed, in terms of creating apps for character sheets? I'm not familiar with it at all, would love to learn.
Only the core of the game is under an open license, so the situation for character builders hasn't changed. Different license, but same content.
Vast majority of D&D character options are not available under an open license.
Ugh that sucks, it feels so strange that characters aren't the core of the game though lol. Interesting to know though, thank you for the info!
I mean, the core of the game is technically enough to play and have a good time, especially if you admit homebrew and improv.
WotC's value proposition is a bunch of character options, spells, magic items, and campaign storylines that have been pre-tested and balanced. You have to pay for that, that's fair.
I agree it's frustrating that I've already purchased it in the form of hard-copies of all the books, I like to own the things I purchase, but it's obviously difficult to import that data from paper into some digital form. You can do it if you're persistent though, just add all the official content as homebrew. DnD Beyond's value proposition is they've already done all that for you. Again, you have to pay for that. I don't really care to pay for the content twice, though, so I don't use it.
It's worse if you want to use character options that aren't in the PHB or DMG - for example my last character was an Artificer, which was a whole hassle since my DM wanted to use DND Beyond and didn't have Tasha's on it. Another player already had the "master" subscription or whatever it's called and was able to share the content with my DM and she let me play that class.
Instead I recommend playing as if you used pen and paper, but in some digital medium. I currently use an e-paper notebook for this, but before that, I used the form-fillable PDF character sheet and Obsidian for notes. There are also many spreadsheets and custom-made character sheets available online.
If you reject WotC or DND Beyond's value proposition then you don't get that convenience. That's fair.
I bit the bullet, and made a webapp for a small group to save/share character sheets for any game. It's really minimalist, but highly effective: the main editing UI is a base-64 encoded png of the character sheet, with a user-provided JSON mapping to lay out text inputs in relative coordinates over that image.
Game names and logos redacted to avoid Pinkerton scrutiny.
I haven't implemented the "Save as new..." button yet, and the checkboxes are janky since I was laying out rectangles manually, but other than that, it's basically feature complete.