Greetings, everyone.
I find myself with a somewhat vexing problem of sorts.
See, I've created quite a few characters (and have, in the very near future, plans to make at least five more) for the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons. To allow others to view (or scrutinize) these manifestations of concept through fluff and mechanics, I have thus far resorted to various character sheets of wildly varying styles and features discovered over the internet.
Due to the way I make characters (customize everything the campaign/system I work under allows me to customize, eschew 'traditional' choices at every turn, make a tentative planned progression for said character from level 1 to level 20, etc.), it's been increasingly difficult to find sheets (especially for relatively mechanically complex characters) that effectively allow me to represent my characters the way I feel I truly need to.
Having thought on the matter for a while now, I've come to the conclusion that perhaps I should make my own character sheet, one would serve to represent any potential character that I could possibly think up without issue minor or major.
Alas, it is here- at the very start of the character sheet creation process- where the problem ambushes and brutally murders my efforts, robbing them of any possessed value.
See, I have a general idea what my ideal character sheet should contain:
- Essential mechanics and basic/core personal information
- Detailed personal information
- Detailed mechanics
- Equipment / gear / treasure
- Spellcasting and similar features
- Companions, familiars, mounts, pets, vehicles, and the like
- References and other notes
Yet, without any idea (I really suck at design, unfortunately) where or how to start, my mind self-terminates before I even make a first step.
And so, I ask again the titular question, in an attempt to get going in at least some direction:
For you- those who read and, on occasion, post on these very forums- what's in a character sheet?
It really depends on how much textural information you want to include. If you want to include text for all the class features, traits and so on (to save looking it up in the PHB during play), you need a free-format style so that every section can take as much room as it needs. I made up my own. Here's one example.
D&D 5th Edition Character Aromin Rainshield.pdf
Otherwise, I use one of the standard WotC forms and fit the information in the boxes wherever it will go, like this:
As a person that has designed numerous character sheets for numerous different games and with numerous different stylistic and utilitarian design goals, allow me to provide you a piece of advice:
Just use lined paper, especially in the form of small-size notebooks that you can dedicate one per character.
I'd like a modular/scalable/printable character sheet. I tend to put enough information on my character sheets that I don't need to open a players handbook to look anything up at the table.
Currently I do what BoldItalic says and I start stealing space from other sections of the official character sheet when I need more room. The allies and organizations is the first place I steal and then I take the backstory area. The backstory can go on it's own document along with an adventure log.
What programs are people using when they create their own sheets? I work in video production, so I don't want to use pirated software and I'm poor enough that I don't want to buy expensive programs like Acrobat Professional.
MrHotter wrote:
I type them up in the format of monsters.
For making the background graphics to a sheet, the boxes, curves, lines, fixed text and so on, I'd recommend InkScape, rather than Gimp or Photoshop. It's also free. It creates the image as vector graphics, rather than pixels, which display more clearly (especially if you have captions in small font sizes) and take up less space. It's closer to the way the background is stored in the WotC fillable PDFs and, indeed, it can import them from the PDFs and export them as images. That's how I made the background to the AL-style character sheet I posted upthread.
What BoldItalic & Aron said. Also, try to create a draft of what you want it to look like on a piece of paper—that way you can have a visual reference before you hit the software.
To anyone that's interested in Adobe software, Adobe usually has discounts for students. So, sign up for a class or two. 
My favorite, longest lasting printed character sheet was something I'd whip up in notepad as a basic text file (with monospace font so I could make columns). I'd update it and reprint every few sessions, after having crossed out stuff and scribbled other stuff in to the point of being too messy.
And when I discovered in play that another piece of info would be handy it was easy to add in to this very flexible sorry of layout any where that made sense.
Also, I switched from notepad to a code editor just because it was better with text files.
A character sheet is more than information: it's organization. And for that, you need to understand psychology, specifically, the design of everyday things.
For instance, consider two virtually identical sheets from WotC's own pack: look at "Character sheet - printable" and "Character sheet - alternative - printable". They're identical except for one thing: the alternative version doesn't list saves and skills in separate, alphabetical lists, but rather lists them connected to your ability scores, with your proficiency bonus still listed prominently at the top.
This is significant because 5e does not say "make an Athletics check", but rather "Make a Strength (Athletics) check". You hear "make a..." and move your eye to the proficiency bonus, then scan down when you hear Strength to the Strength bit. The number next to it is what you roll... but if you hear "(Athletics)", your athletics proficiency is listed right next to where the eye is resting, telling you whether or not you add your proficiency bonus to the number right next to where your eye is.
The same process happens for "Make a Strength save" - your eye follows exactly the same movement for the words "make a Strength..." in both cases. It reuses design space the same way 5e reuses the core d20 mechanic. (Although I admit, it's not quite clear that the save is not just a skill; I would have printed a line below the saving throw checkbox, or put that in a different-colored field.)
Compare with having to track three separate things (score, proficiency bonus, and skill/save, plus whether it's a skill or a save!) in three or four separate parts of the page, organized differently (in ability score order for the score/save and in alphabetical order for the proficiency).
That, right there, is an example of a minor change that follows how people process information and how 5e presents that information pre-processing.
EDIT: There's also the physical nature of the sheet itself. Most obviously, this is whether you print something on two separate sheets (which collapse to a single profile together, but can be laid out side by side to see all the information at once) or back-to-back (where you can never view the information on both sides simultaneously, but you only need one sheet of paper). These also have different manipulations - turning a page over is noisier and slower than sliding one across, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how frequently someone needs to turn it over or in what circumstances.
More dramatically, I've also seen sheets that adjust what they present based on how the physical page is oriented, exploiting the tabletop nature of the game. A simple example is a druid: here's a sheet where the normal stats read face-up, but the bottom 20% of the page has space for two separate wild shapes, and flipping the page upside down presents their stats and evokes the physical action of rotating a page to reinforce the shapechange. Another example is a character sheet with a similar bit printed upside down, but the page is bent so the upside-down bit becomes a nameplate (and the sheet itself rests like a tent), with space for a character sketch or description (so when people look at you, they also "look" directly at your character); I don't have an example of this one I'm afraid.
Traits like this are rarely implemented in sheet design, which is a shame. Exploit both the information and the channel it follows - the medium and the message, if you prefer. I discuss this here, with Brian Morgen (the designer of the unusual and evocative Alternate 2 sheet in the Wizards pack, with improvements at that link).
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
A place to start would be to look at the various character sheets out there, especially ones you've used, and see what they have in common and what you find useful about each one. Take those elements and put them into your own then add in what you feel is missing, move things around. Try not to over-specialize sections so they can be used for a wide range of characters. If you are really ambitious and want more details you could make a base sheet as a template then have variants for each class and/or race that build on the base to make a full sheet.