The first time I played D&D and was faced with the task of tracking character information on a character sheet, all I could think was, 'this needs to happen in plain text'.
I saw potential advantages of tracking the character development and campaign notes with version control, and enjoying retro ASCII-art in the process, all from the mild comfort of my favourite text editor. The alternative seemed to be to track character information in a form-fillable PDF (for an awful user experience) or on paper (probably also ideal, but alas, I lacked a printer for the template).
To my surprise, a quick search turned up no ASCII-based character sheet templates. So, I tried my hand at making one based on the standard PDF. This repository contains the ASCII template that is the result of my attempt, and an example populated up to the end of my first-ever D&D session.
I don't really use this character sheet. Of course, it's a little painful to manually maintain the text alignment.
These days, there are better alternatives to form-fillable PDFs (my friends like D&D Beyond, though I'm not a big fan; I use handwritten notes on a custom template on my reMarkable e-paper tablet, which even has its advantages over paper).
Besides, this was made before I had played much so it's probably missing some important features.
Anyway, someone might find this cool/useful.
you have a problem matt, you need to seek help ---a true friend
wow the memories ---Rayvwen (yes, the e-celeb)
Some of the ASCII art is not originally my own. Signatures are included where possible. More examples with signatures are in scratch.txt. Unfortunately, links to the original sources are lost.
Otherwise, made with 💜 by Matt.